Keeping The Feast Part 6

I was in my late twenties and already living in Texas when my mother drove to a fancy mall in Stamford, Connecticut, one afternoon to sit in on a cooking cla.s.s given by Jamesie himself. She came home bubbling and talked for an hour on the phone about her wonderful afternoon. Better yet, Jamesie had, when asked, been able to recommend a new Italian cookbook, recently published, that was nothing like the standard red-sauce wonders that had defined Italian cooking in the United States up until that point.

The book was Marcella Hazan's The Cla.s.sic Italian Cookbook The Cla.s.sic Italian Cookbook, which eventually became the best-selling Italian cookbook in the United States. My mother bought two copies on the spot, one for herself and my father, and the other for me. We devoured Marcella's book and its recipes like no other cookbook before it, and Marcella in no time supplanted all others in our family pantheon of kitchen G.o.ds. "Marcella says . . ." became our creed.

I actually met Marcella in Dallas a couple of years later, when she gave a cooking cla.s.s at a new Williams-Sonoma store, and I dutifully presented her with my heavily stained copy of her first book to autograph. Marcella was happily shocked to find I had a first edition of her book, which had sold badly under its original publisher. And she was touched to learn that our Jamesie, her friend and colleague, James Beard, had been quietly promoting her behind her back.

A few years later, after my move to Rome, I called Marcella to ask if I could interview her for a story for United Press International's feature wire while I was in Venice covering a medical conference. Wire service reporters often were forced to cover deadly boring stories, from taking dictation on the results of a Russian-Italian track meet to covering the summer visit of some Podunk mayor who had found his way to Europe. To have been invited into Marcella's Venetian kitchen, to have watched her cook up a lovely lunch for me, which she then served on her terrace, to have a couple of hours in which to talk food and drink with my family's favorite cook, in her own kitchen, more than made up for all the evenings of my life that I had spent with a heavy, black phone receiver scrunched between my neck and shoulder, and typing Russian names, letter by letter, hour after hour, from some beer-fueled sports stringer, "Medvedev, M for Mary, E for Edward, D for David, V for Victor . . ."

Julia's creation story, not surprisingly, also centers on food. Within a few weeks of her birth, John's postpartum crisis melted away more quickly than I ever would have expected. As summer approached, we could not wait for Peter and Anna's visit and Julia's introduction to Trevignano. John, for all his stated fears about reentering fatherhood, was already completely at ease around her and loved to sit with her on his shoulder, singing all the nursery songs he had sung to Peter and Anna when they were small. From her earliest days she visibly relaxed whenever she was nestled between his broad shoulder and slim neck.

About the time that Julia turned four months old, her pediatrician told me that she was ready to be introduced to solid food. In teaching Julia how to eat-which I felt was one of the most fundamental parts of teaching her how to live-I was bent on breaking the mother-daughter eating game my mother had started playing on and off soon after I was born. My mother used to say that when I was three or four I did not like to eat. Family lore says the only two things I gobbled down back then were homemade chicken soup with tiny stars of pastina, and black olives, the latter preferably eaten in tens, a pitted one stuck onto the tip of each finger.

My mother was certain it was her own bad eating habits that had caused her "nerves"; she did not want me to end up like she had: skinny, anxious, depressive. Convinced that food and a healthy appet.i.te were the answer to mental and physical health, she took to feeding me a thick, dark brown viscous "tonic" twice a day for several months, before breakfast and supper. I still remember gagging it down until when I was about five that ugly brown bottle finally disappeared for good. My own healthy appet.i.te and naturally fast metabolism-inherited from both my parents-must have kicked in at about that time, for my mother never felt the need to push food on me again until after I had left home for college.

Once I left, every phone call, every letter my mother ever wrote me, and she wrote unfailingly, hundreds of letters over the years, mentioned food in some guise or other. She would tell me about a dinner party she and my father had thrown, detailing each of the dishes they had made for their guests. She would send me new recipes she had discovered, old recipes I had requested. Many of her phone calls and letters, written in the rounded, Palmer-method hand of her school days, ended with the admonition, "Eat more, and pray." And every time I returned home-from college, from Texas, from England, from Spain, from Italy, Poland, or Germany-it was always the same: my mother eyeing me slowly from top to bottom, followed by the inevitable judgment, " Too skinny, you look like h.e.l.l," even if I had not lost an ounce since I had last seen her.

From college onward, once I was out of the daily orbit of my mother's kitchen, pushing food on me became a bad habit she developed, a way to rea.s.sert the control over my life that she knew was slipping away. Meal after meal, year after year, in my late teens and early twenties, I declined to play her game. Ours was a tango I most definitely did not want to pa.s.s on to my own daughter. Force-feeding might work for geese, I thought, but not for children. I wanted mealtimes without the background music of a mother's voice, wheedling or insisting, "More? Just a little. A mouthful. Can't you finish this last bit?"

At the same time, though, I wanted Julia to enjoy her food the way John's family and mine all did, to like most foods, to enjoy trying new things, to approach a table three times a day with a sense of pleasure. "Don't smell it, eat it!" was the standard line John's father would use whenever any of his four boys exhibited the slightest sign of turning picky at table. His mother's version of that same line, "Food is not meant to be smelled, it's meant to be eaten," also warded off potentially finicky behavior. To this day there is almost no food these four brothers don't enjoy.

