On the Noodle Road

by Jen Lin-Liu

  The next day, Easter Sunday, Charlotte and Mayling, two old American friends who happened to be traveling through Italy, joined me on my food fest. Thoughtful Mayling presented me with an ample supply of lactose pills to help me digest Italy’s dairy-laden meals. The gift arrived not a moment too soon, just as cappuccinos were placed before us at the breakfast table of our guesthouse, along with the limp Italian croissants known as cornetti. What Italians ate in the morning lent fresh support for my theory about how the world’s best cuisines neglected breakfast, Turkey notwithstanding. And later in the day, I’d come to regret the morning’s wasted calories.

  For lunch, we joined Daniela and her family at a cozy trattoria called San Domenico next to the town’s main square. I’d envisioned a home-cooked meal on Easter, but most Italians went out for the big holidays, including Christmas, to give the home cook—usually the matron—a break. The town buzzed with activity before lunch, but as soon as one o’clock rolled around, the main square completely emptied out as everyone headed inside to eat. Daniela’s relatives were dressed in clothes fit for church, though they hadn’t gone to services that morning; they preferred to commemorate Easter by eating rather than praying.

  In a space just large enough for four extended families, we sat down for a marathon meal. Everyone filled their glasses with Chardonnay or a local red wine called Negroamaro, and we toasted the occasion. The waiters brought a procession of antipasti: shrimp tossed with raw grated artichoke and shaved Parmigiano-Reggiano; pan-seared cod with tomato-and-parsley salsa; fried octopus with yellow pepper puree; raw salmon, called crudo, finely minced and seasoned with extra-virgin olive oil and a squeeze of lemon; baked mussels stuffed with bread crumbs; and—a dish that spoke of rustic origins—sheep’s head stewed in a clay pot called a pignatta.

  When the plates were cleared, Daniela’s brother, a dark-haired, well-groomed young man named Francesco, announced, “Now lunch will begin.” A trio of pasta courses arrived, each better than the next: orecchiette with salted pork and tomatoes; a light asparagus risotto; and last, my favorite—long strips of pasta dressed with thick tomato sauce and tossed with fresh seafood. The dish was called maltagliata alla pescatore—“the fisherman’s badly cut pasta”—like “zucchini for the poor,” a humble name for a sublime dish. I wiped the last smudges of sauce from my plate with bread, called scarpetta or “little shoes,” when used for this purpose. Bread, I was discovering, was as important to the Italians as it was to everyone else on the Silk Road.

  The waiters brought more: secondi of giant prawns, grilled and seasoned simply with coarse salt, lemon, and parsley. As at Maria Antoinette’s table the day before, sharp anise-flavored fennel bulbs cleansed our palates, after which the waiters returned with dessert glasses of lemon gelato. Each sweet-and-sour bite danced lightly on my tongue. I figured we were done when shots of espresso arrived. But then the waiters poured a round of the lemon liqueur called limoncello, which aided our digestion and allowed us to linger further. The waiters returned a final time, bringing the check, which came to a mere thirty euros (less than forty dollars) per person.

  “Is that too expensive?” Daniela asked, noticing the look of shock on my friends’ faces, and mine.

  My girlfriends and I thanked Daniela and her family and left to attend yet another meal: a friend of a friend had invited us to dinner. But that evening, my taste receptors were overwhelmed, and my head was spinning from the wine. I had no more than a few bites and hardly remembered the meal. This must be why no outsider had written good literature about Italy, I thought: they were so intoxicated by the food and wine that they went to bed each night in a haze of pleasure. The only dish I recalled faintly was something with horsemeat—was it shaped into meatballs or patties? Was it flavored with Parmigiano-Reggiano or pecorino? And had I eaten that meat way back in Kyrgyzstan? But that evening, my travels on the Silk Road seemed a distant memory, washed away by the antipasti, the pastas and the novel pizzas I’d ingested in the last thirty-six hours.

  • • •

  I’d finally made it to Italy, but I still had plenty to explore. After Puglia, I would go on to Naples and Emilia-Romagna, gastronomic centers of Italy’s south and north, respectively. In Naples, I would learn the simple truth behind delicious southern Italian food; in Emilia-Romagna, I’d make pasta with sfogline, female chefs devoted to a slowly fading craft. Only after these pilgrimages would I end in Rome, where the idea for the trip had first struck me.

