Koforidua, 2014, monsoon season. Me in the tiny shop, more a hut, of my favorite shoemaker in the capital of Ghana’s Eastern Region, trying on some long-toed leather loafers when the sky opened and a flash flood rose. Outside came a brick-red torrent down the tight road, cresting over the hoods of cars which had stopped mid-stream. I was trying to decide between lizard skin or white calf when I heard what sounded like a Royal 250 motorcycle spilling sideways into the open gutter.

Which would have been my Royal 250 motorcycle.

A cheap Chinese knockoff of a Honda XR250, but it was my cheap Chinese knockoff, and my only transportation that year in equatorial West Africa. I’d already put 8,000 miles on it, spilling it twice at high speed on jungle roads over mountains when tires blew. It was a spillable feast that moto but I had a good mechanic.

The rain stopped as soon as it started—sun back out, tarmac baking in the midday heat. We got the bike upright me and the shoemaker, out of the gutter, like everywhere in Africa a concrete canal next to the road about two feet deep with no barrier. A woman with a pyramid of loose eggs balanced on a tray over her head stopped to watch shoemaker and obruni (what Ghanaians call white people) struggle with the fucking moto. After letting the oil drain back down into the pan I was on my way. I bought both pair of shoes.

Spend enough time on menswear blogs and in chatrooms and you will detect a through-line, namely: what the hell am I supposed to wear?

Which is a new problem for men who used to have strict dress codes, especially for work. That’s why they invented suits, basically daytime pajamas, so men wouldn’t have to stand before the closet scratching their heads, trying to decide which jacket and trousers might work together. Problem solved.

Now it’s anything goes which seems liberating but is not. Now men have to think about what to wear like they did before the suit, almost as hard as talking about feelings. Some men in the management class still default to navy suits, now with no tie, a look ostensibly rebellious even mischievous but in its broad adoption stultifyingly conformist—the new MBA uniform.

Beyond that and the finance-bro zip-up fleece, the office default is now chinos with a polo shirt and trainers (aka dadwear aka normcore), maybe loafers on a client day. Then there’s full-on slobwear—tech billionaires because they can, or that senator from Pennsylvania who’s a walking laundry hamper.

But there is another way to think about clothes, which is to think about their stories. All clothing has a story, if only I bought it on sale at Zara, notwithstanding the longer story of said sweater’s provenance.

We do this instinctively with food, because what would food be without stories, without provenance? Consider wok-fired charred Chinese broccoli, me and Sarah at an outdoor restaurant in a hutong in Beijing first night, 2012 (son sleeping off jetlag), cloaked in I guess oyster sauce, sweet soy, sesame oil, rice wine. Now I make it in Rome, for friends, my way. Now it’s my story.

So it goes with clothes. Where I live there’s a $136 billion fashion industry around a simple story: Made in Italy. People around the world trust that phrase to mean quality, often true. And certainly handmade is part of the story, call it a chapter because there are plenty of large clothing factories in Italy where skilled Chinese immigrants turn out wool and silk garments in front of machines the size of shipping containers; Geppetto in his workshop with needle and thread still exists, mostly at bespoke tailoring houses, but the Industrial Revolution happened and here we are. Artisanal clothing might make for a “better” story, but the point is that the clothes become part of your own story.

Take my shoes.

I have a lot of shoes although I know men with more. My collection includes a few classic handmade British pairs—black John Lobb jodhpur boots; brown full-grain Edward Green chukkas; George Cleverly suede oxfords—all of them made in Northampton, a center of bootmaking since the 12^th century which is a story in itself.

But my closet is global and includes everything from Japanese Converse-type canvas sneakers in several colors; Spanish espadrilles; Mexican huaraches I bought on the street in Nogales between too many margaritas; clunky two-tone Hungarian wingtip derbies known as budapesters which I bought during a dental tourism visit there; Turkish soft leather yemenis; and even a pair of pointy-toed vintage Persian giveh slippers with woven cloth uppers and leather soles, which I wear around town when I’m in an elfen frame of mind.

Persian elf slippers and African winklepickers not being for everyone, my shoes are my story.

So what the hell am I supposed to wear?

