From Scratch

by Tembi Locke

  * * *

  On the appointed day, I stood in the cheese shop as Donatella taught me that there are two critical times when making fresh ricotta: first, when you stir the sheep’s milk, waiting for it to curdle, and second, when you put the freshly curdled cheese into the cheese basket to give it form. At either of these two junctures, the cheese can go to hell and with it hours of work. To say nothing of wasting the generosity of animals who let down their milk so that we can make dishes such as linguine con funghi e ricotta and fusilli con ricotta, limone e basilico.

  As the girls began making ricotta cheese at Donatella’s, something so deeply entrenched in the Sicilian culinary tradition, I couldn’t escape another wave of longing for Saro. In the low light, I watched Zoela’s small hands hold a large wooden spoon to stir the ricotta in the large stainless-steel industrial mixer. She had Saro’s focus, his precision. The open window behind us let in the sounds of a tractor rolling by and church bells ringing. I wanted my husband.

  “This batch that we are making will take days to salt cure. It will need to be pressed, and pressed, salted again and again to release liquids and then left to set in a wrapped cloth at room temperature,” Donatella explained to Zoela and Rosalia. She spooned three ladlefuls of the liquid into a plastic mesh mold, then pressed on it again and again, forcing the liquid to take the form of the mold. I watched the excess liquid drain off and run into the drain on the floor in the center of the room.

  As I watched Zoela in a white, floor-length apron, stirring the cauldron of milk with a huge wooden spoon, gently separating the curds into coarse grains and letting the whey settle below, I was fascinated. I realized how little I knew about making cheese. In my complete ignorance, I had thought it was formed by simple stirring and pouring. I kept looking to Donatella for guidance and affirmation that this was all going right. I was suddenly very attached to the idea that the cheese must be good, that Zoela be proud of the cheese wheel she made. I stood back and took pictures.

  “Babbo would love to be here to see you,” I said to Zoela in English. I knew he would be so proud of Zoela, her little arms stirring with all her might.

  I thought then of the etymology of the word ricotta. In Italian, it means “recooked.” The process of making it requires that the whey be recooked, which is what makes the cheese distinctive. It’s what gives it its flavor characteristics. The process is in the name.

  I continued to watch the girls take turns stirring and then straining the curds into waiting baskets, using tools to apply gentle pressure to drain the new, still warm cheese. I couldn’t help but feel that I, too, was being stirred and molded and then shaped again. A grief metamorphosis. Now past the one-year mark, I had begun to filter out the unneeded parts of my life. Life was separating my curd from my whey. I began to understand that cheese making, especially making a wheel of infused pecorino, is a lot like dealing with grief. It requires time, labor, attention. It also needs to be left alone for a time. It requires gentle hands but also strong intentions. And in the process, there is pressure, there are the curing and solidifying. In cheese making, the curing comes from the earth element salt. It requires pressure and the addition of time. But grief also involves pressure and time.

  Standing in a cheese shop far away from home, I realized that life was recooking me and it would change me, as surely as the milk curdling in the cauldron stirred by my daughter would become something else. I just didn’t yet know what my something was. I only knew that another summer in the Mediterranean, making cheese in a mountain town in Sicily, was but one of the ways I might get there. I knew that spending time with Nonna was part of it, too. Whether I openly acknowledged it or not, she was the heart of the reason I had come back.

  THE PRIEST

  Each day in Sicily, when it was time to clear the table of what remained of the pasta, artisanal cheese, fresh bread, and home-cured olives, Nonna had one objective: to change the television channel from Zoela’s favorite program, Don Matteo, to her own favorite show, Tempesta d’Amore, a German-produced soap opera dubbed in Italian. When it came to soap operas, Nonna liked a good healthy dose of love, family betrayal, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, an occasional kidnapping, and, of course, young lovers unsure of whether or not to consummate their relationship before marriage. Throw in lies, opulent villas, and sweeping aerial shots of European coastlines, and she was set.

