When I started food blogging, I knew I was way behind the curve–both in longevity and experience. So most of my time in the food world has been behind the scenes, oooh-ing and ahh-ing over other people’s beautiful blogs. One that I’ve had my eye on was The Wednesday Chef (I mean, look at that banner: you try telling me you wouldn’t be instantly sucked in). I asked Luisa if she would be interested in chatting with me–and she obliged! So I share with you dear readers, the start of what will hopefully be a weekly exclusive “Authors in the Kitchen” segment.
How did growing up in Berlin, with American and Italian parents, shape how you cook and eat?
In Berlin, my mother was in charge of dinner, so at home we ate a lot of spaghetti, roast chicken with a lemon up its bum, tomato salads with oregano, and – not often, but oddly enough – chicken wings in barbecue sauce. My mother did not like to cook, but she was very dedicated about getting dinner on the table. I’m so grateful to her for that. To me it’s one of the most important moments of the day: when you sit down together to eat with your family.
The kitchen in Berlin was my favorite room in the apartment: big windows, herbs on the sills, a botanical print by the stove, a lovely square table. Sometimes when I’m in Berlin I drive past the old apartment and look up into the windows and wish I was back there again. The botanical print lives on in my friend’s apartment and I love sitting in his kitchen just for that reason alone. My school had a fantastic lunch program, so there I ate things like Kohlrouladen (stuffed cabbage), Sauerbraten, Milchreis (rice pudding! for lunch!), potato pancakes, and cevapcici (ground meat kebab-type things from Yugoslavia). I found them all quite delicious. I don’t have German citizenship, but Berlin is my birthplace and quite literally the place of my heart. I’m on a one-woman campaign for the glories of Germany: food, language, people.
How did your family treat food? How did that influence you?
My father, who I lived with until I was ten, was pretty strict about not allowing sweets, sodas or other kinds of junk food. And no fast food, EVER. My mother wasn’t as restrictive about chocolate or a cookie now and then (Italians eat them for breakfast!), but junk food was just not ever part of her world. As a result, I tasted my first Cheetos at the age of 31 (cross my heart and, MAN, are they delicious) and drink a Coke about once a year. (I was a very obedient child, can you tell?) Home cooking or sleuthing for a hidden ethnic joint is my idea of a good time.
What is your earliest memory of being in the kitchen?
One of my earliest memories is at breakfast. I’m sitting at the table in the kitchen in Berlin. Am I in a high-chair? Not sure. I can hear the church bells ringing. The sun’s streaming through the open windows: it must be springtime. There’s a bowl of plain yogurt in front of me and my mother’s at the cabinet (the one with the green door that we got rid of a few years later when she updated the kitchen), pulling out a block of bittersweet chocolate wrapped in wax paper. She comes back to the bowl in front of me and grates chocolate into the yogurt: little shreds falling this way and that. I eat the yogurt – am I holding the spoon myself? or is she feeding me? I can’t remember – and it tastes sour and deep and delicious.
What do you miss about Germany and its food that you can’t get here?
I miss the bread: the dark, dense, seed-studded bread. I miss the sweet, cultured butter spread on that bread. I miss the red currants, piled high in jewel-like clusters at the market. I miss Leberwurst – yes, I’ll say it – I miss Leberwurst. And so much more.
What does a meal mean to you?
Time to let go, unwind, connect.
Did moving to the States change your perception of food? Has that shaped how you cook?
I’d say that starting my blog really shaped how I cook. I’d always been a happy and avid cook, but the blog challenged me in ways I couldn’t have expected. It made me so much better, really. More confident, more relaxed. I am a mostly self-taught cook, but slogging through four years of weekly recipes was an education I wouldn’t exchange for the world.
What does cooking mean for you?
Cooking makes me feel capable and at ease. It is an instant de-stresser, allowing me to forget all the annoyances and grievances of the day as I stand at the counter, feeling the heat from the stove. A few days without it and I feel like something essential is missing from my life.
