Crazy in the Kitchen (18 page)

Ah yes, she says, then it can be only one church, the church with the fountain near the little river. And gives us directions,
which we bungle, so we wind up at the end of a tiny alleyway in the medieval part of town, with me crying, sure we'll never
get out. My husband backs up slowly, annoying the people who live here, whose lives we've disrupted.

Finally, finally, after a few more wrong turns, after stopping a few more people for directions, we find the church. With
the fountain. On the river.

But it's shopping time and there's no place to park

My husband wants to park illegally. I'm against it. What if we're towed?

"They don't tow in Italy," he says.

"They do," I say. It's like we're in third grade.

"They don't," my husband says. "Trust me." I never trust him when he says to trust him. When he says to trust him, I'm sure
he doesn't know what he's talking about. He always thinks things are the way he wants them to be, instead of the way they
are.

He rests his head on the steering wheel, tired of all this. "Just tell me what you want me to do."

"Leave the goddamned car here," I say, exasperated. Just in case, I take all our documents, write down the license plate.

We go to the church. There's a wedding. "How nice," I say. "We'll get to see a wedding." I figure if we go into the church,
watch the ceremony, see all the flowers, I'll snap out of my foul mood.

"You hate to go to weddings," my husband says.

"But this is an Italian wedding."

So, we go into the church. I tell myself it's the little Baroque church where my grandparents were married, persuade myself
that seeing this wedding is deeply meaningful, that it makes up for the restful day I'm missing, makes up for the astonishing
pizza I'm missing, even though I realize that this marriage might end up as miserably as my grandparents'.

But I don't feel any connection to this place, although I have imagined I might. Of course, there is no reason I
should
feel a connection to a place my family fled because they could not make a life here.

Mine, the dilemma of all the descendants of immigrants. To want to belong, yet to know that you do not.

I pull out the little piece of cardboard with my father's drawing. Turn it so that the drawing of the river is aligned with
the actual river, so we can figure out where my father lived. Then I remember my father is dyslexic, and wonder whether he's
drawn it right, or drawn it backwards.

We turn right, turn left, go around a construction site. (Villages in Italy are not supposed to have construction sites, not
supposed to have ugly modern buildings that look like cell blocks, though they do.) My father has described a little house
in the country, with a balcony on a river. This is not the country, and from these back streets I can't see the river. So
I figure that we have to go back to the river and work from there.

We go back to the church. The wedding is over. There is rice all over the piazza. A man, older than my father, sweeps it away.

We go to the river, to the bridge over the river. I tell my husband we have to find any goddamned house with a balcony on
the river, take a picture of it, take it home, tell my father we found his house. How will he know? How can he remember? It's
more than eighty years ago, after all.

So we're standing on the little bridge over the river. But there's no sidewalk on the bridge. And the cars are zooming by.
And because the cars are being driven by Italian drivers, Southern Italian drivers, I'm thinking that I'm going to die here,
and that it would be very stupid to die here, playing lookout for my husband who's leaning over the railing of the bridge,
using the zoom lens of his camera to find something, anything, that he can photograph.

"Do you see a house with a balcony?" I gasp. I'm choking from the exhaust fumes. I'm going to have an asthma attack.

"There are lots of houses past the bend in the river," my husband says. "And they all have balconies. Should I take a picture
of all of them or just one?"

"Just one," I say. "If you take them all, he'll never think it's the one he lived in."

"Which one?" my husband asks.

"It doesn't matter," I say. I know the place we've been trying to find is one that exists only in my father's mind.

When we return home, my father and his wife come to dinner at our house. I make a simplified version of tiny potato gnocchi
with smoked scamorza cheese, tomato, and basil, a dish from Alfonso Iaccarino's restaurant, where we've eaten.

The day after we go to Scafati, my husband and I decide that, after what we've been through, we should indulge ourselves.
So we go to Don Alfonso's, the Michelin-starred restaurant in Sant'Agata sui Due Golfi.

