The Love Goddess’ Cooking School

by Melissa Senate

  Holly wanted to complicate things. She wanted to complicate this whole breakup. And so she pleaded her case, reminded him of their two years together, of Lizzie’s attachment to her, of the plans they’d made for the future. Which, Holly had had to concede, had dwindled to maybe going to the San Francisco Zoo the weekend after next. And when he just stood there, not saying anything and taking a sideways glance at the clock, she realized he was waiting for her to leave so he could call his new girlfriend and tell her he’d finally done it, he’d dumped Holly.

  As if in slow motion, Holly went into the bathroom, afraid to look at him, afraid to look at anything, lest she start screaming like a lunatic. She closed the door and slid down against the back of it, covering her face with her hands as she cried. She sucked in a deep breath, then forced herself up to splash water on her face. She looked in the mirror over the sink, at the dark brown eyes, the dark brown hair, and the fair skin, so like her grandmother’s, and told herself, He’s not your great love. He’s not meant to be. It was little consolation.

  And what if he had liked the sa cordula? Then what? How could she fight for a great love with someone who’d said he didn’t love her as easily as he’d said the sa cordula was disgusting?

  After a gentle yet impatient, “Holly, you can’t stay in there all night,” she came out of the bathroom. He handed her a shopping bag of her possessions he’d clearly packed earlier that day in anticipation of dumping her—a few articles of clothing and her toothbrush, and again said he was sorry, that he never wanted to hurt her. And then she stood in the doorway of Lizzie’s room, watching the girl’s slight body rise and fall with each sleeping breath.

  “Good-bye, sweet girl,” she whispered. “I’ll bet if I’d given you a taste of the sa cordula, you would have asked for another.”

  Two

  One month and three thousand miles later, as Holly stood at the stove in her grandmother’s kitchen—her kitchen now, she had to keep reminding herself—the breakup, the final good-night kiss she’d blown to sleeping Lizzie—was the One Sad Memory that went into the bowl of risotto on the counter.

  In the month she’d been living in her grandmother’s house, going through Camilla Constantina’s easiest recipes, she still wasn’t used to wishing into a pot of simmering marinara sauce or recalling a moment that made her cry while pounding a thick breast of chicken. She wasn’t used to pounding a chicken breast, period. She wasn’t used to anything—being alone in this country kitchen with its Tuscan-yellow bead-board walls and gleaming white-tiled center island, the copper pots and black cast-iron frying pans hanging from the rack above her head. The six-burner stove. And especially the recipe book. The very thing that had saved her, given her something to do, something to focus on.

  She would not be bested by a bowl of risotto. If one could call the sticky mess in the bowl risotto. It tasted nothing like her grandmother’s famed risotto alla Milanese. And now, Holly, who wouldn’t even call herself a passable cook, unless you counted omelets, Micky Mouse–shaped cheeseburgers, spaghetti (if she didn’t overcook it), and the homemade chicken nuggets she’d made often for picky-eater Lizzie, was attempting risotto al salto when she couldn’t make a Bisquick pancake without half of it being burned and half being undercooked.

  She glanced at the loose-leaf binder of Camilla’s Cucinotta hand-scrawled recipes, which lay open to page twenty-three: Risotto al salto.

  Risotto al salto

  Leftover risotto alla Milanese

  1 pat butter

  1 sad memory

  1 fervent wish

  All of Camilla Constantina’s recipes called for wishes and memories, either sad or happy or unqualified. They were as essential to Camilla as were the minced garlic or the tablespoon of olive oil. Her grandmother had told Holly that when she first started cooking as a young girl at her mother’s hip, she began the tradition of adding the wishes and memories, which had delighted her elders. “She is saying her prayers into the osso buco,” her mother and grandmother and aunts would say, patting little Camilla on the head. And since little Camilla would invariably wish for her father to return safely from war—and he did—the tradition was born. Much later Camilla would wish her own husband would recuperate from his heart attack and it would not be, yet she’d explain as best she could to Holly that the magic was in the wishing, not so much the getting. And that memories, particularly the sad ones, had healing properties, just like the basil or oregano she regularly used in her dishes.

