I remember my Sicilian father tending to his garden, a beer can poised in a flower bed, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. He would grow several kinds of tomatoes, zucchini the size of baseball bats, and the most perfectly shaped green peppers. Our front lawn was always impeccable. He would turn over the ground, deposit a coating of snow-white lime atop the Kentucky blue grass seed, and rope off the entire area with string, sticks, and rags, to deter any intruders. It offended him greatly when squirrels would steal his nearly ripe peppers, because they never ate them, they just batted them about the way a cat would a ball of yarn. If one had only taken a big bite and smiled, I'm sure my father would have happily tossed it a sausage. My father enjoyed cooking whatever he planted. He would assume control over the kitchen on Saturdays, generally after the heavier housecleaning had been completed. He preferred to cook for large groups, and whatever dish he made always began with a tomato base. In fact, he'd pizziola most every steak, add zucchini and tomatoes to eggs, and even smother hot dogs with tomatoes and potatoes. He refused to eat anything white, anything made with butter instead of olive oil, anything suggesting the slightest touch of mayonnaise or cream"except of course for cheese. He recognized cheese as an Italian staple. Like most cooks, he had his own specialties. He baked ziti for the volunteer fire department, sewed up our thirty pound Thanksgiving turkeys with ricotta stuffing, and insisted upon making pasta over an outdoor fire during our occasional summer Sundays at the beach. We did try and convince my father that we could eat hamburgers like Americans, that he didn't need to try to boil water with charcoal, but he was a traditionalist to the core. With our big pot, a can of lighter fluid, and a good amount of Sicilian pride, he was able to serve spaghetti at a public lake. If by some chance there was no large group needing massive amounts of pasta, my father would use his Saturday afternoons to cook up "Italian delicacies." This was the phrase he gave to tripe, kidneys, and other animal parts that would never be presented on a bun with ketchup, but rather served up in some heated marinara sauce. One Saturday afternoon, my father decided to bake some sort of imported cheese which found its way to our house. The stench was nothing less than horrendous, an aromatic blend of vomit and feet, which either my father didn't notice or wouldn't acknowledge. Even my mother, who could eat her weight in hot mussels without having stomach issues, was soon gasping for air behind cupped hands, and putting curses on the foul wedge. My father insisted the cheese would be well worth the smell, but some of us were already dry heaving, despite the open windows. Insulted, he took the cheese out of the oven, out of the house, and tossed it into the trash, where squirrels could be seen climbing over each other to get the heck away from it. After a brief intermission, my father went back to cooking and never stopped until he died in his own bed, just like he planned. There were certain pots he used when he cooked our holiday meals, and my siblings and I wanted them more than his old watches or cigarette lighters. One sighting of a chipped, enamel round pan could restore his image as he stood emitting a cloud of smoke, mixing the cheese filling for lasagna or his oil and vinegar salad. More than the recipes which we all change at will, the pots, pans, and gardening tools bring him back in all his Sicilian glory, cigarettes, beer, obscenely large zucchini, tomatoes, and sometimes even cheese. |
