Kitchen Yarns Read online

  Serve warm or at room temperature in a big yellow bowl, if you have one.

  Pie Lady

  Instead of a diamond engagement ring, my father presented my mother with a sturdy piece of off-white American Tourister luggage. He was in the navy, a Seabee, an Indiana farm boy who dreamed of the ocean and wanted nothing more than to see the world. She was the ninth child and sixth daughter of Italian American immigrants, living in a busy, noisy household bursting with relatives, food, and shrines to saints and the Virgin Mary. My mother had no desire to go anywhere at all. She loved her small mill town; she loved her small state. But when my father gave her that suitcase, he told her she was going to see the world, with him.

  For their honeymoon, they drove 860 miles in an early winter blizzard so that she could meet his relatives in Greensburg, Indiana. To his family, my father was special. He’d left home at seventeen to join the navy; lived in San Francisco, where he had a brief engagement to a Nob Hill debutante; then was shipped off to China to fight communism. Because of this last assignment, they called him Wong. They didn’t know the stories we later heard: how starving people dropped dead right in the street and the sailors were ordered not to help them or they’d have to pay for the funeral. He saw opium dens and brothels and shoot-outs.

  His brothers and sisters thought my mother the most exotic bird: dark curly hair, olive skin, a Roman nose, a Catholic who wouldn’t eat meat on Friday. Their food—chicken fried in lard, beans cooked with ham hocks, copious amounts of beer—turned her stomach, even though as a young wife she learned to make her husband’s favorite dishes. At just nineteen years old, she’d never eaten food at the house of someone who wasn’t Italian, and she was frightened and disgusted and only wanted to go home. When she offered to make spaghetti and meatballs for everyone, she couldn’t even find garlic in the grocery store. And to my father, home was an elusive place, somewhere to stop for gossip and home-cooked meals on your way to other places.

  When they first met, my mother fell in love with a tall, blond, blue-eyed sailor in a white dress uniform. She didn’t think about how sailors went off to sea, often for long periods of time. She didn’t think about how he wouldn’t be based in Newport forever, or even for very long. There was always the next base somewhere else, a fact that excited my wanderlust-filled dad and made my mother weary.

  He was at sea when their first child was born. My mother, just turned twenty, married for less than a year, found herself alone in a navy hospital. She still describes that as one of the lowest points in her life—she was scared and ignorant of the ways women gave birth, and my father was so far away. Still, she named my brother after my father, happily adding “Junior” at the end of his name, then promptly nicknamed him Skip, short for Skipper, a nod to his navy father.

  After my father returned, with Skip already six months old, he learned that his next post was in Naples, Italy. He thought this would please my mother—her family had come from a small town near Naples fifty years earlier, and many of them still talked with great nostalgia about the old country. But Naples was across a very big ocean from her mother and her sisters, and my mother didn’t want to go. So my father went alone. He secured an apartment in the upscale Vomero neighborhood, and wrote love letters telling my mother how he couldn’t live without her.

  Ultimately she relented, reluctantly. Six months after he left, my father flew home to get her. Surely a part of him worried that if he wasn’t there, she might not get on that plane to Naples. The day he arrived, her favorite sister went into the hospital for a routine wisdom tooth extraction. Mom brought her some magazines and promised to go back later, but after six months apart, my young parents were so eager to be alone that they never made it back to the hospital. The next morning, the hospital called: her sister had died from an allergic reaction to the anesthesia.

  After the funeral, my father flew back to Naples alone, and a few weeks later my mother left her bereft mother, her sister’s widowed husband and two motherless children, and, filled with overwhelming grief, boarded the navy plane with my year-old brother in her arms. She’d never flown before, and everything about the trip terrified her. The plane made frequent unexplained stops, and my mother cried the whole way.

  But something happened in Naples. To her surprise, she loved hearing her ancestral tongue spoken, loved the laundry hung across clotheslines suspended between buildings, loved how my brother charmed the vegetable man and the baker and the sausage maker. She taught herself to cook in Naples—ruining pots of beans and overcooking pasta and undercooking meats. But by the time they left, three years later, she was a navy wife, ready to go wherever her husband’s next post sent them.

