My mother would start her tomato sauce on Saturday night for Sunday dinner. First she would sauté the garlic in olive oil until it was barely golden (low heat, don’t let it burn!). Then she would add plum tomatoes fresh from the garden — or, if it was winter, tomatoes from the garden that she had canned for this purpose — crushed with her own hands. After it had simmered for 30 minutes, she would add fresh cut basil. That’s it. Let it simmer for two hours. Oh, the anticipation!
I still remember the first time I experienced that fragrance of garlic, tomato and basil filling the air in our house when I was a child. After two hours I was allowed to ladle the sauce on a piece of crusty Italian bread and grate some fresh Parmigiano on top. The bread was my grandmother’s, still the best I’ve ever had. The result was absolute heaven at 10 p.m.
The next morning, my mother would fry meatballs and sausage and add them to the sauce. Another two hours of simmering. That would be the first course at Sunday dinner, served over pasta. The second would be roast chicken, made with lemon, oregano, salt and pepper, along with oven-roasted potatoes and a vegetable, usually spinach with lemon and garlic, or sautéed zucchini, all followed by a green salad. That was every Sunday, though each week would bring different pastas, and different meat or fish dishes. No exceptions.
Every Sunday, that is, unless we went on a family outing. This was always an adventure, and always stressful, since there was no actual destination. My father would start driving on an established highway near our home in upstate New York, which would make me think, “Oh, we’re going to Saratoga State Park,” or, “We’re in the Adirondacks, we must be heading to Lake Placid.” That assurance would soon give way to anxiety as he veered off on some poorly maintained, ever-diminishing two-lane road. Ignoring my mother’s protestations, he’d continue until we were on a gravel track that often reached a dead end. And that was where we’d have our picnic, placing the blanket under the shade of red spruce and white pine trees.
When my older brother opened the trunk, and the smell of roast chicken and ravioli in tomato sauce filled my nostrils, all my anxiety would disappear, for there was Sunday dinner, and all was right with the world! After eating, we would walk — our émigré’s version of Italy’s after-dinner passeggiata — discovering a small part of the world that we didn’t know before. Was it worth it, all that driving, to spend two hours eating under the shade of trees that were centuries old? Maybe having to change a flat tire along the way? Absolutely!
If more of us shared a table, maybe we’d learn to understand each other a little better.
Food, and especially shared food, has a way of resetting the balance of life, no matter what came before, whether it was a bad day at work, an argument, or a loss in an after-school baseball game. A family or group of friends or both, sitting around a common table, or just two people sitting on a blanket in the local park, eating and drinking and engaged in conversation. Whatever the occasion, from an everyday supper to holiday dinner, food helps bind us together, forming a collective memory. If more of us shared a table, maybe we’d learn to understand each other a little better.
Writers and other artists have long understood this human connection with what we eat. We know that ancient Egyptians broke bread and ate roast oxen at large banquets where flower-scented fat was burned to perfume the air and fend off insects, because these events are depicted in their paintings. We know in meticulous detail how ancient Israelites prepared certain meals and avoided other foods because their customs are recorded in the Old Testament. From Greek epic poetry to Renaissance paintings and the studied descriptions of food in the work of Ernest Hemingway or the ecstatic alternatives from Marcel Proust, we have an extensive catalog to help us see how food was experienced in different ages of humanity.
Earlier this year, I saw a movie called “The Taste of Things,” a love story between two people that is also about the love of food, and the part food plays in our lives, romantic and otherwise. The main character is a chef, played by the French actress Juliet Binoche. To open the film, she spends 38 minutes cooking on screen, amid steam rising from simmering pots, chicken roasting in the oven, with only the sounds of the kitchen and no interfering music soundtrack. You can almost smell those fragrances and taste the dinner as it’s plated.
These experiences feel almost exotic in today’s America. Constantly rushing from one urgent task to the next, we hardly have time to spend hours in a kitchen or sit with a loved one savoring a slow meal. My grandmother would be horrified by the concept of a Hot Pocket, a glob of something like bread stuffed with something like meat and tomato sauce prepared in 90 seconds in the microwave, though this is far more representative of how we eat today. But traditional cultures from Latin America to the Middle East still revolve around shared meals.
Was it worth it, all that driving, to spend two hours eating under the shade of trees that were centuries old? Absolutely!
Sitting in an Italian restaurant with a friend, I am reminded of my mother’s kitchen. The air is filled with familiar fragrances: tomatoes, basil, garlic, mushrooms, roast meats, oregano, baked bread. We order an appetizer and two pasta dishes: bucatini amatriciana and pesto alla Genovese. Though the atmosphere is enjoyable, with friendly service, soft lighting and just the right amount of ambient conversation, I am transported.
