From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(40)

As a child I often sat silent, watching my grandmother Odell cooking in her kitchen. Studying kitchens and the women who commanded them is something I have done since childhood. Hers was the place where I played as a toddler on the floor and ate seated on a step stool. It was a modest brick house painted white with black shutters. And, like Nonna’s house in Sicily, you entered through the front door right into the kitchen. Built in the 1950s, it held all the promise of that American era: four-burner stove, laminate countertops, a Formica table, a refrigerator, and a deep freezer. An island with swiveling bar stools and a view into the living room that flanked her kitchen. A floor-to-ceiling pantry with a built-in lazy Susan and spice rack. My grandmother had risen above her sharecropper roots; her kitchen was a testament to that.

Her mother, my great-grandmother Fannie, lived two blocks away, and her house was where I spent afternoons shelling peas or playing jacks. She owned a roadside café for “colored folks” traveling up and down Highway 59 and the secondary roads that led to the rural black settlements that eventually became East Texas towns. Fannie served fried pies, chicken biscuits, soda, collards—staples of the South and of the piney region between Houston, Dallas, and east Louisiana, places with sloping porches, shotgun shacks with newspaper fastened over the windows for insulation in the winter. A casual breeze would send little tears of flaking white paint from those porches into the wind like snow. The boards underneath were gray and ashen and gave off splinters without warning. People kept one chair at the porch’s edge, a single pine rocker, maybe two for when someone stopped by to offer them a bushel of corn, sweet and fresh off the stalk. My family came from those sloping porches and various small backwoods points in between, including the town of Nigton, Texas, where generations of my family had been first slaves, then sharecroppers, and finally educators. From them I had learned about food as the physical and emotional sustenance that carried people across the terrain of hard-lived lives.

In Grandmother’s kitchen, I took my first steps in cooking. I first learned to stir SpaghettiOs with a wooden spoon in a tin pot. I wanted to mimic her, her actions. In retrospect, I understand that she let me “cook” so that she could tend to bigger matters. She was caring for her aging mother, her mother-in-law, and her husband, my grandfather, who had Parkinson’s disease. While she cooked, she sighed, leaking out her own pain, resentment, and loss. She put all that into her food, in combinations of sweet and savory, brine and butter. I could tell she cooked out of necessity, but she also cooked in a way that seemed to me a form of self-soothing. And I didn’t bother her. Something told me, even as a child, to leave her alone or be quiet. Her kitchen taught me that flavor can bring forth love and set aside anger, and that something sweet can mend a fence and soothe a heart. “The love of a peaceful home” was her guiding principle.



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Nonna stood at her stove, her back to me. That was how our meals had always begun. She put a metal pot on the gas flame. I noticed that the pot was smaller than the ones she had used in the past. The boiling pot was always the promise of pasta cooked in water flowing from the aqueduct that brought water from the Madonie Mountains. But there was less pasta to make that day. Saro could easily devour two bowls of anything his mother made. But that day it would be only Zoela and me.

I watched her salt the water with five-finger clusters full of sea salt likely extracted from the salt flats a two-hour drive from here. The salt was fine and damp, as if recently risen from the sea. She dusted what remained on her fingers over the water like a wistful prayer. I was still under the spell of the cemetery, the birds, the heat that commanded submission.

I couldn’t quite tell if Nonna even wanted to make this meal. I couldn’t distinguish need from obligation—the need to do something to feel alive in the face of loss or the obligation to feed guests who had come far. I suspected that neither of us was particularly hungry.

But that was what we did. It was what happened at midday, every day. The Sicilian lunch is sacrosanct. It was, as they say in Sicily, “Nè tu letu, nè iu cunsulatu—Neither you happy nor I consoled.” Still we would eat.

I had changed into a tunic dress. Nonna had taken off her formal black shirt and skirt and exchanged them for the simpler, more comfortable widow’s clothes she wore at home. The uniform was the same, a black shirt and tube skirt. The at-home version was less restrictive, made of cotton. She wore her wooden cross at her neck.

“May I help you?” I had asked that question in her kitchen for nearly fifteen years.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. She liked her kitchen to herself.

She had never let me cook in her house. Never. Not even her chef son was allowed to. No matter how many nights I slept under her roof, no matter how many times she washed my bras and ironed my underwear, I was her guest. Even if I was also family. She preferred to work alone, at her own pace; she didn’t want company while she cooked. In the past, I had just passed through, made small talk, but had never lingered from start to finish. She, like many women in town, saw their time at the stove as their domain. I was forbidden to even set the table.

So I stepped out on the street. I heard the loudspeaker of the latest roving street vendor: “Susine, pere, pesche, uva!” He was hawking fruit—plums, pears, peaches, grapes—varieties of which could only be found in Sicily and rarely in the supermarket. The vendor was fifty or so, narrow-faced, unshaven, tall with a subtle hunch in his back. He boasted a grin with teeth spread out in his mouth like missing dominoes. I’d seen him for years. For me his face was a collage of the island’s cultures: dark olive skin, blue eyes, the Greek nose that appears on statues of Apollo, topped with a head of curly black hair. I was fascinated by Sicilians, a populace that over centuries had found themselves subject to first one, then another ruler from Greece, Spain, North Africa, and Normandy. Sicilians were a mixed culture of victors and vanquished, people who managed the often uneasy mix of different languages, religions, and ethnicities that had come to coexist. In the spectrum of Sicilian faces you can see a combination of African, Greek, Arabic, Jewish, Spanish, and Norman people. As a result of all that invading and accommodating, Sicilians are characterized by an openhearted skepticism that I find both vexing and endearing. Their food is an intoxicating mixture of cultures colliding on the plate.