  Although she was always homesick, by the time I came along, a year later, my mother was able to pack up our belongings, set up our furniture in new homes, shop the PX, and get us enrolled in school with ease. To me, she was always one of the most competent people I knew. And part of that competence came in the form of what she perfected during those navy years: pies. Beautiful pies. Back at home, her own mother made pies from the fruit she grew in the yard: blueberries, cherries, apples. But my mother’s pies were modern, things of beauty. Chocolate cream and lemon meringue. She never made one without the other, and she brought one of each to the potlucks and celebrations the navy families always seemed to be having.

  My father’s pals and their wives loved my mother’s Italian cooking, the meatballs and eggplant Parmesan and veal scaloppine. But it was pie that my mother insisted on making. Looking back, I see now that those pies—so American, so contemporary—represented her own independence, her growing up and away from that big Italian family. Not that she ever stopped missing home or yearning to return but, rather, that out there in the big world my father had promised to show her, she was her own woman.

  The lemon meringue remains my favorite. I’ve tasted lemon meringue pies made with higher, sweeter meringues. Pies made with real lemon curd. But I have never tasted one as good as my mother’s. Her topping does not soar but is white and sugary and topped with small browned peaks. (Even now, seeing a pie set on the counter, I steal a peak off the top with my fingers.) Her lemon filling is made from a mix. Her crust is store-bought.

  No matter. One taste and I am back in our apartment in Arlington, Virginia, my father at work for Admiral Rick-over at the Pentagon. The door opens and he is there in his uniform, and my mother’s face lights up as she runs to him and lets him take her into his arms for a movie-star kiss. My brother is eating the chocolate cream pie, I am eating the lemon meringue, and it is so sweet, so sweet, that pie, and this transient life we have together, this family.

  GOGO’S LEMON MERINGUE PIE

  My mother’s name is Gloria Giuianina Masciarotte Hood. When my son, Sam, was young, he called her Grandma Gloria, a nickname his sister Grace tried to say, only it somehow came out Gogo, which stuck. Now everyone—including me—calls her Gogo. Feisty and energetic, even at eighty-six, Gogo’s got a nickname that fits.

  INGREDIENTS

  1 store-bought piecrust (preferably Pillsbury)

  1 box Jell-O lemon pudding and pie filling, not instant

  4 egg whites

  4 tablespoons powdered sugar

  1 teaspoon cornstarch

  A few drops lemon juice

  Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

  Bake piecrust until lightly browned.

  Make lemon filling according to package directions. Pour into the browned piecrust.

  As it cools, make the meringue: combine all remaining ingredients in a bowl and beat with an electric mixer until stiff peaks form.

  Sprinkle powdered sugar evenly over the top of the filling to keep the meringue from sliding off.

  Gently pour the meringue onto the pie and bake for three minutes.

  Let cool out of reach of people who, like me, enjoy eating the browned peaks of meringue.

  Variation

  Replace the lemon pie filling with chocolate pudding and pie filling—not the instant
kind—and the meringue with homemade whipped cream, which you can make by pouring 1 cup of heavy whipping cream into the bowl of a mixer, adding 2 tablespoons of sugar to it, and whipping until soft peaks form. Top the cooled chocolate filling with the whipped cream and you’ve got yourself a chocolate cream pie. We happen to be a family who likes the skin that forms on the top of pudding, but if you don’t, put a piece of plastic wrap over the filling until it cools, at which point you will remove it and then top the pie with the whipped cream.

  Gogo’s Meatballs

  “Teach me,” I say to my mother every few years. “Teach me to make meatballs.”

  She groans and sighs. “There’s no recipe,” she insists.

  “I’ll just watch you then,” I offer, and reluctantly she agrees.

  As she combines the ground beef and the eggs and the bread crumbs, mixing it all with her hands, I try to assess what quantity of bread crumbs and how many eggs are going in and to write it down before she adds the garlic and parsley.