  Zoela, however, liked one show and one show only: Don Matteo, a moralistic telenovela whose protagonist is a crime-solving priest with piercing blue eyes contrasting with his black robe. In every episode, the priest, Don Matteo, whips a cell phone out of what Zoela called his “dress” whenever an important plot development transpires. The show is an Italian hybrid of The Mentalist and old-school Columbo. In particular, the scenes in the confessional booth riveted Zoela. She especially loved the scenes when Don Matteo went undercover and changed into jeans and a polo.

  “He looks like he could be Justin Bieber’s father,” Zoela said, looking at the TV one day as we were finishing lunch.

  Nonna looked up from the sink, where she had gathered the lunch dishes, and then toward the screen. She clucked her tongue behind her teeth and said, “Only in the north do priests go around like that.”

  She had no love for Zoela’s show, and I could see she was ready to change the channel to catch her soap opera just as Don Matteo was coming to a conclusion.

  “Zoela, why don’t we let Nonna watch her show and you can watch a movie on the iPad upstairs?” I said in English. I had become the intergenerational programming intermediary.

  “But, Mommy, I want to know how it ends.”

  “Yes, I know. But Nonna just made us lunch, and she likes to watch her show as she cleans the kitchen. I can tell you how it ends . . .” I had seen many such shows and read enough scripts to know their predictable conclusions.

  “No, don’t tell me!” she said, horrified that I might give away the plot. “I want to watch it.”

  “Today you can’t, sweetheart. Maybe tomorrow you can finish the episode across the street at Emanuela’s house while Nonna washes dishes. But today, watch a movie upstairs.”

  Emanuela was Nonna’s widowed first cousin who lived across the street. She was recovering from a recent hip surgery and would welcome the company. Zoela seemed nonplussed about the idea. She pushed her chair back, handed her plate to me with just a touch of side-eye, and then went upstairs.

  “What happened? Why is she going upstairs?” Nonna asked me in Sicilian.

  “Because she wants to watch a movie,” I lied.

  Nonna shrugged, turned off the running water in the sink, dried her hands, and reached for the TV remote. She turned to Tempesta d’Amore just as the opening credits were finishing.

  I helped her clean up, momentarily stepping out in the midday sun to shake out the tablecloth in the middle of the street, away from the front door, so that ants wouldn’t be attracted to the crumbs and make a trail into the house.

  When I came back inside to fold the tablecloth and put it away, Nonna lowered the TV volume during a commercial break. She had other things to tell me.

  “C’è un prete di colore,” she began. There was an interim priest “of color” in town.

  She had my full attention. Except for the immigrant men who passed through twice a year selling items like those found in the 99 Cent store at home, I had never heard of a person of color in Aliminusa, let alone a priest.

  Nonna wasn’t sure exactly where he was from, but, based on her description, “africano,” I suspected he was likely a young priest from a developing nation sent to town as part of his seminary requirements. Suddenly I looked forward to meeting him. The whole idea of the parishioners of Aliminusa being led by an African priest, even for a few weeks, was the kind of cross-cultural moment I couldn’t pass up.

  Nonna had mentioned him before, when we had spoken around the time of Saro’s one-year memorial. He had spent a week in town at Easter. Now he was back for the summer season while the resident
priest, Padre Francesco, was away doing a sabbatical in the north for some months. The new priest had been met enthusiastically. That he was “of good heart” was the consensus. However, his Italian was not good. He had mixed up his words after a Mass for the dead and offered the bereaved heartfelt congratulations instead of condolences.

  “Now we need a wedding so he can offer his condolences,” Nonna quipped. She loved a good joke. But her laughter quickly subsided. She was onto a serious matter: the new portable fans that had appeared in church.

  Unlike some churches in Italy, during the summer months the small church in Aliminusa was not cooled by marble walls and vaulted ceilings. It was narrow with stone walls and no windows. In the summer, afternoon Mass was like a sauna. During the winter, Mass was the best ticket in town, as few people had central heat. But at the moment, winter was a long way off, and we were in the dog days of summer.

