Keeping the Feast (26 page)

Soon after we bought the house, we planted an herb garden, sheltered by the tall stone walls that surround our backyard. It fast became overgrown, for like Ann and Joseph’s herbs in Trevignano, our sage and rosemary bushes, our parsley, dill, verbena, and basil, even our cherry tomatoes, tend to grow to fairy-tale heights. Just after we bought the place, a gardener friend moving back to Boston gave me a small bay laurel that had lived on her terrace in Paris; it has finally taken root in our rock-infested soil and I think of her each time I break off a leaf or two to flavor a sauce or soup. The raspberry canes and the rhubarb we planted last year are already flourishing, but my blueberries and arugula are languishing, and my horseradish patch gave up the ghost. Even so, I can already picture the quince tree and another fig that we hope to plant in the meadow early next year. We are a tad too far north for persimmons, but I may plant one anyway, for memory’s sake.

When I left Dallas at age thirty-one, I thought of myself as a reporter on temporary assignment abroad. I pointedly held on to the house I had restored in Dallas, unwilling to let it go, unwilling to give up my iris-filled backyard or the waist-high basil and thickets of morning glories that covered my front yard, unwilling for years to give up a home of my own even if, outside its four walls, I had never felt much at home in Texas.

I certainly did not think of myself as an emigrant when I left, although it seems that is what I have unwittingly become as the years have passed. Unlike my grandparents, who decided to emigrate, I slipped into emigrant status without really knowing that that was what I had decided to do. Perhaps the difference is that I left the country of my birth not because I needed or wanted more to eat, but because I hungered to know both the good and the bad things that my grandparents and great-grandparents had left behind.

I am nearing sixty now, with a daughter soon to enter her teens and a husband closing in on seventy, so I have two tall, long-limbed reasons other than my small, short-limbed self for getting good meals on the table two or three times a day. We still arrange our lives to be together at mealtimes, and while I do most of the cooking, John and Julia increasingly pitch in, too. John has always loved making his family’s special dishes, and every Christmas he and Julia make his mother’s family ravioli— hand-rolled pasta dough filled with meat, spinach, eggs, bread crumbs, and Parmigiano. The leftover stuffing goes into a veal breast or chicken for another meal, and the kitchen floor and counters and shelves get thoroughly covered in flour and dough bits, just as they are meant to during a family pasta-making session. They purposely make far too many ravioli for a single meal so that Peter and Anna, and now Anna’s Benjamin, will get their share when they arrive for their holiday visit around New Year’s. Soon now we’ll all have a new reason to keep cooking, for Anna and Benjamin are expecting a baby boy in a few months, about the time the strawberries will be bearing fruit down at the country house. Julia’s not-so-old portable crib is already there waiting for its next occupant, whose face we are longing to see.

Already we can’t wait until August, when we hope the three of them will be spending a part of the baby’s first summer with us at the house. The wild blackberries will be ripe then, and Julia is making plans to pick masses of them, as she has for the last few years. Last summer she turned into the family fruit-salad maker, happy to be cutting up peaches, pears, bananas, melon, and adding raspberries from our garden and blackberries from the bramble bushes that line the hedgerows in the fields nearby. Already John and I are thinking about watching Anna’s baby grow and learn to enjoy his meals the way Julia did just a few years ago.

All of us cook, I think, in part to feed our daily hunger, but just as important, and perhaps more so, we cook and eat to feed our spirits, to keep us all in the same orbit of life. As the generations turn, as our family expands, the table and its simple pleasures—never just the food, but the food and the talk, the food and the laughter, the food and the tears, the jokes, the memories, the hopes—still hold us in place, well anchored in a safe harbor. There may very well be another depression or endless other troubles, big or small, lying in wait for us, but rather than freezing in fear about what may come, we try our best to live and enjoy the lives we’ve been served forth.

Like my mother’s mother, Jennie, I like collecting recipes from neighbors and friends wherever I have landed. I’m happiest today when my French friends teach me recipes from their families, and I teach them recipes from mine. Pascale, whose good English helped her ignore my lack of French when we first arrived in Paris, taught me to simmer garden rhubarb with a sprig or two of fresh rosemary as well as the usual sugar, a sublime addition I never would have thought to try. Our country neighbor, Jacqueline, who watches over our place when we are in Paris, brings us just-picked white asparagus from our farmer neighbors or genuine homegrown tomatoes that taste like those my father’s parents used to grow. I love Jacqueline’s scrambled eggs with sorrel and tomato sauce—a dish her own mother used to make—as much as she looks forward to my grandmother Jennie’s sour cream coffee cake with walnuts and cinnamon.

I know that one of these days, if I live long enough to enter the world of the truly elderly, I am likely to start losing my abiding interest in food. It happened to Jennie, when she started to have those tiny strokes that no one noticed until my grandfather complained that she could no longer remember how to cook. I saw it with my mother, who in her late sixties and early seventies was worn down by the relentlessness of putting three square meals on a family table every day. Often when I would call her from England or Spain or Italy or Poland or Germany she would confess that she never knew what to cook anymore. Faced with a dinner party, which she was both eager and loath to host, she would ask me, long distance, to devise a menu. Menu in hand, she could proceed, knowing my father would help her cook. But she had lost the ability, and the
wool-eee,
to devise the plan. I saw it with my mother’s sister, too. Auntie, she of the chocolate cakes, gave up cooking more than a decade before she died. Luckily Uncle Joe liked to cook, and simply took up the slack.