  During the past month, the memory of saying that final good-bye to John, of watching Lizzie sleep for the last time, of missing both of them with a fierceness that stopped her breath, had made it into quite possibly one hundred overcooked pastas, countless too sweet or too salty sauces, and three rubbery veal scallopinis alla something. She’d been trying not to think about John and Lizzie and the breakup that had brought her to her grandmother’s house on a rainy September evening. Or what had happened since—on the chilly October morning she woke to find her grandmother lying lifeless in her bed, a tiny painting of the three Po River stones watching over her from the iron headboard. But Holly’s new life—and the white binder containing her recipes—insisted upon memories.

  No, she didn’t want to think about John, who would likely be putting Lizzie to bed right then (it was his weekend, a schedule she’d have in her head forever), or Lizzie, who was probably asking him to read Green Eggs and Ham for the third time. Because if Holly let herself remember too much, she’d remember herself in that scenario, of hoping every weekend for a proposal, an engagement ring, that never came. And the pain of what she’d lost would knock her to her knees, as it had many times since she’d come running to her grandmother’s house. The place she always ran to. And now the house was here, but the source of the comfort was gone.

  What was left was this kitchen and the recipe book, her grandmother in the form of walls and ceiling and stove and hundreds of utensils—and recipes. Very original recipes.

  She pulled a broad-based black frying pan from the wall of pots and pans adjacent to the stove (the other day she’d had to type broad-based frying pan into Google for a picture, since her grandmother had so many pans), set it on a burner, and sliced a pat of butter into the center. Risotto al salto was simply (ha—supposedly simply) a thin pancake made from leftover risotto. She reached for the binder and checked the recipe for how high to set the burner and for how long to let the pancake fry in its swirl of butter. She had to get this right. Camilla’s Cucinotta was hers now, hers to keep going for her grandmother, who’d left her the house and the business—the popular Italian cooking class and the tiny takeout pasta shop. There was no time for sobbing against the refrigerator for what she’d lost. There were pastas and sauces to make for tomorrow. There were recipes to get right so that Holly could teach her students how to make them like her grandmother did.

  There was learning to cook.

  Though Holly had spent a month every summer of her childhood with her grandmother on Blue Crab Island, helped cook beside her, rolled out fresh pasta so thin it was almost see-through, knew which pastas took which sauces, Holly was not a cook. She might have been, had she not almost killed her grandmother with her culinary experiment at the age of seven. She’d made her grandmother a sandwich piled high with ridiculous ingredients like a slice of cheese, a spoonful of ice cream, two slices of hard salami, a mashed scoop of banana, and, unknowingly, rat poison. Her grandmother had been in the hospital for almost two weeks, and despite her assurances that Holly was only seven, that it was an accident any child could make, and that the sandwich had been delicious otherwise, Holly had developed a fear of the kitchen, of what lurked inside cabinets and inside food, like the weevils her mother had always cautioned her about. She’d lost the love of cooking. During subsequent summers, Holly still helped in the kitchen, still loved sitting at the table, peeling potatoes, watching her grandmother hum along to the Italian opera that always played on a CD player. But she’d stopped trusting herself as
a cook that day and she’d never gotten the trust back. Now, though, she had to trust herself. Her grandmother’s bank account, one combined for personal and business, totaled $5,213, when property tax was due in December. When heating oil was $2.57 a gallon. When a half pound of veal was over six bucks. Her grandmother had always said she was doing fine financially. But clearly she’d been scraping by. If Holly couldn’t keep the cooking course going, keep the little pasta business going, Camilla’s Cucinotta would disappear with her grandmother.

