Our Roots Are Deep with Passion

by Lee Gutkind

  If the aroma of tarragon is the perfume that evokes my mother’s solitude, the scent of oregano—mingled with odors of garlic and inhaled through clouds of cigar smoke—conjures Grandpa’s kitchen, both its early prosperity and its late defeat. Over the years I’ve written often, even obsessively, about this kitchen, from which regularly emerged enormous and intricately festive meals to mark the turnings of the seasons. Our New Year’s supper featured a rather Americanized baked ham but one that was garnished with Grandma’s own mellifluous version of salade russe, side by side with Grandpa’s stuffed mushrooms, caviar d’aubergine, and—pièce de résistance!—lobster salad. And then there was a spring menu of roast lamb accompanied by Really French flageolets (they were canned and my aunt bought them at Bloomingdale’s gourmet grocery) and completed by a cake topped with strawberries macerated in some brilliant combination of liqueurs in which Grand Marnier played a prominent part. But best of all, the cycle of the year was crowned by a Thanksgiving dinner, joyously followed in just a month by a Christmas feast, centering on a roast turkey stuffed with Grandpa’s inimitable spinach-mushroom-sausage stuffing.

  I don’t remember what my grandparents served for dessert at Thanksgiving. Pumpkin pies were certainly alien to them so perhaps we had one of my Grandpa’s splendid crèmes caramel, a golden ring of custard lapped in bittersweet burnt-sugar syrup. And I know that Christmas dinner never ended with pumpkin or mince pie though it sometimes theatrically climaxed in blue flames flickering over a plum pudding and sometimes in a luxurious Mont Blanc of puréed chestnuts happily married to whipped cream.

  But the stuffing with which Grandpa lavishly garnished his turkeys was the sine qua non of his cuisine, the dish for which he was and still is most famous among our extended network of family and friends. And it is the dish that now tells me how deeply Ligurian he was.

  My grandparents, Amedee Mortola and Alexandra (Sasha) Zelensoff, had somehow met and married in Paris. Like so many children of immigrant families, I haven’t a clue how and where they came together, nor do I know exactly when and where they wed. I did learn, not long ago, that my father, Alexis Joseph Mortola, was born in the 17th arrondissement of this city where I now spend a good deal of time, but of the life the family lived in Paris I know nothing beyond my grandmother’s tales of the “Russian Church” (i.e., the Cathedrale Alexander Nevsky). Yet of course the family’s Gallic connections are evident in their menus—the salade russe that we actually called “Russian salad,” the caviar d’aubergine always described to me as “eggplant caviar,” the various marinades of artichokes and mushrooms and roasted peppers that you can buy from most French traiteurs. My grandparents’ vast lazy Susan was always heaped with hors d’oeuvres variés that included these and other succulent starters for an overture to every feast, although the course itself was often metonymically described as “the lazy Susan.”

  But though Grandpa was called “Frenchy” in the New York market district, and Grandma’s domestic frugality was no doubt fostered in Paris, and the French army tried to draft my French-born father when he was eighteen (the United States Congress had to pass some sort of special resolution to save him, as it evidently does in many such cases), and my aunt Louise, despite her servitude at G.E., had a Master’s in French literature, and although until World War II cut Americans off from pleasure trips to Europe the family went at regular intervals to visit relatives in Nice and Paris, Grandpa’s stuffing was definitively Ligurian in origin, as I’ve learned in recent years from friends who actually have a house on a little street in San Rocco, a frazione of the Ligurian town of Ruta. Their street is called Via Mortola, a name that persuades me that in some distant ancestral lifetime I too would have been the owner of such a house.

  The Via Mortola is probably too rough and certainly too narrow for any vehicles except motorcycles to brave its bumps and cracks. It curves around a hillside on the Portofino peninsula that’s thicketed with chestnut trees, dotted with olive and lemon groves, and blooming with bay, rosemary, thyme, and other leaves and herbs whose names I don’t know. From this road, really a path or track, you can clamber down to the little fishing village of San Fruttuoso or the small resort town of Camogli or up and around the hilly peninsula to elegant Portofino itself, where a dazzle of international yachts bob in the harbor, admired by strolling masses of tourists nibbling at paper cups filled with the wonderfully portable sundae called a paciugo. But if you stay on this hillside, from here on the Via Mortola you can see the great plateful of blue that is the Mediterranean and the hilly spine of the Riviera whose Italianità once stretched all the way to Nice, until, over the protests of Garibaldi, himself a native of the town some still call Nizza la Bella, the Niçois voted to become part of France.

