Born Round Read online

  Adele’s specialty was what most Italian food lovers know as orecchiette, which means “little ears.” Her name for them, strascinat, pronounced something like strah-zshi-NOT, came from her southern Italian dialect. It alluded to the Italian verbs for “to trail” and “to drag” (strascicare and trascinare), because to make this pasta, you’d drag a knife along a sheet of dough, repeatedly pressing down and pinching off just enough of the dough to make an ear-shaped nub of pasta. The method was even more tedious than Florence’s process for ravioli.

  Adele used her thumb as the mold for each strascinat. She would sit at a sizable table, an enormous rectangle of dough before her, and pinch and mold and then flick, the concave nubs landing in a nearby heap. She’d sit for hours, because there was no reliable machine for this endeavor, no dried pasta from a box that could emulate the density and pliancy of her strascinat, no alternative to doing the work, no matter how numbing it was. And even if there had been an alternative, she wouldn’t have taken advantage of it. Dried pasta from a box didn’t advertise how long and hard you had labored. Dried pasta from a box didn’t say love. When you ate a bowl of Grandma’s strascinat, covered in the thick red sauce that she and most other Italians simply called “gravy,” you knew that every piece of pasta had the imprint of her flesh, that the curve of each nub matched the curve of her thumb.

  Another of her signature dishes was a sort of casserole made with many alternating layers of mezzani, a noodle similar to penne, and thin slices of fried eggplant. The eggplant was the tough part, the messy part, because the dish required scores of slices, especially if you were making enough for a dozen or more people, and Adele was always making that much. Each slice had to be a particular weight: too thin and it might get mushy and fall apart; too thick and it wouldn’t cook to a silky enough state in the center. Each slice had to be dredged in flour and given its own discrete space in scorching oil, so she had to deploy several stovetop pans at once or a big electric fryer, the kind that plugged into an outlet and sat on the counter.

  Some cooks recall landscape artists at their easels, pausing to ruminate as they apply dabs of paint to a brilliant canvas. Grandma recalled a mechanic under the hood of a car, clanging and huffing and covered in gunk. Cooking was steamy, sweaty drudgery for which she didn’t just roll up her sleeves. She wore something ratty and sleeveless—the fewer obstructions to movement, the better—along with comfortable slippers or flip-flops, even though she preferred heels in all other circumstances. She stood just four feet, eleven inches tall, not counting her hair, which got her all the way up to five foot three if she’d just come from the beauty parlor.

  She did as much of this cooking as possible outside of view, in a space where she didn’t have to worry about the mess. By the time my father turned sixteen, she had a whole second kitchen, in a two-family house that she and Mauro bought on Fifth Street in the Battle Hill neighborhood of White Plains. They rented out the second floor and lived on the first floor and in the basement, where Grandma churned out her fried eggplant and strascinat. She never had to sully the nicer kitchen on the ground level, and she could bask in the wonderment visitors expressed at its sparkling cleanness, which seemed to contradict the freshly made banquet she was laying out for them on the table in the center of the room. Where had all that food come from? Why weren’t there any telltale signs of its production?

  Although she and Grandpa didn’t have all that much money, they had food to share and made sure that anyone entering their home knew it. They had it in part because they sold it, in a tiny store in White Plains that was a cross between a delicatessen and a bodega. Mauro opened it to supplement his erratic work and undependable income as a stonemason. It succeeded in part because its hours were longer than those of larger grocery stores, many of which shut their doors early in those days. Because of those long hours, Frank, who was five and a half years older than Jim and eleven years older than Mario, often had to head straight from school to the store to relieve his father.

  Certain nights of the week were devoted to certain meals, and that schedule rarely varied. Sunday afternoon was the big weekly feast, antipasti followed by a pasta course followed by meat. Monday was soup night: something light, like minestrone, a retrenchment from Sunday’s excess. Tuesday was a dish of peas and pasta, or what the Brunis pronounced peas-an’-pas’, mashing three words together in a hurried exhalation. Chicken had its designated night; so did steak.