I vote for stories. Let’s cook stories, and wear stories. Our own.

There must be a million carbonaras in the city, most of them pretty good, the best being the one you’re eating, with the wine at the time. Too Zen? Let me start over.

It was Thursday night, me off a five-hour train from Calabria, hungry. I walked over to my friend Max’s enoteca, L’Angolo Divino,^[1] to see what was cooking; the small menu changes daily but usually includes a homemade pâté (uncommon in Rome), meatballs in sugo and a pasta dish or two.

The place, just off Piazza Farnese and the French embassy, was founded by Max’s grandfather in 1946 when Romans were living in the rubble of their bombed-out city and eating pasta (when they could find flour) with whatever weeds they could forage. They had just kicked out the king and approved a new democratic Constitution, women voting for the first time. Nonno’s place met the times, selling wine and olive oil from barrels to the neighbors. You could live without meat, not without olio e vino. The locals would come by and refill their household flasks from the barrel taps.

Times change, now Max runs it as a proper wine bar with vintage and fresh bottles from all over Italy, most of them natural, unfiltered, organic and many biodynamic. He’s an expert on natural wines from small producers and he’s happy to share. The clients are still locals but also lots of tourists—the Washington Post called it “the wine bar of your dreams”^[2] and so they come.

As it happened, that night Max was in Sweden visiting friends. Jacopo, the Neapolitan waiter, was behind the bar. A new waiter from Albania was running tables. It was opening night of the World Cup, TV tuned to the Mexico-South Korea match. The march of flags in the opening ceremony did not include Italy’s tricolore, the four-time champions missing out on the World Cup for the third straight time. I sat down at the bar like always.

“Ciao bello! I greeted Jacopo as men in Rome do. (Don’t try calling another man beauty in other parts of Italy.) “I’m in the mood for ravioli.”

“Not tonight,” he broke the bad news. Max buys ravioli made by Mauro Secondi, a master whose pastificio is an hour’s drive east, almost to the ring road, out in the periphery where the real business of Roman cooking often gets done and where tourists don’t go although they could because Mauro, a former sommelier, also serves lunch (no dinner) on a patio outside his shop with bracing Lazio wines for a few coins a glass. Sometimes, with some other artisanal producers (a butcher a baker and a cheesemaker), he hosts Sunday brunch with DJ music, no extra charge.

Back at Angolo Divino, Max and his crew take Mauro’s ravioli and dress them in whatever they feel like making that night, maybe simple butter and sage or maybe a walnut cream sauce like they do in Liguria—no actual cream but made with bread crumbs soaked in milk, then blended with olive oil and a hint of garlic. But tonight niente.

“If you want pasta,” said Jacopo, “we have fresh tonnarelli. Eric can make you something off-menu.”

Eric!

Eric would be the chef, from Cameroon. I could see him in the tiny kitchen behind the bar, all arms and apron flaps.

“Carbonara?”

“Per forza!” said Jacopo.

To drink? I scanned the blackboard with the day’s selections by the glass—whites in white chalk (including a few chalky whites), reds in red. It was hot and muggy. “Hey I was just at Il Goccetto [enoteca down the road] enjoying a nice dry Lambrusco, cold as ice. By chance you got one open?” A dry Lambrusco, lightly fizzy and chilled, is the red wine you want on a hot day.

“Not by the glass.”

“No worries, I’ll take a glass of that pét-nat.”

Pétillant naturel being the French méthode ancestrale of making a lightly fizzy wine by bottling during first fermentation, trapping gases. It began in the Loire Valley in the 16^th-century, some 300 years before vintners in the Champagne region started producing sparkling wines using the more refined secondary fermentation process.

By contrast to Champagne and its aspirational cousins around the world, pét-nats are spontaneously fermented and unfiltered; with no added yeast and no sulfites, the result depends on whatever is in the air, and on the grapes. They’re fresh, cloudy, funky and unpredictable. It’s not a wine for control freaks. Most have a layer of sediment, enjoyable to some, and mostly they are white, but you can find rosés and reds. The bottles are stopped like beer, with a crimped metal cap. They don’t cost a lot.

