Now I’m Home

I was three, maybe four years old, and my grandmother had just handed me a mezzaluna knife.

Her name was Mirella. Half Apulian, half Roman, and a teenager during the Second World War, which meant she had known real hunger before she had known anything else. By the time I came along, that feeling was well behind her, but it had left its mark on the way she cooked: generous, unhurried, nothing wasted. She would sit at the kitchen table with a glass of wine beside her, shelling beans, peeling potatoes, chopping vegetables. When the glass was empty, she would look at me and say, in her particular way: “ Manù – che non ti sia di comando, verseresti un bicchiere di vino a nonna? ”

‘If it’s not too much trouble, would you pour grandma a glass of wine?”

My job, at four years old, was the soffritto (a flavor base of finely chopped onions, carrots, and celery). A bag of green beans to trim. Small things, but they meant I was part of what was happening. She also taught me to make pasta, to knead dough, to feel the difference between something ready and something that needed more…