Similarly, I wanted to encourage Julia, as my mother had encouraged me, to listen to her stomach, and to think about what it was her body might "need" to eat. I wanted her to understand wool-eees wool-eees and I wanted her to respect them. Both John and I grew up eating the food our parents made for the family as a whole, and neither of us believed that children's food should be different from adult food; once she got physically old enough to eat anything, I wanted Julia to eat what we ate night after night. I was not about to overturn our eating habits for Julia, nor was I planning a second career of making special meals on demand. I wanted Julia to climb aboard our family's established food wagon, not hitch our wagon to hers. and I wanted her to respect them. Both John and I grew up eating the food our parents made for the family as a whole, and neither of us believed that children's food should be different from adult food; once she got physically old enough to eat anything, I wanted Julia to eat what we ate night after night. I was not about to overturn our eating habits for Julia, nor was I planning a second career of making special meals on demand. I wanted Julia to climb aboard our family's established food wagon, not hitch our wagon to hers.

I expect every country has its own prescribed method of weaning. Italy, which keeps to its historical food traditions perhaps more than most developed nations, certainly had a straightforward, step-by-step system for how and when to introduce solid foods to babies, never before four months. I still have the typed single sheet of feeding instructions, t.i.tled "The Stages of Weaning," which the pediatrician gave me as Julia approached that four-month milestone.

The pediatrician suggested mashing a single slice of banana to see whether she was ready to move beyond formula. From her eagerness to eat that first spoonful of banana, given in the warm morning sunshine of our wisteria-covered terrace in Trevignano, it was clear Julia was more than ready. But the doctor warned me that I must never introduce another new food until the baby had eaten the first one-and showed no ill effects from it-three days running. The slow addition of new foods, the doctor said, meant that potential allergies could be quickly pinpointed.

The pediatrician's instructions started Julia off with plain, unadulterated, raw fresh fruit, grated, mashed, or whipped in a food processor, at four to five months (but never an orange before she was two or three years old). At five months, Julia moved on to simple vegetables, boiled or steamed: carrots, potatoes, zucchini, tomatoes, celery or lettuce, Swiss chard-but never spinach-followed by simple infant cereals made from rice, barley, or wheat.

At five to six months, Julia started on pappa, pappa, or pap, which begins as vegetable broth, moves on to a thin gruel a few weeks later, then finishes off as a thick mush. or pap, which begins as vegetable broth, moves on to a thin gruel a few weeks later, then finishes off as a thick mush. Brodo vegetale Brodo vegetale is the first step. One peeled carrot, one peeled potato, and one unpeeled zucchini are put into cold water and boiled until just tender. At first only the broth is offered, once a day in a bottle. Later, with only one new ingredient introduced at a time, so that potential allergic reactions can be easily tracked, other mild vegetables are added to the basic mix. As the days go by, the cooked vegetables are pureed and returned to the broth, thickening it to the point where the baby can be fed the concoction with a spoon. As more time pa.s.ses, baby cereal is added; later, a teaspoon of extra-virgin olive oil; and later still, at six months, small amounts of beef, veal, turkey, rabbit, or lamb, poached or grilled, then pureed in a blender. Yogurt and mild cheeses, fish, eggs, and cow's milk follow in the next months, until the baby is considered ready for table food. is the first step. One peeled carrot, one peeled potato, and one unpeeled zucchini are put into cold water and boiled until just tender. At first only the broth is offered, once a day in a bottle. Later, with only one new ingredient introduced at a time, so that potential allergic reactions can be easily tracked, other mild vegetables are added to the basic mix. As the days go by, the cooked vegetables are pureed and returned to the broth, thickening it to the point where the baby can be fed the concoction with a spoon. As more time pa.s.ses, baby cereal is added; later, a teaspoon of extra-virgin olive oil; and later still, at six months, small amounts of beef, veal, turkey, rabbit, or lamb, poached or grilled, then pureed in a blender. Yogurt and mild cheeses, fish, eggs, and cow's milk follow in the next months, until the baby is considered ready for table food.

Making brodo vegetale brodo vegetale, fresh every morning and fresh again each evening, kept me firmly anch.o.r.ed in the present, watching and helping Julia explore the world of food. I had started reading to her about the same time I was weaning her, so she was also exploring the world of sounds and pictures and words. It was a time of wonder and exploration for the two of us, and I don't think I could ever decide which I liked better, feeding her or reading to her, just as my father had read to me every night. I loved satisfying her hunger for food-which so easily translates into a hunger for love-as much as she loved having that hunger sated.

It was a magical period, both for Julia and for me, although after three or four months of making pappa pappa twice a day, even my enthusiasm was beginning to flag. Making twice a day, even my enthusiasm was beginning to flag. Making pappa pappa was beginning to feel like a ch.o.r.e, and Julia, too, seemed to be tiring of eating the same thing each day. was beginning to feel like a ch.o.r.e, and Julia, too, seemed to be tiring of eating the same thing each day.

Then three of John's cousins arrived in Rome for a visit. I had made an enormous pot of zuppa di ceci, zuppa di ceci, a thick, tasty winter soup of pureed chickpeas, tomatoes, olive oil, garlic, and a handful of finely chopped fresh rosemary. Mary, Elizabeth, and Vivian were seated around our table, with John at one end, me at the other, and Julia in her high chair next to me. As I filled up our big white soup bowls with the thick, orange-colored soup, the rich smell of rosemary and garlic filled the room. a thick, tasty winter soup of pureed chickpeas, tomatoes, olive oil, garlic, and a handful of finely chopped fresh rosemary. Mary, Elizabeth, and Vivian were seated around our table, with John at one end, me at the other, and Julia in her high chair next to me. As I filled up our big white soup bowls with the thick, orange-colored soup, the rich smell of rosemary and garlic filled the room.