  Holly reached for a spatula from the row of canisters holding every imaginable utensil, still unsure if she should use plastic or wood or metal. What made her think she could do this? She was thirty years old—thirty—and had never been able to succeed at something like a career except when it came to kid-focused work, like manning the aquarium tank at the children’s museum during the marine educator’s maternity leave (Holly had memorized every sea creature, from anemones to starfish, and thrilled four-year-olds) and she was a decent waitress, which was how she’d earned her living in San Francisco, but at a la-di-dah coffee shop that sold eight-dollar bowls of basic coffee and fifteen-dollar sandwiches a gourmet chef created. Her ability to make spaghetti with jarred marinara and a side of garlic bread, a passable lasagna and veal parmigiana (for the nondiscerning, such as herself) did not qualify her to teach her grandmother’s famed Italian cooking class. Her grandmother hadn’t even considered lasagna and veal parmigiana Italian food. “Those are American dishes,” she’d scoff.

  “How am I going to keep Camilla’s Cucinotta going when I can barely make a decent tomato sauce?” she asked her grandmother’s ancient gray cat, Antonio, who was grooming himself in his red cat bed by the side door. The class started in one week. One week. One week left to learn the recipes for the eight-week fall course and sound like she knew what she was talking about. She stared at the risotto, nothing more than a clump of rice, and told herself she could do it. “You follow the recipe,” her grandmother used to say. “That’s all there is to cooking.”

  There was a world of difference between Holly Maguire and Julia Child. Julie Powell, even.

  A glance at the recipe, handwritten in her grandmother’s beautiful scrolling script, in red ink, told her she’d forgotten one of the essential ingredients. The fervent wish. She’d been so focused on studying the steps for spreading the risotto in the pan, and then she’d interrupted herself to do a Google search of gilded to see exactly what was meant by gilded edges of the risotto pancake, and then she’d gotten lost in the One Sad Memory and forgot all about the last essential ingredient. When she’d made the risotto alla Milanese earlier that day (both too salty and too tasteless at the same time), the recipe had called for a wish, just a plain old wish, not a most fervent one, and a memory, neither happy nor sad. Just a plain old memory.

  And so after adding the dry white wine into the beef marrow broth (she had not liked the sound of that the first three times she’d attempted the risotto but had gotten used to it) and then letting the rice absorb it, she’d closed her eyes and let a wish come to her, and the one that formed fully inside her was that her grandmother would come back. Would once again be standing at the island in the middle of the bungalow’s kitchen, stirring, chopping, talking.

  “Nonna, my most fervent wish is that you’re watching over me, guiding my hand so I don’t mess this up,” Holly said as she spread the sticky risotto into the pan. She couldn’t mess this up. Not her grandmother’s kitchen, this magical place.

  She studied the recipe for how long before she was supposed to flip the pancake. Not that the risotto al salto would be any good; it would be as good as the risotto it was made from, which Holly would grade a solid C. But it was better than her first five attempts. Risotto and the risotto al salto were on her grandmother’s list for week two of the cooking class that would start next week, but Holly would switch it to a later week. Her students knew that Camilla Constantina herself would not be teaching Camilla’s Cucinotta Italian Cooking class this term (except for one student, who Holly couldn’t reach). They knew there would be changes to the proposed menu of recipes in her grandmother’s little brochure, which Holly saw all over town.

  At the funeral, Holly’s mother had been stunned to hear that Holly was taking over the course. “For God’s sake, Holl, just sell the house and be done with it.” But Holly couldn’t—wouldn’t—do that. She would not sell the house or business she’d inherited. She would not sell out her grandmother. The grandmother who’d been so kind to her while Holly was growing up, never fitting in anywhere except in her grandmother’s kitchen, where Holly could barely peel a potato without slicing the skin off her finger. Camilla’s Cucinotta had been her grandmother’s life. It had been her grandmother. And despite being a so-so cook, Holly was determined to continue what her grandmother had started as a young widow with a young child in 1962. For the past two weeks, since her grandmother had died, she’d spent her days surrounded by flour and eggs and garlic and onions and veal, following the recipes for the pastas and sauces so exactly that they’d come out okay for the past several days. Progress. Not with that extra delicious quality of her grandmother’s, but enough to satisfy your basic penne in vodka sauce lunch eater in Maine.