It is a splendid meal. As I'm eating it, I think I will never forget it, although now I cannot remember what I ate that day,
unless I consult my diary.

We had the tasting menu. There were— I know, for I have written it down— three kinds of bread: spinach; tomato; borage and
nettles. A pureed-lentil soup with baby calamari, finished with olive oil infused with mint. Fusilli with a sauce with little
chunks of bluefish finished with olive oil infused with basil. Amberjack with fried ginger, anointed with a special kind of
salt and tiny Schezuan peppercorns, served with a pea puree. Duck breast with little peach fritters and fried peach slices,
raspberry puree, and a sauce made with grapes grown by Don Alfonso, finished with an oil infused with star anise. For desert,
a fantasy of espresso, served in a cookie cylinder and accompanied by cookies in the shape of spoons.

Throughout our meal, I imagine that it is a hundred years before, and that I am dining in a
masseria
in Puglia, or in a palazzo in Naples, and that all of my grandparents are young, and are standing outside, hungry, their
faces pressed to the window. They watch others eat the bounty of their land. They wish they could be given the crust of bread
left behind on a bread plate, the piece offish or morsel of meat pushed to the side—" I can't eat any more; I'm too full"—
the food other people are wasting, as they are starving.

Back in New Jersey, we finish our meal. My husband serves cups of espresso, chocolate hazelnut biscotti. My father looks at
the pictures of Scafati my husband has taken. A church. A wedding. A river. A house with a balcony on the river.

"So?" I ask.

"I remember the river," my father says. "But I'm not sure about the house. It doesn't look the way I remember it."

"Shit," I think. "He knows." And can't continue with the charade.

"I'm not sure it's the right house," I say. "There were a few houses with balconies by the river."

My father puts the picture down. Sips his coffee. He's thoughtful. Tearful.

"Well, you know," he says, "it was a long time ago. And things do change."

"Yes," I say, relieved. "They do."

"But it was beautiful, wasn't it?" my father says. Remembering the clean river where he and his sisters swam. The farms that
stretched to the flanks of Mount Vesuvius. The walks on the Via Nova to Pompeii, where he spent the day when he didn't want
to go to school. Fishing from the little balcony where his mother cooked their food. His grandmother and her meals in the
house by the fountain, and the whole family ranged around the table, complete, eating turkey, eating rabbit, eating pigeon,
eating pasta with fresh vegetables. Remembering drinking the watered down wine given to young children in Italy. Remembering
what it was like to have so much family around you, and being loved by a grandmother you will never see again, and being taught
to pick vegetables by a grandfather you will never see again.

It was beautiful, wasn't it?

I want to tell my father that, no, Scafati wasn't beautiful. That it looked like Union City, that the houses looked like cell
blocks, looked like the nightmare of ugly housing that has sprung up on the outskirts of the gems of cities everywhere in
the South of Italy. And that, except for the church and the square in front of it and the fountain nearby, Scafati was the
ugliest place I have ever seen in Italy.

I want to say that there were derelicts everywhere. And garbage. And rats swimming in the river. That Scafati was the Italy
that people talk about when they talk about the problem of the Mezzo­giorno. And that it had changed dramatically, and for
the worse, in the eighty years since my father's family abandoned this place to return to America.

I want to say all these things. But I stop myself. For I have made this journey for him.

My father is very old now. He can never return to Scafati. Can never find the church with the fountain. Never find where his
grandmother lived. Never again see the little house by the river. So he will never learn what has become of this place that
he cherishes. Unless I tell him.

I pick up the picture. Give it to my father. And say, "Yes, it was very beautiful."

APPETITE

Once I saw an article in
The New York Times
about how you could cook a brisket if you packed it in heavy-duty tinfoil and put it on the hottest part of your engine while
you took a long ride. Slow cooking, highway style.

I clipped it, started imagining a nice slow braise of veal with little pearl onions I would sneak into position under the
hood of our car without my husband knowing what I was doing. I knew he'd be a spoilsport, that he would say no.

