The beginning of my life in food

I confess—I love food. I love eating it, cooking it, watching other people cook it, reading about it, shopping for it—you get the picture.  I plan trips around where we will eat and am often miserable unless I know the next meal is duly provided for.  This love of food and the art and practice of eating has been with me for almost as long as I can remember.

I mark the true start of my adventures in food and wine with a lunch at the home of a family friend in Edinburgh when I was fifteen.  My father and Alisdair had taught together in Edinburgh six years earlier, when my father was an exchange teacher and our family lived in Edinburgh for a year.  That year we had traveled extensively throughout the U.K. and continental Europe, staying mainly at youth hostels and inexpensive hotels, picnicking along the way.  But except for one hostel in Italy which impressed me by serving an entire meal out of a single wooden bowl, wiped clean with bread after each course, I was too young to fully appreciate the wonders that a great table could offer.  I did know, however, that my mother cooked food quite different from that of our Scottish friends, traveling across the entire city to the one Italian grocery for the ingredients necessary for spaghetti and meatballs, braseaole and other tasty (and important to me, filling) dishes not generally eaten in Scotland at that time.  By the time we returned several years later to visit the friends we had made, retrace some of our travels and explore new places, though, I was ripe for a culinary education.

Alisdair was broad, ruddy-faced and jovial, a proud Scotsman. Arriving at the apartment he shared with his wife Jean, I marveled at the beautiful antiques and furnishings, but was completely dazzled by the set lunch table—rows of glittering crystal, elegant china and dazzling silver forks, spoons and knives, the mystery of their uses to be unlocked as the long and elegant meal they promised, progressed, lubricated by varied and copious amounts of drink.  Alistair loved his scotch, whiskey that is, and my father was fond of a small glass or two as well.  I too was permitted to indulge with the adults—gin with a hint of tonic before dinner and wine, frequently replenished, with the meal.  I cannot recall exactly what we ate—that is a skill I developed later–but I knew after that meal that I wanted to eat, drink, talk and linger over meals forever.

On that same trip, we also visited the Maxwells, Edinburgh friends from our year abroad, enjoying another wonderful, albeit less lubricated, meal.  Mrs. Maxwell was a spectacular cook and served a whole poached trout, poised on its side on a large platter as if in mid-swim.  I was not a fish-lover at the time—growing up in 1950s America, my taste in seafood ran to fish sticks with lots of ketchup—and I had never seen anything like it.  It was as delicious as it was beautiful.  An early hint as to what can make a successful and memorable meal.

On another night later that summer, we went to dinner in the Trastevere, the traditionally Jewish area in Rome.  It was a beautiful, warm summer evening and we were eating on an outdoor patio at Romolo, set in a grape arbor with vine covered walls surrounding simple but elegant tables. At the table directly behind us was a distinguished, impeccably dressed Roman couple, sitting side-by-side, their small dog at their feet.  The couple was well-known to the restaurant staff, all of whom were extremely deferential.  As they ordered, the waiter brought out a fish for their inspection, before it was cooked.  I was impressed! When something was not prepared to the gentlemen’s satisfaction, he calmly called the waiter over and the offending dish was swept away, to be promptly replaced by another, more satisfactory version.  For us, who tended to accept what was offered with thanks, spoken with some difficulty in rudimentary Italian, or French or whatever language, this was the height of sophistication, the matter-of-fact expectation that of course everything would be to one’s satisfaction.  I have not to this day managed to signal that expectation with quite so much calm, ease or elan.  The restaurant is still open today—you can find it, and a picture of the outdoor garden, unchanged after all these years, at www.ristoranteromolo.it.

Of course, that trip involved much more than just eating—there were plays and music and endless churches, cathedrals, castles and ruins, homes of well-known artists and writers and more, all to be remembered and written of.  But eating became a focal point for my travels and for much of my life to come.