  Holiday meals were also set in stone. Grandma always hosted her brothers and their wives and children for Christmas Eve, when she hewed without exception to the tradition of seven fishes. She put canned tuna on an antipasti platter; mixed clams into a sauce for spaghetti; folded anchovies into a calzone; boiled octopus; and fried salt cod, squid and scallops. Sometimes she expanded the meal to include more than seven fishes, but she never contracted it to include fewer. There were things in this world a person should be able to depend on. Eating the right meals on the right occasions was foremost among them.

  She told her children that they should never, ever leave anyone with the impression that they wanted for food, drilling into them that when someone offered them something to eat, they should refuse it. Period. If the offer was repeated, they might consider accepting it, but it was probably best to wait for a third or even fourth offer. Otherwise, she said, “the people” might get the wrong idea.

  She spoke of “the people” constantly, usually in the form of a question that was basically her life’s refrain: “What will the people think?” She asked her children this whenever one of them was about to head out in a shirt that was torn or pants with the barest of stains. She asked Grandpa this whenever he dawdled in attending to some home repair whose necessity might be apparent to a neighbor or passerby. Her children—and, later, their wives and the rest of us—liked to tease her by asking, “Who are the people? Do they have names?” But we knew. They were anyone and everyone who might get a glimpse of, and draw a conclusion about, you. They were the jury, seen and unseen, before whom you maintained a “bella figura,” a bedrock Italian expression that literally translates into “beautiful figure” but really means “good impression” and refers to your image and standing in the world.

  The house on Fifth Street wasn’t fancy, but Adele made sure it had fancy flourishes. In a magazine she once saw garage doors painted in the manner of a black-and-white chessboard, and realized that her garage doors, formed by a grid of squares, could yield to a similar decorative treatment. So she and Jim, her middle son, went to work, improvising somewhat by replacing the black paint with turquoise, which matched the metal patio furniture. The results thrilled her, in no small part because they were visible to the neighbors, who had boring garage doors, monochromatic garage doors, garage doors that looked like, well, garage doors. Hers looked like a mosaic.

  Before long, Domenica’s did as well. Domenica owned the house next door, and seemed always to be sitting at the window with the best view of the goings-on at the Brunis, her unblinking eyes staring out. She watched the garage makeover, then decided to mimic it. She painted her own chessboard, only in pink and white, and it was fewer than twenty feet away from Adele’s. To Adele this was an outrage. Had the phrase “copyright infringement” been in her vocabulary, she would have muttered it, or muttered whatever words in her southern Italian dialect came closest, along with references to plagiarism and theft of intellectual property. She wasn’t about to sit still for this. She and Jim plotted, and then made a stencil, and then went back to painting, at the end of which the grid on her garage doors comprised turquoise squares with inscribed white circles: a sort of chessboard with plump polka dots. Game, set, match.

  She wanted to feel rich, and to her thinking a rich person would speak on a gold telephone. When she couldn’t find one in a store, she applied glittering gold paint to the glossy black surface of a normal phone. But the surface wasn’t right for paint, which didn’t fully dry on it, not after several hours, not even after several weeks. To place or a
nswer a call at Adele’s house was to risk a wet, sticky hand and a wet, sticky cheek. And if the telephone conversation was a long one, you might wind up looking like you’d been mauled by Midas.

  As each of her sons married, the house on Fifth Street became a sort of culinary school for their wives, none of whom were Italian but all of whom were expected—and in fact eager—to master the essential dishes: the eggplant macaroni; the cutlets; the frittata; the pizza dolce, a fluffy cheesecake made with ricotta; manicotti stuffed with ricotta; lasagna. Many of these dishes involved gravy, and my uncle Jim’s wife, Vicki, visited the basement kitchen to see how Adele made hers. So did my uncle Mario’s wife, Carolyn, who cooked with her as often as once a week. My aunts observed which meats she put into her gravy and how much of them, which sorts of tomatoes and seasonings she used. They knew that watching the way Adele worked was their best hope of replicating it, because they’d heard the story of my mother’s first attempt to make gravy for my father.