We were going to visit our gourmet pals in Connecticut. And I thought that cooking something along the way would be such fun.
I saw us pulling up the long driveway to their house, saw me popping the hood, pulling out the packet. Opening it. "Surprise,
surprise," I'd say. "Here's lunch!"

And the braise, of course, would be spectacular. The aromas, appetizing. We'd savor this perfect little lunchtime meal outside
on their deck beneath the trees. Everything would be perfect.

But I make the mistake of leaving the article on the kitchen table.

My husband finds it. "This is where I draw the line," he says. "There will be no slow cooking under the hood of my car. What
if something goes wrong with your little scheme?"

"What if we take my car?" I ask. He ignores me and walks away.

Now, I am not the kind of woman who can be told what to do, and what not to do. Especially when it comes to food. My husband
knows I'll do what I want to do anyway.

Still, I cave, because I am also the kind of woman who believes that if something can go wrong, it will. I imagine the juices
leaking from the packet, the juices burning, smoking. Imagine a smoke screen preventing Ernie from seeing the road. Imagine
an accident. Injuries. Ambulances. And the wonderful braise of veal scattered all along the roadway.

You see, I am obsessed with food. I'm always trying to find some new cooking technique to perfect, always trying to find something
new to cook. I read cookbooks the way other people read pornography. And for many of the same reasons.

I think about food all the time. Once my husband and I go to the Armenian monastery in Venice where Byron studied. After the
tour, when the guide asks if we have any questions, I don't ask about Byron, or about whether any of his manuscripts are archived
here, or about his study of Armenian— all questions I would have raised ten years before. No. This time, I raise my hand and
ask, "Do the monks who live here eat Italian food or Armenian food?"

My husband is in the front; I'm in the back. He knows it's me asking the question. And he knows, then, just how serious this
food thing has become.

"To the loss of a fine mind," my husband says, lifting his glass of Prosecco as he toasts me during lunch a few hours later.
And I have to admit that, yes, earlier in my life I would have pestered the monks to see manuscripts, to see precisely where
Byron sat when he studied. But on this trip, whether the monks eat Italian or Armenian seems more important.

We are eating lunch on the roof on the Danieli, where we eat each day during our stay, watching the boats chaotically crisscrossing
the San Marco Basin. That day, we have
spaghetti con vongole,
with clams as tiny as the nail on your pinky; and roasted vegetables dressed with an unfiltered olive oil. Tomorrow, we'll
take the long boat ride to Burano, to find the restaurant in the central piazza where we ate
vongole
when we were here with our sons in 1989. We want to compare the
vongole
there with the
vongole
here. I say the
vongole
on Burano were better; Ernie says they're better here. Another one of our food fights.

I can find any restaurant where we've eaten in any place we've visited, no matter how many years have passed since we've been
there. (Although I could not find my way without a map to the most important cathedral, ancient site, or museum.)

Once, driving through a remote village in the south of France, I tell my husband, "We've been here before; we've eaten here;
we had a fantastic bowl of mussels here, the best mussels we've ever eaten."

He tells me I'm crazy, we've never been here before. "A hundred thousand dollars says we have," I say. My husband and I bet
like this a lot. The more I bet, the surer I am. Of course, neither of us pays up. But we keep a tally. So far, I'm winning.

So I tell him to turn right, and left, and right again, and right again, through an intricate system of one-way streets.

And there it is, the sweet little restaurant with the outside tables. With the flowers tumbling from the baskets along the
railing. I've won my bet.

But they're closed. We can't have the mussels. Suddenly having those mussels becomes the priority of this holiday. So we come
back for lunch the next day, even though we're staying at a hotel a hundred miles away.

When we're on vacation, a long ride to eat well, or to buy a special ingredient or a piece of kitchen equipment, trumps visiting
churches and museums every time. In Liguria, for instance, we can tell you where to buy the very best dried mushrooms, where
to eat the very best
farinata,
where to buy the hand-carved stamps for making
corzetti,
where to find the best truffle oil, which baker in Camogli makes the best bread, which the best focaccia.

