Read Online Keeping the Feast by Paula Butturini - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Paula Butturini
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two p.m. on Christmas Day, we were always back at the table, somehow ravenous again despite what we had consumed the night before. On Christmas we always ate ravioli, large, round pillows of tender, homemade pasta filled with ricotta, Parmigiano, parsley, and eggs. Tiny Nana Gabriel was my cousin Paul’s paternal grandmother and no blood relation to us, but my brother and I considered her our third grandmother, not only on the strength of her hand-rolled ravioli and homemade sausages but also on the strength of her patter—a nonstop monologue of jokes, stories, and impersonations of her customers at Gabriel’s Meat Market. Nana Gabe would hover near the two huge pasta pots, murmuring incantations against the possibility that her creations might open and spill their cheesy contents into the bubbling water.
We called them “ravees” and ate them drenched in a tomato ragù enriched with every kind of meat imaginable, from meatballs and sausages that Nana Gabe had made herself, to a bit of chicken, some meaty pork ribs, and braciole, thin scallops of tough beef rolled around an herbal stuffing that stewed in the sauce till tender. After we had downed the ravees and the gravy meat, the roast beef would appear, dark and crusty on the outside but bloody rare inside, just the way we all liked it.
After salad, desserts began appearing: roast chestnuts, with rough crosses carved into their tough hides to keep them from exploding on the fire; almonds and walnuts; dried figs and dates; Jennie’s famous Swedish butter cookies, the recipe learned decades earlier from a Swedish neighbor; more of Jennie’s struffoli; more boxes of torrone ; and finally, for my cousin, brother, and me, candy canes and popcorn balls, the only proof that we were American, and not feasting in a dining room located somewhere in Italy.
John’s childhood Christmases were similar to mine, celebrated year after year at the same big mahogany table that now sits with pride of place in a niece’s dining room. Even the menus were not all that different. The Tagliabue family ravioli were rectangular and filled with meat, rather than round and filled with ricotta, but John remembers the same big slab of roast beef on the Christmas table in Jersey City that I remember on our table in Connecticut. Although my childhood memories of Christmas are happy, John remembers an undercurrent of sadness in his otherwise upbeat home. His father, Charlie, was sure to weep at some point every holiday. Charlie’s father had died decades earlier on an Easter Sunday, and Charlie’s mother on the Christmas Eve when John was nearly four. All John’s holiday memories struggle to reconcile the joy and the tears the holidays brought forth.
T he first bad news of my life arrived by telephone, a cheery yellow model that hung on our cheery yellow kitchen wall. I have never fully trusted phones since. I like my bad news written down, so it can be read silently, so it can be brought to a quiet corner and taken in slowly, at a speed you can stand. When bad news is delivered in a rush of sobs or spoken words that charge into your ear and mind and heart and stomach, when bad news is disembodied from a human face, the badness of the news is magnified many times over. The mind—mine, at least—replays the sobs and the words and the news, over and over, without rest. The replays churn my heart, clutch my stomach, etch deep inside my skull the news I don’t want to accept.
I started hating telephones the year I was nine and my brother was two, when a phone conversation I overheard between my mother and hers let me know that he was suddenly dangerously ill. A toddler in yellow pajamas is an unlikely savior, but even at the age of nine I knew Danny had saved me. He kept me from being an only child, took half my mother’s heat. Unlike me, he was unfailingly good-natured and kept our mother too busy to brood. His mouth seemed permanently set in a wide grin, and he had the kind of dark-haired,
We called them “ravees” and ate them drenched in a tomato ragù enriched with every kind of meat imaginable, from meatballs and sausages that Nana Gabe had made herself, to a bit of chicken, some meaty pork ribs, and braciole, thin scallops of tough beef rolled around an herbal stuffing that stewed in the sauce till tender. After we had downed the ravees and the gravy meat, the roast beef would appear, dark and crusty on the outside but bloody rare inside, just the way we all liked it.
After salad, desserts began appearing: roast chestnuts, with rough crosses carved into their tough hides to keep them from exploding on the fire; almonds and walnuts; dried figs and dates; Jennie’s famous Swedish butter cookies, the recipe learned decades earlier from a Swedish neighbor; more of Jennie’s struffoli; more boxes of torrone ; and finally, for my cousin, brother, and me, candy canes and popcorn balls, the only proof that we were American, and not feasting in a dining room located somewhere in Italy.
John’s childhood Christmases were similar to mine, celebrated year after year at the same big mahogany table that now sits with pride of place in a niece’s dining room. Even the menus were not all that different. The Tagliabue family ravioli were rectangular and filled with meat, rather than round and filled with ricotta, but John remembers the same big slab of roast beef on the Christmas table in Jersey City that I remember on our table in Connecticut. Although my childhood memories of Christmas are happy, John remembers an undercurrent of sadness in his otherwise upbeat home. His father, Charlie, was sure to weep at some point every holiday. Charlie’s father had died decades earlier on an Easter Sunday, and Charlie’s mother on the Christmas Eve when John was nearly four. All John’s holiday memories struggle to reconcile the joy and the tears the holidays brought forth.
T he first bad news of my life arrived by telephone, a cheery yellow model that hung on our cheery yellow kitchen wall. I have never fully trusted phones since. I like my bad news written down, so it can be read silently, so it can be brought to a quiet corner and taken in slowly, at a speed you can stand. When bad news is delivered in a rush of sobs or spoken words that charge into your ear and mind and heart and stomach, when bad news is disembodied from a human face, the badness of the news is magnified many times over. The mind—mine, at least—replays the sobs and the words and the news, over and over, without rest. The replays churn my heart, clutch my stomach, etch deep inside my skull the news I don’t want to accept.
I started hating telephones the year I was nine and my brother was two, when a phone conversation I overheard between my mother and hers let me know that he was suddenly dangerously ill. A toddler in yellow pajamas is an unlikely savior, but even at the age of nine I knew Danny had saved me. He kept me from being an only child, took half my mother’s heat. Unlike me, he was unfailingly good-natured and kept our mother too busy to brood. His mouth seemed permanently set in a wide grin, and he had the kind of dark-haired,
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