Crazy in the Kitchen: Food, Feuds, and Forgiveness in an Italian American Family

by Louise DeSalvo

  And so, every baking day, she walks down the big hill to the bakery, and back up the big hill to our house, carrying her fresh yeast. It is one of the few errands she undertakes that gives her any satisfaction.

  When my grandmother makes her bread, she makes a well in the middle of the flour and into it pours bay-leaf-scented water she has warmed on the stove. In my grandmother's village, they used water from the sea to make their bread so you didn't have to add salt, which was too expensive. Besides, the water from the wells, if they contained any water at all, was often contaminated. So in my grandmother's village, you had to buy water from the water vendor, if you had money to buy water.

  My grandmother flicks the flour into the yeasty water with her fingertips a little bit at a time and stirs the mixture round and round until it comes together into a shaggy mass.

  Making the bread, a welcome ritual that redeems the difficulty of my grandmother's days, of my days. A time I share with her, sometimes wordlessly, sometimes accompanied by her stories; and her bread, her pizza, her zeppole, are food I like, food I can swallow, food that does not disgust me, food that instead sustains me and nourishes me.

  The two of us, in the kitchen, ignoring my mother's annoyance and disapproval, her unnecessary clanging of pots and pans during this important time. The two of us, enveloped in a nimbus of flour, inhaling the yeasty, narcotic vapors that transport her to a little white village by the sea, where she returns in reverie. Though she would never return there, she said, because life was so difficult. No work to be had. No food to be had. And the land was poor though it had once yielded bounty beyond imagination, even for the poor. Melons round as a baby's bottom; tomatoes red as blood, artichokes the size of a man's fist or as small as a little snail; grapes, oranges, fennel, onions, olives— all so perfect, all so delicious, she was told. Until those sfaccM (may they rot in hell through all eternity) took the land from the people, wouldn't let the land rest, wouldn't let the workers rest. They worked the land until it refused to yield; they worked the peasants until they dropped dead or left for America.

  Throughout my childhood and adolescence, when I hear about Italy, it is this impoverished village she describes to me while she makes the bread, this little white stone village that tumbles down a hillside to an azure sea, that I imagine all of Italy to be. And when I travel to Italy after she dies, it is this bread, her bread, that I hope I will find there.

  KNEADING THE DOUGH

  When my grandmother kneads the bread, she takes off her shawl, her sweater, her apron, her dress, because she sweats a lot because kneading is such hard work, and she stands in the kitchen at the table in her underwear. Coarse unbleached white undershirt over a substitute for underpants that looks like a large diaper (these, she makes herself because you can't buy them here). Black stockings, rolled down around her ankles. Old black shoes, their backs cut off, with a hole cut into the front of the right shoe for her bunion.

  When my grandmother strips down, my mother huffs and leaves the room. My grandmother acts as if nothing has happened. She has mastered the art of pretending that my mother isn't there unless she wants to argue with her. And because she is making the bread today, she has better things to do than argue with my mother.

  We can hear my mother in the living room complaining about how, if she ever wanted to, she could never have a friend over for tea in the afternoon, what with my grandmother walking around the house in her underwear. "Dear God, what have I ever done to deserve this?" my mother asks. My mother has only one or two friends and would never invite them over to tea in the afternoon anyway, so what she says seems ridiculous. Still, I understand what my mother means, because I never invite my friends to my house. It's too risky, what with my mother and grandmother's constant arguments over my grandmother's strange ways.

  When my grandmother kneads the dough, she gives me a little batch to knead too. She shows me how to lean into the dough, to push it away, to gather it back onto itself, to lean into it again. The two of us kneading the bread, rocking together.

  After my grandmother kneads the dough, she gathers it into a ceramic bowl one of her relatives has sent to her from Italy to let it rise.

  When she first came to live with us in Ridgefield, she would take the big bowl of dough, carry it up the stairs to her bedroom, and settle it into her bedclothes. This is where she would let the dough rise. To my grandmother, this was normal. This is what her mother had done, and her mother's mother, and her mother's mother's mother. But to my mother, this was barbarism incarnate. Dough belonged in kitchens, not in bedrooms. "Jesus Christ Almighty, how much more of this can I take?" my mother asks, as she slides past my grandmother on the stairs.