  I guess the farm where Grandpa grew up was reached by another narrow road, not unlike the Via Mortola, high in the hills above Nice, perhaps set among olive and lemon groves, studded with bushes of rosemary and looking toward fields of other herbs—lavender? thyme?—evoking the greenery of Liguria because really primordially part of it.

  What did they cultivate on that farm? I’ve heard they had rabbits. When my aunt Louise visited there as a young girl, her Tante Rosette took her to see those rabbits and asked her which of the tiny, soft, hunched-up quivering creatures she liked best, and when little Louise pointed to the sweetest bunny, beautiful Tante Rosette (for she was beautiful, dark-haired, dark-eyed, and tragically bereft because her fiancé had been killed in the first World War) said, Bon, we’ll have that one for dinner.

  Did they stuff it with some semblance of Grandpa’s stuffing? His famous stuffing was green with spinach—which I now realize was a standin for the wild herbs that Ligurian cooks pack into ravioli—and dense with sausage and salty with parmesan cheese and creamy with mushrooms and lively with garlic, onion, celery, all bound with a couple of beaten eggs and several cupfuls of good stale bread or bread crumbs, and all seasoned with Grandpa’s all-purpose Italian American herb: oregano.

  If tarragon was the herb my mother fastened on when she searched the shelves of Bohack’s and the A & P in Jackson Heights, oregano was what caught Grandpa’s eye. Perhaps there weren’t many other herbs available in the forties and fifties. Could anybody in Queens buy basil, rosemary, or thyme at a local supermarket? Surely there weren’t any fresh herbs, but there must long have been dried oregano, even then widely used in pizza and pasta sauces, and it kept well. So when Grandpa dictated recipes to me and my young husband as we sat at his kitchen table in the early sixties, bent over our graduate student notebooks, taking down his every word, he always said, “And add a little oregano.” Add it to the marinades. Add it to the sauces. Add it, most important of all, to the stuffing.

  The indescribably delicious stuffing was of course essential to the turkey, and better, indeed, than the turkey itself, which Grandpa tended to overcook, perhaps out of some fundamental mistrust of American turkeys. After its sojourn in the turkey, however, Grandpa’s stuffing had many more uses. On the days after Christmas, Grandma rolled out noodle dough and together she and Grandpa made ravioli that they crammed with the stuffing, thus returning their mix of greens and meat and cheese it to its original Ligurian function as a filling for pasta. And then if there was more stuffing—as, if one was lucky (or provident), there may well have been—it could be used, can be used, to stuff mushrooms, or even zucchini, peppers, who knows what other vegetables, in time-worn Ligurian fashion.

  I recognize grandpa’s stuffing as an Americanized version of a traditional recipe from the Via Mortola because my friends who live on that street have written a book in which a recipe akin to my grandfather’s appears, only with exotic wild greens instead of spinach, and local cheeses, mushrooms, and sausages replacing the ingredients Grandpa bought in Queens. Still Liguria survives, though transformed, in Grandpa’s stuffing, which my children and I have shared with numerous friends and relatives, many of whom prepare it at least once a year to mark, as Grandpa did, the turnings of the seasons, especial
ly the swivel from fall to winter, when one wants to preserve the spirit of green hillsides for a while, along with the bite of garlic, the zest of oregano.

