Monday,
October 23,
Italian American's
Eyes Tear Up Finding Grandmother's Red Sauce in
The ANNOTICO Report
Yes, EVERYONE
loves to write about their Trips to
And I get a
Vicarious Charge every time I read one, and some are worth Repeating. This is
one of them.
Every meal confirms all the stories about food
Deseret News -
PittsburghPostGazette
ByDougOster
Sunday, October 22, 2006
That's what my wife, Cindy, and I learned on a
recent trip to the country. It was no surprise, of course, since anyone who has
ever visited will tell you the same thing.
We spent six months planning the visit for our 25th
anniversary. She dreamed of discovering her family roots, and it offered us a
chance to find each other again.
Her features betray her ancestry, brown eyes and dark skin
that deepened each day under the intense Italian sun. She could walk into the
market and be mistaken for a local. I, on the other hand, would never be
mistaken for anything but a tourist. My fair complexion and huge Irish head
stuck out like a sore thumb. My skin slowly changed from red, to a little
redder.
It was our first meal in the country that would confirm
all the stories we'd hear! d about Italian cuisine. We
stumbled onto a little trattoria on the 25-minute
walk from the
The trattoria was family-run,
with two sisters waiting tables. We sat outside waiting for our antipasti and a
bottle of the house red wine. We thought it was 6 euros (equivalent to $7.60) a
glass, but our waitress shook her head as she explained in broken English that that
was the price for the bottle.
When that first antipasti
arrived, we finally understood why visitors raved. Cured meats and soft buffalo
mozzarella melted in our mouths, grilled eggplant and greens rewarded our palates with their simple, fresh delights.
Then it was pasta: I'd never enjoyed gnocchi more. The
texture and taste was superb and the mushroom sauce, divine. We ordered what we
thought were scallops, which turned out to be veal scallopine.
"What kind of scallops are these?" I asked my
wife, and ! then, after a few
bites, figured it out.
Free from the responsibility of children, home and work,
we indulged in a second bottle of wine, then promptly
proceeded to get lost on the walk back to the hotel. It's easy to slip out of
your comfort zone while wandering the residential streets of
After a few days in
We were headed for the small towns of Castiglione Marittimo and Falerna, where
Cindy's deceased grandmother lived until the 1900s.
Cindy's cousin Giovanni (Johnny) arranged t! o meet us at our hotel that night. We had last seen him 26
years ago, when he visited the States. From the moment he picked us up, he took
care of us in every way, introducing us to family and showing us the
spectacular views Cindy's grandmother enjoyed as a child.
Johnny's grandmother and Cindy's were sisters, and he
treated us like the long-lost family we were.
We used our broken Italian to communicate, and the family
used their broken English. Phrase books and Johnny's huge Italian-American
dictionary bridged the gap until by the end of our visit we really knew each
other.
The first day, we walked through his olive orchard and
then came upon some fig trees. I now understand why so many Italian-Americans
go to such lengths to grow them in our climate. Peeling and eating sweet warm
figs while overlooking the sky-blue shallows of the
&nb! sp;
We really thought the food couldn't get any better on this trip, but Johnny's
wife, Maria, proved us wrong. Still filled with figs,..
we were about to learn how families eat in
Pasta in a fresh red sauce was followed by salad and
bread. Johnny's olive oil, pressed from the harvest of last year's orchard,
gave everything a wonderful flavor. The aroma of fried veal filled the kitchen,
and it was both tender and tasty.
Just when we were falling into a food coma, the cheeses
came out, along with grapes harvested from the couple's vines. We had never
tasted a Parmigiano-Reggiano like it: pungent, with
an occasional almost-crunchy texture that I long to find in the States.
But it was a day later that Maria created perfection.
After our pasta, salad and bread came the best
eggplant Parmesan we'd ever tasted. It was soft, fresh, dripping with cheese
and had a crunchy ! layer,
too. The combination was pure heaven.
At the end of our visit, Johnny insisted on taking us to
the train station, even getting us in our proper seats. He started to tear up a
bit when we said our goodbyes.
We left with our most treasured gift of the trip, a bottle
of his homemade olive oil. We hope that someday we can return the hospitality
we received there.
After returning to
We stayed there for a week and found a restaurant we
loved. When we went to visit on our last day, it was closed. We walked down the
street to Tipica Trattoria Etrusca, a restaurant that came highly recommended. The
wait staff was eating in the dining room and we asked if they were "aperto" (open). They nodded and in about three minutes
they cleaned up their table and were back in the kitche!
n.
The waiter was hilarious. It's one of the incredible
things about
Cindy's first course was a simple red pasta dish. She took
one bite and was astounded. She fed me a little.
"It's the exact recipe of my grandmother's
sauce," she said.
I agreed. We hadn't tasted that perfect mix of spices and
pork for more than 20 years.
As she savored the next bite, she began to weep and
continued crying as she finished every bit of the dish, soaking up the sauce
with hard-crusted Italian bread.
Everything had caught up to her: experiencing the views
her grandmother once enjoyed, walking in her footsteps along
! the stone streets of Falerna
and seeing the ancient cemetery where Johnny's mother and grandmother were
buried.
I tried to explain to the waiter in my bad Italian and
using ridiculous hand gestures that there wasn't a problem, that it was one of
our most wonderful moments: This woman is crying because of the emotions your
red sauce is evoking.
All it did was confuse him. He never returned to the
table, sending another waiter to finish the job.
I wanted so badly to explain to the owner how special the
moment had been, and to get the recipe for Cindy's grandmother's sauce, but it
wasn't meant to be.
As we stepped back onto the cobblestone streets of Orvieto, the irony was not lost on either of us.
We came 4,000 miles to get a taste of home.
E-mail: doster@post-gazette.com
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