Julia was enjoying the hubbub, attention, and laughter as we settled down to eat. But when I finished serving the soup, she clearly looked deflated that she alone had been denied. I thought about it for a moment, then went to get a smaller white soup bowl from the cabinet, poured a scant ladleful inside, and placed the bowl on her tray. We all dug in happily, and I offered a spoonful to Julia. She looked a bit surprised at first swallow, but then she, too, like the rest of us, was suddenly smiling. She took that first bowl of adult food down in minutes, and I suddenly realized that I had likely made my last batch of brodo vegetale brodo vegetale that very morning. It was a happy realization, utterly unlike the abrupt end of breast-feeding a few months earlier. I called the pediatrician later in the day to make sure Julia was truly ready to leave baby food behind, and the doctor, listening to my description of the meal, told me she agreed that Julia had been launched successfully. From that point on, she ate what we ate, hungrily, with gusto and pleasure. that very morning. It was a happy realization, utterly unlike the abrupt end of breast-feeding a few months earlier. I called the pediatrician later in the day to make sure Julia was truly ready to leave baby food behind, and the doctor, listening to my description of the meal, told me she agreed that Julia had been launched successfully. From that point on, she ate what we ate, hungrily, with gusto and pleasure.

Julia tried, over those next days and weeks and months, new food after new food. She ate them, smeared them, rubbed them through her fingers and into her hair. She sang to them, groaned for them, laughed in joy at their arrival. She developed fetishes early on, for days delighting in boiled baby onions, then switching gleefully for a week or two to tiny lumps of soft, ripe mango.

After that we experimented with a taste of mild, fresh stracchino stracchino cheese, Greek yogurt, a cut-up peach, a slice of ripe avocado, pear juice, veal meatb.a.l.l.s, nectarine slices, a few lumps of b.u.t.ter-nut squash, glazed carrot sticks, fresh-squeezed tangerine juice, a whole wheat cracker, polenta with Parmigiano and tomato sauce, Swiss chard, a slice of fresh persimmon, an asparagus spear, risotto. Julia loved cheese, Greek yogurt, a cut-up peach, a slice of ripe avocado, pear juice, veal meatb.a.l.l.s, nectarine slices, a few lumps of b.u.t.ter-nut squash, glazed carrot sticks, fresh-squeezed tangerine juice, a whole wheat cracker, polenta with Parmigiano and tomato sauce, Swiss chard, a slice of fresh persimmon, an asparagus spear, risotto. Julia loved frutti di bosco frutti di bos...o...b..ueberries, raspberries, wild strawberries, and red and black currants served in season at Roman restaurants; grilled sea ba.s.s drizzled with olive oil and lemon juice; pasta of any size or shape, with zucchini-garlic sauce, with various tomato sauces, with meaty, brown ragu alla bolognese, ragu alla bolognese, even with one of our most strongly flavored family favorites, a thick green pasta sauce made with broccoli, garlic, parsley, and anchovy. But to this day Julia's favorite dish of all remains even with one of our most strongly flavored family favorites, a thick green pasta sauce made with broccoli, garlic, parsley, and anchovy. But to this day Julia's favorite dish of all remains spaghetti alle vongole spaghetti alle vongole, that simple pasta prepared with baby clams in the sh.e.l.l, olive oil, white wine, plenty of finely sliced garlic, a handful of chopped parsley, and a hint of hot red pepper.

Julia's favorite snacks were Roman street food: cut-up watermelon sold in plastic cups on street corners during the hottest months of the year; roast chestnuts sold in the fall; arancini, arancini, b.a.l.l.s of risotto stuffed with a square of mozzarella cheese, rolled in bread crumbs, and quickly fried. Her very favorite was b.a.l.l.s of risotto stuffed with a square of mozzarella cheese, rolled in bread crumbs, and quickly fried. Her very favorite was pizza bianca pizza bianca, a small square of which was presented to her free of charge any and every day we stopped by our local bakery to buy the crusty, oversized loaves they baked in wood-fired ovens every day but Christmas. As she grew older, Julia learned to love the bakery's other pizzas: pizza rossa, pizza rossa, which was which was pizza bianca pizza bianca slathered in tomato sauce; or slathered in tomato sauce; or pizza con patate, pizza con patate, pizza dough baked with thinly sliced potatoes and rosemary; or pizza dough baked with thinly sliced potatoes and rosemary; or pizza bianca pizza bianca covered with paper-thin slices of mortadella, the Rolls-Royce version of an open-faced baloney sandwich. covered with paper-thin slices of mortadella, the Rolls-Royce version of an open-faced baloney sandwich.

But my favorite memory of Julia's babyhood is tied up with my father's eighty-first birthday, which we celebrated the July she was two on the terrace of the lake house at Trevignano Romano. Dear friends who once lived in Rome but who had moved back to Moscow were coming to spend the night with us on their way to their annual visit to Elba.

I had planned a big fishy dinner, not the boiled lobster or the big scampi we might have eaten in Connecticut, but Mediterranean sea bream baked whole with thinly sliced potatoes, very ripe cherry tomatoes, and handfuls of freshly chopped parsley, all dribbled with good, fruity olive oil and seasoned with sea salt and freshly cracked black pepper.