The bucatini — a long noodle similar to spaghetti, with a thick coating of tomatoes and pancetta, which is similar to bacon — reminds me of thousands of meals prepared by my mother and both grandmothers. The mingled flavors of the pesto — a dense green sauce that combines Parmigiano and pecorino cheeses, extra virgin olive oil, garlic, pine nuts and fresh basil — activate my senses and carry me back to an intimate trattoria I visited in the town of Ventimiglia, where I was visiting my uncle. This is the way food should be, and used to be, presented.
I commented to my friend, who many years ago owned an excellent restaurant that served the best pesto alla Genovese in Salt Lake City, that the pesto was good. He tasted it, savored it, smiled and said, “Pesto should taste like spring.”
When you’re Italian in a town where that’s not so common, you tend to know a lot of restaurateurs. Like Valter Nassi, may he rest in peace. The late owner of Valter’s Osteria, he moved in across the hall from my condominium on South Temple Street in 2008. When he opened his restaurant, he would often invite me to have dinner with him later in the evening, when most of the customers had left. Valter would go into the kitchen, speak to the chef and soon multiple courses of dishes not on the menu would arrive at the table.
This would occur a few times a week, but there were other nights when Valter would show up at my apartment late, around midnight, and knock on my door. “Have you eaten?” he would ask. Of course, being the owner of a very successful restaurant, with a well-stocked kitchen, he had nothing at home to cook! So I would prepare a pasta dish, make a plate of cheese, olives and cured meats and we would dine together while watching Vittorio de Sica’s “The Bicycle Thief” (Lardi di Biciclette) at 1 o’clock in the morning. This became a weekly event, so I kept my supplies well stocked.
“Most people have been deprived of that experience, but when you give them something special — like a ripe pear or a warm loaf of whole-grain bread fresh out of the oven — it can be deeply emotional.”
What has happened to our food and dining experiences? My grandparents and parents kept urban gardens of vegetables and fruits that we ate from and preserved to eat in winter. The grocery stores back then carried locally grown, in-season produce. Fruit didn’t come in a plastic container, shipped from Mexico or South America, where it was picked too early to endure a lengthy journey. Because of that process, today’s fruits and vegetables lack flavor and nutrient value. This change became noticeable to me back in the 1970s.
That same decade gave us a massive expansion of fast, cheap, convenient food and drive-thru franchises like McDonald’s and Taco Bell. These developments have altered our relationships with food, though I held out for quite some time. It wasn’t that many years ago when I first drove through a Wendy’s, ordering a cheeseburger with fries at a brightly lit sign equipped with a microphone and speaker and driving away minutes later, eating the fries at the first stoplight. A very long way from that family picnic of my childhood.
Someone else recognized these shifts and decided to do something about it. Alice Waters pretty much started the slow food, farm-to-table movement. While at UC Berkeley, she spent time in France on study abroad, where she first experienced food that was grown organically, sold at local farmers markets and prepared seasonally. “I learned that our senses are the pathways into our minds — smelling, tasting, looking carefully, listening,” she writes. “Food encompasses all of that.”
She brought this culture back with her and soon opened her restaurant Chez Panisse (1971), a Bay Area landmark that is still recognized as one of the country’s best dining experiences. “Most people have been deprived of that experience, but when you give them something special — like a ripe pear or a warm loaf of whole-grain bread fresh out of the oven — it can be deeply emotional.”
I try to live that way whenever I can. I go to the farmers market in summer and the winter market in the cold months for fresh produce grown locally in greenhouses. These may not rival the open markets of Paris, or the Mercado do Balhao in Porto, or that market in Ventimiglia where I bought fresh figs with my uncle, but still there is a bounty to be had. Oh, those fresh picked tomatoes in late summer! And the peaches of late August and early September! Attesting to their quality, the lines at the peach stands are long. Get there early. The fragrance, the experience of biting into a juicy, sweet peach fresh off the tree. Take your time. Savor it.
I agree with the writer/chef Marcella Hazan that cooking is a deeply emotional, physical act, from the selection of produce, fish and meat to the preparation in the kitchen and the presentation at the table. What am I having for dinner tonight? Well, I have some fresh arugula from Saturday’s market that I can pair with some thin sliced Prosciutto di Parma. I have picked some basil from my small garden and will make Trofie pasta with pesto. And take a short walk through the neighborhood afterward. The clouds are breaking up and there is a full moon.
As I walk, I often think again of my grandmother. For her, cooking was even more than all that. It was a spiritual experience. She baked bread twice a week until she was 85 years old and taught me how to do it. When I moved to Utah, I decided to make a loaf of her Italian bread. It was OK, but not as good as hers. She drilled me about every step.
“Did you let the dough rise and punch it down twice?”
Yes.
“Did you have the oven temperature at 325 degrees?”
Yes.
“Did you cut diagonal slits in the top just before baking?”
Yes. None of this made a difference.
She paused. “Did you say a prayer over the bread before you put it in the oven?”
No, I did not.
“Ah, well now you know.”
This story appears in the March 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.