  It was 1957; they had just been married, and were living in San Diego, where my father, then a junior officer in the Navy, was stationed. The first time he shipped out for several months, my mother decided she wanted to surprise him when he got home by making pasta with his mother’s style of gravy. So she wrote Adele and asked her for the recipe.

  But Adele didn’t have recipes. She had only memories, routines and loose guidelines. If, for example, she was telling you how to make lentils, she’d say that you needed two fingers of water in the bottom of the pot. Then she’d press an index and middle finger together and hold them sideways, illustrating that the water should rise as high as the combined widths of those fingers. She never considered that different people might use pots of different sizes.

  When she got my mother’s letter, she turned to her son Jim for help. How could she give my mother a recipe that didn’t exist? Jim said that she should talk him through the gravy process, and he would write it down, and then there would be a recipe, and into the mail it would go. He fetched a piece of paper and a pen.

  Adele began. “You get a nice piece of pork,” she said, setting a tone for the specificity of the instructions. “You put it in a pot of olive oil and brown it nice-nice.”

  Whatever document she and Jim produced no longer exists, but its limited utility is easy to imagine, as is my mother’s befuddlement when she received it. She apparently believed that with a little extra coaching and coaxing, she could pry something more concrete out of her mother-in-law, so she wrote back, asking: “How many cubic inches is a nice piece of pork?”

  Jim read the letter to his mother, and fielded her questions.

  “What does she mean,” Adele asked him, “by ‘cubic’?”

  My mother confronted complications beyond the nonexistent recipe. She couldn’t find the right ingredients in San Diego, which didn’t have the Italian population or ethnic groceries that White Plains did. So Adele rounded them up and sent them along: cans of imported plum tomatoes, bottles of acceptable olive oil, packages of dried pasta, and, wrapped in several layers of aluminum foil, an enormous hunk of pecorino Romano.

  In those days it took a fair amount of time for a package of this size to travel from coast to coast, and when it arrived it was kept in the post office until my mother could be notified to come and get it. She stepped into the post office and was stopped short by a horrible smell. She wondered what could be causing it and why the post office hadn’t done something about it. She presented the slip for her package, noticed the curious expression on the face of the worker who looked at it and, as the package was carried to her, realized that the smell was getting stronger and stronger. Aluminum foil could do many things, but preventing unrefrigerated cheese from spoiling wasn’t among them.

  The summer house on Oak Avenue, which had its own spit of private beach on Long Island Sound, came later, after Mom and Dad had been married for many years. It was painted white, at Grandma’s insistence, with sky blue shutters and sky blue flower boxes under each of the front windows. And it had a white stone fountain along the bend of a crescent-shaped gravel driveway. To Grandma a fountain was the very definition of elegance.

  Grandpa and Grandma Bruni in a fancy mood.

  Mark, Harry and I would spend long July and August afternoons on the beach. With a dragnet we’d walk back and forth through the shallow water to see what we could catch for Grandma. Mostly we caught silver shiners, each no bigger than a pinkie. We would bunch them into a corner of the net and bring the net to Grandma, who sat waiting in a beach chair, ready to perform for us and for the neighborhood kids who’d heard about and learned to enjoy this particular show. She’d pinch a shiner between two fingers and, while it still wriggled, drop it in her mouth and eat it. Sometimes she pinched it hard enough at one end to lop the head off, sometimes not. Either way, those of us watching her would wince, speechless, then carry the net back into the shallows for another sweep through the water.

  Long Island Sound wasn’t considered a source of exceptional seafood; most of her neighbors on Oak Avenue didn’t use what the waters yielded. So they brought the bluefish and the clams and the mussels to Grandma’s back door. She could be counted on to turn them into meals, especially the mussels, which she steamed in enormous pots. Years later I’d learn to love mussels, along with squid and octopus, but back then I wouldn’t even try them. I couldn’t get around the way they looked, those squiggles of peachy orange flesh, and their briny aroma unnerved me.