But we couldn't tell you which palaces you should visit in Genoa, or which church is worth a stop in Portovenere, or whether
the maritime museum or the aquarium in Camogli merits a visit.

In Camogli, we've spent too much time eating at one focacceria and then another; too much time figuring when the focaccia
in each is piping hot; too much time sitting at a table at the Primula on the waterfront, savoring the best cappuccino we've
ever had. (When we're away, whatever we're having is the best of whatever we're having that we've ever had.)

Our sons and our grandkids are the same. How could they not be?

When our sons are on vacation, they call us not to talk about what they've done but to tell us what they've eaten. Jay and
Deb talk about the dessert with almonds at Chez Panisse, and how our grandson Steven ate his own dessert and his father's,
and how Steven relished the fresh ravioli made with cod. Justin and Lynne describe the Italian restaurant they found in western
New Jersey, headed by a woman chef, and tell us we absolutely have to go there.

Our daily morning conversations begin, "So, what did you have for dinner?" Both Justin and Jason are inventive cooks; both
relish a good meal at the end of the day; both prepare wildly inventive meals without cookbooks. Justin: pan-seared tuna with
a sauce of sauteed garlic, homemade mayonnaise, and lime juice; Jason: sauteed scallops with orange-ginger sauce on a bed
of spinach.

When the family gathers for Thanksgiving this year, our grandkids, Julia and Steven, are watching the parade on TV. I think
this will keep them occupied as I make our chestnut soup, finish our home-baked breads. After a few minutes, I check on them
to see how they are.

"Nana," Steven says, as the twirlers are twirling and the marchers marching, "this is boring. Can we please watch TV Food?"
This is our family name for the Food Network. The kids are mesmerized by Martha Stewart cooking turkey. And by Emeril Lagasse.

"This is so exciting," Steven says, when I check in on them again. "Let's kick it up another notch."

Another time, I'm taking care of Julia. She's playing dress-up. She puts on a scarf, pretends it's a shawl. Puts on my shoes,
takes my pocketbook. Starts walking around.

"Where are you going?" I ask.

"To London to visit the Queen," she answers. Then reconsiders. "No," she says, "I won't go there. London is too scary. There
are globlins in London. I think I'll go to Williams-Mamoma instead." Williams-Sonoma, my favorite store, not part of the lexicon
of the average three-year-old girl, unless she has someone like me for a grandmother.

When I pick up either of the kids for some special time after school, we always have an activity— riding bikes, walking around
the neighborhood, going for a ride, visiting a playground or a museum. And then we go shopping so Steven or Julia can choose
a special treat that costs five dollars or less.

"Would you like to go to a toy store?" I ask Steven the last time we meet.

"No," he says, "I'd rather go to Whole Foods." He takes his time walking around; checks out the fruits; checks out the prepared
foods; eats every sample of cheese; eats every sample of bread. I can tell this is going to take a very long time.

Finally, he chooses: a quesadilla, and a cheese-and-dill dip. Then Steven asks if we can afford to bring his sister and his
parents a treat. He's gotten one; they should have one too.

"Of course," I say, proud of his generosity.

We walk through the store again. These choices take him just as long. Finally, Steven decides on a box of organic strawberries
for Julia. And a bouquet of flowers and a six-pack of a premium beer for his parents.

I restrain my laughter. As we check out, he points to the beer. Tells the clerk, "This is for my parents; they like special
beers. They drink it when we eat Indian food."

This past summer, my husband and I are going away for four days. At the other end of our two-hour drive is a kitchen, and
we will arrive in time for lunch.

In the kitchen at home we have beautiful farmer's-market cherry tomatoes, a ball of homemade mozzarella swimming in its own
milk, some fresh basil doing nicely on the windowsill, its roots in water. So I think, pizza Margherita, the queen of pizzas.

