Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

by Gabrielle Hamilton

  These first encounters are still exciting. I love to set eyes on everyone again for the first time since last year. I don’t know if anyone in the family knows me or likes me, but I like them. Without language, I am left hyper, acutely tuned in to tone and body language and I can never trust my observations fully. People smile and seem happy to see us. Anna and Carlo, Michele’s younger brother and his wife, arrive with one of their daughters. Paolone arrives with Angela—everyone is here in the way that I love nostalgically. The big din of Italian people, sitting around the table together, drinking wine and eating delicious food—it looks like a page in a magazine—but I am again exhausted, and on the terrace with my two kids alone, trying to keep them out of the dog shit. Michele comes outside and offers to sit with the kids awhile but even when I go inside and take a place at the table, I feel a gulf between me and the impossibility of what I want, what I crave from this family of which I am, still, not a part.

  Alda and Carlo and Manuela and Giulio ask me about every part of the meal, how I cooked each thing, what was in each dish:

  “Ma la sepia, how did you make them so tender?”

  And what was in the zucchini?

  How did you think of putting the salami in with the cauliflower?

  This is perfect starter conversation for me because I can, in fact, understand in Italian and answer in Italian. It is not difficult for me to say the names of ingredients in Italian.

  Everyone says they loved the food and I watched Alda’s face intently to see if she was being polite. She seemed genuinely happy with the meal and the ability to sit and enjoy her family without having to cook. And that is all I give a shit about.

  Every year I vow to learn to speak this language. Every year I arrive and am completely tongue-tied and disoriented in the first few days. By the end of the first week I have fully recovered everything I learned the year before and I can piece sentences together. By week three I’m more liquid, ready to really learn to speak this language, and just then we pack our bags with dirty laundry and Salentino pottery and taralli biscuits and fly home.

  In the morning, we pack the rental car and drive the eight hours south to the house in Puglia, without speaking except as it pertains to or involves the kids. Our first few days of vacation in Italy and I have not left the apartment in Rome once, and Michele and I are starting to spiral like dishwater from cordiality toward the sucking hole of hostility.

  WE ARRIVE AT THE HOUSE. This small seaside town has, curiously, a collection of wild and improbable villas right on the main drag facing the sea, built in the 1800s. In the two hundred intervening years since these lavish villas were built, some with turrets and parapets and some, like ours, with rooms with no ceilings!—this place has become the Italian Asbury Park. I feel like I’m at the Jersey Shore. A dozen kiosks sell sequined bathing suits and tie-dyed beach wraps. Italian teenagers in mirror sunglasses and thongs up their asses sit on the tide wall and don’t look at each other. Smoking. A karaoke bar now resides exactly adjacent to the Villa Fuortes, and until two in the morning each night we are serenaded by drunk twenty-year-olds half-singing Celine Dion songs in thick Italian accents, their mouths forming words they don’t know the meaning of into a microphone. There’s a sliver of a children’s amusement park at the far end of the boardwalk promenade with rides that go around and around for five euros a pop.

  The villa still impresses.

  But whatever money there was has all run out. No one comes by with dusty carts of tomatoes and melons. There are no men working in the mornings to whom we could bring cold beers. There are many dead branches fallen in the driveway and the gravel is all but washed away. There are so many leaves encroaching from the sides like a riverbed, with the driveway now narrowing like a trickling stream and not the wide boulevard it has been in the past. It needs to be raked. And raked. And bagged and hauled away. It could take most of a week. The high wall that fronts onto the Via Tommaso Fuortes—the road named for Michele’s great-grandfather—has been vandalized over the winter and the delicate lattice of stonework, which they smashed with hammers evidently, has been hastily repaired with big unattractive cinderblocks, laid by an apprentice, it looks like.

  Michele gets out of the car and spends a long time looking at the wall and shaking his head.

  “Look at theees!”

  The kids follow him already barefoot, leaving their Crocs scattered haphazardly up the unkempt driveway. Already they are digging in the leaves and the gravel where they will spend many hours in the next days contentedly eating, pissing, digging, and fighting.

  Here we are.

