Rosemary and Bitter Oranges: Growing Up in a Tuscan Kitchen
By Patrizia Chen
Scribner, 219 pages, $24
Life al Dente: Laughter and Love in an Italian-American Family
By Gina Cascone
Atria, 187 pages, $22
Fried Butter: A Food Memoir
By Abe Opincar
Soho, 165 pages, $18
Lately everyone I know watches the Food Network, and not for the recipes. It’s supposed to be a form of reality TV: Theoretically, we can all take an eating tour of Cambodia, learn to slice up a fish like Nobu, or grill stuffed poblanos like Bobby Flay. But the network’s true function is fantasy: It’s not that we will actually do these things, but that we can imagine them.
It may be heretical to compare TV and books, but the food memoir appeals to the same vicarious experience. Here is the heart of personal history measured by what is consumed, lives shaped by good meals in wonderful places. As culinary pleasures seem to become more and more restricted by considerations of trans fat, sodium and heart disease, not to mention cost, food books give us the next best thing: If we can’t indulge in foie gras, veal roasts and chocolate souffle, at least we can read about them. Food fantasy is as safe as voyeurism gets. It offers access not only to another life but also to possibility–lives we wished we had, meals we might one day get to enjoy.
Patrizia Chen’s “Rosemary and Bitter Oranges” is a buoyant trip through her childhood in Livorno, Tuscany. Chen’s education in food begins when she laments the contrast between the pale meals, devoid of garlic and onions, that her well-to-do parents and grandparents are served, and the robust dishes, redolent with tomatoes and spices, that the cook Emilia prepares for herself. Chen prefers the latter of course, and her childhood is filled with quests for flavor, whether she is preparing her first zabaione, devouring street food snacks of chickpea pancakes and fried polenta, or spending summer afternoons in the family garden, waiting for refreshments: “iced tea, full of freshly picked mint leaves . . . huge crispy slices of bread coated with yellow butter and sprinkled with sugar . . . an egg yolk, beaten with sugar to a creamy, marvelous texture.”
In much of “Rosemary and Bitter Oranges,” time seems to stand still, as though the author is trying to preserve the past even in the face of change–growing up, being influenced by American products like sliced white bread and “I Love Lucy.” The memoir is filled with happy moments of an idyllic childhood, with many wonderful scenes such as the time she tries to make an instant egg liqueur, latte di Gallina, by pouring wine into the chickens’ water supply. We also get a child’s-eye view into the world of adults. When Chen sits down to the dreaded hodgepodge of minestrone, or observes how a great-aunt keeps “a box labeled. . . STRINGS. Too short to be useful,” it is a postwar reminder that deprivations may be over but never forgotten. To savor a moment of food is to understand what it may represent: comfort, indulgence, memory, a stay against scarcity.
The language of the book is at times overly nostalgic or overwrought (“The gumballs rolled into my impatient hands and were quickly shoveled into my awaiting mouth. Propelled by my skillful blowing, the gluey substance metamorphosed into wonderful balloons”). But Chen’s enthusiasm for adventure and hunger for good food are infectious. Her recipes are stories and family heirlooms, a stark contrast to the utilitarian recipes I download off the Internet.
In the last chapter of the book, when Chen narrates her return to Tuscany as an adult, the connections between food and memory come together poignantly: the visit to the family mansion, long since sold and chopped up into apartments; the ancient nun who still teaches at the Catholic school Chen and her mother attended; the covered market still bursting with fresh vegetables and meats. This memoir shows how a single taste can evoke a lifetime of emotions.
The title of Gina Cascone’s memoir about growing up in an Italian-American family, “Life al Dente,” seems to promise a food memoir. As with Chen’s book, food and recipes here mark important moments and generate a spirit of liveliness–bustling kitchens, good ingredients, dinners prepared with love. Cascone’s deliberately haphazard recipes are meant to create intimacy:
“How much olive oil? Enough to just cover the bottom of the pot. How many tablespoons is that? I don’t know.”