And so they are gaining in popularity, well beyond France. Angolo Divino carries several Italian versions, and in summer Max always has one open by the glass. Tonight it was a local Lazio white from Corvagialla,^[3] a small organic producer (10 acres!) near the Umbrian border where owner Beatrice Arweiler practices regenerative farming and mostly hand harvesting. Her cellar is “0/0,” meaning nothing added, nothing removed from the grapes. It’s pure, elemental winemaking, the way I used to make hard cider from my apple trees in Maine. Tonight’s bottle was a peach-colored blend of Trebbiano and Roscetto, the latter a rare central Italian grape that came close to extinction but is enjoying a comeback along with the trend to organic wines, thanks to its natural disease resistance.

In the glass, Corvagialla’s pét-nat is flinty thanks to the local volcanic soil, and surprisingly complex for a €20 bottle thanks to the natural, anything-goes fermentation. I could drink it with oysters but also pasta carbonara. Which arrived just in time.

The tonnarelli, Rome’s spaghetti-like pasta but not spaghetti because it’s a fresh egg pasta cut by hand so square not round, came velveted in egg and pecorino, a dusting of black pepper. There were really more crispy pieces of guanciale than should be legal. Eric smiled from the kitchen—an African chef from a former French-English colony (mostly French) who can cook anything. When I lived in Ghana, the one-time British Gold Coast, Accra hotels hired chefs from neighboring Togo, a broken dysfunctional former French colony but a place where you can still find steak-frites like in Paris and crispy baguettes. Generally speaking, the Brits treated their former African colonies much better than the French; they opened good schools, they stuck around long enough to teach the locals relatively good governing principles. But they didn’t teach them sauce Béarnaise.

Could the best carbonara in Rome be made by an African immigrant? It was definitely the best that night. I had gone out after my train, not knowing what I would eat, or drink. What I found wasn’t on the menu, but I found it. Or did it find me?

^[1] Play on words, L’Angolo Divino meaning the divine corner (it’s a corner shop) but could be read as L’Angolo di Vino, the wine corner.

^[2] Article is paywalled.

^[3] The name means a yellow female crow.

We were four when we cast off. The boat was comfortable but not luxurious—a 44-foot older motorboat, belonging to my American friend Donna and her husband Gianni, a retired Roman doctor. The other guest was Fabrizio, 74, also a retired doctor and Gianni’s best friend since medical school. I took the train down from Rome that Saturday morning to Agropoli, the port south of Naples. Fabrizio, who had a summer home in the mountains behind Agropoli, picked me up at the station in his silver Mercedes around noon, and we navigated through heavy summer weekend traffic down to the busy port where Gianni and Donna were already waiting on the boat.

Parking was scarce along the quay so Fabrizio dropped me with my overnight bag and drove off to find a space along the main road. Minutes later he called Gianni to say he had a flat tire and couldn’t manage the spare by himself. Gianni summoned a dockworker who sped off on his Vespa to help. A half hour later Fabrizio returned in his car, and the dock worker helped him find a parking space. But he seemed stressed and exhausted by the ordeal. Gianni told me that Fabrizio had a heart condition.

Finally we tossed off our dock lines and were underway, Gianni at the helm. As we rounded the quay, the Mediterranean opened up; far to the north we could see the cliffs of the Amalfi Coast; with binoculars I could spy La Rondinaia, the villa of the late Gore Vidal. It was a clear day but with a breeze that was kicking up rolling seas. After cruising south for about an hour, we dropped anchor in a cove beyond the beach at Castellabate for lunch and a swim. Donna and I dove off the stern for a dip; the water was warm as a bath. Then we climbed the stern ladder, toweled off and made a Caprese salad of local buffalo mozzarella and tomatoes.

As we ate, Fabrizio announced he was feeling warm and wanted to take a swim. He was tall and relatively obese—you might describe his body shape as similar to Trump’s—and he wasn’t about to dive off the deck of the boat. Instead, he carefully descended the stern ladder, holding an orange float that was tethered to the boat. After about ten minutes paddling around, he was ready to re-board.