  In the morning I clean out The Cabinet. The Cabinet houses the mismatched espresso cups, the everyday Pyrex cookware, the coffee itself, bread crumbs, very, very old spices in very old jars—faded aromaless sage in a black pepper jar, and cloves in an oregano bottle—as well as pasta in bags and boxes. Usually on the third shelf toward the bottom there are a couple of platters of room temperature food, cooked, if lucky, that morning, but not uncommonly the day before, and even—I’ve seen it—the day before that. The fried peppers and eggplant and potatoes that rest there have never seen refrigeration, which is on one hand kind of unsettling but also helps me see how hyper we Americans are about refrigeration. In Alda’s house, the refrigerators themselves hardly make fifty degrees and prepared food rests for days in the cabinet and also in the turned-off oven. Everyone in the family eats this stuff and hasn’t died from it yet.

  As the new, temporary-surrogate-junior-helper-self-appointed-matriarch, or whatever I am here, the first thing I want to do is to prepare the kitchen so that I can cook in it. For some reason, everyone is surprised and there is much commotion and animated consternation when I start pulling out all the mealy-moth-infested bags of pasta and rice and old biscotti, which I have been politely noticing but ignoring for the prior six years. Everyone seems truly surprised to find these bags teeming with live moths and brimming with the husks of their eggs. A veritable fabric of cobweblike filament infests all the jars and bags of meal, bread crumbs, polenta, and hard wheat flour. Moths fly into the room and up up up to the top of the twenty-foot vaulted ceilings of this villa’s old kitchen. I have been aware of this infestation since my first visit here, where it amused me and charmed me. In my third and fourth years I was maybe less charmed and more skeeved out. But this year, well, I feel completely neutral and unemotional: This shit’s gotta go. For my first act as surrogate matriarch understudy or nanny or housekeeper or useful guest—I’ll never know what I am in this family—I am chucking the mealy-moth-infested crap that I have known to be living in this crazy cabinet since the day I arrived here seven years ago. I feel it is appropriately respectful to have waited this long though I admit it was a challenge for me not to have at this cabinet five years ago.

  I put the espresso cups with the espresso cups, the saucers with the saucers, the platters with the platters.

  On the next shelf I put the viable pastas in a group, the spices together in a row, and leave one shelf empty to receive the fried peppers and fried potatoes and the fried “croquettes” that I know Rosaria will put there in the morning when she arrives. I keep an eye on Alda’s face, seated at the kitchen table squinting at the newspaper, to see if she hates me already. Giovanni shuffles in and pulls open a drawer crammed so full of corks and bottle caps and bits of string that I start to sweat slightly just looking at the chaos of it. He stands there for eleven or twelve minutes picking through the caps with one finger looking for the cap to the olive oil jug before giving up and heaving the heavy drawer shut.

  At last, we rearrange the kitchen. Giovanni pushes the tables around as I describe and we take it one piece by one piece. The small table to the corner. The tall, granite table to the center in front of the stove and sink. The refrigerator against the wall by the door. Giovanni shakes his head many times, insisting that a certain piece won’t fit or can’t be moved, but I am not deterred. And I love working with him; even his stubborn resistance feels c
ollaborative and he never condescends to me. “Let’s just try it,” I say. “If it doesn’t fit, we can move it all back.”

  Soon, everything sits exactly as I have envisioned it for years as it “should” be. There is space for me to work, to produce all these meals, and the family can now sit at the other kitchen table with the newspaper, the coffeepot, the lunch plates, the random screwdriver, suntan lotion, pistachios in the shell as well as a pile of empty shells, mosquito coil, and the debris that accumulates in this family.

  Then I go to the market. On this, the first day back in Leuca, I am happy to see some of my old favorites again: the puntarelle, the Leccese green beans, the small dense zucchini, and the eggplant. I buy big bundles of all of them and lots of peaches and a watermelon. Alda eats fruit after each meal and I think my kids will eat the watermelon. The meat is dismal as usual but there is a fish stall with some good-looking stuff. I get an octopus. A branzino. A few pounds of head-on shrimp.