Our friends told me they would take care of the first course, and they arrived in a rush of hugs and kisses with a large bottle of vodka and a plastic tubful of the best black caviar, the kind one could buy at the time only in Moscow, and with the right connections. While Julia played happily with their two girls, Celestine and I toasted slabs of rustic Italian bread, b.u.t.tered it lightly, then slathered the toast with caviar. We piled those slices of toast on a huge, hot platter and set it on the long wooden table that sat near the giant wisteria vines overlooking the lake.

The adults drank icy vodka, the children drank chilled apple juice, and we all laughed and talked and toasted my father's health as the sun slowly started to sink behind the house. We drank more vodka and began nibbling the warm, crunchy toast with caviar. I had eaten caviar of that quality only once in my life, more than a decade earlier, while visiting Moscow at New Year's. For my father, it was a first, and none of us, children included, seemed to be able to get enough of it. I quickly made more toast and refilled the platter.

Julia, sitting in her jump seat and facing her grandfather at the far end of the table, watched our friends' girls, about five and eight, spread caviar on their last bit of toast. She had already eaten two enormous slabs, barely coming up for air. She looked up from her empty plate and asked, during a momentary lull in the conversation, "Mama, more bread and black jam?"

All of us burst into laughter. I was thrilled to see that at the age of two she had already learned how to celebrate the life we are given, around a table, with good food, close friends, and family.

Epilogue.

Nearly a year after Julia's birth, John had long mastered his fears about restarting fatherhood, and the two of them would giggle happily on the floor together whenever John was at home. Julia delighted more than anything in the antics of "Little Man," an imaginary figure whose two legs were John's index and middle finger. Little Man got into trouble constantly, jumping onto plates, bouncing onto people's heads, falling into teacups and coffeepots, and Julia loved him most when his antics got completely out of hand and he had to be punished, forced repeatedly to sit on the edge of the dining room table, forbidden to make a peep.

Late in 1999, more than six years after we had returned to Rome, we moved to Paris. To move from southern Europe to northern Europe when its summer light is dying and the cool, pewter gray of winter is at hand was perhaps not the best idea for a family that had unknowingly become extremely attached-physically and psychologically-to Rome's glorious and comforting southern light. Even Julia, who was at first excited at the thought of moving to the city of Madeline and "twelve little girls in two straight lines," was rattled by our transfer. Shortly after we moved, she began balking at getting out of bed in the morning, no longer jumped into her clothes once she did get up, and cried whenever we left the apartment.

John, without psychiatric help for the first time in seven years, was happy to plunge into his new Paris a.s.signment. He was happy to have left Italy, happy to be back in a more stimulating intellectual environment, happy to be brushing up on his French. The only things he, like Julia, seemed to miss were the light and warmth of Rome. The three of us, in fact, were all shocked by Paris's dirtiest little secret: that the weather in Paris is generally just a tad better than London's, that the light of the City of Light is for many months of the year largely of the electric variety. I responded to the change in air and light by developing a three-year-long attack of chronic sinusitis that no amount of Western medicines could fight. It was not until, in despair, I consulted a Vietnamese acupuncturist and homeopathic doctor whose first treatment let me breathe normally again that I found I was slowly being taken in by Paris's considerable charms.

And then, by the time I was beginning to feel at home in France, in the fall of 2002, John began to flag. A routine prostate operation went off without a medical hitch but triggered flashbacks to his shooting and everything that followed. Over the course of the following year, despite a resumption of talk therapy, he slid, slowly at first, and then faster and faster, down the long, familiar slope of depression. Ultimately, after trying the new antidepression drugs on the market, to no avail, he agreed to our doctors' urging of hospitalization and electroconvulsive therapy, a modern version of the treatment that had cured him for thirty years after he left the monastery. It was a year from diagnosis to recovery this time, but the experience was remarkably different because we knew what we were dealing with, and all of us-me included-responded much more aggressively.

Throughout the period of his slide, we followed the doctors' advice and tried to keep our home life as unchanged as possible. Night after night, I would cook one of John's favorite comfort foods for supper-spaghetti with tomato, olive oil, garlic, and a handful of basil, or a risotto alla milanese risotto alla milanese yellow with saffron, b.u.t.ter, and Parmigiano; sauteed veal scallops finished off with a touch of white wine and sage; a platter of tiny green beans or a green salad made of baby field greens. While I was throwing the meal together, for few of our favorite dishes took much time to cook, John and Julia would set the table together, correcting each other if either of them misplaced the silverware or gla.s.ses. Once the table was set, John usually disappeared into our bedroom or into his corner chair in the living room to sleep or pretend to sleep, to try his best not to cry, to at least close his eyes and mind to the world until the food was ready. yellow with saffron, b.u.t.ter, and Parmigiano; sauteed veal scallops finished off with a touch of white wine and sage; a platter of tiny green beans or a green salad made of baby field greens. While I was throwing the meal together, for few of our favorite dishes took much time to cook, John and Julia would set the table together, correcting each other if either of them misplaced the silverware or gla.s.ses. Once the table was set, John usually disappeared into our bedroom or into his corner chair in the living room to sleep or pretend to sleep, to try his best not to cry, to at least close his eyes and mind to the world until the food was ready.