  To be sure, the most famous Ligurian recipe—and one often encountered in Nice as well—is the one for pesto, a summery sauce that sanctifies greenery in the marriage of basil with olive oil, pine nuts, garlic, cheese, and sometimes butter. But oddly, my grandfather never produced a single pesto that I can remember, nor did any of my other relatives. I learned to make this sauce by reading cookbooks, despite the ancestry in which I take such wistful pride. And this is strange indeed since everyone now knows that pasta all’ pesto is what one can and should eat on the Italian Riviera. My friend, the food and travel writer David Downie, quotes in Enchanted Liguria, his wonderful introduction to the region, a passage that he calls “florid” but that nevertheless exactly summarizes the privileged place of pesto among my ancestors:

  “What is that scent of alpine herbs mixing so strangely with the sea spray on the Riviera’s cliffs,” asked writer Paolo Monelli.… “It is the odor of pesto: that condiment made of basil, Pecorino, garlic, pine nuts, crushed in the mortar and diluted with olive oil.… [It] is purely Ligurian; it speaks Ligurian; the mere smell of it makes your ears ring with a dialect at once sharp and soft, full of sliding sounds, of whispered syllables, of dark vowels.”

  Yet this is a taste of Liguria I never encountered in my family. Did Grandpa favor oregano as his invariable seasoning because it wasn’t quintessentially Ligurian? Or did he choose it so often because in the taste of oregano there is a darker hint of basil, as if oregano were basil grown more intense, a little more bitter, a little older? Yet basil must have grown on the farm in the hills above Nice just as it blooms in small, intensely fragrant and flavorful leaves in all the kitchen gardens of Liguria, waiting to be picked and merged with olive oil, garlic, pine nuts, Pecorino.

  Maybe Grandpa cooked with oregano because he lost not only the restaurant in the market district but also the farm. In 1960, about a decade after the restaurant failed, my parents went to Europe for a long-deferred second honeymoon. And of course they journeyed not just to the usual tourist places—Rome and Venice and London and whatever—but also to the family places: Paris, Sicily, Liguria, Nice.

  Because my father felt so sorry for his father’s suffering and bankruptcy, so sad that his father was unmanned by living on Grandma’s savings and Auntie’s meager earnings, he went to Nice to sell Grandpa’s half-share of the family farm in the hills above the old city, and he was pleased that he succeeded in getting about $7,000 for the place. The purchaser was his second cousin, Liline, whose husband had made a good deal of money marketing refrigerators in Tahiti.

  A few years later, Liline and her husband—who looked rather like Albert Camus, I thought, even though I knew he was an appliance salesman—built a ten-story condo on the land where the farm had been. Ten years later still, my husband and I visited Nice and went to look at this structure, which then seemed remarkably glamorous. And although we never entered the building, never ascended in what I suspect is rather a fancy elevator, I imagine that from the top story of the condo we would have seen the blue expanse of the Mediterranean and the thorny spine of Liguria, relaxing here and there into gardens dense with rosemary and basil, tables laden with bowls of pasta all’ pesto.

  Basil

  When I was a little girl and even when I was a teenager, I don’t think I knew what basil was, so I couldn’t have known that it had been mysteriously replaced by oregano in my Niçoise-Ligurian grandfather’s cooking. Yet I was often surrounded by basil, as I realized when I first began to cook with its distinctively peppery, aromatic leaves. In the tiny yard behind his three-story brownstone in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—then a stronghold of Sicilian culture—my Uncle Frank, the husband of my mother’s only sister, Frances, had laid out a miniature formal garden. Just behind the house there was a grape arbor, with a porch swing in its leafy shade, and above the arbor flapped Aunt Frances’s clothesline, on which she could pin her wash while standing in her big, second-story kitchen. But for maybe twenty or thirty feet beyond the arbor stretched the sunny giardino, with a stone bird bath at its center and little plots of herbs and flowers radiating in all directions.

  From these tiny beds of exuberant bloom rose many fragrances, as fascinating as they were mysterious to a child who lived in a fourth-floor, two-bedroom, gray-carpeted apartment in a stolid brick building surrounded by prickly, boxy hedges of some dismally indeterminate plant.

  One late afternoon in California, when I was tearing the leaves from a bunch of basil in preparation for a pesto, I thought, as I often had, how familiar their perfume was, and wondered why I felt that I had long ago—somewhere, but where?—inhaled it. And then I remembered the hot flagstone paths in the miniature Williamsburg garden and the little beds of herbs and flowers. The aroma that rose when the sun leaned hard on them was mostly basil, or basil dominated the others, and I think that when I was very young I came to consider this distinctive perfume coextensive with summer in that garden in that part of New York City.