  At the supermarket, I push the cart slowly up and down each and every aisle, filling it with all of the things I have come to know each person in the family will like. There is bottled iced tea for Michele, and Coca-Cola for Giulio, and fruit juices in cartons that Giovanni and Alda drink. I get some Italian versions of junk food for the kids—just to see what the Italian chips are like—and as I am at the checkout, paying for the cartload on my American Express, I feel potent and capable and maternal. I am taking care of and providing for my family.

  The checkout girl swipes the card and for the long minute it takes to dial up to an international satellite that can verify its legitimacy—and by extension, my own—I fall into a moment’s emotional slump. I do want to be here; I just want my vacation in Italy with my Italian Italian husband to feel like what it sounds like. I want to do the cooking. It is what grounds me, gives me pleasure, and is the best way for me to communicate with the Italian-speaking family and to make a contribution. But it can also make me feel like the hired help. While Michele babysits the kids at the pool for the day, dozing in and out of naps and reading the newspaper and having fluid conversations with people in his native tongue, I am nagged by an emptiness while I am neatening and organizing the drawers and shelves in all the cabinets, and it continues as I move up and down each aisle in the grocery store, and interferes still while I am chopping each onion at the newly created cooking island in front of the kitchen stove. By the time I check out at the grocery store and I’ve put this grocery bill on my personal card, sautéed the onions with the potatoes, and wiped down the counter, I feel precariously poised exactly between totally perfect, as if I am exactly where I should be, and totally fucked-up, as if I were bankrolling my own martyrdom. If he had ever once finished one of those started sentences as I had always yearned for them to be finished, we may have had a different vacation, a different ending. But at the time, all I could think was, Dottore, you don’t get a new iPhone if I don’t get a dinner party.

  I prepare the octopus as Alda prepares it. With potatoes and onions and a few hot chilis. But when I put it in the serving dish, one of her large old Salentino pottery pieces, she doesn’t recognize it.

  “Gabrielle, che c’è dentro?” What’s in there?

  “Polpo, Alda. E tua recette. Con cipolle, patatas, e peperoncini pauci. Polpo.” It’s octopus, Alda. It’s your recipe. I learned it from you. With onions and potatoes and a few chilis. It’s your octopus!

  “Con cipolle?” she asks, her brow knit up tight. Her black eyes not comprehending.

  “Si!” I say.

  “E che altro?” she asks. And what else?

  I repeat, as if saying it for the first time. “Patatas.” “Cipolle.” “Peperoncini.”

  This is Italian I can actually speak. Menu Italian.

  Leone comes running into the kitchen, nearly impaling his head on the corner of the newly situated heavy granite cooking island. Everyone is back from the pool.

  “E … E.… E, Gabrielle?” she finally manages. “Come e chiama questo piccolo?” What is this little one’s name?

  “Questo e Leone,” I say.

  “Leone!” she cries, her face now flush and bright with recognition and relief. She remembers Leone.

  “Si! Leone. Ciao, Leone! Tesoro mio! Ciao, piccolo!” Yes! Leone. Hi, Leone. My treasure. Hi, little one!

  And then she asks me, “Quanti figli ci sono?” How many kids are there?

  “Due, Alda. Ci sono due. Marco e Leone.”

  This is new this year, this kind of memory loss. She gets a storm across her face, her brow knit so tight I would like to press my thumbs into the creases and massage them away.

  “Due figli??” she exclaims. “Due??!!”

  “Si, si,” I reply. “Marco e Leone.”

  And she falls silent and brooding for a couple of minutes, sitting at the kitchen table with the telephone in front of her. I wash the puntarelle and tip the green beans standing at the sink with my back to her, affording her, I hope, the privacy in which to experience her frustration and befuddlement and disorientation. Leone runs back out to the driveway to pee in what’s left of the gravel.

