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

do many things, but preventing unrefrigerated cheese from spoiling wasn’t among them.
     
     
     
     
    The summer house on Oak Avenue, which had its own spit of private beach on Long Island Sound, came later, after Mom and Dad had been married for many years. It was painted white, at Grandma’s insistence, with sky blue shutters and sky blue flower boxes under each of the front windows. And it had a white stone fountain along the bend of a crescent-shaped gravel driveway. To Grandma a fountain was the very definition of elegance.

    Grandpa and Grandma Bruni in a fancy mood.
    Mark, Harry and I would spend long July and August afternoons on the beach. With a dragnet we’d walk back and forth through the shallow water to see what we could catch for Grandma. Mostly we caught silver shiners, each no bigger than a pinkie. We would bunch them into a corner of the net and bring the net to Grandma, who sat waiting in a beach chair, ready to perform for us and for the neighborhood kids who’d heard about and learned to enjoy this particular show. She’d pinch a shiner between two fingers and, while it still wriggled, drop it in her mouth and eat it. Sometimes she pinched it hard enough at one end to lop the head off, sometimes not. Either way, those of us watching her would wince, speechless, then carry the net back into the shallows for another sweep through the water.
    Long Island Sound wasn’t considered a source of exceptional seafood; most of her neighbors on Oak Avenue didn’t use what the waters yielded. So they brought the bluefish and the clams and the mussels to Grandma’s back door. She could be counted on to turn them into meals, especially the mussels, which she steamed in enormous pots. Years later I’d learn to love mussels, along with squid and octopus, but back then I wouldn’t even try them. I couldn’t get around the way they looked, those squiggles of peachy orange flesh, and their briny aroma unnerved me.
    The treat I associated most with the summer house were Grandma’s frits . She seemed to make these even more often in Madison than in White Plains, although I suppose she was sometimes serving frits she had in fact transported to the summer house up Interstate 95, in a gold-colored Oldsmobile sedan whose cargo of food rivaled any 18-wheeler’s.
    She made frits two ways. In addition to the plain frits— the ones to be eaten with sugar—there were frits stuffed with mozzarella and tomato sauce. Stuffed frits were like miniature thick-crust pizzas turned inside out, or rather outside in, only better, so much better, than any pizza could be. A pizza wore its soul on the surface, baring all. It didn’t harbor any surprises. The cheese and sauce in Grandma’s stuffed frits were secrets you had to eat your way into, and the dough around them was different from a pizza crust, denser and richer and glistening with all of the oil it had sopped up during the frying.
    While Mark and Harry preferred plain frits , I favored the stuffed ones, and prided myself on my own version of X-ray vision, which allowed me to look at a platter of mixed frits from a few feet away and tell which were which, spotting a telltale pinprick of red tomato sauce on the otherwise tawny surface of a stuffed frit or recognizing a plain frit by its less swollen form. I’d count how many stuffed frits were on the platter—there were always fewer, because they were less popular. If there were twenty frits in all and only four were stuffed, I’d keep a close eye on my siblings, willing them not to stray from the plain ones.
    Apart from my experiment with Atkins, I didn’t try to restrain myself around Grandma’s cooking, on the grounds that it would be selfish, even churlish, to do so. Enjoying her food was a kind of altruistic gluttony, and I embraced it as a rare escape—increasingly rare as I grew older—from watching and fretting over and berating myself for what I ate.
    Away from her, I had to question and try to control my