Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite by Frank Bruni Read Free Book Online

even after several weeks. To place or answer a call at Adele’s house was to risk a wet, sticky hand and a wet, sticky cheek. And if the telephone conversation was a long one, you might wind up looking like you’d been mauled by Midas.
     
     
     
     
    As each of her sons married, the house on Fifth Street became a sort of culinary school for their wives, none of whom were Italian but all of whom were expected—and in fact eager—to master the essential dishes: the eggplant macaroni; the cutlets; the frittata; the pizza dolce , a fluffy cheesecake made with ricotta; manicotti stuffed with ricotta; lasagna. Many of these dishes involved gravy, and my uncle Jim’s wife, Vicki, visited the basement kitchen to see how Adele made hers. So did my uncle Mario’s wife, Carolyn, who cooked with her as often as once a week. My aunts observed which meats she put into her gravy and how much of them, which sorts of tomatoes and seasonings she used. They knew that watching the way Adele worked was their best hope of replicating it, because they’d heard the story of my mother’s first attempt to make gravy for my father.
    It was 1957; they had just been married, and were living in San Diego, where my father, then a junior officer in the Navy, was stationed. The first time he shipped out for several months, my mother decided she wanted to surprise him when he got home by making pasta with his mother’s style of gravy. So she wrote Adele and asked her for the recipe.
    But Adele didn’t have recipes. She had only memories, routines and loose guidelines. If, for example, she was telling you how to make lentils, she’d say that you needed two fingers of water in the bottom of the pot. Then she’d press an index and middle finger together and hold them sideways, illustrating that the water should rise as high as the combined widths of those fingers. She never considered that different people might use pots of different sizes.
    When she got my mother’s letter, she turned to her son Jim for help. How could she give my mother a recipe that didn’t exist? Jim said that she should talk him through the gravy process, and he would write it down, and then there would be a recipe, and into the mail it would go. He fetched a piece of paper and a pen.
    Adele began. “You get a nice piece of pork,” she said, setting a tone for the specificity of the instructions. “You put it in a pot of olive oil and brown it nice-nice.”
    Whatever document she and Jim produced no longer exists, but its limited utility is easy to imagine, as is my mother’s befuddlement when she received it. She apparently believed that with a little extra coaching and coaxing, she could pry something more concrete out of her mother-in-law, so she wrote back, asking: “How many cubic inches is a nice piece of pork?”
    Jim read the letter to his mother, and fielded her questions.
    “What does she mean,” Adele asked him, “by ‘cubic’?”
    My mother confronted complications beyond the nonexistent recipe. She couldn’t find the right ingredients in San Diego, which didn’t have the Italian population or ethnic groceries that White Plains did. So Adele rounded them up and sent them along: cans of imported plum tomatoes, bottles of acceptable olive oil, packages of dried pasta, and, wrapped in several layers of aluminum foil, an enormous hunk of pecorino Romano.
    In those days it took a fair amount of time for a package of this size to travel from coast to coast, and when it arrived it was kept in the post office until my mother could be notified to come and get it. She stepped into the post office and was stopped short by a horrible smell. She wondered what could be causing it and why the post office hadn’t done something about it. She presented the slip for her package, noticed the curious expression on the face of the worker who looked at it and, as the package was carried to her, realized that the smell was getting stronger and stronger. Aluminum foil could