But once he heard my usual summons, "A tavola," "A tavola," no matter how bad he felt, he knew he was expected to pull himself together and join Julia and me at the table, then eat, hungry or not, and at least listen to the conversation if not take part in it. During the meal Julia would tell us stories from the school-yard: which second-graders were demanding daily tributes; who hadn't done their homework; who had bled; who had cried; who had been mean or a comfort. Her stories and enthusiasms, like the simple meals I prepared, were a lifeline for each of us, keeping us afloat on those evenings when none of us could see any quick way-or any way at all-out of our latest situation. no matter how bad he felt, he knew he was expected to pull himself together and join Julia and me at the table, then eat, hungry or not, and at least listen to the conversation if not take part in it. During the meal Julia would tell us stories from the school-yard: which second-graders were demanding daily tributes; who hadn't done their homework; who had bled; who had cried; who had been mean or a comfort. Her stories and enthusiasms, like the simple meals I prepared, were a lifeline for each of us, keeping us afloat on those evenings when none of us could see any quick way-or any way at all-out of our latest situation.

John was hospitalized for nearly five weeks, but at his insistence, the doctors allowed him to spend weekends at home, a dispensation that made him feel less ill and that allowed him to see Julia regularly, as children were not allowed to visit the psychiatric hospital just north of Paris where he was being treated. He received eight rounds of electroconvulsive therapy during his stay and was remarkably less depressed upon his release, although all of us were shaken by the loss of a portion of his short-term memory, basically everything that had happened in the three to four months before his hospitalization. Despite that memory loss, within three months he felt well enough to try returning to work part-time.

Julia, who was six at the Christmas when John's depression descended again, was flummoxed by the change in her father, the smiling, cheerful daddy who would play with her endlessly when he got home from work. She seemed fairly fine during the course of the day, going off to school, playing with her friends. But the edges of the day were too much for her. Soon after John became ill, Julia began waking up sobbing each morning. But once she was up and dressed, once she had eaten, we would walk off to school happily, just as each afternoon we would walk home together in similar high spirits. Only as she climbed into bed would her mood swing around again, and she would lie there fretting, weeping, unable to fall asleep for hours. Julia had always had the gift of falling off to sleep in a matter of moments, without problems; now she was nervous, frightened, afraid of the dark, demanding to sleep with a light on, demanding that I read to her until she was so exhausted that she would practically pa.s.s out.

The responsibility of caring for Julia pushed me to act much faster for John's recovery than I would have had John's illness been affecting only him and me. Frightened by Julia's reactions to John's depression and understanding more and more that all of us were suffering from it, I sought help for both Julia and me early in his illness. It was an easy decision, for the one thing I knew more than anything was that I did not want my daughter growing up the way I had, knowing somehow that something was very wrong with one of her parents, but completely ignorant of what that something was. Our family doctor suggested a colleague in the neighborhood whom he described as excellent at family therapy. It was she who very quickly helped me find the right words to explain to Julia in a manner that a just-turned-seven-year-old could understand.

Your daddy, I would tell her, sitting next to her on her bed, is sick. He has a sickness called depression. Depression is a sickness that makes you feel very, very sad, even though you have nothing to be sad about. It is not your fault that he has depression. It is not my fault that he has depression. It is not his fault that he has depression. It is just a sickness that he has and he is doing everything he can to get better. He is going to two or three doctors. He will go to the hospital if he needs to. He is taking medicines that the doctors prescribe. The only thing we can do to help him get better is have fun ourselves. We cannot become sad, too. Because if Daddy sees us having fun, he will start to remember that he used to have fun, too. And once he remembers that, then the depression will start to go away. But it will take a long time, so we have to be patient. And then one day he will not be lying in bed in the dark any longer, will not be crying in his chair in the living room. He will be back being the daddy you remember.

The night I first told Julia this story, she fell asleep instantly, after nearly four months of insomnia. It was a story I had to tell and retell incessantly, however, for a seven-year-old needs repeated rea.s.surance. Whenever Julia began experiencing sleep problems, I would sit her down before bed and talk her through the entire explanation again.

Two years later, when her father was already long back to work and very much better, Julia began experiencing sleep problems once again. I told her that she had to try to figure out what was troubling her and why. I thought Julia's insomnia was the result of a recent suicide in the family of a cla.s.smate, but my doctor and I felt that Julia would be helped most if she could figure that out for herself. It took her a few months, from spring until the night before John was due to start his summer vacation. Julia, nine at the time, came to me that night to explain what she thought had been troubling her.

"Daddy's got depression," Julia said quietly. "Does that mean I will have depression?" For the first time in my life I found I was nearly thankful that my mother had suffered from depression, for I could tell her honestly, and I did, that just because Daddy has depression does not mean that she would, too. I know that for sure, I told her, because my mother had depression and I do not.

Julia then spoke about her school friend Anna, whose aunt committed suicide on New Year's Eve. "Anna's aunt had depression and killed herself," Julia said. "Does that mean Daddy is going to kill himself, too?"Anna's aunt, I told her, had a different kind of depression, one that is harder to cure. Anna's aunt, I told her, tried to get better or pretended to try to get better, but deep down she was still getting worse. Daddy's treatment really and truly did make him feel better. And if Daddy's depression comes back or gets worse, we will bring him right back to the hospital until they make him well again. I cannot tell you for sure that Daddy will never kill himself. But I know he will try his best not to do it. And I think Daddy and you and I have learned all sorts of ways to keep him from ever feeling that bad.