I figure that, before we leave, I'll make a pizza dough, real quick, in my Cuisinart, from a great recipe I found in one of
Julia Child's cookbooks. It's not authentic, but it's easy to stretch, with a nice crunch. I'll put it in a bowl, stash it
on the floor of the car. It'll rise while we're driving. When we're halfway there, we'll stop by the side of the road, I'll
jump out, punch it down, re-form it into a ball, cover it again. Let it have a second rise. By the time we arrive, it'll be
ready. In no time at all, we'll have pizza. But not just any pizza. My homemade pizza, one of the best we've had, even including
those we've eaten in Italy.

So, we pack the car. A few bags of pasta we've brought home from Italy. Some Sicilian sea salt, gathered by hand. "They have
stores there, you know," my husband says. "But they don't have these ingredients there," I reply.

I stash some of my kitchen equipment, which travels— my favorite skillet, my mezzaluna, my authentic Ligurian mortar and pestle
carted home from our most recent trip, my Pugliese cookbook, my
panini
cookbook.

"We're going to stop, right, so I can punch down the dough," I say.

"You're not going to punch down the dough on the side of the road," Ernie says. "What if someone sees you?"

My husband cares about what people think about him, even what total strangers think about him. Me, I don't give a shit what
other people think of me. But my husband thinks that the guy in the car on the Long Island Expressway will see me punch down
my dough by the side of the highway and think less of him.

So I tell my husband that no one will know what I'm doing; no one will care. Frankly, I think it's kind of cool to be using
your driving time to let a batch of dough rise. This is the kind of multitasking I approve of.

I tell him that when he eats the pizza I will make, he will think that it was worth all the trouble. "You're nuts," Ernie
says, "but a wonderful kind of nuts."

On our last trip to Italy, to the South, to find my ancestors' villages, Ernie and I have eaten a lot of splendid pizza topped
with the finest and freshest ingredients, cooked in wood-burning ovens. We have eaten pizza every day. Pizza marinara, with
tomatoes, garlic, oregano— the original pizza; pizza
canzone del mare
(song-of-the-sea pizza), with cherry tomatoes, basil, garlic; pizza
verdi,
pizza with buffalo milk mozzarella, anchovy fillets, fresh parsley, capers, garlic, arugula; pizza
alia melanzana
(with eggplant); pizza
con carciofi
(with arti­chokes) and
con cipolle
(with onions). And, of course, pizza Margherita.

In a bookstore, I have discovered the cookbook
La Pizza: The True
Story from Naples.
This is my fifth pizza cookbook. But it is definitive, because it relates the origin of pizza, tells how it is cooked in
the finest pizzerias in Naples.

I have read it, underlined it, taken notes from it, especially on the chapter "Pizza Taboos," listing the rules for pizza
laid out by the Associazione Vera Pizza Napoletana. Yes, there are rules for making an authentic pizza, and strict ones. You
can't use any kind of fat in the dough, including olive oil; you must knead the dough by hand, although you can use a special
pizza-kneading device approved by the Association; you can't use a rolling pin to flatten the dough; you can't use a baking
tin; you can't use an electric oven— only a wood-fueled, bell-shaped oven.

The aim is to produce a pizza that will be "supple, perfectly cooked, fragrant and framed by a high, soft border."

Pizza is taken very seriously in the land of my ancestors. People argue about it. People come to blows about it. You would
stand a chance of getting away with disrespecting someone's mother sooner than you would of getting away with disrespecting
someone's favorite pizza. I take pizza very seriously too, and when we arrive home, I begin what my family calls my Pizza
Period.

Before this, there have been the Risotto Period; the Tagine Period; the Paella Period; the High-Heat Roasting Period; the
Slow Cooker Period; the Stir-fried Period; the Artisan Baker Period; the Homemade Pasta Period; the Lasagna Period; the Creative
Salad Period; the Panini Period; the Homemade Yogurt Period, the Homemade Ricotta Period (a very short period, because making
ricotta is such a pain in the ass and the result doesn't taste as good as the ricotta from my favorite Italian market); the
Homemade Ice Cream and Homemade Waffle Cone Period; the
Minestra
Period; the Tuscan Period; the Ligurian Period; the Pugliese Period.