  Except for China, Italy was ostensibly more familiar than any other place I’d traveled. But on earlier trips there, I’d learned that having frequented Olive Garden in my childhood and waitressed at a “Sicilian” restaurant in college did little to prepare me for real Italian food. Italians didn’t eat shrimp scampi or fettuccine alfredo, nor did the dish called spaghetti Bolognese exist across the Atlantic. Most Italian chefs used garlic sparingly, onions and shallots generously. Parsley was sprinkled atop pastas as often as basil, and the latter was never, never cooked. Many pasta sauces didn’t bubble on stoves for hours on end, but were cooked as quickly as the pasta itself. Italians used balsamic vinegar rarely, reserving the expensive flavoring for special occasions; the kind that appeared in supermarkets and restaurants outside of Italy was a cheap bastardization no Italian would deign to touch.

  And even though I had some knowledge of Italy and its cuisine, Puglia was a whole new territory. It wasn’t high on most tourists’ itineraries, lacking the glorified history and culture associated with Tuscany, Venice, or Rome—but that was precisely why I’d chosen it. Having already hit the usual places, I wanted something more authentic. In Puglia, orchards of gnarled olive trees thrived under a bright, harsh sun, very different from the warm glow of Tuscany. I woke to azure skies and looked out at an equally blue and tranquil sea. And I’d heard about the region’s delicious cuisine, which was Mediterranean but carried hints of the East. Fresh pastas resembled Chinese ones, a popular cheese called caciocavallo reminded me of Turkish kas¸ar, and Apulians, like most Italians and cultures to the east, had an obsession with bread.

  At meals, Italians required some form of bread (even more than pasta), and Apulians had a strong affection for dried bread that reminded me of the East. They ate little packets of dry toast for breakfast and bags of crostini lined supermarket aisles. In Puglia, dried rolls called friselle were dunked in water and sprinkled with olive oil, tomatoes, and oregano; sweet biscotti were served with espresso. Some version of this tradition extended all the way back to the western border of China. Had nomadic tendencies run from China all the way to the Mediterranean? Dry bread was the perfect food for travel—light, portable, and unlikely to spoil. Christopher Columbus had allegedly taken a version of biscotti when he sailed to the West in search of the Far East and instead discovered America.

  As much as there were culinary linkages, each region of Italy also retained its specialties. In Puglia, I was struck anew by distinct traditions. I tasted dishes there that I’d rarely encountered in my travels farther north in Italy, much less overseas: pureed fava beans served with wild chicory and toasted bread; fresh sea urchins, split open and served like sashimi, or tossed in a pan with olive oil, garlic, and pasta; eggplants mashed with mint and pecorino cheese and fried into light, savory balls.

  Puglia had been settled by the Greeks as early as the eighth century BC and retained its own identity, a reminder that before Italy was unified in the mid-nineteenth century, the peninsula had consisted of feuding city-states. The Apulians identified more with the Greeks—whom they called their “brothers”—than with their fellow Italians. Some villagers still spoke a dialect of Greek called Griko. Daniela’s town was called Monopoli, which means “only city” in Greek. The Apulians’ rugged, independent spirit set them apart from their more refined, effete countrymen to the north.

  So little did Apulians identify with other Italians that they displayed little pride in or knowledge about some of Italy’s best-known heroe
s, including Marco Polo. At a dinner party one evening, a friend of Daniela’s named Giuseppe told me that most Apulians only vaguely knew of the explorer.

  “Really?” I asked skeptically.

  To make his point, Giuseppe gathered his friends. What, he asked, was Marco Polo famous for? A lot of head scratching ensued. “Did he invent the telescope?” “Did he discover America?” No one associated Marco Polo with his travels to the East, much less with pasta. One guest shrugged. “We have too many explorers to remember them all. Plus, he’s a Venetian. We don’t know anything about Venetians.”