My nine-year-old with the greeny gold eyes looked at me, and it was clear she was wishing that I could have answered with the same degree of cert.i.tude that I answered her first question. Still, she accepted my answer, then lobbed me the ball for the third time, with an observation that still breaks my heart at the same time that it sets me free.

"Mama," Julia said, "when Daddy got depression I felt like my real daddy went away and that a fake daddy came and took his place. It looks like Daddy but it's not really Daddy." At this, I felt tears suddenly stinging my eyes, for my nine-year-old, with her fine, wise eyes, had given me the most cogent personal description of depression that I have ever heard.

"You're right, Jules," I told her. "Depression does take away the person we know. But it doesn't necessarily take them away forever." And somehow, looking at her and taking her hands in mine, I felt that with the intimate knowledge of depression that she had deep in her soul, she had a most excellent chance of escaping the same illness that had so devastated her father's and grandmother's lives, and so changed our own.

These days we own a small stone farmhouse, a low-slung, tile-roofed place half hidden by climbing roses and grape and Virginia creeper for most of the year. Its two-foot-thick walls make it feel safe and strong and comforting, and it has enough beds tucked into odd corners that we can almost always sleep the family and friends who journey to join us there. We bought it with the idea that it might, over time, become our own Trevignano, a safe haven for us all, even if it lies deep in the center of France on a gentle rise overlooking a lazy, willow-lined river, and not in the center of Italy, on a steep hillside overlooking a crystalline lake lined by umbrella pines.

We head to the house whenever we feel the need to flee the big city, whenever I need to feel thoroughly at home. The first time I saw our house it was a cold, late-October day, and when I pushed open the door to step inside I felt the same rush of recognition I experienced the day I first saw my old house in Dallas, the sense that I was home. The same thing happened in Dallas: that white clapboard wreck of a house-whose st.u.r.dy front door, outlined by a narrow surround of white wood and tiny windowpanes-entered my heart precisely because it reminded me of old New England houses that I missed seeing in Texas.

I have only felt more at home in our farmhouse the longer we are there; the house subconsciously evokes happy memories of all the places I have lived. I felt at home when I discovered that fig trees and acanthus-personal icons of our life in Rome-grew in our gently sloping meadow. I felt at home when I learned that an ancient Roman villa lies buried on the edge of our town, with ancient Roman artifacts occasionally popping to the surface during plowing season.

But it is not just memories of Italy that the house reawakens. The nightly racket of frogs that croak in the quiet river at the bottom of our meadow somehow reminds me of the mournful wail of the foghorn in the stone lighthouse off Penfield Reef, to which I used to love to sail in my early teens. I take comfort in the flocks of herons, egrets, and cranes, like the geese and gulls I used to see out our living room window in Connecticut, who take refuge in our quiet corner of France. I feel more at home each time Julia finds yet another fossilized seash.e.l.l or ammonite embedded in our meadow's rocky soil. When we bought the place, we had no idea that it was once at the bottom of a vast, prehistoric sea.

The house lies in a nature reserve, Le Parc Naturel Regional de la Brenne, a protected wilderness of forest, moor, lake, pond, and river punctuated by small stone villages and tiny farm hamlets, situated two hours east of the Atlantic. Built in the mid-eighteenth century, the house sits near the perimeter walls of a former Benedictine priory that was broken up during the French Revolution. It is a deep comfort for me to be able to pray in the monastery's tiny chapel, which had been filled to its roof with sand and stone for generations, only rediscovered last century by the forebears of the family that lives there today. I often slip into the chapel to collect myself, sometimes to pray that depression never upends us all again. But it is my ultimate comfort to know that if or when it does, we have the doctors and the methods at hand to try fighting it off another time. Violence, blood, depression, and death are, I know now, part of life. Today I recognize them, respect them, fight them, and try as much as I can to keep them at bay, but I no longer pretend that they are not as much a part of life as birth or joy or love or the laughter, comfort, and strength that grow out of a simple meal shared with family or close friends.

Soon after we bought the house, we planted an herb garden, sheltered by the tall stone walls that surround our backyard. It fast became overgrown, for like Ann and Joseph's herbs in Trevignano, our sage and rosemary bushes, our parsley, dill, verbena, and basil, even our cherry tomatoes, tend to grow to fairy-tale heights. Just after we bought the place, a gardener friend moving back to Boston gave me a small bay laurel that had lived on her terrace in Paris; it has finally taken root in our rock-infested soil and I think of her each time I break off a leaf or two to flavor a sauce or soup. The raspberry canes and the rhubarb we planted last year are already flourishing, but my blueberries and arugula are languishing, and my horseradish patch gave up the ghost. Even so, I can already picture the quince tree and another fig that we hope to plant in the meadow early next year. We are a tad too far north for persimmons, but I may plant one anyway, for memory's sake.

When I left Dallas at age thirty-one, I thought of myself as a reporter on temporary a.s.signment abroad. I pointedly held on to the house I had restored in Dallas, unwilling to let it go, unwilling to give up my iris-filled backyard or the waist-high basil and thickets of morning glories that covered my front yard, unwilling for years to give up a home of my own even if, outside its four walls, I had never felt much at home in Texas.

I certainly did not think of myself as an emigrant when I left, although it seems that is what I have unwittingly become as the years have pa.s.sed. Unlike my grandparents, who decided to emigrate, I slipped into emigrant status without really knowing that that was what I had decided to do. Perhaps the difference is that I left the country of my birth not because I needed or wanted more to eat, but because I hungered to know both the good and the bad things that my grandparents and great-grandparents had left behind.