But with the waves swelling and the boat rolling, Fabrizio was struggling on the ladder. We abandoned our Caprese salad to help him, then realized his left ankle had been caught between one of the ladder rungs and the transom. We couldn’t free his ankle, which was already swollen, and he was stuck in limbo—holding onto the ladder like a trapeze artist, swinging above the water.

Except Fabrizio was no trapeze artist. Donna and I locked our hands around his wrists in an attempt to hold him up, but his arms were running out of strength. Finally he gave up and said he was going back in the water. I tried to stop him: “Your ankle is caught, you can’t free yourself!”

But he had no more strength in his arms, so he let go of our hands and fell backward, assuming he would land butt first in the water. But of course that’s not what happened. With his ankle still caught in the ladder, he fell head-first, backwards and upside-down, into the sea. Now his ankle was twisted and trapped even more, his back was against the ladder, and his head was underwater. Donna and I grabbed his hands and tried to pull him up. By now Gianni was calling the Coast Guard on the radio. We managed to get his head above the water for a minute, but the rolling boat kept dunking him under the waves. He was still conscious, but obviously weak and scared. He was running out of strength, and we couldn’t lift him.

I dove in the water, thinking I could maybe push him up from below. I swam under him and tried but I couldn’t get any purchase. All I could do was push my feet against the propeller, which of course wasn’t turning but was sharp. I told Donna to hand me a rope, and I made a bowline loop to put around his wrist. Gianni was watching but he was also in his 70s with health problems, so he couldn’t do much except send out more distress calls on the radio.

I put the loop around Fabrizio’s right wrist, but Donna and Gianni couldn’t pull him up; he was just too heavy, and basically unconscious by now. My feet were getting sliced by the propeller and I was running out of energy trying to hoist his head above the waves. His dentures came loose and were rolling around in his mouth. I pulled them out and tossed them on the boat, but I couldn’t keep his head above the water long enough to try breathing into his mouth; I could barely keep myself afloat in the shifting sea. His tongue was hanging out.

“I didn’t realize he had dentures,” said Gianni, which struck me as a weird comment in the moment but made sense later, I guess. I mean, wouldn’t you want to know if your best friend had dentures?

Donna dove in and tried to help me position the orange float under his body, but the seas were too rough; it kept popping out, and I couldn’t tie it around him because I couldn’t let go of his head. We were all screaming “Aiuta! Aiuta”! Help!

Finally, after about 20 minutes, a speedboat of young vacationers approached—a bunch of guys and their dates. Two of the men dove in and swam over to us. They got on the boat and managed to get Fabrizio’s ankle freed—I think they had to break it. But they couldn’t manage to lift him on board either. One of them stayed on our boat; the other swam back to their boat, which then sped away to summon more help.

After about another half hour, me still in the water trying to keep Fabrizio’s head above the waves, a Coast Guard cruiser arrived on the scene and began circling us. I started yelling, “you need to get in the water and help us!” But they just kept circling. I was running out of energy. The water was tinted red from my bloody feet. But sometimes it looked like Fabrizio was breathing, so I held on, forcing myself to continue.

After another 20 minutes, a fast Zodiac arrived with two guys. They weren’t in Coast Guard uniforms; I assumed they were harbor masters. They managed to pull Fabrizio, now totally unconscious, aboard the Zodiac while Donna and I pushed from below, in the water. They raced off to the beach, performing CPR on Fabrizio whose mouth was spewing seawater.

Donna and I got back on the boat and dried off, my towel stained in blood from my feet. After a while, the Zodiac from the harbor patrol returned to pick up the young man from the recreational speedboat who had stayed onboard with us. They said they were trying to “reanimate” Fabrizio on the beach. In the distance I could see an ambulance and crowds of people along the shore.

We waited for maybe half an hour. Finally the Coast Guard cruiser pulled alongside and held out a basket on a pole; they wanted Fabrizio’s identification card. Then they exchanged phone numbers with Gianni.

After another hour, the guys on the Zodiac returned. “State parenti?” one of them asked. Are you his relatives? This was not a good sign.

“We are just friends,” I replied.

The man was crying. “I’m sorry. We did all we could. There were four medics on the beach. We need to contact the family.”

