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Kitchen Table Kibitzing 8/9/2022: What's Pasta Is Prologue [1]
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Date: 2022-08-09
Vincent Van Gogh: Green Wheat Fields, Auvers (1890)
Good evening, Kibitzers!
When my dad came to New Jersey in 1952, stationed by the army at Ft. Monmouth, he was beguiled by two things. One was my mother, and the other, Italian food, neither of which was available in Grand Rapids, Michigan at the time. I am told that, when he went to an Italian restaurant and it came time to order dessert, he’d just order more spaghetti.
This made him popular at my grandma’s house, because she loved to have someone come to her table and test her ability to cook vastly more food than could ever possibly be eaten by those present. The cultural view she was guided by is: if you only serve just enough for everyone but no more, you’re a stingy host. Even if there’s just a little more than anyone can eat, someone might want more but not want to take the last helping. So if you’re inviting people to dinner, even if it takes all the food you have for the rest of the month, it’s downright rude not to serve it.
Her policy made people new to her table sitting ducks, if they came to Sunday or holiday dinner and had not been warned. (A lot of times we forgot to warn people — this was inadvertent and not at all done for sport.) She would put out this giant spread of pasta, generally one long kind and two short, plus meatballs and sausages, and urge second helpings on everyone, which the unsuspecting guest eagerly accepted. Then, she would clear the first course and bring out the actual dinner, generally some sort of roast beast and a hundred and ten side dishes. There is nothing like the face of someone who has just realized he’s stuffed himself on the appetizer. So many competing emotions!
I was thinking about those dinners recently. My grandma liked to mix it up with the short macaroni shapes, which were her favorite. But the variety of macaroni for sale here these days is greatly expanded from sixty years ago, when you were going to get whatever the Queens-based Ronzoni company felt like selling. If I encounter an especially huge pasta aisle in a supermarket now, I am going to poke around in there and look for shapes I haven’t seen before, and try to figure out how they form them. This side interest was piqued recently, without me having to go anywhere.
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