Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (8 page)

But something was missing: baby Jesus, who was perhaps three-quarters life size. He would stay missing—metaphorically in utero, though technically in a bottom drawer of Grandma’s bedroom dresser—until just before the midnight moment when Christmas Eve became Christmas Day. Grandma held to this pinpoint schedule as if indisputable historical accuracy were at stake and White Plains were in the same time zone as ancient Bethlehem. At 11:58 p.m. on December twenty-fourth—two minutes before the Christ child’s birth—she would dim the lights. She would put on a record of Dean Martin or someone like him singing “Silent Night.” And she would fetch baby Jesus from that dresser drawer, where he lay swaddled in the finest white linens Grandma owned. She’d cradle him in her arms, carry him out to the shack on the front lawn, and put him in his manger, nestled between Mary and Joseph. And she would cry, because it was an emotional moment and because, well, she hadn’t been feeling so well lately. This Christmas, it always pained her to say, would most likely be her last.

 

 

 

 

Holiday celebrations—which were when the Brunis’ talent for excess really came out—got divvied up so that everybody in the family could host one. Until she grew too old to pull it off, Grandma had Christmas Eve. Uncle Jim and Aunt Vicki had Easter. Uncle Mario and Aunt Carolyn had the Fourth of July or Labor Day or some other holiday that took on more importance than it normally would, so that they, too, would have their rightful chance to put together a feast. Mom and Dad had Thanksgiving, and held on to it even after the move to Avon.

Whoever was hosting a given holiday treated it as an opportunity—no, a challenge—to lay out more food than anyone else had at their holiday. If there were two kinds of pie at Easter, there might be three kinds of pie at the following Thanksgiving. If there were three choices of ice cream to go with the pies at one event, there might be four choices, plus hot fudge, at the next. There’d be a cake in addition to the pies, in honor of the family members whose birthdays fell in the vicinity of the holiday. There’d be cookies, and probably cannoli, because someone might want something sweet to nibble on after pie, ice cream and cake.

But the dessert spread usually paled next to all that preceded it: the six, seven or eight kinds of appetizers passed around before the main meal; the main meal itself, which always included a pasta dish on top of a gigantic turkey or an enormous ham, unless the pasta dish supplemented a gigantic turkey
and
an enormous ham. And the amount of each kind of food was plotted with this rule of thumb in mind: If every guest decided to eat nothing but mashed potatoes, or nothing but turkey and only white meat at that, would there still be enough mashed potatoes or white-meat turkey to go around?

The holiday pasta dishes varied from host to host. While Grandma favored her thumb-molded
strascinat
, Mom liked to serve manicotti, which were like oversize, thin-shelled, sleeve-shaped ravioli stuffed with ricotta and herbs. Sometimes, though, she served eggplant macaroni. Aunt Vicki and Aunt Carolyn liked to serve ricotta-stuffed shells, which were thicker and smaller than manicotti.

Over the years, on the many occasions in addition to holidays when the extended family got together, and even on occasions when Grandma cooked just for my siblings and me, I noticed that she stopped making the dishes that Mom, Aunt Vicki and Aunt Carolyn made so well. One by one they fell away, although it might be more accurate to say they were forfeited: manicotti and lasagna to Mom; stuffed shells and
pizza dolce
to Aunt Vicki; chicken cutlets and a range of Italian cookies to Aunt Carolyn. I think that after so many years of competing with her sisters-in-law, Grandma didn’t have the heart to compete anew with her daughters-in-law. But I think she was also validating them—letting them know they’d arrived. In some ancient public ceremonies, a torch was passed. In the extended Bruni family, the responsibility for eggplant macaroni was.

A holiday feast required days and days of planning and preparation. Mom’s Thanksgivings in Avon, for example, tended to go like this:

 

T MINUS SIX DAYS—Sit down at the kitchen table with a ruled steno notebook and, over the course of three to four hours, make, revise, refine and double-check a series of lists. On the first two pages list every dish you plan to make. Use a third page if necessary. On yet another page list every dish that, in contradiction to your controlling nature, and in a moment of rare and laudable flexibility, you have permitted Vicki or Carolyn to bring. On yet another page list every item of ready-made food you plan to put on a platter, and on several pages after that translate the list of dishes you’re making and the list of ready-made food you’re assembling into a list of every ingredient, and how much of it, you need to buy. Pause to scream at Mark, who is listening to a Deep Purple album in his bedroom upstairs, that the electric guitars are too loud. Pause to scream at Frank, who is watching TV in the next room, that
The Love Boat
is too loud. Wonder where Harry is, and when Dad will get home from the office, and circle certain items on the shopping inventory—the special-trip, specialty-store stuff like cannoli and
bocconcini
—to be assigned to Dad. Make a mental note to tell him that he should wait until Wednesday to pick them up, so that they’re as fresh as possible on Thursday. Make an additional mental note to remind him on Monday and again on Tuesday that Wednesday is right around the corner.

 

T MINUS FOUR DAYS
—Shop. Take the station wagon. Make sure nothing is in the far back, or in the backseat, or in the passenger seat, because it’s possible you’ll need all of this space. Make sure a stretch of about five hours is free and clear, because you’ll need this much time for driving to and among all the right stores and shopping and circling home to unload the perishable items; nonperishables can be left in the car until the kids come home, at which point, with enough prompting, they might help. When the kids do come home, tell them there’s some stuff in the rear of the car you’d like them to carry into the kitchen. When they haven’t budged a half hour later, tell them again. When they promise to get on it “during the next commercial,” commence strategic weeping. Thanksgiving requires you to use all the weapons at your disposal; besides, the stress is getting to you.

