this is my body

It’s complicated for me to write about food. I don’t consider myself a foodie or a gourmet, and I generally find going to restaurants stressful. I cringe when I tell people I have a ‘food blog,’ because it never seems to mean what I want it to mean.   

I have simple feelings about food. My life is improved by making and eating food that brings me a little closer to the traditions that produced me, to living memories of dead people. Also, eating well is the most frequent physical joy I have access to, and a way to share. I think we would all be a little better — knowing more about ourselves and the world we live in — if we were serious about feeding ourselves, by putting a little effort into it. You should make time for important things. I consider food an important thing, for all of us, that’s why I write about it.

We have been fooled into thinking that good food is beyond our reach, every day, or nearly every day. It’s a dirty trick, one designed to keep us off balance and make someone else more money.

I don’t have any special knowledge about food. I have only once in my life eaten foie gras. I’m not a specialist on restaurants and I’m not the guy you want to hand the wine to list if we’re out. I scoff at food culture. I am not interested in joining a club of anointed assholes who get excited about fancy, expensive, bullshit food, or in putting bacon or cupcakes on every single thing. I don’t believe in butter, except on toast in the morning. I believe we would all be improved by making a pot of beans well, by understanding how a few simple ingredients can go beautifully together, how we can find or own joys, without instruction or excuses or vast reserves of cash, and eat well every day.

[The Well-Stocked Kitchen by Joachim Beuckelaer, 1566]

A short essay of mine about the above dish (squid and peas) – and its murky underground origins – will appear in Issue 18 of meatpaper, due on shelves in July. You can read a piece I had in a previous issue of the magazine here. It’s about pets being fed to children.

Making dried beans feels like a victory. I get up earlier than normal, take down the large pot and pour in the hard beans, checking for rocks or bugs or other weird things that can happen in plastic bags that sit on shelves for a long time. They sound like marbles hitting the metal. Fill the pot with cold water, near to the top, salt lightly and put over a high flame with the lid on. Timing is important. Once the water begins to boil, turn the flame down somewhere between medium and low and tilt the lid. The beans will rise and fall slowly in the water, coming up through the middle and back down around the edge. If they just sit at the bottom, turn the heat up some. Stir gently every once in a while. When the beans look plump, somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours, taste them, but be sure to taste them from all over the pot. Some might be done while others are still hard. If the beans boil too hard for too long at the start, they will turn to mush. A few minutes too many at the end, the same thing will happen. It’s not easy and it takes care. You don’t need to soak the beans overnight, as suggested. This is an extravagance. Save the thick bean water for soups.

Too little salt will kill you, and too much will do the same. It features in the world’s religious traditions – it’s a gift direct from Allah in the Muslim world. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus called his disciples the ‘salt of the earth.’ Lot’s wife was turned to a pillar of salt after turning back toward the burning remnants of Sodom and Gomorrah. Plowing salt into fields is a traditional curse on future generations. It also makes food worth eating. There are few things more wasteful than an under-salted meal, and our human tongues are designed to recognize and respond to the taste of these crystals.

There is a problem now, one which challenges my natural instincts toward loyalty and against change. I grew up with one kind of table salt – Morton’s Iodized Salt. It came from the supermarket in a navy blue cylinder, with an illustration of a young girl in a yellow dress holding an umbrella in the rain. My mother knew how to wield that salt, how long to shake the container, with its small metal spout, over a piece of fish or meat. How much to pour into her hand to throw into a pot of boiling water for pasta. She might have died of shame if a guest asked for salt at her table. It was part of the cooking, as important as the meat or vegetables, or the wine.

But now I know: Iodide is added to Morton’s Salt and they say it gives off a chemical taste. I suspect it is true, and the need for such an additive – to combat iodine deficiencies and fend off cretinism in children and goiters in adults in poor areas of the world – is no longer a concern in the United States where I live and cook and eat.

I am left with doubts, and too many choices. The Morton’s Salt is fine, very fine. I don’t know how much coarse salt or semi-coarse salt to use, how much to sprinkle with my fingers, or pour from the various containers or grinders on offer at the store. The mechanics, and all the varieties of boxes, the kosher salt and the sea salt, the large rock salts and the smoked and roasted salts, the choices bring a confusion that comes with new challenges to important things, a loss of simplicity, and a concern about just how much the Morton’s Salt tastes or doesn’t taste like chemicals.

The devil’s in the details, and when superstitious people spill salt, they throw a pinch over their left shoulder to blind him and keep him from interfering. My fear of the devil lingers from youth, and I sometimes toss salt even when it hasn’t spilled.

Put a splash of Campari in the bottom of a tall, thin champagne flute, then fill it with Prosecco. Sit on a chair outside. Make sure the sun is out, and hot on your back. Take your shoes off and put your bare feet on the cool ground. There should be a long, slow, large meal in the works, and you should eat after you finish the drink.

I don’t know if it has a name here, but in Italy, in the Tuscan town where I had my last drink with my late grandfather, it’s called a Schizzato. It means ‘a splash’ or ‘a squirt.’ The Campari’s medicinal and bitter thickness is thinned out and brightened by the cleanness of the sparkly wine, bringing out its citrus side. It does magical things to your brain, and awakens an empty stomach.

There is a photograph in my kitchen of my Nonno, myself, my father, my mother, my sister, my very young nephew, all seated on plastic chairs around a small table. There is a bowl of tiny green olives pushed to one side, four empty glasses and one full one, glowing red in the center.

A whole roasted chicken causes great excitement in me. It’s prepared by my partner Nina, from a recipe book her mother penned years ago, with a touching inscription. There are cartoon drawings of chickens and funny, warm asides in black ink.

A mixture of grated Parmigiano cheese, butter, and thyme is pushed up under the skin of the raw bird; it combines and melts into the meat while roasting simply in the oven.

The skin goes deep brown and crisp. The drumsticks and thighs give out a slippery and sticky oil, thick with melted fat and salt. It runs down my face. It hardens and mats down my beard. I suck on the bones and make grateful noises, overeating every time.

Chicken was rarely seen on my mother’s table when I was a boy. My father, a champion eater and a man of many opinions, hated the smell of cooking fowl. He wasn’t crazy about eating it either. The bird now has the quality of a rare delicacy for me, a cue for rising anticipation and delight.

I would hop around my mother’s kitchen, blowing kisses to the sky, trying to hug the air with my arms. Cappelletti, meaning small hats in Italian, were special. They appeared but rarely on our table and news of their arrival caused in me a joyous delirium.

My mother didn’t make them. The cappelletti came, without warning and at random times, in a re-used plastic shopping bag. They were frozen through with crystals of ice clinging to them, made either by my grandfather or a friend of his, or a wife of a friend of his. It was never clear. They were mysterious.

The cappelletti, small crescent-shaped ravioli, folded at the corners, were served in a simple dark broth made with chicken and beef bones. The pasta shell was so thin that a wrong move of the spoon would pierce it, spilling the slick, soft, perfectly salty meat inside. Small bubbles of oil would rise and float at the top.