About a year ago I went hiking in the Alps, in the Tirol. We started an afternoon in Utrecht and about a day after we were reading ourselves for dinner in a small mountain hotel in Pozza di Fassa. We unpacked our things, repacked what we needed for the week walking, and eventually came down to the restaurant. There was a buffet as first course, and I choosed some random unknown things. The Tirol having a strong Italian influence, I did not expect anything too weird to eat, and I hoped for some new tastes to try to reproduce later on at home.
The tastes I did not expect were the tastes of my childhood.
What happened was that I had unknowingly choosen a serving of fried chard. If you would have asked me, I would not have even remember that my mother, and my grandmother, had cooked that so many times. But my memory is more than what I am aware, and the taste of the garlic, and the chard, and the olive oil opened memories that were just there, waiting to be recalled. I could hear the voice of my grandma, and smell once more her kitchen on a saturday midday in Buenos Aires. Or, few years down the road and already in Caracas, the quiches that my mother filled with that fried chard. I recalled conversations, and voices and the colors of the streets of Buenos Aires, and the sky of Caracas. Just like that, in an unexpected moment.
And so past week, visiting Naples.
I concede, I should have known. But as these things go, I was busy with a million and then some other things. The pleasure of the travel and the stress of the travel. The lovely allowing myself to be directed and organized by my capable beloved, and the stressful knowledge that I am being directed and organized by somebody else than me myself. Being in a crowded airport for a while, and sitting in a more crowded airplane for longer. Understanding the instructions for the espresso device available in our room, and realizing that the sugar portions, in the same little paper bags than in the rest of Europe, are about twice as big than the ones available in The Netherlands. I should have begin to suspect the rest right then, but I did not. I did not realize that in the last two decades that I have expend in The Netherlands, whoever sees my sugaring my coffee, gapes in disbelief. So much sugar? they say. So at seeing this correctly sized sugar bags, I should have known that I was, again, back home. But I just enjoyed the sweet espresso, and we went to bed.
It happened in the bakery.
Not surprisingly this time we did wake up late, and decided to catch brunch in whatever bakery we could find. So down we went to the unbelievable smelly and crowded and noisy and fantastic market of Pignasecca, where our room was located, to enter the paradise of endless mountains of freshly baked ciabatta’s in a close by bakery. Also with a counter full of grilled paprika’s and zucchini’s and fennel and who knows what more. So after tussling with apparently furious but also smiling ladies and gentlemen, probably willing to educate us in the rules of buying bread and choosing greens in Naples, alas in italian beyond my comprehension, but luckily with very explicit waving hands, we manage to buy some warm ciabatta’s and some greens and sit in the closest bench available under the sun.
And then of course, it happened again. But differently. Because I don’t remember my mother, or my grandmother for all what matters, cooking or preparing similar fares. And yet, to put it in the words of C. this is indeed the food that I have been cooking for the last twenty years. Because I like to eat fresh white bread, and I love to stuff it with grilled paprika’s. And so this is what I have been cooking more frequently than my family loves, to put it mildly. I know that I have pick the way of cooking the paprika’s from a catalan friend of mine, and the way to grill the zucchini’s from a book, and the idea of roasting fennel’s in the oven from another one. In my life these are disparate things, that I did not expect to be together here, in Naples. And yet they are. And I love them.
I am argentinian by birth, and argentinians are, as the joke goes, italians that would like to be english and hope to speak french to sound interesting. What I did not known myself is that this italian being, has made me select and collect and preserve the recipes that my origin, my roots, have been cooking always, even if I wasn’t aware. Like owning an identity without knowing it.
And then go somewhere for a small week and discover that you have, actually, come back home.
Absolutamente, escrito en nuestros genes...🤣🥂