  But Apulians, like other Italians, did display the same stereotypical machismo. Upon meeting my two American girlfriends, Giuseppe swaggered and flirted aggressively, as if upholding a sworn duty of Italian men. “I would really like to continue our conversation after dinner,” he said suggestively, to both. “Perhaps we can go for a walk on the beach?”

  Giuseppe, though, knew not to start with me, as he was aware that I was married. But he did question me about my husband. Where was he? Why wasn’t he traveling with me? Where did we consider home? All good questions.

  In our comfortable platonic rapport, Giuseppe explained the psyche of the Italian male. “We are all mama’s boys. Everything is related to our relationship with our mothers. . . . We’re macho and sensitive.” He was a lawyer who’d worked in Milan until recently, when he’d decided to open his own firm in his hometown. Milan was a rat race, he said. “It’s like America. Everything is all about work, work, work.” In Puglia, he could take long lunches and have a life.

  In southern Italy, a leisurely lunch was practically a mandate. One afternoon Daniela and I rushed to make a lunch reservation. When we pulled up at the restaurant, my guide looked at her watch and hesitated. “Maybe we should go somewhere else,” she said. We had an appointment at a winery afterward.

  “But why?” I asked, pointing out that we had an hour and a half.

  “Well, I’ve . . . I’ve never eaten lunch in less than two hours. At home, yes, but not at a restaurant!” she said.

  “Let’s try,” I said.

  After we ordered, an embarrassed Daniela asked the waiter to speed up the meal. He grimaced, as if our request was a huge imposition, and disappeared into the kitchen. We finished the meal in just over an hour, skipping the usual espresso and digestivo. But the experience taught me the importance of the two-hour lunch. I belched my way through the winery and felt bloated from inhaling my pasta. Deprived of my shot of caffeine, I also had difficulty concentrating.

  It was easy to get the impression that Italian eating was an all-out glutton fest. But glancing up from my second gelato while sitting in a busy town square one day, I noticed that few Italians were overweight. (The one exception in view was a stereotypically stout nonna, but grandmothers could get away with anything, including probably murder, in Italy.) Younger women were particularly svelte and fashionable. I wondered how they could pull it off, given how much food there was, everywhere I went.

  It was very simple, my new Italian friends told me. There were rules to eating. It started with breakfast, which was no more than a stale cornetto or packet of dried toast. That was washed down with an espresso or a cappuccino. A cappuccino was heavy enough that many Italians considered it a meal in itself. Committing the atrocity of ordering one after lunch brought a look of flushed what-will-the-waiter-think-of-us embarrassment to my companions’ faces and an admonishment: “We don’t drink cappuccinos after eleven o’clock in the morning!”

  Italians didn’t snack. To my alarmed surprise, even big urban centers like Rome were devoid of streetside food vendors. “If we need a snack, we have a cigarette,” a Roman friend told me later. Eating was done strictly at the table, at set mealtimes. Not only was it a faux pas to eat while standing or walking, it was disgraceful to eat while in transit. In contrast to the incessant snacking on Chinese trains, Italian passengers refrained from eating on board, even around the lunch and dinner hours. The same rules applied to cars: one afternoon, rushing to make a meeting, I searched in vain for a drive-through restaurant, then parked illegally in front of a pizzeria. As I pulled away with a slice of pie in my lap, I felt like I’d committed more than one traffic violation.

  I also wondered how most Italians could stomach three courses—menus were divided into antipasti, primi (the pasta or risotto course), and secondi—until I realized that only outsiders like me felt pressured to consume all three. Most Italians ate an antipasto and either a primo or a secondo, only ordering three courses on special occasions. Whether at home or in restaurants, pasta was generally served in set portions of one hundred grams. Plated, a pasta dish took up no more space than a compact disk. Many women ate pasta only once a day. Italians drank water, wine, or espresso, rather than calorie-laden soda, juice, or beer. Dessert usually consisted of no more than a kiddie-sized scoop of gelato or a fruit salad, enlivened with a dash of sugar and lemon.

  Most important, I learned in Puglia that cooking was an act of love, bestowed on those closest to you. That was what made it healthful and nourishing.