And I see it now with my father, still living on his own at ninety. He moves at a crawl these days, and the three meals he used to eat daily have shrunk to two. He cannot manage to make himself three meals a day any longer, unless one of them is a snack of yogurt and fruit. But while age has forced him to buy more prepared foods rather than cook everything from scratch, he still gives the occasional dinner party to very close, extremely patient friends, who are willing to wait (and wait and wait) while he painstakingly prepares an asparagus risotto, a pasta with broccoli sauce, or pork filets sautéed with leeks. My father, unlike many widowers or divorcés who have lost their spouse, never lost the friends he had when my mother was alive, because he continued to invite those same couples to dinner after her death. They in turn continued inviting him as well.

But I could see this year, during his annual winter-long stay, that he was more tired and quiet than he had been in years past. Instead of bustling into the kitchen late each morning to prepare a plentiful breakfast, as he had always done since my mother’s death, he seemed relieved and thankful when I would prepare his breakfast for him, or at least help him get it ready.

Years ago I sent my father a poem that I knew he would love, even though poetry as a whole tended to scare him off. It was written by John’s cousin, another John Tagliabue, a poet and longtime professor at Bates College in Maine. The first time I read Cousin John’s poem about polenta, I knew I had married not only the right man but into the right family. I knew my father would recognize it, too. For a long time, a copy of “A Pure Desire on a Gloomy Drab Day” decorated my father’s fridge, which chuffs noisily these days but still manages to keep his perishables cold:

Just as I see my father’s lifelong passion for food starting to slip away as he begins to struggle to get food on his table, I can see the signs of this same sea change lurking within me. Already I can sense that I will not always be eager to whip up a quick pasta sauce, sauté a bit of veal and herbs, throw together a quick salad for our nighttime meal. Luckily, I am protected from this for now by Julia, who at twelve still needs years of good food on which to grow. But once she is off on her own, I can see that the soup suppers or the yogurt-and-fruit suppers that John and I often have when she is away for an evening are very likely to propagate like weeds in an untended field.

If I manage to produce that soup myself, and serve it steaming, in big, deep bowls, with silverware and napkins neatly placed on a not overly stained tablecloth, then I know I will not yet be in my final decline. If I serve the yogurt in my mother’s best glass cups, and peel and cut up the fruit to go with it, I will know that I am still hanging on. But when I start to dream of the food being placed before me, hot, steaming, and prepared by somebody else—or worse yet, when I stop dreaming of food at all—I will know that I have crossed a boundary that means I am on my way out of this world and into the next.

It is not something I look forward to. And I know it is something I will fight, just as my father is fighting it now, just as Jennie and Auntie and my mother fought it toward the end of their own lives. So tonight and all the other nights when I may be tired, without appetite, or simply not in the mood to produce even a simple meal, I shall will myself to do it anyway. I will root around the bottom of our refrigerator, check the vegetables stored on our balcony, open our tiny pantry, and find something to restore my energy and my mood.

John and Julia will set the table and I will fly about the kitchen, chopping a few garlic cloves and a handful of fragrant flat-leaf parsley. If I am lucky, I may find a package of De Cecco spaghetti in the pantry, and a bit of frozen chicken broth that I made a few weeks ago. I may find a can of sweet New England clams that my father has carried across the Atlantic for just such emergency meals. I know there is always a bottle of good, green-gold olive oil on the shelf near the stove, and a bottle of dry vermouth in the old cabinet I bought in Rome.

Tonight I will set a huge kettle of water on our tiny stove’s biggest burner. By the time the water reaches a rolling boil, I will have sautéed the chopped garlic and a tiny, hot
peperoncino rosso
in a few spoonfuls of olive oil until the garlic just starts to sizzle. I will have added the vermouth and clam broth and chicken broth to the pan, then boiled it down until it has reduced by half. I will cook the spaghetti in the roiling, salted water for just under eight minutes, then heat the clams themselves for a minute or less to keep them tender and juicy. I will drain the pasta the moment it is done and tip it into a well-heated serving bowl with a tablespoon of soft butter. I will add the clams and their sauce and, finally, a handful of chopped parsley.

I will rush the bowl to the dining room and then John and Julia and I, suddenly hungry from the sweetly pungent smell of garlic and clam broth coming from the kitchen, will sit down to eat. The three of us will be quiet for a moment or two as we twirl our spaghetti into the first neat forkfuls that we lift to our mouths. We will chew that first bite hungrily and perhaps, if I have hit all the measurements right, give a tiny sigh of delight. Then, already heartened, we will start to talk and laugh and eat in earnest, keeping the feast that we are meant to keep, the feast that is our life.

This book had many midwives, both medical and literary. Profound thanks to: Harold Bourne, Flavia Donati, Veronique Durouchoux, Jacques Pieri, Henri-Paul Denis, Francis Slattery, Marianne Goldberger, Gary Lefer, Joan Prudick, Joshua Twersky, Krystyna Piotrowska, the late Petru Radulescu, Joseph Lelyveld, and to my father, brother, and late mother—in various ways, healers all.

On the literary front, heartfelt thanks to: Francis X. Clines and Esther Fein, whose telex presence from Moscow to Munich helped launch this book years before I knew I had started writing it; the late Louis Inturrisi, who was there from the beginning; Katie Hafner, Cheryl Bentsen, John Marks, Debra Immergut, and the late Marilyn Koch, who soon joined in; and Jean Frere, Cathy Booth Thomas, Karen Wolman, Pat Remick, and Pauline Choi, who helped immeasurably near the finish. Very special thanks to Barbara Grossman, who counseled me not to write a cookbook, and to Sarah McGrath, who has an uncannily fine eye for addition and subtraction. Most important, deepest thanks to Charlotte Sheedy, whose chance acquaintance late in the process gave me the reason to pick up where I had left off.