Food

     As the daughter of an Italian immigrant, I never went hungry.  It must be genetic.  Italians know how to eat.  They know how to shop for the best ingredients, how to cook everyone in the neighborhood to shame, how to get creative with food and marry flavors one wouldn't dream of even introducing, how to talk their way through a meal, (or in my house, yell their way through it!) how to squeeze the hell out of good Italian tomatoes right into the pot after cranking out 40 meatballs for Christmas Eve gravy. (Yes, we called it gravy, not sauce!) The Italians in my family know food. In fact, I feel like I'm somewhat of a food snob.  I really don't mean to be, it's just that my palate was trained to know the difference between a good peccorino Romano and a cheese food in a can on a shelf down aisle 7!  It's not to say that I don't turn to mush over a creamy, coconut ginger soup, or a near perfect paella.  Nor would I turn a cheek on  simmering bouillabaisse or send back a plate of  buttery pierogies.  These are international foods that in my  life, in both childhood and adulthood, had a fiesta with my taste buds, and I wouldn't pass up an invite to that party any day of the week.
     But when it comes to my family and the art form they called cooking, there are hardly the right words to describe the experience.  Metaphorically speaking, I suppose you could say their food was the freshest bouquet of flowers, a perfect harvest moon, your favorite song from high school and the ultimate first date all swaddled in the most accessible corner of your brain or mouth or stomach.  As a young girl, well, I'd take a dish of my mom's spaghetti over any meal any day of the week. It was comfort food at its finest.  And on the holidays, just when I thought I couldn't fit another crumb into my stomach, just after the zuppe, the antipasto, and the dish of Auntie Marietta's homemade macaroni a la gravy simmering with meatballs, pork, and hunks of beef, just when I was ready to make my way to the couch, that's when the roast would come. I honestly thought someone had to have made a mistake.  'You mean THAT wasn't the dinner?"
     So food, therefore, has become somewhat of an event for me; that is, talking about it, comparing it, researching it, preparing it, eating it, relishing in its aftermath. And at the mere thought of the culinary experience I am expecting to have in Italy next year, well, I simply shake my head in wonder. I hear the table wine is far better than any wine you've purchased here in the states. Can that be true?  It has been described to me in ways that summon a breath of air on a hillside in Tuscany overlooking a valley, and it has even been described to me as the rose bouquet sashe, something like what's in my grandmother's underwear drawer.  I prefer the former.  Nonetheless, I want to believe some of these rumors are true.  I want to believe that I will sit at a table and have food prepared and sent to my family and me, and that the woman (or man) in the kitchen believes the preparation is his or her art form, the reason for that party in my palate.
     I don't want to go hungry in Italy, not unless it is the hunger for a return visit.