  The treat I associated most with the summer house were Grandma’s frits. She seemed to make these even more often in Madison than in White Plains, although I suppose she was sometimes serving frits she had in fact transported to the summer house up Interstate 95, in a gold-colored Oldsmobile sedan whose cargo of food rivaled any 18-wheeler’s.

  She made frits two ways. In addition to the plain frits—the ones to be eaten with sugar—there were frits stuffed with mozzarella and tomato sauce. Stuffed frits were like miniature thick-crust pizzas turned inside out, or rather outside in, only better, so much better, than any pizza could be. A pizza wore its soul on the surface, baring all. It didn’t harbor any surprises. The cheese and sauce in Grandma’s stuffed frits were secrets you had to eat your way into, and the dough around them was different from a pizza crust, denser and richer and glistening with all of the oil it had sopped up during the frying.

  While Mark and Harry preferred plain frits, I favored the stuffed ones, and prided myself on my own version of X-ray vision, which allowed me to look at a platter of mixed frits from a few feet away and tell which were which, spotting a telltale pinprick of red tomato sauce on the otherwise tawny surface of a stuffed frit or recognizing a plain frit by its less swollen form. I’d count how many stuffed frits were on the platter—there were always fewer, because they were less popular. If there were twenty frits in all and only four were stuffed, I’d keep a close eye on my siblings, willing them not to stray from the plain ones.

  Apart from my experiment with Atkins, I didn’t try to restrain myself around Grandma’s cooking, on the grounds that it would be selfish, even churlish, to do so. Enjoying her food was a kind of altruistic gluttony, and I embraced it as a rare escape—increasingly rare as I grew older—from watching and fretting over and berating myself for what I ate.

  Away from her, I had to question and try to control my appetite, at least if I wanted to avoid the “fat boy” catcalls and the husky section. Away from her, I had to work on this weird psychic muscle Mom kept chattering about, this thing called willpower.

  Until, somewhat miraculously, I didn’t. Something other than Atkins came along. Something more effective.

  Three

  Mom and Dad signed up Mark, Harry and me for swimming lessons because it was the responsible, safe thing to do, given all the time we spent on the shore in Madison. In between our Little League games and our tennis lessons, Mom ferried us to the pool at the White Plains YMCA, where we graduated rapidly from beginner to intermediate to advanced classes, the as
cending levels named for ever-bigger fish: guppy, then minnow, then shark. It didn’t take us long to become sharks. We were naturals, all three of us. Even me.

  So we joined the YMCA team and started regularly attending practices, at first just a few times a week, then every day. Before long, swimming elbowed out all the other sports in our lives.

  “If you’re going to do something, you should do it well,” Mom always said to us, by which she meant we should be the absolute best at it, at least if there was any possibility of that. When it came to her children, she seldom thought there wasn’t the possibility of that.

  Besides, she wanted a family of winners, wanted to stand on the pool deck and bask in the compliments from other parents, in the envy she was certain they felt.

  “Mrs. Turner couldn’t even look at me after you beat Johnny in the freestyle,” she’d say to me, her expression and voice gleeful. “Next time, you have to beat him in the butterfly, too.”

  “You can,” she’d continue, less as show of support than as admonition. “You were only a half second behind today, and that’s only because you got off the blocks so slowly. You were klutzy off the blocks. You need to work on your start.”

  I was good in the freestyle and the butterfly and even the backstroke. To the astonishment of everyone in the family—and to my astonishment most of all—I was good at more events than Mark or Harry, and I got better all the time. By eleven I had so many trophies and medals that Mom boxed the oldest and smallest of them and toted them up to the attic. Water, it turned out, was my element. All my fumbling, flailing and sluggishness vanished when I entered it.

  Dad would have been as happy to have Mark, Harry and me spending our athletic hours on a basketball court or in a hockey ring: those were the sports he watched on TV and knew well. Those were guys’ sports.