Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite (5 page)

To understand why food meant so much in the Bruni family, you have to understand why it meant so much to Grandma. For her, food was a currency and communicator like no other, trumpeting pride, establishing wealth, proving love. It gave her what bearings she had in the world. In fact, she’d come to the United States to cook.

It was 1929, and she was seventeen. The voyage from Italy was a great adventure to her, a privilege for which her father, Vincenzo Mazzone, had singled her out. Her sisters were to remain in Ruvo di Puglia, a rural town outside the southeastern port city of Bari where the Mazzone family tended its olive and almond groves. Only she among the Mazzone girls would accompany her father and two of her brothers, Agostino and Giacinto, to America. Only she, Adelina, would experience this rich, magical country.

Vincenzo had been to America before, to ascertain that there was more money to be made here than in southern Italy. He wanted to set his sons up in America as gardeners; although they didn’t have much education, they knew about soil and sunlight and how to make things grow. But they were young—Giacinto was eighteen and Agostino just shy of fifteen—and it would be a while before they were ready to marry. In the meantime they’d need someone to make their meals and clean up after them, and so would Vincenzo, for the few months he would stay in America to help his children get settled. That’s where Adelina came in. That was her America: an instant transition from daughter and sister to, really, wife and mother; an instant promotion, if it could be called that, from coddled teenager to take-charge, overwhelmed, premature matriarch.

They lived in a two-bedroom cold-water flat in a four-family home in White Plains, where the poorer neighborhoods, like theirs, had concentrations of both African Americans and recent Italian immigrants like them. And they struggled. Just three months after they arrived, the stock market crashed and the stage was set for the Great Depression. But still they had to send money back to Italy—that was a big part of why they’d left, a central part of the plan. In addition to her responsibilities at home, Adelina worked as a seamstress, doing piecework.

Not too long after she arrived she met Mauro Bruni. He had also come from the area of southern Italy around Bari and had also landed in White Plains. But while her route had been a fairly direct one, his hadn’t. After saving up as much money as he could from his work as a stonemason in the Italian coastal town of Bisceglie, he had traveled to Yugoslavia and then France and then across the Atlantic, all in the hope of getting to America. He entered the country from Canada, using forged papers. It would be many years before he finally became a legal citizen, in the late 1930s, and he initially lied to my grandmother and her father about his status, so that he wouldn’t be branded an undesirable suitor.

They married in 1933 and moved into the cold-water flat, which by then was home only to Adelina, Giacinto and Agostino. She and Mauro took one bedroom; her brothers stayed together in the other. My father, whom they named Frank, was born in 1935, and he slept in his crib in their bedroom until Giacinto married and moved into a home of his own two years later. Then my father took Giacinto’s place in the room with Agostino until Agostino married and moved out another three years after that.

Giacinto, who became known as Jack, and Agostino, who went by the Americanized name of Gus, both married women of Italian descent, and that set up a friendly, and sometimes not so friendly, rivalry between the three sisters-in-law, Adelina (who went by Adele), Fiorina (Florence) and Liliana (Lillian).

This rivalry played itself out in many ways. Florence prided herself on keeping the most immaculate home, and it was pretty much impossible for Adele or Lillian to challenge her on this front. Every day Florence swept the floor or vacuumed the carpet of every room, and every week she carried a broom outside and swept the
curb
in front of her house. She did the windows twice a week.

Adele prided herself on her three boys: my father; his younger brother, Jim; and the youngest, Mario. Their hair was always cut short and slicked back with Dippity-do. During summer they got a fresh set of clean clothes after dinner, so that anyone who saw them walking through the neighborhood at eight p.m., when it was still light out, beheld perfect children. They did unusually well in school, and Adele made sure Florence and Lillian knew about that. Her bragging was ruthless.

And Lillian, the only one who grew up in America, prided herself on being the least hidebound, the most flexible, the one whose home you could enter without any sense of ceremony, the one who would greet you in a housedress with the readiest, widest smile. When Adele and Mauro broke down and got their boys a cocker spaniel, it was confined to certain rooms, and it moved cautiously through them, alert to its lesser place in the household and aware that any misstep could trigger their wrath. The dogs owned by Lillian and Gus went wherever they pleased, squirming around the legs of guests even on special holidays and sometimes nipping at people’s ankles.

Of course the rivalry played itself out in the kitchen, especially between Florence and Adele. Each had dishes she was known for, dishes that, everyone in the extended family agreed, she did better than anyone else. This agreement wasn’t acknowledged when the women were around, but it was made clear to them by how much of something family members ate, by how often family members mentioned it and pined for it when they knew it was scheduled to be served on an upcoming night or holiday.

Florence’s frittata, an audaciously dense omelet with green and red peppers and locatelli Romano cheese, was mentioned very often, to Adele’s obvious consternation.

“I could make a frittata like that,” she would sniff, “if I used
four dozen
eggs.”

Florence was also famous in the family for her breaded, fried veal cutlets, which had to be drained on, and pressed between, brown paper grocery bags, not paper towels, because paper towels weren’t to her mind as effective. She was famous, too, for her homemade ravioli, filled with ricotta and herbs. They were gorgeous, perfect: each one the same size, because she used the rim of a glass to cut the circles of dough from a long sheet. Each one also had the same cinching around the edges, the same pattern of dimples, made in a meticulous fashion with the tines of a fork.

Lillian made ravioli, too, but she didn’t have Florence’s patience. So she improvised with the implements she used to trace and cut each raviolo. She traded the kind of glass Florence used for a small bowl, then the small bowl for a bigger bowl, these changes lessening the number of ravioli she needed to make. Over time her ravioli grew so big that one per person was nearly enough, and the filling would seep or poke through the envelope of pasta, because a raviolo this sprawling was a raviolo on borrowed time.