  To keep peace in the family (even though he himself disrupts the peace), my father builds my grandmother a special little platform with little legs that sits on top of the radiator in the kitchen where she can place her dough to rise. The platform is made from plywood stained maple to match the Early American furniture in our kitchen.

  My father tells my grandmother that it's warm here on top of the radiator, warmer than in her bed, and so better for rising. My grandmother is skeptical. Still, this is where she begins to rest her bread. (This annoys my mother. So after a while she starts using the platform to store her pots and pans so there is no room for my grandmother's bowl. So my grandmother again trudges her dough up the stairs to let it rise in her bed.)

  After my grandmother sets the bowl of dough to rise on the platform, she dresses herself again. Pulls on her black dress (and, if it is wintertime, pulls on a second black dress over the first); pins the bib of her apron onto her bodice; ties the apron strings behind her; puts on her sweater; pulls on her shawl. Then she goes upstairs, pulls a multicolored crocheted blanket off her bed, takes it downstairs, tucks it around the breadbowl. Whether this is because she believes bedclothes make the dough rise higher, or because she is saving face by showing my mother that she will use her bedclothes even though she is no longer allowed to let the dough rise in her bed, I never learn. `Still, this gesture, which seems part compromise, part self-assertion, shows my mother— and me— that although my grandmother may never win, neither will she ever lose.

  When my grandmother arranges her blanket around the bread, she acts as if she is putting a child to sleep, that unborn ideal child against whom she compares my unfortunate mother. It is my grandmother's most tender gesture, this swaddling of the bread.

  After the dough rises, my grandmother shapes her loaves into round puffy pillows, and she helps me shape mine into a little braided crown. These she puts onto a wooden board to carry up to her bedroom to rise again. While our breads rise, my grandmother takes some scraps and shapes them into little figure eights, which she fries in hot oil, then sprinkles with confectioner's sugar for my sister and me. Zeppole. These, we will eat when my sister comes home from playing with her best friend. This is our lunch on baking days. This is why I love the days when my grandmother bakes the bread.

  My mother disapproves of me and my sister eating anything my grandmother cooks for us. "Zeppole" she sneers, "nothing but sugar and starch, sugar and starch," as if she were the queen of nutrition. But she lets us eat them anyway. As usual, she has been too busy fussing and complaining and cleaning our already clean house to make us lunch.

  After the loaves have risen, my grandmother bakes them in the oven down in the basement. We have an oven in the kitchen but my mother won't use it, won't let my grandmother use it. She uses it to store pots and pans, so even though there are two ovens in our house, she fights with my grandmother over who gets to use the oven in the basement.

  My grandmother doesn't mind going downstairs to bake her bread because in her village in Italy she had to bring her bread to a communal oven for baking when she had collected enough flour to make a loaf of bread. And although other women, scarves on heads, hands on hips, welcomed the opportunity to stand around the oven to socialize, and to gossip about the malefactions of anyone who wasn't there, my grandmother wa
s never one for wasting time in idle talk. When we moved to Ridgefield, my mother got a new stove for our kitchen, because she considered the old stove that came with the house unsightly. She had my father install the old stove in the basement, so she could use it during summers so the kitchen upstairs wouldn't get hot.

  But my mother never uses the oven in the kitchen upstairs, even in winter, never lets my grandmother use the oven in the kitchen. My mother only uses the oven in the basement, only lets my grandmother use the oven in the basement. So even though there is an oven in the kitchen, my mother and my grandmother have to run up and down the stairs to and from the basement several times whenever they are baking.

  My grandmother doesn't seem to mind. She doesn't have all that much to occupy her. Usually, when she's baking, she stays below ground in our dimly lit basement, sitting on a cast-off straight-backed chair near the furnace where it's warm, away from my mother, away from the commotion upstairs. This, I can't understand, though I do see why my grandmother puts as much space as she can between herself and my mother because I do the same thing. Still, the basement is dark, damp, unpleasant. (Years later, when I'm in the South of Italy, I learn that sitting on straight-backed chairs in dimly lit rooms where dust motes dance is what peasant women like my grandmother do when they're not working, which isn't often. In our basement, my grandmother must have felt at home.)