  The secret to Gogo’s meatballs is how you roll them, a skill my father could never master. Neither can I. She demonstrates her technique, which results in firm meatballs that somehow manage to not be too dense. I try, and she shakes her head. “You’re like your father,” she says sadly. “Soft meatballs.”

  The first time I made meatballs for my family, I miscalculated the salt. My daughter Grace tasted one and puckered her lips and then spit it out. Sam was more diplomatic. “Interesting,” he said, then gently placed the meatball back on his plate.

  The next time, my Auntie Junie tasted one and laughed so hard she shot meatball all over herself. “The woman up the street made meatballs like this,” she said. “Bad.”

  Years later, with a now-grown Sam, I went over to Gogo’s hoping to have a meatball lesson, but she’d already mixed everything by the time we got there and just needed them rolled.

  “I wanted to write down the ingredients,” I reminded her. “And the measurements.”

  “There’s no recipe,” Gogo said again. “Now roll. Like this.”

  She demonstrated, and Sam and I watched. Then we pinched off the same amount of meatball mixture and began to roll. Gogo’s eyes widened with delight. “He can do it,” she said, pointing her Carlton 100 at Sam. “Look at how beautiful.”

  Sam beamed, and placed his perfectly rolled meatballs beside Gogo’s.

  Without her telling me, I knew: mine were too soft. As if I needed proof, they almost fell apart in the frying pan.

  I rolled harder. Once cooked, they sent Auntie Junie into more fits of laughter. “These are like marbles. Remember the woman down the hill? She made meatballs like this.”

  Gogo’s meatballs are best hot, right out of the frying pan, eaten off a fork with no sauce. But they are also good in lots of sauce beside a big bowl of spaghetti. And in grinders, topped with extra sauce and a heavy dusting of Parmesan cheese. Here is the recipe—which, as Gogo says, doesn’t really exist. I’m trying to talk Gogo into doing a YouTube video of how to properly roll a meatball. Of course, she refuses. “There’s no recipe,” she says, puffing on her cigarette and proceeding to make the most perfect meatball in the world.

  GOGO’S MEATBALLS

  Although Gogo insists there’s no recipe for her meatballs—or anything else she makes—when pushed, she reluctantly supplies measurements and amounts. However, in our Italian American family, people commonly leave out ingredients or alter recipes in order to ensure that their cookies, bread, eggplant, or, yes, meatballs are the best in the family. Once my mother was given an almond cookie recipe that deliberately called for too much marzipan, an expensive ingredient that she grumbled about even before the cookies came out wrong. All of this is to say that any recipe I share with you from Gogo is liable to need a little tweaking—more or less salt or garlic or onion. Some of these small errors are because, like all good cooks, Gogo adjusts according to the size of the garlic cloves or onions she’s using. But be forewarned that she always wants her food to be better than yours.

  Makes 13 meatballs

  INGREDIENTS

  1½ pounds ground beef (don’t use lean beef! Gogo suggests 86 percent or lower)

  Dusting of salt and pepper

  2 eggs

  2 to 3 cloves of crushed garlic (depending on size)

  ¼ cup chopped flat-leaf parsley

  Enough bread crumbs to bind everything together; start with ¼ cup and increase as needed (if you make your own, use white bread; if you use store-bought—which Gogo usually does—make sure they are plain, not seasoned)

  Put everything except the bread crumbs into a big bowl.

  Mix it up with your hands. (Mama Rose, my grandmother, gave this task to the grandchildren; there are few joys greater than playing with food.)

  Add the bread crumbs about ¼ cup at a time, mixing each addition in and stopping when the mixture binds together. (It is very important not to use too much.)

  Roll the mixture into meatballs. To determine how big each ball should be, remember that you should have thirteen meatballs for every 1½ pounds of meat.

  NOTE: According to Gogo, the rolling is the most important part of making meatballs. Take enough meat mixture in your palm to make one meatball. Keep that hand still, and roll with the palm of your other hand until you feel the mixture growing into a round ball.

  Place the formed meatballs on a plate.