Adele’s specialty was what most Italian food lovers know as
orecchiette
, which means “little ears.” Her name for them,
strascinat
, pronounced something like strah-zshi-NOT, came from her southern Italian dialect. It alluded to the Italian verbs for “to trail” and “to drag” (
strascicare
and
trascinare
), because to make this pasta, you’d drag a knife along a sheet of dough, repeatedly pressing down and pinching off just enough of the dough to make an ear-shaped nub of pasta. The method was even more tedious than Florence’s process for ravioli.

Adele used her thumb as the mold for each
strascinat.
She would sit at a sizable table, an enormous rectangle of dough before her, and pinch and mold and then flick, the concave nubs landing in a nearby heap. She’d sit for hours, because there was no reliable machine for this endeavor, no dried pasta from a box that could emulate the density and pliancy of her
strascinat
, no alternative to doing the work, no matter how numbing it was. And even if there had been an alternative, she wouldn’t have taken advantage of it. Dried pasta from a box didn’t advertise how long and hard you had labored. Dried pasta from a box didn’t say love. When you ate a bowl of Grandma’s
strascinat
, covered in the thick red sauce that she and most other Italians simply called “gravy,” you knew that every piece of pasta had the imprint of her flesh, that the curve of each nub matched the curve of her thumb.

Another of her signature dishes was a sort of casserole made with many alternating layers of
mezzani
, a noodle similar to penne, and thin slices of fried eggplant. The eggplant was the tough part, the messy part, because the dish required scores of slices, especially if you were making enough for a dozen or more people, and Adele was always making that much. Each slice had to be a particular weight: too thin and it might get mushy and fall apart; too thick and it wouldn’t cook to a silky enough state in the center. Each slice had to be dredged in flour and given its own discrete space in scorching oil, so she had to deploy several stovetop pans at once or a big electric fryer, the kind that plugged into an outlet and sat on the counter.

Some cooks recall landscape artists at their easels, pausing to ruminate as they apply dabs of paint to a brilliant canvas. Grandma recalled a mechanic under the hood of a car, clanging and huffing and covered in gunk. Cooking was steamy, sweaty drudgery for which she didn’t just roll up her sleeves. She wore something ratty and sleeveless—the fewer obstructions to movement, the better—along with comfortable slippers or flip-flops, even though she preferred heels in all other circumstances. She stood just four feet, eleven inches tall, not counting her hair, which got her all the way up to five foot three if she’d just come from the beauty parlor.

She did as much of this cooking as possible outside of view, in a space where she didn’t have to worry about the mess. By the time my father turned sixteen, she had a whole second kitchen, in a two-family house that she and Mauro bought on Fifth Street in the Battle Hill neighborhood of White Plains. They rented out the second floor and lived on the first floor and in the basement, where Grandma churned out her fried eggplant and
strascinat.
She never had to sully the nicer kitchen on the ground level, and she could bask in the wonderment visitors expressed at its sparkling cleanness, which seemed to contradict the freshly made banquet she was laying out for them on the table in the center of the room. Where had all that food come from? Why weren’t there any telltale signs of its production?

Although she and Grandpa didn’t have all that much money, they had food to share and made sure that anyone entering their home knew it. They had it in part because they sold it, in a tiny store in White Plains that was a cross between a delicatessen and a bodega. Mauro opened it to supplement his erratic work and undependable income as a stonemason. It succeeded in part because its hours were longer than those of larger grocery stores, many of which shut their doors early in those days. Because of those long hours, Frank, who was five and a half years older than Jim and eleven years older than Mario, often had to head straight from school to the store to relieve his father.

Certain nights of the week were devoted to certain meals, and that schedule rarely varied. Sunday afternoon was the big weekly feast, antipasti followed by a pasta course followed by meat. Monday was soup night: something light, like minestrone, a retrenchment from Sunday’s excess. Tuesday was a dish of peas and pasta, or what the Brunis pronounced
peas-an’-pas’
, mashing three words together in a hurried exhalation. Chicken had its designated night; so did steak.

Holiday meals were also set in stone. Grandma always hosted her brothers and their wives and children for Christmas Eve, when she hewed without exception to the tradition of seven fishes. She put canned tuna on an antipasti platter; mixed clams into a sauce for spaghetti; folded anchovies into a calzone
;
boiled octopus; and fried salt cod, squid and scallops. Sometimes she expanded the meal to include more than seven fishes, but she never contracted it to include fewer. There were things in this world a person should be able to depend on. Eating the right meals on the right occasions was foremost among them.

She told her children that they should never, ever leave anyone with the impression that they wanted for food, drilling into them that when someone offered them something to eat, they should refuse it. Period. If the offer was repeated, they might consider accepting it, but it was probably best to wait for a third or even fourth offer. Otherwise, she said, “the people” might get the wrong idea.

She spoke of “the people” constantly, usually in the form of a question that was basically her life’s refrain: “What will the people think?” She asked her children this whenever one of them was about to head out in a shirt that was torn or pants with the barest of stains. She asked Grandpa this whenever he dawdled in attending to some home repair whose necessity might be apparent to a neighbor or passerby. Her children—and, later, their wives and the rest of us—liked to tease her by asking, “Who are
the people
? Do they have names?” But we knew. They were anyone and everyone who might get a glimpse of, and draw a conclusion about, you. They were the jury, seen and unseen, before whom you maintained a
“bella figura,”
a bedrock Italian expression that literally translates into “beautiful figure” but really means “good impression” and refers to your image and standing in the world.