  I think it's crazy that my mother won't use the oven in the kitchen. Especially since, when she bakes, my mother is always also cleaning out a drawer, tidying a closet, scrubbing the toilet. So she always loses track of time and often burns whatever she's baking. My father can't understand this either. Whenever my mother runs up and down the stairs to and from the oven in the basement, my father asks, "Why are you always making things harder for yourself, Mil? Why can't you treat yourself right? Why do you make things harder for yourself than they need to be?"

  Like how my mother washes clothes. In Hoboken, my mother used to heat water on the coal stove, wash clothes on a washboard in the sink, wring them by hand, and hang them outside on the clothesline to dry. It was hard work and it took a long time. Here, in Ridgefield, we have a washing machine and even a dryer in the basement; they came with the house. My father imagines that these appliances will save my mother time, will make her into a lady of leisure.

  But although my mother washes our clothes in the washing machine, she won't let it complete the cycle. She wrings the clothes out by hand, because she wants to save water. She reuses the water in the washing machine for another load. This entails a lot of running up and down the stairs to interrupt the wash cycle. This entails a lot of rinsing of clothes in the basement sink. A lot of lugging heavy wet clothes out of the water, a lot of wringing, a lot of sweating, a lot of swabbing down the floor with the rag mop, a lot of swearing.

  My mother refuses to use the dryer at all. "Uses too much electricity; it's too expensive," she says, and so she hangs the wash outside in summer, inside in winter on the lines that she has strung back and forth across the basement.

  All this drives my father crazy. He calculates that my mother saves a dollar or so a month on water, five or so on electricity, which, he says, isn't worth it. "Think about your time, Mil; think about saving your energy for better things," he says to my mother, who doesn't listen. "A penny saved is a penny earned," my mother replies.

  My mother won't wash my grandmother's clothing because it offends her. And my grandmother won't use the washing machine in the basement to wash her clothing because she is afraid of it, as she is afraid of all electrical appliances, but especially the washing machine because it combines water and electricity and she is certain that if she uses it, she will electrocute herself. So my grandmother washes her clothes in the second-floor bathroom we all share, in the basin or the tub, depending upon how many clothes she needs to wash.

  "Jesus Christ," my mother says, when she wants to take a bath but encounters a tubful of my grandmother's clothes soaking, "how much more of this can I take?"

  After my grandmother finishes baking the bread, she cleans up, but not the way my mother wants: clean enough so you can eat off the floor, even though we never eat off the floor.

  My mother's face is red with rage. She rescrubs everything with Ajax. She curses. "Sporca, sporca, sporca," she says. "Dirty, dirty, dirty." She spills water on the floor because she's so angry, makes an even bigger mess, tries to clean that. She turns down the corners of her mouth.

  It is impossible for my sister and me to ignore my mother while we sit at the table and eat our zeppole, for my mother is cleaning the table we sit at, she is scrubbing around our plates and under our glasses. "Sporca, sporca, sporca," she repeats.

  My grandmother is standing on the threshold of the kitchen, watching us eat, watching my mother clean. She is serene, proud of the fat loaves of bread cooling on the counter. She is looking forward to eating the leftover zeppole all by herself after we have finished eating, after my mother has finished cleaning, after my mother finishes her snack of a crust of toast and a cup of cold black coffee.

  I concentrate on the crunchiness of the outside of the zeppole, on the warm pillow softness of the inside, on the cloying sweetness of the maple syrup that I use for dipping. Yes, it is impossible for me to ignore my mother. But I try.

  THE KNIFE

  The knife that my grandmother uses to cut the bread is not a bread knife, not a serrated knife like every well-equipped American kitchen now has. No. The knife that my grandmother uses to cut the bread is a butcher knife, the kind of knife that figures in nightmares, in movies like Psycho. The same knife, incidentally, that my father will use when I am a teenager, when he threatens to kill me. (Years later, I bring up the subject of how he grabbed the knife, came at me, how I got away because my grandmother put her body between us. "I never meant to hurt you," he said. "I was just trying to make myself clear.")