Do you find that your cooking style is reflective of your personality?
I guess so. I am both a creature of habit (endless salads, neverending plates of spaghetti) and totally curious and adventurous (Vietnamese noodle salads! Homemade naan!); a homebody and a restless traveler.
What does a typical dinner end up looking like for you?
It’s hard to say since so much of what I cook changes from meal to meal due to the blog. But I do enjoy the heck out of a nice salad and a good crusty bread. I can do that for dinner most nights in the summer: soft lettuces, wedges of good tomatoes, little cucumber (Persian ones!) rounds, a sharp vinaigrette, flaky salt – done.
Do you have a kitchen disaster story to share?
One summer, in 2004, I think, I was whipping cream for some recipe or another (this was BTB – before the blog – so my memory is hazy about which one) and the cream went to butter in about 10 seconds flat. It was a million degrees out, the oven was on, and I totally lost it. I remember feeling the tears come – and being so embarrassed by them! – and having to leave the apartment, with my boyfriend speechless at my meltdown in it, until I calmed down. Little did I know that a few years later I’d actually want to make butter from scratch voluntarily…
Food is so intimately associated with memory: the smells, the tastes all seem to be intrinsically linked with people and places and events that stick in our minds. Is there an aroma that triggers a memory for you, and what memory?
Rosemary is intense for me: it brings me back to Italy and my childhood summers there every time I smell it. I have a jar of dried rosemary from my grandfather’s garden that I take a whiff of every once in a while and instantly I’m 10 again, or 5, or 15, and the days feel endless and languid and wonderful.
Do you have a go-to comfort food?
Spaghetti with a sauce made from fresh cherry tomatoes, a clove of garlic, and olive oil is a pretty reliable one, though canned baked beans will do the trick, too. Both are things that my mother and father made endlessly for me when I was little. When I’m feeling run down, or in need of a meal despite not having an appetite, I can rely on those two.
Food can be a uniting force. How does food bring people together in your life, whether it be family, friends, or complete strangers?
I have family and friends in lots of faraway places, so my visits to see them are always structured around meals: breakfast with that person, lunch at so-and-so’s, dinner with those people. When I see my Sicilian uncle, for example, or my second mother, Joan, who was really my first cooking teacher, a lot of what we do for fun is cook and eat and talk about cooking and eating. Food is definitely a uniting force, but not just with beloved friends and family. With strangers, too: I look no further than the comments section of my blog to find proof of that every day. Wonderful.
If you could have dinner with one person, dead or alive, who would it be?
Anne Frank.
What would be your perfect meal? Who would be there and where would it be—anywhere and anyone!
Just imagining this one is bringing tears to my eyes! The perfect meal would be outside in the garden of the house in Italy: a big, long table filled with my whole family, including my dead grandparents, all of my family (blood-related and not), my friends from New York, my people in Berlin, just everyone: all together. I don’t even care what we’d be eating.
What is the number one lesson about cooking someone has taught you, whether it be a family member, a friend, or a stranger? And the opposite: has cooking taught you any life lessons?
Both of my parents, who raised me as “single” parents, had a home cooked meal on the table almost every night of my childhood, so as a result I feel pretty strongly that cooking and eating at home is a huge part of someone’s stability and happiness.
M. F. K. Fisher considered eating one of the arts of living well. Do you agree?
Yes, but there should be plenty of others to choose from, too. Because eating is good fun, but I’d also say that nightswimming in your birthday suit, hearing children giggle uncontrollably, ordering champagne on a Wednesday night just because, and buying a truly stellar pair of shoes once a year are just as important.
Let’s end this “meal” on dessert–at the end of a long day and a lovely meal, what do you indulge yourself in?
A really perfect piece of fruit would be nice, like a deeply juicy peach from the roadside vendors on the road to the beach in Pesaro.
Thanks Luisa! Now everbody head over to The Wednesday Chef!