  “I have to get to Mass early today,” she declared, having just finished ironing the clothes she had mended earlier. “Yesterday the fans were off and my clothes were drenched.”

  There had been an ongoing battle of late among parishioners about whether the new fans should be on or off during Mass. Some said the wind troubled their rheumatism, while others, like Nonna, were labeled “wind lovers.” Today she was armed with a plastic ice cream container lid to cool herself between the rosary before the start of Mass and singing at the end of it.

  “After Mass, come to the church. I want you to meet the priest,” she said. “He’s very nice, and I told him about you. Bring Zoela.”

  Later that afternoon, as Nonna was preparing to leave for Mass, Zoela was out roaming with Rosalia and Ginevra, the cheese maker’s daughter. I asked Nonna where she was. Nonna stuck her head out the window and called to Giacoma down the street. Giacoma, in turn, stuck her head out of the door and shouted back that she’d call Rosalia’s mother. Ten minutes later Zoela was back home.

  I convinced her and Rosalia to come with me to church just as Mass was ending. I told Zoela to make sure that her hair was combed and she had on a clean shirt. We would be representing Nonna, and although her free-spirited gypsy look would be totally fine back home in the hipster confines of Silver Lake, in Sicily a granddaughter meeting the priest had a certain formality to it. I promised there would be gelato afterward for all her effort.

  As the sun had just begun to settle below the mountain range on the other side of the valley that ran to the sea, we walked into the sacristy. Parishioners were beginning to rise from the pews and file out. We hung toward the back by the holy water font and two fans going at full blast. Nonna spotted us and bade us to come forward. A minute later, we were in the parish office and I was shaking hands with the African priest.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” I said.

  “The pleasure is all mine,” he said. His Italian was tentative and spoken with a wonderful accent that I couldn’t place. When I shook his hand, I got a warm and open vibe. I felt a kind of unexpected pride in this man I was just meeting. Here was a fellow person of color. Here was a man acting as the spiritual leader of a town of people so culturally foreign to him. He was doing it in Italian, bridging language, geography, nationality, and race. I imagined that we both knew something about being both foreign and a non-Italian in Italy—he perhaps more than I, given his vocation, the intimacy it required. I wanted to secretly tell him that he was doing “God’s work” in more ways than one by simply being in Aliminusa. But we couldn’t cover all that ground so soon.

  “It is wonderful to have you here,” I said. There was a line forming behind us. There were other parishioners who had special requests or needed to speak with him privately. But he didn’t rush us.

  “Where are you from?” he asked.

  I recognized the curiosity in his eyes. I had seen the same look when I had lived in Florence and bumped into newly arrived Senegalese immigrants. We were two people of African descent meeting across the diaspora, an event that forges an instant sense of community with another black person anywhere in the world.

  “I come from California. Los Angeles,” I responded. His face broke open in a smile of wonderment, as if I had spoken of an alternate universe full of fantasy and whim. I wondered how many films he had seen with palm trees and bikini-clad lifeguards. “Where are you from?” I asked in return.

  “Burundi,” he said. My geography was shameful. I couldn’t picture the country on a map of the continent. But I did conjure up a tableau of a family who surely missed him, people who were sharing their son with the Catholic Church.

  Next to me, Nonna beamed. As a deeply devout woman, introducing me to the priest was a sign of respect for him. During our conversation, she had been going into her purse to retrieve a private offering. Now, with money in hand, she put her hands on Zoela to gently nudge her to say hello.

  “This is my daughter,” I said. Zoela came forward and shook his hand. She said, “Ciao,” and looked at him in wide-eyed wonder, as if he were a black version of Don Matteo.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you.” He smiled and took Zoela’s hand. “You are the American granddaughter.” He took a half step back and took her in. “May blessings be with you,” he said, putting his other palm on her shoulder.