  My grandmother would take a gigantic loaf of the bread she had made, and she would pull the knife through the bread towards the center of her chest where her heart was located, as if she were trying to commit an Italian form of hara-kiri.

  "Stop that," my mother would shout, half fearing, half hoping, I think, that this woman, this stepmother who didn't love her, would pull the knife towards her breast just a fraction of an inch too far, so that after all the screaming, all the threats of "If I get my hands on you I'll kill you," we would finally have bloodshed in our own kitchen, finally have a real mess on our hands that would take my mother a very long time to clean.

  "Stop that, for Christ's sake!" my mother would shout. She would pull the bread away from my grandmother and often she would cut herself in the process, not much, but just enough to bleed onto the bread. And my mother would throw the bread down onto the counter, where it would land upside down (a grave sin, my grandmother said, for bread should only be placed right side up; to do otherwise was to disrespect the bread; to do otherwise was to invite the forces of evil into your house). And she would say, "Why can't you cut that goddamned bread like a normal human being?"

  My grandmother would bend over the bread that she had made, turn it right side up, and make the sign of the cross over it and kiss her fingertips, weeping. My grandmother would weep because to her the bread was sacred and to her the only way to cut the bread was to pull the knife through the bread toward your heart. And perhaps she was weeping, too, for all that she had lost, for all that she never had, and for all that she didn't have. For the insufferable life she was forced to live.

  My mother was afraid of knives, and if she could avoid using one, she did. She'd tear the lettuce instead of slicing it, and not because she didn't want to destroy the tenderness of the leaves. She'd use kitchen shears to dismember a chicken. She'd put blunt knives at our places instead of steak knives, even if what we were eating was fibrous and tough.

  Some things, though, she couldn't avoid cutting, like onions, like carrots. So when she cut them, she ordered everyone out of the kitchen.

  "Knives are
dangerous," she'd say. "You have to stay far away from someone who is using a knife."

  Before she went to bed at night, my mother would gather up all the knives in our kitchen, and she would put them away in a drawer. "This way," she said, "if burglars come into the house in the middle of the night, they'll have to look for them and we'll hear them. This way," my mother said, "we'll have a fighting chance."

  I never believed this burglar bullshit. I always thought the reason my mother put away all the knives was because she was afraid that one of us might creep down to the kitchen in the middle of the night, take the butcher knife my grandmother used to cut the bread, climb back up the stairs, and kill the rest of us.

  SLICING ONIONS

  It was when we moved to the suburbs from Hoboken that my mother abandoned cooking foods that required much preparation and began cooking things that were cooked already. Although she said she was happy to live in the suburbs, happy to be out of Hoboken, our new house was an old house that needed a lot of work— stripping old wallpaper, sanding, plastering, painting, rewiring— all of which was done by my parents because they didn't have the money to hire someone, hardly had the money for this house, which they bought with a GI mortgage. And so my mother, too exhausted to cook, gave us TV dinners (usually turkey, Swanson brand, although sometimes we'd have meatloaf) for supper. Canned ravioli or spaghetti (Chef Boyardee). Beef stew (Dinty Moore). Chow mein (Chun King, with Minute Rice and canned fried noodles on the side). Instant mashed potatoes and canned beef gravy (this was a meal). Canned chili (with Minute Rice). Canned ham (with Minute Rice). Canned Spam (she gave up on this one because even my father wouldn't eat it; said he'd seen enough of it for a lifetime while he was in the navy). Frozen pizza that came in little squares. Often, a canned vegetable accompanied whatever my mother heated up. Peas were her favorite; but she liked asparagus, green beans, and beets, too. Always, there was a bag of Dugan's bread plopped in the center of the table, inside its sanitary plastic bag. And when she was making a special effort, there was salad (iceberg lettuce, of course) slathered with bottled salad dressing (Russian).