I am nearing sixty now, with a daughter soon to enter her teens and a husband closing in on seventy, so I have two tall, long-limbed reasons other than my small, short-limbed self for getting good meals on the table two or three times a day. We still arrange our lives to be together at mealtimes, and while I do most of the cooking, John and Julia increasingly pitch in, too. John has always loved making his family's special dishes, and every Christmas he and Julia make his mother's family ravioli- hand-rolled pasta dough filled with meat, spinach, eggs, bread crumbs, and Parmigiano. The leftover stuffing goes into a veal breast or chicken for another meal, and the kitchen floor and counters and shelves get thoroughly covered in flour and dough bits, just as they are meant to during a family pasta-making session. They purposely make far too many ravioli for a single meal so that Peter and Anna, and now Anna's Benjamin, will get their share when they arrive for their holiday visit around New Year's. Soon now we'll all have a new reason to keep cooking, for Anna and Benjamin are expecting a baby boy in a few months, about the time the strawberries will be bearing fruit down at the country house. Julia's not-so-old portable crib is already there waiting for its next occupant, whose face we are longing to see.

Already we can't wait until August, when we hope the three of them will be spending a part of the baby's first summer with us at the house. The wild blackberries will be ripe then, and Julia is making plans to pick ma.s.ses of them, as she has for the last few years. Last summer she turned into the family fruit-salad maker, happy to be cutting up peaches, pears, bananas, melon, and adding raspberries from our garden and blackberries from the bramble bushes that line the hedgerows in the fields nearby. Already John and I are thinking about watching Anna's baby grow and learn to enjoy his meals the way Julia did just a few years ago.

All of us cook, I think, in part to feed our daily hunger, but just as important, and perhaps more so, we cook and eat to feed our spirits, to keep us all in the same orbit of life. As the generations turn, as our family expands, the table and its simple pleasures-never just the food, but the food and the talk, the food and the laughter, the food and the tears, the jokes, the memories, the hopes-still hold us in place, well anch.o.r.ed in a safe harbor. There may very well be another depression or endless other troubles, big or small, lying in wait for us, but rather than freezing in fear about what may come, we try our best to live and enjoy the lives we've been served forth.

Like my mother's mother, Jennie, I like collecting recipes from neighbors and friends wherever I have landed. I'm happiest today when my French friends teach me recipes from their families, and I teach them recipes from mine. Pascale, whose good English helped her ignore my lack of French when we first arrived in Paris, taught me to simmer garden rhubarb with a sprig or two of fresh rosemary as well as the usual sugar, a sublime addition I never would have thought to try. Our country neighbor, Jacqueline, who watches over our place when we are in Paris, brings us just-picked white asparagus from our farmer neighbors or genuine homegrown tomatoes that taste like those my father's parents used to grow. I love Jacqueline's scrambled eggs with sorrel and tomato sauce-a dish her own mother used to make-as much as she looks forward to my grandmother Jennie's sour cream coffee cake with walnuts and cinnamon.

I know that one of these days, if I live long enough to enter the world of the truly elderly, I am likely to start losing my abiding interest in food. It happened to Jennie, when she started to have those tiny strokes that no one noticed until my grandfather complained that she could no longer remember how to cook. I saw it with my mother, who in her late sixties and early seventies was worn down by the relentlessness of putting three square meals on a family table every day. Often when I would call her from England or Spain or Italy or Poland or Germany she would confess that she never knew what to cook anymore. Faced with a dinner party, which she was both eager and loath to host, she would ask me, long distance, to devise a menu. Menu in hand, she could proceed, knowing my father would help her cook. But she had lost the ability, and the wool-eee, wool-eee, to devise the plan. I saw it with my mother's sister, too. Auntie, she of the chocolate cakes, gave up cooking more than a decade before she died. Luckily Uncle Joe liked to cook, and simply took up the slack. to devise the plan. I saw it with my mother's sister, too. Auntie, she of the chocolate cakes, gave up cooking more than a decade before she died. Luckily Uncle Joe liked to cook, and simply took up the slack.

And I see it now with my father, still living on his own at ninety. He moves at a crawl these days, and the three meals he used to eat daily have shrunk to two. He cannot manage to make himself three meals a day any longer, unless one of them is a snack of yogurt and fruit. But while age has forced him to buy more prepared foods rather than cook everything from scratch, he still gives the occasional dinner party to very close, extremely patient friends, who are willing to wait (and wait and wait) while he painstakingly prepares an asparagus risotto, a pasta with broccoli sauce, or pork filets sauteed with leeks. My father, unlike many widowers or divorces who have lost their spouse, never lost the friends he had when my mother was alive, because he continued to invite those same couples to dinner after her death. They in turn continued inviting him as well.

But I could see this year, during his annual winter-long stay, that he was more tired and quiet than he had been in years past. Instead of bustling into the kitchen late each morning to prepare a plentiful breakfast, as he had always done since my mother's death, he seemed relieved and thankful when I would prepare his breakfast for him, or at least help him get it ready.