  Pour enough canola oil to reach about halfway up a meatball into a frying pan and heat on high. When it starts to sizzle and a small pinch of meat mixture tossed in fries right up, reduce the heat to medium.

  Lower the meatballs into the oil and fry until the bottoms are browned. (“How long is that, Gogo?” “Until they’re brown!”) Then flip and fry the other half until brown.

  A NOTE ON GOGO’S MEATBALLS: They are not soft on the outside, so be sure they are browned nicely.

  The meatballs might still be a little pink on the inside. This is all right because you will put them in the red sauce while it simmers to finish cooking them. However, leave several in the frying pan a bit longer to get rid of the pink if you want to stick them on forks and eat them hot, without sauce, as a snack.

  Save the frying oil in a coffee can for reasons to be revealed in “Gogo’s Sauce” (page 151).

  Love, Lunch, and Meatball Grinders

  When I was in elementary school, we began our day by wishing the teacher good morning, followed by the Pledge of Allegiance and an off-key rendition of a patriotic song, which is to say this was the 1960s, when kids still hid under their desks to practice what to do when the atom bomb fell. The Providence Street Grammar School was built in 1914. One classroom for each grade, as many as forty kids in a class. The wood floors were polished and shiny, the chalk yellow, the chalkboard green. We did our work—and ate our lunches—at our old wooden desks.

  Every night after supper, my mother made lunches for my brother and me. She used brown paper bags, the same kind we cut into book covers for our textbooks. By day, my Italian American mother worked in a candy factory while my father kept America safe, stationed in Cuba with the navy.

  I’ve come to believe those school lunches were my mother’s only creative outlet. She didn’t have time to knit or sew—unless a button fell off our winter coats—or read. But she threw everything into those lunches. All of her energy and culinary desires, and all of the food in the house. Fried chicken—two pieces—bread and butter, Fritos, a Devil Dog, and half a pound of cherries; a meatball grinder wet with spaghetti sauce, two apples, and a mini blueberry pie. You get the idea.

  These things were so enormous that I had to carry them not by the rolled-up top of the bag but like another geography book, large and heavy and unwieldy. I envied the kids walking down the street while jauntily swinging their metal Jetsons lunch boxes. The kids who opened those lunch boxes and pulled from them a fluffernutter on white bread, an Oreo or two, and a small apple.

  One girl had the most magical sandwich of all: one side white bread, th
e other side something called wheat bread, with a light smear of Miracle Whip and a thin slice of ham. That sandwich was so delicate, so lovely, that it caused the first pangs of jealousy I ever felt. One day I screwed up enough courage to ask her if she’d like to trade. I spread my haul across the desktop.

  “What’ve you got?” she asked, narrowing her eyes and bending her head, with its pixie haircut, to survey it.

  What did I have? Everything!

  But she only wrinkled her nose, turned her head, and took a delicate bite of her exotic sandwich, leaving me to gnaw on chicken and hide cherry pits in my desk.

  When I had children of my own, I made them thin cucumber slices, turkey and cheese rolled and cut into delicate pinwheels, airy meringues. One day at pickup, Sam’s kindergarten teacher grabbed my arm. “Sam’s lunches,” she began, and I beamed with pride. My kid had the perfect school lunches, and I knew it. “They’re measly!” she announced. “He needs more food. He’s asking everyone to share theirs with him. He’s hungry.” I wish I could say I changed my ways. But my youngest, Annabelle, still suffers from my desire to re-create the lunches I longed for. I remove her crusts and use cookie cutters to make her sandwiches into hearts and stars. I husk strawberries. And as I do, I remember my own brown bags groaning with food.

  Growing up as an awkward bookworm in a house crammed with so many people, with a mother who worked and came home tired each night, I often felt lonely. Of course Mom and I went on shopping sprees at the mall and for lunches at local restaurants. But mostly she was vacuuming or ironing or gabbing with her sisters around the kitchen table, playing backgammon with my father, or taking a well-deserved nap. I wasn’t as funny or outrageous as my brother, who garnered attention like a comet streaking across the kitchen.