My Life As A House

My brother writes to tell me that our Italian grandparents' home of forty years, in Rochester, NY, is for sale. I click on the Virtual Tour and there, again, is Grammie's kitchen. Concetta Bondi, of the Ponticello clan from Palermo, Sicily, and beloved maternal grandmother.

Grandma Bondi before Wednesday morning mass.

Her generosity and love lived in everything she did, but in the kitchen? Love supreme. Her food, and its loving preparation and presentation, bore witness to her enormous heart. I speak specifically of her spaghetti sauce, now, so named Grammie's Sauce. I watched her make it a thousand times, as though I was preordained to chronicle the process, and, although I am not a recipe writer, dear follower, you'll get the idea as we go along.

She first prepared the tomatoes by hand, straining them through a gigantic round, flat sieve, just under a gallon. This liquid went into the huge pot on the stove, along with a small can of Contadina tomato paste as a thickener. Then she sauteed bits of garlic in Berio olive oil, and in they went. She then added, one batch at a time, sauteed meatballs (combined beef and pork), eggplant, cauliflower, mushrooms, and fried hard boiled eggs. She dusted the now simmering ragu with pecorino romano grated cheese, salt and pepper, some chopped, fresh basil, and some fennel seeds. And then, with the heat on low, and me stirring every half hour or so, it simmered for three to four hours. The aroma filled the entire house and could induce fainting, so she usually gave me a meatball sandwich to tide me over until dinnertime.

But her love didn't stop there. There were twelve of us at table, and Grandpa and Uncle Tom liked two different kinds of pasta, served two different ways. This necessitated three separate pots of boiling water -- one for each of them and one for the rest of us spaghetti eaters. This woman did all that. And then some. If Grandpa had purchased eel or octopus at the public market, there would be a side dish of that for him, and she always made a side of sauteed eggplant for my father.

She did it because she loved to see people blissfully eat. Hence, she was in heaven when my brother and I brought starving college friends over for Sunday dinner. There was a viscious lottery system going in our dorms.

Over the years, other members of the family have honed a speedier process, but I've stuck to Grammie's standard operating proceedure. Without those steps, in my opinion, you weaken the layered conversation between ingredients. Grammie's way begins as a simple dialogue with the tomato and becomes a symphony of sound and taste as each element enters the mix. The conversation moves from dialogue to quartet, quintet, octet. And I wouldn't miss a word or spoonful of it.

I click on the Virtual Tour again and see twelve people sitting in that dining room, fourteen, counting rogue college students. And I'm reminded again of Dianne Jacob's dedication in her book Will Write For Food, that food is "a vehicle for memory and identity," and that at the core of my life as a house is Grammie's kitchen, once upon a time.

Grammie (in apron) moving from kitchen to table, calling everyone to sit down.