From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(21)

It was that aspect of my grief that took me to the kitchen. It was both an instinct and a desire. There was also fear. I wanted to be near my husband. My family intuitively knew that and left me alone in there for the first time in a week. I understood that in this first attempt to cook on my own, my grief demanded that I take it slow. Feel my way through. Trust that I would be led in the right direction.

“Begin with the soffritto,” he’d say.

So that’s what I did. I chopped my first tiny pile of garlic. I brushed it into a narrow white line with the palm of my hand, as I had seen Saro do at the beginning of thousands of meals. The palm of his hand had guided the garlic toward what was to come next.

He had told me, “It’s a humble herb, but it adds a dose of courage to every dish. A little goes a long way.”

Il soffritto is an act of submission, submitting onion and garlic to oil.

Cooking is about surrender. He had always demonstrated that.

So I diced the onion next, rendering it into rough cubes.

I had watched Saro bring raw ingredients to a state of surrender, releasing their form and flavor to create something new. He was my master alchemist. I felt like the onion I had just placed in the pan, translucent and vulnerable.

I wanted to get back to the first tastes—the risotto con sugo verde I had tasted at Acqua al 2. I understood that everything that happened to me next, at this stove, in my house, in the world, would from here on be a life of second firsts.

Fai una salsa semplice—Make a simple sauce, I imagined he’d say.

I reached for a bottle of tomato sauce, the last one from our previous summer in Sicily that sat in my cupboard. I opened the bottle and poured a liquid Sicilian summer into the pan, on top of the soffritto.

“Use basil, not laurel. Add a bit of sugar to balance the acid.”

I mimicked the movements and gestures Saro had shown me, and I stirred.

Un piatto di pasta ti farebbe bene, amore—A plate of pasta will do you good. That was always his advice.

Like water, doubt is fluid. A week after Saro’s death, I doubted I could do much, either in the kitchen or in life. But I knew how to put a pot of water onto the stove. I watched the water fill the pot, aware of its fluidity, its pliability. Was my life like that now, a thing that flowed according to the capriciousness of life’s situations?

I turned off the water, put the pot onto the stove. I added salt and waited for it to boil.

“A fistful is a single serving. Always do two fistfuls, six if friends are coming over.”

Six fistfuls of pasta seemed unimaginable. For now, preparing a single-serve pasta col sugo di pomodoro was all I could manage.

Twelve minutes later, I drained the water from the pasta and let the vapor warm my face. I poured the sauce over the fistful of spaghetti I had made, finishing the pasta in the pan the Italian way. I had made my first meal for one in Saro’s kitchen.

I took a bite. It wasn’t great, it wasn’t bad. I could taste doubt and love, maybe a pinch of faith, a dollop of determination. After a few bites, I pushed the plate way. As I looked out onto our back yard, the fig tree with the promise of summer fruit had fully formed bulbs facing the sun, I made a decision: I would take Saro’s ashes to Sicily this summer. I would keep a promise to my lover, and I would, maybe, in the process discover a new promise for myself and for a future that at the moment felt incomprehensible.





A VILLA. A BROOM.




Saro took the lead in nurturing our long-distance relationship. When I returned to the United States after my extended stay in Florence, he devised a plan: I would come back to Italy during the summer and read books by the beach while he did a summer stint as a chef on the island of Elba. He visited Wesleyan in the fall of my senior year, then came again for my graduation in spring. After I graduated, he searched for apartments for us in Florence while I did summer stock theater in the Berkshires until we could figure out next steps. We were making it work across time zones, an ocean, two languages, and being at different stages in our lives. And even though I still hadn’t met his parents, we were following the dream of our relationship, and sooner than we thought I would follow another big dream: a career as an actress.

While doing summer stock theater, a New York talent manager agreed to represent me. It took all of about half a second to decide that my future was in New York, not Italy as Saro and I had thought. And I couldn’t wait to tell him the news. When I called him, I was standing at a roadside pay phone in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, between rehearsals. “Luckily, people eat all over the world,” he said with excitement in his voice. “I can be a chef anywhere.” A month later, he decided to sell his interest in a successful new bar he had opened with friends. Two months later, he gave notice at Acqua al 2 and was ready to move to New York.

“Are you sure?” I asked him. By then I was living in New York and sleeping on my aunt’s couch on the Upper East Side to save money while taking acting classes during the day and waiting tables at night.

“Of course. I don’t see a future without you,” he declared. I couldn’t wait for him to join me in the States, but I knew it would take a few months for him to wrap up his life in Florence, and it would be hard for him to say good-bye to all his friends.

But I knew he welcomed the idea of moving to America. I hoped he’d see it as a sort of reclaiming. He had, after all, spent his teen years in Buffalo, New York, when his parents had emigrated there briefly. His father had taken a job in a pasta factory, and his mother had gotten shift work on a jacket assembly line. His father hated the snow; his mother had been assigned the mind-numbing work of attaching the same lapel to the same style men’s sports jacket for three years. Saro had told me about their disillusionment with their American dream. His family had ultimately returned to Sicily when he was seventeen and had just graduated from an American high school. He hadn’t wanted to leave.