Childhood Food Memories from Two Italian Kitchens and One Garden

Millie (in housecoat) and Max (in fur) in her Italian Kitchen ~ Christmas 2002

"Name five foods, dishes or otherwise, that were a part of your childhood, and that you sometimes miss when nostalgia gets to you..."

The beautiful Kristin Espinasse from her ab-fab delightful French-Word-a-Day quotidian graciously tagged me a while back. I was in the throws of recovery from my most recent cooking adventure at a certain unmentionable chateau which I have christened Chateau d’Enfer (Chateau from Hell! more on that later….) and was unable to write even one mot (word). So after much vin-therapy (read: consuming an abundance of wonderful French wine while cruising on a barge in Burgundy’s Côte de Beaune), I am back and ready to write! But before that, allow me a moment to highlight Kristin’s charming books aptly named Words in a French Life sharing a slice of her rêve (dream) of a French life. I have given them as gifts as each ‘slice’ never fails to utterly charm me and put a smile on my face! Merci Kristin!

Bon (ok, good), back to the meme...

Being a "culinary professional" which, may I remind you, means nothing more than I spent copious amounts of money to learn how to braise and now know what simmer means, most people I talk to assume that I was born with a whisk in my hand. Not so, my friends. Had that been the case, it would have saved the above mentioned copious amounts of dinero and I could be living on that barge, but I digress... 

I was born from a mother and grandmother who are both truly gifted chefs, talent straight from their DNA, and I can honestly say that I don’t recall a bad meal. At least food-wise. Family-wise, well that another story requiring more wine than even Burgundy could produce... Anyways, my mother studied with Julia Child and Mastering the Art of French Cooking had a permanent place on the counter. (Maybe that is where the seed was planted in this little Francophile!) My grandmother was from Italy (need I say more), outside of Rome in a little town called Esperia, so not just good but delicious food was the standard (except during my mother’s liver-for-breakfast phase!) and wafts of mouth-watering smells curled and twisted throughout both homes, infusing every molecule of air.

However, I was continually shooed out of the kitchen at home unless it was to do the dishes and my grandmother would let us sit and watch but never encouraged any participation other than eating her food piled high on a plate from the moment of arrival to the moment of departure, and you still left laden down with various items she’d just whipped up such as a pumpkin pie or a bag of apples just picked from the garden. So three decades later it was off to cooking school for moi.

#1: The first and most impressionable childhood food memory would have to be…..my Italian grandmother’s tomato sauce. My maternal grandmother, Millie pictured above, all 4’11” of her, always wore a “housecoat” over her St. John’s knit suit and pumps (to go to the grocery store) and she, without fail, always had a bubbling pot of fresh tomato sauce gurgling on the stove. I would run in after school (she lived 3 blocks away from us), rip off a chunk of bread, and dunk it in the sauce. I burned my tongue every time but I didn’t care. It was heaven, home, the ultimate comfort food. Then I would grab a fork and spear a meatball or two and a sausage, spoon more sauce into a bowl and that days torments from growing up with braces, acne and a Dorothy Hamill hair cut would magically wash away. After that first spoonful…. I knew life was going to be ok.

Thirty years and one cooking school stint later, it is still the best tomato sauce I have ever had. Ever. Period. I don’t care what anyone says, it is the best, so take that and your orange clogs, Mario!  I tried to get the recipe out of her, an exercise in futility as her standard response was “Oh dear, I can’t remember, a little of this and a little of that.” Frankly I don’t think she wanted to give it up so I set a date to make it with her and every time I turned my back she would throw something in! Mine still doesn’t taste like hers so I know there is something in there she’s not telling me!  Or maybe it takes making it everyday for the better part of 50, yes fifty!, years to get it just right. That and a lot of love….

#2: Another meal that I can still taste to this day, though the last time I had it was at least 22 years ago, is my mother’s Romertopf Pot Chicken in Cream Sauce. If you recall, Romertopf made those clay cooking pots that were all the rage, well 22 years ago. I once tried to cook a roast in one and it came out like the bottom of my shoe but that was PCS, pre-cooking-school, though not sure if the results would be that different… My mother currently isn’t speaking to me so I can’t get the recipe just yet but this is one that I think comes relatively close (without the tomatoes). I’ll update you should the lines of communication open.

I loved watching her gently slide the clay pot part way out of the oven, lift the lid, and baste the poulet. The aroma was intoxicating and the best part was, of course, dunking the bread in the sauce after all the chicken had disappeared as quickly as it had been served.  This was my absolute favorite thing that she ever made however her Thanksgiving turkey and stuffing came in a close second!

#3: This food memory take place outside. My grandfather’s jardin des legumes et des fruits (vegetable & fruit garden). Blessings must be showered upon my grandfather, also from Italy from a little island called Ischia, for cultivating and nurturing a garden that would make the Potager du Roi, the King's vegetable gardens at Versailles,  greener than their haricots-verts (greenbeans) with jealousy.



A compost pile was nourished daily with various and sundry scraps such as apple peelings from an apple pie or two, coffee grounds, parsley stems from chicken soup, egg shells from a fritatta, leftover meat from last night’s dinner and anything else that hadn’t made it into a pot, onto the stove, or into a tummy during the previous day so the soil was as rich as it could be. My grandfather, Joe, would turn the dirt with his shovel and flick a few worms my way knowing that I loved to play with them. Ok, I was really young! Apples wove a rug of green and red beneath the shade of their trees. There was just so many apple pies and apple cakes and apple sauce that one little Italian grandmother could make in a day.

