From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(64)

“Of course. What kind of cheese do you want? I just need to know the size and flavors.”

“I will be eating it here and then taking some back at the end of the month to my home in Los Angeles. Small wheels for travel.”

“Two kilos?” she asked, moving to the display case and retrieving a small notepad from underneath a dusty cash register.

“Sure,” I said, unsure exactly how big two kilos was but figuring she knew best.

She wrote a note to herself in the notebook and then looked back at me. And then across at Zoela and Rosalia.

“Are you sure you want to make cheese? Most people here don’t want their kids to get dirty doing something like that. They want the cheese at the table, but they are not interested in how it gets made.” She looked at me with skepticism.

“I live in Los Angeles. I don’t have a cheese maker down the block. And Saro would love this. I can always wash her clothes.”

Donatella nodded. “As you like.” She seemed pleased by if not curious about this American woman standing before her.

After all, I was a visitor, not a local woman with a home to keep, a husband and children to cook for. I had time to be curious about things that other women saw as the work of someone else.

“Well, it’s my American curiosity,” I said, making a joke that I suspected was both unclear and lost in translation the minute it left my mouth. “What day should we come?”

We set an appointment for two days later in the late afternoon. She would be making fresh ricotta. Zoela could make a batch to take home to Nonna. We would make small wheels of salt-cured pecorino that would mature in her shop. The whole endeavor seemed exciting, educational, and full of savory promise.

“We’ll bring aprons,” I said to Donatella as Zoela, Rosalia, and I spilled out into the street and the afternoon sun. The main street had come alive in the late afternoon. We waved hello to a brigade of old men gathering in front of the bar and in the piazza alongside the church to play cards before dinner. Each one had a face tanned by work in the fields and was wearing a starched shirt and a well-worn coppola storta, the traditional Sicilian cap that makes people outside Sicily think of the Mafia. Again I thought of Saro and how he had once told me that his father had lined the top of his coppola with newspaper in the winter to keep his head warmer. It was a detail that had endeared Giuseppe to me.



* * *



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.