Food, Family and Memory

Monday, mid morning, I found my five year old Sara, in the kitchen,
Curious, standing on her stool at the island counter,
Fiddling with the 24 table grapes on the plate,
The ones that were part of our experiment,
The ones that would answer all of our questions.

I admit, my questions:

How long does it take to make a raisin from a grape?
I don’t know daddy…
Will our raisins taste better than the ones out of the box?
I don’t know daddy…
Over time, what the heck goes on inside of a grape anyway?
And how? And why? And so on…

“Hey Sara Bear, how many grapes on that plate?”
I was tempted to start grouping them for her.

“I don’t know daddy, do you want me to count them?”

“Good Idea!”

“Can we have dessert?” my four-year-old grandson asks, a conspiratorial half-smile pulling down the right side of his mouth. He knows full well that this is not dessert time, but also knows that spending special time with Mama Dora means tossing all parental restrictions to the wind. Ice cream? Yes! Cookies? Why not! Chocolate? Of course! As far as I’m concerned, a grandparent’s holy responsibility is to spoil the grandchild. The parents’ holy responsibility is to deal with the aftermath—a sugar-filled, hyper child, who’ll climb up walls and spin like a possessed dreidel. So! We will have chocolate, I silently decide, my own mouth watering.

“Two,” he negotiates. “Two what?” I ask, as if I don’t know. “These tiny square, brown things,” he says, without naming chocolate, as if voicing the magic word might summon his parents, heaven forbid. “Ok,” I reply “two.” So we march to the kitchen, arrange the table with china plates and napkins. It’s important to set a good example even, or especially, when chocolate is at stake. I put two chocolates on each of our plates. Help him up the stool and sit next to him.

The good thing about having a sister who owns a restaurant – and The River Café is a great one in my opinion – is that when she’s cooking my son is allowed to order ‘off the menu’. In his case it’s a plate of the most wonderful creamy pasta carbonara. Made special for him with egg yolks the color of oranges, peppered pancetta and the parmesan cheese hand carried from Parma, I suppose. The bad thing is that my sister won’t let me have any. “You don’t need it”, she says looking at my waist. So it’s the regular menu for me.

Last year, we had friends and family over to celebrate La Vigilia, which is a traditional Christmas Eve feast that had its beginnings in the south of Italy. It celebrates the wait for the birth of baby Jesus. Vigilia – the wait. Traditionally the meal is comprised of seven fish dishes – including shellfish, of course – and it can be one of the great feasts of the year. It can be a blowout, actually, un cenone, which means a very large and very long dinner.

We decided to go another way. Yes, we would do the seven fishes but we would take it easy on ourselves – just three courses instead of seven – plus dessert at the end, of course — and we split up the work load between four cooks: myself, the eminent Don Michele di Sicilia, our daughter, Alison and her beau, Shannon. So it was a kind of BYOF – bring your own fishes.

We had twelve people for dinner. We started with one of my favorite appetizers – anchovies on sweet-buttered bread. That’s it – as simple as you can get, but the combination of the briny fish and the sweet butter is one of the great single bites of all time.