  My Uncle Frank, the garden designer, was swarthy, mustachioed, slightly bald, and very bitter. He almost always wore an unbuttoned suit vest and his sleeves were almost always rolled up, as though he was determined to Get Down to Things, or anyway, do some work in the garden. He was an architect, born on one of the Lipari Islands off the coast of Sicily, I don’t know which one, and I believe his family name was Adami. But when he arrived on Ellis Island, the immigration officer who greeted him said, “Here we call you Adams.” So a genteelly WASP-ish Adams he became, though the name sat strangely on him, given his belligerent, even rather piratical air.

  Uncle Frank chain-smoked Camels, a habit that eventually led to his death from emphysema, but in his healthy middle age, the time I remember best, he neither coughed nor wheezed, but vigorously breathed in and out great hot blossoms of smoke as he pounded on the table, elaborating his rage at America: New Deal, Old Deal, every deal was a bad deal. For he was an impassioned communist (though I doubt that he was what used to be called a “card-carrying” one), who admired Stalin, loathed almost every other politician, and articulated his unswerving beliefs in English, Sicilian, and Italian.

  Most likely it was the Depression that drove Uncle Frank to such heights and depths of apoplectic, chain-smoking fury. Things had happened before I was born, I gathered, that had imposed some professional torment on him. He was a brilliant, highly educated architect, and yet the Depression had deprived him of his livelihood. My mother said he “had to work for the WPA,” and she made this acronymic fate sound awful to me. Uncle Frank worked for the WPA and as part of his labors he made a beautiful little model of a Mayan Temple, which he kept downstairs in his study. But his family—a wife, two daughters, and a son—had sunk into genteel poverty during his years at the WPA, or so my mother implied when she discussed family history. My mother told me that she and her aged mother had lived with them and she had helped support the whole clan with her wages as a schoolteacher until her mother, a grandmother I never met, had died. Then my mother married my father (once he had passed his trial by sausage), gave birth to me, and moved to Queens.

  I have to admit that to this day I don’t quite grasp why Uncle Frank constructed a model of a Mayan Temple as part of what was defined as a “demeaning” job for the WPA. But even as a child I understood the reasons for his bitterness, his rage, his intransigent communism. After all, he outlined his grievances in the course of each one of the countless political debates that surged around the long dinner table at which my parents and I frequently joined him, my aunt, and my three cousins for festive meals featuring—yes—hot Italian sausages and platters of arancini or great roasting pans laden with Sicilian-style pizza or marvelously layered pasta infornata and cannoli filled with sweet ricotta.

  My three Adams cousins were significantly older than I, and I worshiped them all: dark-eyed, lively Nancy, who spoke perfect Spanish and knew
how to tango and rhumba; beautiful Virginia, who looked just like Ava Gardner and dated tall, witty Jules, a Jewish mathematician; and the youngest, Richard, who was so brilliant and dashing, such a great joke-teller and such a devastating debater (especially in arguments with his father) that when I was thirteen I pretended to my schoolmates that he wasn’t really my cousin, he was my boyfriend!

  Theirs was the home I wanted: a tall house, three children, a long table heavy with pans of pasta, people shouting and laughing in a language incomprehensible to me—Sicilian!—but that seemed somehow a source of the strange vitality that kept everyone making convivial noises and pounding the table, and a garden warm with that inexplicable scent I now know to have been the perfume of basil.

  In his garden, stooping over his herbs and flowers, perhaps tending his basil with special care, Uncle Frank did sometimes smile. His sleeves rolled up, his vest loosened, a Camel fuming in the corner of his mouth, he was nevertheless more amiable there than he was at the dinner table, when memories of the Depression and the immigration officer and the WPA and the Mayan Temple flooded him with bile. The aroma of basil must have penetrated that cloud of smoke; its sunny flavor must have left a trace on his tongue.

  When, years later, I went with my daughters to Sicily, we spent a day in the windswept, hilly town of Sambuca-Zabut, where my mother, her sister, and her seven brothers were born a century ago. Not far from there, we visited the great ancient ruins of Agrigento, so superb one doesn’t want to call them ruins since they look almost as if someone had wanted them to have the special majesty they have, set against those vine-covered hills and sun-baked fields. I wondered why Uncle Frank hadn’t made a model of Agrigento for the WPA.