She also tells us to drink plenty of Chianti, inviting us to relax and enjoy her world. It’s easy to do. The book is warm and comic, the best chapters filled with neighborhood high jinks, hilarity and observations on masculinity, her lawyer father’s rumored ties to the Mafia and her own outsider status in her posh, WASPy high school. This family lives big and eats big: At dinners out at a practically secret Italian restaurant they feast on spaghetti and truffles and baccala salad; when they travel to Italy it’s first class all the way, complete with sumptuous meals at five-star restaurants in Rome.
But “Life al Dente” is not so much a food memoir as a memoir with food in it. The difference between the two is in how food and identity are intertwined. For Cascone, it seems to be a given rather than a subject for exploration. Five recipes–spaghetti and crabs, and Christmas eels are the standouts–seem too few, and the book never quite decides how foodie it wants to be.
All of which shows just how hard it is to write about food, to make it matter beyond the personal anecdote. Abe Opincar’s “Fried Butter” accomplishes this remarkably by infusing his own memories with other people’s stories, his travels around the world and bits of food history and trivia.
The opening line sets the tone of the whole book: “I baked a chicken the night I left my wife.” After this last meal with her, he sneaks away to a motel–and takes the leftovers with him! We don’t hear much more about the marriage, but the ensuing chapters, seemingly discrete musings on subjects ranging from tacos, turmeric and Little Debbie snack cakes to ethnicity, Los Angeles and Orthodox Judaism, refer back to the waywardness and mysteries of love. Here is a food memoir that is not about childhood romps but about adulthood and all of its bittersweetness and disappointments.
In describing his mother’s pregnancy, Opincar writes:
“All summer long she sat in the dark kitchen, eating eggs, their yolks shining like little suns on her plate. While she was carrying me, she says, the kitchen smelled always of fried butter. . . .
“There are few foods I enjoy more than sunny-side up or soft-boiled eggs, their yolks hot, smooth, and runny.”
By suggesting the link between his craving and his mother’s craving, he addresses a central issue in this book: Where do our desires come from, and what do they mean? For many of the people here–friends, people he observes or meets during his travels–as well as for himself, desire and food are tangled up with a host of complex feelings. A box of Ibarra chocolate, for instance, forever reminds Opincar of guilt, and a man named Ernie whose life Opincar believes he ruined.
Opincar resists the easy connection between food and happiness. Instead, “Fried Butter” is elegiac: He drinks Chateau d’Yquem with a dying friend; he notes that garlic on his fingers reminds him of his father. The book is also clever and witty: To shut up his sister-in-law he draws on the sedative powers of tryptophan and makes her “loaves of buttery banana bread . . . a twenty-pound turkey, first rubbed well with unsalted butter . . . plenty of mashed potatoes.” While offering food facts he ponders the often strange and contradictory reasons behind why we desire certain tastes: He tells us that the “barnyard on a hot summer day” smell of Alsatian Muenster “comes, in part, from ammonia produced by bacterial action,” adding that ammonia “is present in animal and human waste.”
Bad relationships, deaths, unhappy families–these figure prominently in the stories Opincar tells. Food does not necessarily heal, but sometimes it is all we have left. So the memory of a girl Opincar traveled all the way to the Alps to see, and who turned out to have fallen in love with someone else, becomes a bright image of the perfect, sweet tomatoes her parents picked from their garden and served at dinner and breakfast.
The sense of solitude in this book is everywhere, even when the author is eating with other people. Reading “Fried Butter” is refreshing. Opincar’s writing is lucid and emotionally restrained, refusing cliches about food and family, happiness and sharing. He points out that how and what we eat help define who we are, but the complexities of identity and desire, often dark and deep-seated, are tied up with issues of politics, religion, nationality. Our food choices–what we want to eat, and why–go beyond ourselves, stretching back through layers of memory and history.