  The stove needs to be replaced, but after rearranging the kitchen so that the heavy granite topped table is now a cooking island and the low kitchen table with all the crap on it is pushed against the wall so that people can convene and eat there without getting in the way of the cooking, I feel there is strong and immovable resistance from Giovanni. There is only so much change this family can stand. Throw away the mealy-moths and move the kitchen table and call it quits for this year because this is at the threshold of what they can handle. The Fuortes brothers are practically sweating with nerves. I realize I have already gotten away with as much as I can for this year and will let go of the new stove. But it does not make me comfortable. The grids that rest over the burners have corroded away these past fifty years—and where there used to be four solid prongs over each burner atop which your pot could sit securely, there are now little stumps and missing legs altogether so that sometimes you must balance the pot to boil water or fry French fries on two little prongs.

  The pots themselves, aluminum pieces of crap—as dented and buckled and mangled as little car wrecks—wobble on a perfectly flat surface, let alone on the stump of a burner grid. One ten-quart pasta pot full of boiling water at every meal and I’m tense, ultra-edgy when my kids come blasting into the kitchen clutching my thighs, shrieking, hugging me right where I stand, between the stove and the island, in an apron with a paring knife in my hand. If that fucking water tips over, we are not close enough, for my comfort, to a pediatric burn ward in this little seaside town. And that is not how I want to spend my vacation.

  But Giovanni says no. Or acts no. He never says no. He just physically Will. Not. Budge.

  It’s Alda who is invoked as the reason nothing can change or be different. And yet Alda is delighted with the new arrangement of the kitchen. To everyone who visits or telephones, she gushes and gives them a tour—physical or verbal—of the new layout.

  “Guarda com’è piu’ grande!” “Guarda, ci sono due spacii—uno per mangiare e uno per cucinare!” Look how it’s bigger now! Look how we now have two separate spaces—one for eating and one for cooking!

  She seems genuinely thrilled. When I wanted to have a big party Michele said no, because Mamma would be overwhelmed and exhausted. When I wanted to build a fire out near the front garden to cook a lamb outdoors, Michele said no, Mamma won’t like it. But it’s Mamma who pulls up the first chair and watches as I build the fire on a tiny makeshift grill and as I put the three-pound branzino stuffed with lemons and fennel branches over the coals. It’s Mamma who stays out until one in the morning at the big party at Sergio and Mercedes’s house, worrying her sons who have stayed at home, and who then upon returning home sits at the kitchen table and raps it with her crutch gently, calling for “Un goccetto!” A little drop.

  Giovanni, with his long wavy eyebrows like Spanish moss mingling with his long wavy hair, repeats in
amazement and admiration at his mother, at Mamma. “Un goccetto voi?!” A drop you want? Alda beams back at him, spirits high.

  In unison, Michele and Giovanni repeat, disbelieving, “Un goccetto?!”

  “Perche non?” she asks. And Michele laughs genuine, happy laughter. He loves this woman with all of his heart and mind. There is nothing abbastanza about it. This is the woman he loves; this is the woman he hoped to find in me when he first looked into the restaurant and saw me at the stove.

  In classic Italian style, the brothers fumble around the kitchen, saying it again several times, while shaking their heads and smiling. Un goccetto. Un goccetto. And Giovanni finally pulls from the refrigerator a bottle of wine.

  It is Alda who is singing the song of this new kitchen layout. It is Alda who stays out late at the party. Giovanni pours us all two sips of Salentino rosé and we sit at the kitchen table for a few minutes before going to bed. This woman, this magnificent woman, is not the one who fears change.

  TWO WEEKS LATER I am hunting through the local market, scanning each vendor’s crates, desperate to discover something new to cook. My jaw tightens and I’m grinding my molars a bit at all this eggplant. In Leuca, there is nothing but eggplant. Local. Seasonal. These are the words that turn everybody on these days. But twenty-one days of local eggplant season is torture.

  I think when people get all dreamy about local and seasonal, they are thinking of California, where you can get anything any time of year. But they are not referring to Santa Maria de Leuca, a small seaside town at the tip of the heel of the boot of Italy in the state of Puglia. And they are not imagining eating that way—local and seasonal—for twenty-one days straight. They know they can go get a platter of sushi at their local joint any night of the week. Maybe they are thinking of their week-long trip to Tuscany.