  Zoela smiled, slightly embarrassed by the attention. Then she looked back to Rosalia, who was waiting a few feet away near the confessional booth.

  “How old are you? What grade are you going into?” he asked.

  “I’m eight, and I’ll be in the third grade,” she said shyly in her best Italian.

  “Do you like Sicily? It’s good to be with your grandmother, no?”

  “Yes.” The one-word answer covered both questions. I could tell that she had lost interest in the priest. She was eager to link back up with Rosalia and meander through town until dinner.

  Nonna handed the priest her donation. He smiled, nodding a thank-you.

  An impatient line had formed behind us, a formation of women with their handbags at the ready, poised to ask for special prayers, request a confession, make a donation on behalf of themselves or some loved one. Nonna put her hand on my elbow, the universal Sicilian gesture communicating that it was time to go.

  “I hope to see you again before I leave,” I said as Nonna and I peeled off from the standing-room crowd.

  When we got outside, we stood on the marble steps in the midst of the sunset hour. Benedetta, who lived two doors down from Nonna, came up behind us and offered to walk with her and the kids back to Via Gramsci. I, on the other hand, wanted to take a walk to enjoy the first moments of the day without unrelenting direct sun. I wanted to walk the hills outside town, pick blackberries off the brambles. Be alone for a moment in the silence that could be found only once I left the stone buildings and cobblestoned streets.

  I started into the low hills above town that were lined with small plots of cultivated land because it was the walk I had always taken with Saro. The cicadas were nestled in their posts among the almond trees. Nature was magnificent here. It created a kind of inner stillness I couldn’t find in L.A., where I was in constant motion. Now I could slow down, I could just be. As I listened to an orchestra of cicadas, I could smell jasmine. I turned toward the wind so I could see the land outstretched to the blue sea.

  I didn’t see things like that in L.A. A haze always hung over the city, separating the lives we led from the open sky. I moved through urban stretches without ever looking up or even out. Still, occasionally such vistas came to me. Driving from Pasadena to Silver Lake, I would see the sky stretching toward the ocean—a narrow, fleeting view because I was moving along freeways and thoroughfares.

  With each curve my ascent was more pronounced, the town of Aliminusa receding into the background. A view of the sea emerged peekaboo style when I reached the first flat plain. Then the Mediterranean was in full view. I stopped in my tracks. I turned my body in every direction, not wanting to miss any of the landscape. From that spot, it was all cultivated plots of land that, de
pending on the season, yielded tomatoes, artichokes, fava beans, peppers, eggplant, zucchini, garlic, potatoes, lettuce, chard, fennel, cardoons, chamomile, oregano, basil. Olive, fig, almond, pear, and apricot trees were my companions. Each inhalation cleansed my soul. Looking out over the land, I felt no inner division too wide or too difficult for me to cross.

  There on the outskirts of town, my lutto—my mourning, the thing I carried with me, invisible to others—was freer. I didn’t have to hold on to it so tight. I knew I wouldn’t lose it there. And I was comforted to know that I wouldn’t lose Saro there, either. There were a town, a history, a culture that would ensure that wouldn’t happen. Saro couldn’t be forgotten there, and for my still-grieving heart that allowed me to breathe deeper. In some way, I felt his heartbeat there, pulsing through the magic of the moment, as if it had been waiting for me to take myself there, our quiet place in a hurried world. There is a saying in Sicilian: “It can’t get any darker than midnight.” Life some days, more than a year later, still felt like an ever-present midnight. But as I walked, I was willing to lean forward into what little light I was given—the light of the Sicilian summer sun. I wanted to stand naked in it.

  An hour later, I made the descent back into town and found Nonna ironing upstairs, something she never did at that hour of the day.

  “I’m ironing Emanuela’s nightgowns. Since her recent hip surgery, she needs the help. Come. Here.” She led me from that room into the next, leaving her cousin’s sleepwear and intimates on the ironing board. “I want you to see this.” She was pointing to the dresser in her bedroom.