  And Holly had four students enrolled—the same number of students Camilla had had in her first cooking class in 1962. The other twelve had requested their money back at the news of Camilla’s death, but Holly could understand that. After all, Holly wasn’t the seventy-five-year-old Milanese Love Goddess Camilla, whose maccheroni in secret sauce had supposed aphrodisiac properties, whose exotic black-eyed gaze upon you, her Italian stones in your hand, could determine just the man for you, the life for you. Whose very essence had earned her the title Love Goddess and her business The Love Goddess’s Cooking School.

  Holly as the love goddess. That was laughable. Cryable too.

  Holly had students. Enough for a class. Enough to purposefully buy fresh ingredients at the supermarket and farmer’s markets in Portland. Some neighbors and past students had assured her (she couldn’t tell if they were just being kind) at Camilla’s funeral and later at the bungalow that her grandmother’s magic was in her blood, that if she wanted, she could do it. Holly desperately wanted to believe this, but all her practice tiramisus and pumpkin ravioli with their ingredients of wishes and memories hadn’t changed a thing for her: John hadn’t come back with that diamond ring, saying he’d made the biggest mistake of his life, that he wanted a future with her, that his daughter missed her. In fact, she hadn’t heard from him at all. Her crying voice mail about her grandmother’s death got her only a text message the next morning:

  Sorry about your gm’s passing.

  Perhaps she hadn’t needed sa cordula to tell her this man was not her great love.

  Holly was about to turn on the gas burner when a banging interrupted the stillness in the kitchen. For a moment she thought the wind had dislodged the screen door again. It was early October, and the wind rolled off Casco Bay a quarter mile into the center of town, where the cottage stood at the end of the road, nestled between a stand of evergreens that separated the house a bit from the rest of the houses and businesses that lined the main street.

  The banging continued and Holly glanced up through the large archway that led into the entryway, surprised to see someone at the door, knuckles against the glass. It was a girl, around eleven, maybe twelve, holding something in each of her hands with the hopeful, confident expression of a child about to attempt to sell a magazine subscription or Girl Scout cookies, which Holly would happily buy. A sleeve of Thin Mints and a glass of Chianti while watching an old movie later sounded great. Holly glanced at the wall clock. It was just after eight p.m. Risotto al salto, you will just have to wait.

  Holly walked over to the door, slid the silver bolt, and was immediately struck by the girl’s coloring. Her long, shiny hair was the color of chestnuts, which Holly had used to make Italian chestnut cake yesterday morning, and her eyes the beau
tiful dark blue of blueberries. The girl reminded Holly of one of her favorite (to look at) customers, a man who’d been in several times since Holly had come to the island, the always-in-a-rush, two containers of penne and two containers of vodka sauce. Mid-thirties. Tall, lanky, yet muscular. He had those same blueberry-colored eyes. But his hair was darker.

  “There isn’t really vodka in the sauce, is there?” he’d asked the first time he’d come in, a woman, wearing a very pink and frilly suit with black patent leather heels, beside him.

  “Silly,” the woman had said, smiling and resting her pink-manicured hand on his arm. “It burns out in the cooking.” She’d turned to Holly and added, “Men,” with a delighted headshake. And Holly had smiled and filled the orders, surprised that this man, this stranger she’d never seen before on the island, had registered on her radar at all.

  “May I help you? Holly asked the girl.

  “This is all I have.” She held up the twenty-dollar bill. In her other hand was a brochure for Camilla’s Cucinotta’s Italian cooking course. “I know it’s not enough. But I can wash dishes or sweep up. Whenever I try to cook or my dad does, half of everything ends up on the floor, so I know you’ll probably need a sweeper for your students. And I could fetch stuff, like from the pantry or the markets or anything. Every report card I’ve ever gotten says I’m a good listener.”

  Holly smiled. Her own report cards had always said the opposite. “Are you saying you want to take the class but you don’t have enough money?

  The girl bit her lip and looked away, and Holly realized she was trying very hard not to cry. “My dad’s going to marry that totally fake pink bobblehead if I don’t learn how to cook.” Tears pooled in those blueberry-colored eyes.