Taste: My Life through Food(27)

After dinner, dessert, and semi-drunken conversations about politics or something vaguely serious were attempted, the furniture was cleared to the edges of the living room, and the “Ring Game” was played. This is a game of deception in which lying and cheating are encouraged. There are no teams and there is no winner. A ring is threaded onto a long piece of string, which is then tied together at the ends. A circle is formed by the players, who hold the circle of string in both fists at waist height. One person is placed in the middle of the circle, whose goal it is to find out which player is hiding the ring. The person who has been found to have the ring then takes their place in the center. As soon as the game commences, all players begin sliding their hands in both directions, either pretending to pass the ring or actually passing the ring to the players on either side of them, shouting wildly things like, “Here, you take it! I don’t want it!” etc., etc. Needless to say, the poor person in the middle is slowly driven mad. The better you were at slipping the ring into the fist of the person next to you, and they are caught with it by the person in the middle, the less likely you were to end up in the middle. It is a cruel but brilliantly funny game, and as soon as you understand that cheating is not only necessary but fair, as it sometimes is in life, you will enjoy it.

At the end of the day, when all the guests had gone and the children were tucked away after endlessly caterwauling about not being tired, Kate and I would end up having the “inevitable conversation.” It is important for you to know that this was a woman with the patience of a saint, a woman who seldom complained about anything. But by the light of the Christmas tree, as I sipped a late-night scotch, the words “That fucking timpano…” would hiss from her lips and a discussion about tradition, how not to insult family, or whether we should just go skiing over Christmas, etc. would ensue.

However, I must admit that while the rest of the family slept, midnight often found me by the open refrigerator, eating a huge piece of timpano and secretly thinking that for all its trouble, it was probably the best fucking Christmas gift of all.





A Yule Epilogue


My wife, Felicity Blunt, and I started dating in the fall of 2010 (thrilling details await you in an upcoming chapter), and about a year or so later she moved to Westchester to live with me and the kids. When Felicity spent her first Christmas with us, I was hoping she might take to timpano differently than Kate had. That didn’t happen. What happened was exactly what I have described in the previous pages. I am not kidding. Exactly. Predawn Christmas Day parental arrivals, roasted meats brought to the table dry or charred like pathetic afterthoughts, the rolling of eyes, the gnashing of teeth by a woman (who also has a saintlike patience) at the mere mention of timpano, and of course the inevitable late-night conversation beginning with the words, now uttered darkly in a posh British accent, “That fucking timpano…”


I?Fry the egg in extra-virgin olive oil so that the edges of the egg are crispy but the yolk still soft, place on top of the pitti fritti, and add salt and pepper to taste.

II? “Fiscotto,” or “biscotto,” means “twice cooked” in Italian. The first spelling is the Calabrese pronunciation. It is stale bread that is slowly baked at a very low temperature for a few hours. The result is a hard, toastlike bread that will keep for a long period of time in a tin. The slow baking releases the sugars and gives it a gentle sweetness. It can be eaten with any kind of cheese or roasted peppers, or broken up into smaller pieces and dropped into soups or… whatever.

III?Even though we were cooking the dinner, my mother refused not to bring at least three extra side dishes as well as any leftovers from the Christmas Eve dinner, from which we were all still recovering, because in her words, “I’m not going to eat them and God knows your father doesn’t need them!”

IV?The English and the Italians love lamb, and places like Australia and New Zealand are famous for theirs, yet perhaps the most delicious lamb I have ever eaten was in Iceland. I will address this in another chapter.





A Christmas Cocktail


Here is my holiday version of a Cosmopolitan.





1 tablespoon pomegranate seeds

50 milliliters Ketel One vodka

25 milliliters Cointreau

25 milliliters cranberry juice (either unsweetened or cranberry juice cocktail; your preference)

25 milliliters pomegranate juice

Ice

1 raspberry, mint leaf, and fresh rosemary sprig, to garnish



Put the pomegranate seeds into a shaker and muddle until muddled.

Add the booze.

Add the juices.

Add the ice.

Shake it.

Strain into a coupe or a Martini glass.

Garnish with a raspberry wrapped in a mint leaf and skewered with a small stalk of rosemary. Drink it and have a happier holiday.





8


Films and television were crucial to my development as a kid and stand accused for causing me to choose the occupation I have devoted myself to for almost forty years. At around the age of ten, I would go to the movies every Saturday with a friend and see whatever was showing in a nearby movie theater that our parents had deemed appropriate for our innocent eyes. (I remember sitting through a Planet of the Apes marathon one Saturday and emerging from the theater bleary eyed, exhausted, and, because I’d spent so long in an altered reality, very confused as to why there were no simians on the streets of Mount Kisco.) Although I did enjoy reading, especially anything to do with the Second World War, I also spent so much time watching old movies on our black-and-white Zenith television that my parents had to pry me away from it over and over again. On certain afternoons there was the Million Dollar Movie on channel 9. This was usually some classic drama to which I would glue myself as I ate an excessive number of buttered hard rolls or peanut butter sandwiches. I was also addicted to so many of the classic television shows of the sixties and seventies, like The Rat Patrol, The Brady Bunch, The Wild Wild West, and Lost in Space. (The latter three, for better or for worse, would become Hollywood films over thirty years later.) I also loved watching cooking shows, and as the years went on there were more and more of them on WNET, the New York City PBS station. Just as certain actors led me to acting, there are two television cooking show hosts who had a profound impact upon me and are partly to blame for my heightened interest in the subject of food.