  Dinners with Daniela and her friends and family started around nine o’clock. I remembered the late meals from the last time I’d visited Italy with Craig—sometimes we’d walked into empty restaurants around seven-thirty and practically begged the staff to serve us. And here in Puglia, ten o’clock on a weekday was not too late for Daniela to assemble a dozen friends and family for a casual meal of panzerotti, fried pockets of soft dough stuffed with mozzarella and tomato sauce. No one stood on ceremony. Instead of awkwardly waiting for others to take the first bite, everyone simply filled their cups with wine and dug in. In addition to the panzerotti, Daniela served chunks of fresh mozzarella and grilled eggplant slices drizzled with olive oil. For dessert, we nibbled on fruit, chocolate, and zeppole, Sicilian cream puffs. When one guest fell over in his chair, everyone clapped and laughed.

  This was the night Giuseppe quizzed his friends about Marco Polo. After they drew a blank, I asked everyone what their favorite dish was. They objected at first, one saying, “That’s like making us choose our favorite family member!” But then the names of now-familiar dishes—including that delectable orecchiette with turnip tops and the pasta with sea urchins—came tumbling out of their mouths.

  “What is your favorite food?” someone asked me.

  “No, no, we want to know, what is your favorite American food?” another insisted.

  I thought for a moment. What counted as American food, after all? Pizza or lasagna? Those, they would argue, were Italian. I tried to think of something unique to Southern California, but all that came to mind was Mexican food. “Guacamole,” I blurted out.

  That resonated. “I’ve always seen guacamole in the movies but I’ve never eaten it!” Daniela exclaimed. She was so intrigued that I promised to make it for her the next day.

  • • •

  Avocados, a fruit from the Americas, had only recently arrived in Italy. In Beijing, markets aimed at foreigners occasionally carried them, and in Istanbul they’d appeared as part of a novel meze, but mostly they’d been absent along the Silk Road. Daniela and I arrived at Nonna’s the next day with a bagful from the supermarket, along with tortilla chips. Nonna greeted us with several kisses on either cheek. “Did you eat well today?” she asked Daniela, and, reminding me of how Chinese greeted loved ones, she added, “What did you eat? You are too skinny!” She peered into our bag for a look at the mysterious fruits. Because her granddaughter had described them as “mushy,” she’d expected something banana-like, she told us.

  We settled into Nonna’s kitchen. It was a room that was lived in, like so many others I’d seen across the Silk Road. The usual amenities aside, it was furnished with a sofa, a flat-screen television, and a large dining table. The formal dining room down the hall went unused. Outside on a balcony was a second oven and a stove, for baking during the hotter months and deep-frying
year-round.

  At the dining table, I mashed the avocados in a bowl with onions, parsley (the stand-in for cilantro), lime, tomatoes, ground chili peppers, salt, and black pepper. After tasting it, Nonna decided it would make a decent antipasto. Daniela practically did a little dance as she dipped chip after chip into the spicy green puree, my favorite comfort food. I’d unknowingly picked a dish that she thought was as American as apple pie. “You know, in Italy, at least here in the south, we still believe in the American Dream. We think everything is so great in your country, we have that idea in our heads,” she said. I told her the feelings were mutual, that we romanticized Italy just as much.

  And then Nonna began making another epic meal, the centerpiece of which was mussels and rice, that other Silk Road staple, which even had a hold on Italy. She flattened several garlic cloves with the side of a knife and removed the green shoots from the center of each, gritting her teeth. “We’re taking out the soul of the devil,” she said. In a baking dish, she layered potato slices, shelled mussels, and short-grain arborio rice, and liberally sprinkled the garlic, along with parsley, Parmigiano-Reggiano, and pecorino over the dish. She poured in some chicken broth and placed the dish in the oven.

  I thought about the care Nonna put into her dishes. She was a repository of recipes she’d never written down. Cooking was her solace—she didn’t get out much these days, but she could still socialize by cooking for loved ones. Barely five feet tall, she prepped at her dining table, and worked with careful precision, her curly golden hair arranged neatly so as not to obstruct her vision. Whatever the task at hand—whether it was slicing strawberries thinly to lay them on a cake or shaping little ears of pasta—she put all of her attention into it, as if it was the only thing that mattered. Her style of cooking was a dying art—in Italy and elsewhere.