Years ago I sent my father a poem that I knew he would love, even though poetry as a whole tended to scare him off. It was written by John's cousin, another John Tagliabue, a poet and longtime professor at Bates College in Maine. The first time I read Cousin John's poem about polenta, I knew I had married not only the right man but into the right family. I knew my father would recognize it, too. For a long time, a copy of "A Pure Desire on a Gloomy Drab Day" decorated my father's fridge, which chuffs noisily these days but still manages to keep his perishables cold: O Polenta- I want something like you on a foggy day- here it is gray vague cloudy dreary Maine getting cold November and I want something like a yellow saint, bright, bright, something something to stand me in good stead-like my grandparents'

cooking for me, a very bright yellow warm supper, a bowl like a mother's breast to hold; yes, I want to be nourished and very happy like a loved child- O Santa Polenta, I am about to lift the spoon and eat and be saved!

Just as I see my father's lifelong pa.s.sion for food starting to slip away as he begins to struggle to get food on his table, I can see the signs of this same sea change lurking within me. Already I can sense that I will not always be eager to whip up a quick pasta sauce, saute a bit of veal and herbs, throw together a quick salad for our nighttime meal. Luckily, I am protected from this for now by Julia, who at twelve still needs years of good food on which to grow. But once she is off on her own, I can see that the soup suppers or the yogurt-and-fruit suppers that John and I often have when she is away for an evening are very likely to propagate like weeds in an untended field.

If I manage to produce that soup myself, and serve it steaming, in big, deep bowls, with silverware and napkins neatly placed on a not overly stained tablecloth, then I know I will not yet be in my final decline. If I serve the yogurt in my mother's best gla.s.s cups, and peel and cut up the fruit to go with it, I will know that I am still hanging on. But when I start to dream of the food being placed before me, hot, steaming, and prepared by somebody else-or worse yet, when I stop dreaming of food at all-I will know that I have crossed a boundary that means I am on my way out of this world and into the next.

It is not something I look forward to. And I know it is something I will fight, just as my father is fighting it now, just as Jennie and Auntie and my mother fought it toward the end of their own lives. So tonight and all the other nights when I may be tired, without appet.i.te, or simply not in the mood to produce even a simple meal, I shall will myself to do it anyway. I will root around the bottom of our refrigerator, check the vegetables stored on our balcony, open our tiny pantry, and find something to restore my energy and my mood.

John and Julia will set the table and I will fly about the kitchen, chopping a few garlic cloves and a handful of fragrant flat-leaf parsley. If I am lucky, I may find a package of De Cecco spaghetti in the pantry, and a bit of frozen chicken broth that I made a few weeks ago. I may find a can of sweet New England clams that my father has carried across the Atlantic for just such emergency meals. I know there is always a bottle of good, green-gold olive oil on the shelf near the stove, and a bottle of dry vermouth in the old cabinet I bought in Rome.

Tonight I will set a huge kettle of water on our tiny stove's biggest burner. By the time the water reaches a rolling boil, I will have sauteed the chopped garlic and a tiny, hot peperoncino rosso peperoncino rosso in a few spoonfuls of olive oil until the garlic just starts to sizzle. I will have added the vermouth and clam broth and chicken broth to the pan, then boiled it down until it has reduced by half. I will cook the spaghetti in the roiling, salted water for just under eight minutes, then heat the clams themselves for a minute or less to keep them tender and juicy. I will drain the pasta the moment it is done and tip it into a well-heated serving bowl with a tablespoon of soft b.u.t.ter. I will add the clams and their sauce and, finally, a handful of chopped parsley. in a few spoonfuls of olive oil until the garlic just starts to sizzle. I will have added the vermouth and clam broth and chicken broth to the pan, then boiled it down until it has reduced by half. I will cook the spaghetti in the roiling, salted water for just under eight minutes, then heat the clams themselves for a minute or less to keep them tender and juicy. I will drain the pasta the moment it is done and tip it into a well-heated serving bowl with a tablespoon of soft b.u.t.ter. I will add the clams and their sauce and, finally, a handful of chopped parsley.

I will rush the bowl to the dining room and then John and Julia and I, suddenly hungry from the sweetly pungent smell of garlic and clam broth coming from the kitchen, will sit down to eat. The three of us will be quiet for a moment or two as we twirl our spaghetti into the first neat forkfuls that we lift to our mouths. We will chew that first bite hungrily and perhaps, if I have hit all the measurements right, give a tiny sigh of delight. Then, already heartened, we will start to talk and laugh and eat in earnest, keeping the feast that we are meant to keep, the feast that is our life.

Acknowledgments.

This book had many midwives, both medical and literary. Profound thanks to: Harold Bourne, Flavia Donati, Veronique Durouchoux, Jacques Pieri, Henri-Paul Denis, Francis Slattery, Marianne Goldberger, Gary Lefer, Joan Prud.i.c.k, Joshua Twersky, Krystyna Piotrowska, the late Petru Radulescu, Joseph Lelyveld, and to my father, brother, and late mother-in various ways, healers all.

On the literary front, heartfelt thanks to: Francis X. Clines and Esther Fein, whose telex presence from Moscow to Munich helped launch this book years before I knew I had started writing it; the late Louis Inturrisi, who was there from the beginning; Katie Hafner, Cheryl Bentsen, John Marks, Debra Immergut, and the late Marilyn Koch, who soon joined in; and Jean Frere, Cathy Booth Thomas, Karen Wolman, Pat Remick, and Pauline Choi, who helped immeasurably near the finish. Very special thanks to Barbara Grossman, who counseled me not to write a cookbook, and to Sarah McGrath, who has an uncannily fine eye for addition and subtraction. Most important, deepest thanks to Charlotte Sheedy, whose chance acquaintance late in the process gave me the reason to pick up where I had left off.