Salads were always fresh, like really fresh, like picked 5 minutes before dinner was served, so Romaine, Butterleaf, Escarole, Dandelions (my favorite), and Arugula overflowed from bowls dressed only with some sliced red onions, a swirl of olive oil and enough red wine vinegar (from my grandfather’s barrel in the cellar) to make you pucker for days. A lemon tree, a fig tree (that I used to climb), an enormous orange tree, a few of the above-mentioned apple trees, pumpkins, zucchinis, squash, carrots, celery, and any other imaginable fruit or veggie filled cupboards, baskets, bowls, ovens, pots, pans and eventually our tummies. Anything I try to grow, food or flower, dies a slow painful death (ask my flatmate Pierre about his banana tree). Perhaps, like my grandmother’s tomato sauce, it takes 50 years of nurturing, pruning, watering and weeding to finally have my own Potager du Roi. That and a lot of love…..

#4: A Sunday morning breakfast of Dutch Babies. Don’t freak out and call child protective services…however if I do ever have children, dial away! I’m not talking about real babies or babies from Holland for that matter. I am talking about those delicious huge soufflé type pancakes that rise in a pan and then are cut like a pie and filled with wonderful cinnamon sautéed apples or fresh strawberries, nectarines, peaches, bananas, etc and sprinkled with some powdered sugar or drizzled with thick warm maple syrup. Those Dutch babies!

When we were good, which wasn’t very often, my mother would make these for us on a Sunday morning. We would have to tip toe through the kitchen so the Dutch babies wouldn’t collapse, at least before it was finished cooking otherwise it would end up in la poubelle (garbage). This is still my favorite Sunday breakfast that not even a flaky, buttery croissant can surpass.

#5: Red Vines and Pop Tarts and Fruit Pies, Oh My!  Ah, glorious junk food! Even before the ominous moniker, it was a taboo food completely unwelcome in our cupboards. I always complained that we had NO FOOD in the pantry (see #3) and that all my friends had better food (better food being pringles, oreos, gummy bears, wonder bread, those pink and white iced cookies with the sprinkles, kit kats, etc)  in their homes and why couldn’t my mother shop like them?!?!?  But somehow I managed to consume my fair share, no doubt keeping Kellogg’s from becoming a going concern (accounting speak for imminently out of business). My favorites that I can remember are: Red Vines, Hostess Fruit Pies, Pop Tarts, and Goober Peanut Butter and Strawberry (not grape!) Jelly, not necessarily in that order. 

Red Vines (thanks for reminding me Kristin!) were never in the house but every time I went to a movie, which was a lot back then, I would get a box of Red Vines and a Root Beer. You see, I was one of those freaks with braces, acne and a Dorothy Hamill haircut that saw the first Star Wars starring Mark Hamill (no relation to Dorothy and her ubiquitous hair cut that ruined junior high for me), Carrie Fisher and a young Harrison Ford, 25 times so that was a lot of Red Vines.

I LOVED Hostess Fruit Pies. Berry was my favorite and my mother was loathe to buy them for me so a crying fit in the middle of Key Market was necessary to close the deal. Not that this behavior was tolerated but once in a blue moon, it was just necessary. Keep your Twinkies, SnowBalls, and HoHos, but a Berry Fruit Pie would shut me up for at least an hour or long enough for my mother to finish her errands sans interruption!   

Pop Tarts. Suffice to say that Pop Tarts are the cornerstone of my junk food consumption and when I am back in SF, it takes every ounce of effort to glide the shopping cart past these beguiling boxes without stopping or even slowing down long enough to grab one or two. I can resist a red vine or a fruit pie or Goobers but a pop tart will cause me to bargain with my brain endlessly about how harmless one little box of pop tarts really is. My favorite was again berry with the white icing. I would grab it the second it popped out of the toaster, and take a bite burning my mouth and fingertips every time. You’d think I would learn? Not a chance!

Now Goober Peanut Butter & Jelly my mother flat out refused to buy, tantrum or no. I was fascinated by this concoction and couldn’t figure out for the life of me how they got the peanut butter AND the jelly AND the layers into the jar! I figured it out, many years later, but it still hasn’t lost its charm. I am not lured into the beckoning aisles at Safeway to buy it like those devilish Pop Tarts but I tip my hat in homage to the brilliant marketing person that came up with the packaging. 

So this is probably more than you ever wanted to know about me. My apologies as I tend to ramble. Should this ever become a profession, I will need to enlist the help of a most discerning editor! I guess it’s my turn to tag someone, if it’s not too late…. so here goes.

Abby at Ladie Cutie Troublemaker, Cindy at Food Migration, Alicat at Something So Clever, Florence at Bliss in the Kitchen, and Stephanie at Creaturebug. Forgive me if you’ve already been tagged as too many braincells were destroyed in the previous millennium to warrant any sort of normal memory retention level.

I hope you have a fun stroll down memory lane. It certainly was for me!  Merci Kristin!

If you are tagged and are up to the challenge (no pressure), here's how to proceed: Remove the blog in the #1 slot from the following list and move the other blogs up one place; add your blog's name in the #5 spot; link to each of the other blogs for the desired cross-pollination effect.

Then write away as you take your personal journey back in time. Au revoir et bon voyage!

1 - Station Gourmande
2 - Tasca da Elvira
3 - Cuisine et Compagnie
4 - French Word-A-Day
5 - Cucina Testa Rossa

Comments

[mutant]

i like roemertopfs. made the best-ever coq aux vin in one.

[Lil]

oooo... you've been tagged with childhood meme! and my, sounds like wonderful culinary world you're living there... i think it was especially sweet to have fresh tomato sauce on the hob at your gran's... :)

[Corine]

Bonsoir,

I just discovered your blog and I love it. J'aime beaucoup et je reviendrai.

Corine (French living in the US)