Taste: My Life through Food(13)

We arrived at a small hut at the top of a mountain from which one could see across all of Calabria from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Ionian, or so it seemed. We met the goatherd, who was an old man dressed as though he were out of a children’s storybook, complete with thick woolen trousers, a corduroy coat, and a felt hat. After a few minutes money was exchanged (my father insisted on chipping in but his attempts were shooed away by his in-laws); the skinned, gutted, and cleaned carcass of a goat was placed into the trunk of the car; and we made our descent back toward Cittanova.

Unfortunately, I was not privy to the preparation of the goat, but I remember sitting down at the long table with these newfound great-aunts, uncles, and second and third cousins, all of whom were thrilled that we were visiting and made us feel so welcome. They talked animatedly over one another in the Calabrese dialect, which was practically indecipherable to me even though by then I spoke Italian very well. They passed around bottles of wine; told jokes; offered “brindisi,” spontaneous rhyming toasts in honor of beloved guests; and of course devoured the goat, which was delicious.

I remember thinking, as I looked around the table, that I had never seen my grandfather so happy. He was back home after many years, among people he loved in a culture that was his. I wondered what it would have been like for him to leave his home so many years ago knowing that he might not return for a very long time, or, when or if he ever did return, how many of his loved ones would still be there. He had been raised here, been conscripted into the Italian army during the First World War, and seen action in the brutal battles in the mountains of Northern Italy, only to come back home to a poverty that precipitated his leaving to find a better life in America. I cannot to this day fathom that life. What he had to do to survive, to move steadily forward as the world changed so rapidly around him and its leaders continued to make the same mistakes over and over again. Like many Italian immigrants of that era, the life he led was a very simple one. A family, a steady job, and a garden were the bastions that tethered him firmly to this world and protected him from the swift swirling chaos of the twentieth century.

There is only one other strong gustatory reminder of my year in Italy. It’s a snack for which I was given a bit of pocket change every day after school, known as schiacciata.

Schiacciata is the Tuscan version of focaccia. It’s basically made in the same way but it is “schiacciata,” meaning it is smashed, therefore making it thinner. After being rolled out, the dough is “smashed,” or pressed down with one’s fingers, creating little craters in the surface, before being drizzled with olive oil, sprinkled with lots of coarse salt, and then baked. The result is a crispy crust and a slightly soft but not fluffy or doughy interior. Every day outside my school, a vendor sold from a cart what was basically a mass-produced version of schiacciata, slathered in oil and coated with excessive amounts of salt in little wax-paper envelopes, to groups of ravenous young teens who forked over a precious one hundred lire. As cheap as it was in every way, still to this day, whenever I eat a schiacciata, a focaccia, or any other iteration of Italian flatbread, that after-school snack is the gold standard to which they are and will forever be compared.





4


At the end of almost a year abroad, we returned home to Katonah, and I must say, my sisters and I were very happy to be back. We had missed our friends and all of the American things we had grown up with, particularly on the food front. Although my mother still cooked healthy meals for us that we loved, it was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, the occasional Swanson TV dinner on a Saturday night, a Velveeta sandwich, or frozen Buitoni “pizzas” that we had been longing for.

Given the availability of products from just about anywhere in today’s global market, it seems absurd, but in 1970s Italy, peanut butter was basically nonexistent. For Gina, Christine, and me, this was outrageous and unfair. We loved peanut butter. We ate it almost every day. Peanut butter with jelly, jam, honey, bananas, Marshmallow Fluff, or BUTTER, slathered on pieces of extremely white bread or a crusty Italian loaf. In fact, when an aunt and uncle came to visit us while we were in Florence, per our desperate request, they brought a small plastic vat of peanut butter, which my sisters and I fought over for weeks until we had scraped the vessel dry. Peanut butter is not really bad for you, but our other food obsessions, like Velveeta and Buitoni pizzas, were of little or no nutritional value.

For those not “in the know,” Buitoni frozen pizzas are (or were; do they still make them? Actually they do) little discs of dough filled with a paste that is supposed to be tomato sauce with dried herbs and cheese. These frigid pucks were taken straight from the freezer and slipped into the toaster, then into one’s mouth. In essence they were a savory Italianesque version of a Pop-Tart. And we loved them. Why, you ask? They were the opposite of our normal fare. They were like the occasional Swanson TV dinner or the slab of Velveeta on white bread with mayonnaise. They were what our friends ate, and so we coveted them. In hindsight this is obviously the reason my mother bought all of these things for us even though they were anathema to her. Yes, they were quick and easy snack foods with which to placate us, but I’d like to think that she bought them so we might feel like we “belonged.” However, it is more than likely that they ended up in our fridge so we would stop constantly haranguing the poor woman to buy them.

With that preface, here is a glimpse into what I ate as a teenager on any given day during the school week.