I have recently been burdened with the truth that I will never again savour the world’s best comfort food. Nor will anybody else. Because it’s gone, forever. It left this Earth with my mother, who died in 1986.
Like most Italian women who absorbed their culinary skills from other women in flour-coated aprons in houses made of stone and love, Diana cooked from a canon passed down from soul to soul, not from printed recipes or classrooms or, perish the thought, reality-TV competitions. The fare was always hearty and filling, for she was a country girl, and never short of the warm bliss that a mother, above all others, can offer.
I think I liked her ethereal gnocchi best, though she made them rarely. As a woman with a day job outside the home, she seldom had the luxury of time. I’d probably award a close second to her lasagne, always made in freezer-storage quantities with Rita Missio, next door, or her friend Clara Carega, who ran an Italian-wedding catering business and owned a badass pasta machine. Then there was her rib-sticking osso buco, saucier and certainly more wholesome than an Italian politician’s extracurricular activities.
Over the past 29 years I have tried in vain to reproduce some of her dishes from taste memory, particularly her Bolognese sauce. It’s an exercise that I imagine Marcel Proust might have engaged in had he aspired to labour behind a hot stove for hours or knead dough instead of wisely applying his genius to the printed page.
By coincidence, my father, Tony, was a lifelong devotee of Proust’s work and also a proud cook. He died last year and left behind a mountain of personal writings, including a few cryptic, handwritten recipes. My brother, John, and I have been saddled with the melancholy task of excavating what our parents left behind. There was a moment of glee last week, though, when we came upon a stack of food-related papers as well as books nestled high up in a kitchen cupboard, some scrawled in Tony’s largely illegible penmanship and some clipped from periodicals. Excitedly, we sifted through the material, not for a Tony recipe, but for something – anything – our mother might have relinquished to posterity. I was hoping to come across the word “gnocchi.” John, for his part, quickly called dibs on her tiramisu, a handwritten recipe he knew once existed.
No such luck. Mamma’s cucina is lost to time. Lost, that is, except, in a sense, for a book printed in Italian that we found. The tattered blue cover reads Il Cucchiaio d’Argento – The Silver Spoon.
First published in 1950 and recently revised and restored to glory in a superb English edition by Phaidon Press, it has been called one of the best cookbooks in print, an icon of Italian culture. Diana, like so many other rosy-cheeked young women in the motherland, received it as a wedding gift. This was during a depressed postwar time in northern Italy when books were considered luxuries. The publishing date reads 1956, the year she was married.
I’ve been leafing through it for the past few days, half-expecting to find a sample of Diana’s pretty handwriting in the margins. But there’s just a single scribble on page 291 by my father, who apparently vowed to make kidney-bean salad for the costolette di maiale marinate (marinated pork chops).
And, so, I now own the book, which my brother generously waived. It includes promising recipes for gnocchi and “ossibuchi,” neither of which I thought to consult in my new English edition of The Silver Spoon when performing my Proustian experiments. I will make them, because the effort will honour my mother and my heritage as well as put comforting food on the table. I have also vowed to try my hand at a Franco-Italian version of tiramisu, the dessert of lady-finger cookies, coffee, mascarpone cheese and cocoa, replacing the Italian cookies with the iconic madeleines of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. The recipe’s not in the book, but my fumbling attempt will help me feel like my mother and father can be together again.
The Flavour Principle by Lucy Waverman and Beppi Crosariol (HarperCollins) recently took home top prize for best general English cookbook at the Taste Canada Food Writing Awards.