T MINUS TWO DAYS
—Back to the stores. There were things you didn’t get on the last trip, because you were worried about how well they’d keep. There were things you forgot. There were mistakes you caught when, on day T minus three, you spent two hours at the kitchen table reviewing your lists. Say to Dad, “You’re all set for tomorrow?” Hear him answer, “What?” Say, “The cannoli! The mozzarella!” Hear him answer, “Sheesh, I almost forgot.” Cry. He’s kidding, and you half-know that, but you need everybody to be operating with a peak sense of urgency.

 

T MINUS ONE DAY
—A new set of lists. A map, really. Plot a painstakingly detailed time line of what can be assembled in the hours before the guests arrive and what must be prepared after they arrive. So that you don’t get thrown off track or confused on the big day, prepare Post-it notes to be put on different bowls and pans and packages. Each Post-it note is an appointment, a set of instructions signaling destination (top oven, bottom oven, burner) and time (10 a.m., 11:15 a.m., 11:55 a.m.) and temperature (350 degrees, 425 degrees, medium heat). Turn the refrigerator and the counters into a yellow thicket of Post-it notes, then worry that you won’t be able to see and heed the individual trees for the forest. Look out the window, notice that Harry’s skateboard is still in the middle of the driveway, though he’s been told four times already to put it away, and scream at him that Grandma is going to step on it, break her hip and be rushed to the hospital, and if she dies it’s all his fault. Think about a glass of Chablis. It really might be time for a glass of Chablis.

 

THANKSGIVING DAY, 11:30 TO 11:45 A.M.
—The guests begin arriving, and you instantly begin feeding them. Pull two freshly made quiches out of the oven. Cut them into square-shaped pieces and put the pieces on platters and have Mark or Frank make himself atypically useful by passing them around. Have one of the children pass around a platter of chicken livers wrapped in bacon, too, and a separate platter of stuffed mushrooms as well. These supplement a tray of deviled eggs, another light beginning to a long day. Somewhere there’s a plate of little balls of mozzarella known as
bocconcini
; somewhere else, some prosciutto and maybe some olives. Don’t forget the chilled shrimp! You cleaned and cooked four pounds of them on day T minus one, and you’re serving them with cocktail sauce you made at seven a.m., another lifesaver that could be prepared ahead of time.

 

NOON
—Hustle Dad into the kitchen so he can begin the carving process. The carving process could take up to an hour, because you’ve made both a twenty-eight-pound turkey and a separate nine-pound turkey breast so that there will not only be enough turkey for the main meal but enough left over for sandwiches later in the day. You must serve sandwiches later in the day.

 

12:30
P.M.
—Lay food on the buffet table. Somehow find space for separate bowls of corn, green peas, creamed onions, canned cranberry jelly (because some people prefer it to homemade), homemade cranberry sauce (because some people prefer it to canned), stovetop stuffing (same reasoning), real stuffing (ditto), mashed potatoes and pureed sweet potatoes with little marsh-mallows on top. Find additional room for two casserole dishes of manicotti. Then find more room for a broad tray of individual foil-wrapped yams, which you had to have in addition to the sweet potatoes (and the mashed potatoes) because, again, diners have very particular preferences within a given genre, even if the genre is as tangential as tubers. You must find yet more room on the buffet, because you’re also setting down a basket of napkin-swaddled warm biscuits and of course the gargantuan platter of carved turkey, with the dark meat clustered in one section and the white in another. Put out the sliced baked ham as well. Though no one’s bound to eat the ham during the main meal, it’s going to be necessary for the sandwiches later on, so you might as well make it available now, too, just in case. Worry. Are there enough yams? Has Dad fallen behind on the carving? Amid all the worrying and arranging, use the turkey drippings to make gravy. Gravy is the final, last-minute flourish.

 

12:50
P.M.—
Ring a bell. It’s the only way to summon and speed sixteen to twenty vigorously chewing, loudly chatting Brunis to the buffet table and then into their assigned seats, and you need them to move and eat right away, lest the eating schedule be ruined. Collect and throw away loose Post-it notes that have fluttered into corners of the kitchen counter or onto the kitchen floor.

 

1:20
P. M.—
Begin badgering guests to head back to the buffet table and help themselves to seconds.

 

1:45
P.M.—
Begin clearing the buffet table. Clear guests’ plates. Tell Harry to tuck his shirt back in.

 

2:00
P.M.—
Begin making espresso. Put platters of melon slices and apple slices and grapes, along with bowls of almonds, in the center of the dining room table. This is the beginning of the official thirty-minute pause before dessert, but you still have to have some food around. You can’t not have food around.

 

2:30
P.M.—
Repopulate the buffet table with two pecan pies, two pumpkin pies, two apple pies and an assortment of ice creams. Vicki has made chocolate chip cookies: put those out. Carolyn has made some
pizza dolce
and some traditional Italian biscotti: put those out, too. Dad ultimately remembered to get the cannoli: put those out as well. Put out a chocolate cake with chocolate icing because that’s Frank Jr.’s favorite kind and his birthday was a few weeks earlier, on Halloween. Put out a separate lemon-flavored cake because not everybody likes all that chocolate and the guests shouldn’t have to suffer for Frank Jr.’s peculiarities. To Vicki’s or Carolyn’s compliments that “you’ve outdone yourself,” laugh in a carefree fashion and say, “Oh, please, it was nothing!”

 

3:15
P.M.—
Permit people to get up and leave the dining room.

 

5:30
P.M.—
Summon them back. The buffet table now holds bread slices and rolls and carved turkey and ham and mayonnaise and cranberry sauce and lettuce and tomato and other fixings. It’s sandwich time. But guests needn’t feel confined to sandwiches. The quiche is back. The shrimp are back. Even the two kinds of stuffing and the manicotti are back. And, of course, the desserts.