“He’s divorced,” said Gianni. “I know his children in Rome.”

“Come with us.”

They helped Gianni into the Zodiac, then motored off.

Now it was just me and Donna on the boat. We sat, waiting for at least another hour. Around 5:30 pm, the Coast Guard cruiser pulled up again and said they couldn’t let Gianni pilot our boat back to the harbor; he was too stressed after talking to Fabrizio’s son and daughter. “Are either of you licensed boat captains?” We shook our heads no.

I told them I was an experienced sailor in America but that I had never piloted a boat in Italy. “Aspetta,” I said. Wait. I went up to the bridge and confirmed I could read and follow the nav screen. But the dashboard engine controls were in Italian, and my nautical vocabulary was limited. There seemed to be controls for bow thrusters, which you would need to dock, but I wasn’t sure. I told the harbor master I wasn’t confident given the high seas.

“Arrivo,” he said. Then he boarded the boat and cranked up the engine while Donna and I raised the anchor. We were off, back to port.

Gianni was on the quay, waiting for us. People on the dock embraced us, consoled us. The woman who ran the refreshment kiosk brought us a pot of chamomile tea. I wanted wine, and lots of it. A woman from a sailboat moored near us recognized me from MasterChef and wanted to know all about the TV show. She didn’t know about the accident, the drowning, and I didn’t want to tell her.

We had eaten nothing but a slice of mozzarella hours earlier, but our ordeal was far from over. The police escorted us down to the Coast Guard station, at the other end of the port; there would be an interrogation. Which of course there would be; a noted Roman doctor with several homes had died at sea. Maybe we had murdered him?

We sat for a long time, past dark, in a tiny waiting room with an espresso vending machine and a large-screen TV playing an endlessly repeating video of a Twix candy bar commercial. They took our passports and made copies. I could see through the glass wall that they were photocopying every page of my passport. I had a double-size 50-page passport filled with visas from around world, going back almost 10 years. The guy ran out of paper. It took him a long time to find more. The clock on the wall kept ticking.

The officers explained that we would each be interviewed separately, doubtless to see if our stories matched up. Gianni went first. It took an hour. I snapped a video of a Coast Guard officer getting coffee from the vending machine. I don’t know why I did it, just boredom. He saw me and yelled, then made me delete the video. Then he motioned to a paper sign taped on the glass partition, warning in tiny print against no pictures. Whatever.

Next they called in Donna. Another hour. Then me.

Even by the normally musical standards of the Italian language, the commandante of the Agropoli Guardia Costiera had a notable name: Valerio de Valerio. The walls of his commodious office were decorated with many honors and plaques. The air conditioning was set to meat-preservation levels, unusual in Italy. He motioned me to sit across from his large desk and began: “How are you doing?”

“Well,” I said, “I’m exhausted, hungry and bleeding. But mostly I’m sad and consumed by guilt that I couldn’t save him. Otherwise, fine.”

Then he asked me to recount the story of what happened, step by step. Sometimes he interrupted me—I was going too fast; he wanted to know more about this or that. He was typing away as I spoke. At one point he seemed skeptical of how it all happened. As in, why couldn’t we release his ankle right away? Why was it so difficult to free him from the ladder? I said, “Signor Commandante, I lift weights every day; I exercise, I ride my bicycle all around Rome even on the hottest days. I’m in pretty good shape, but I’m 64 years old and this guy was fucking heavy.” He nodded.

At the end of my story, he read back his written version, then asked if I wanted to add anything else. I wanted to say “Yeah, where the fuck were you guys when we needed you? Why did the cruiser just circle around for an hour while I was in the water, bleeding and trying to save his life by myself?” But I said no, it’s fine. He printed out three copies, then made me read and sign them. We were done.

It was 10:30 when we sat down to dinner at the Palazzo Dogana overlooking the harbor. The hotel’s elegant dining terrace is, naturally, noted for its fresh seafood, but I’d had quite enough of the sea for one day; the saltwater was still stinging my lacerated feet. I briefly considered the bocconcini of angler fish over a white bean cream sauce with grated bottarga roe from Sardinia. Instead I ordered the veal chop with fries and arugula. We ate mostly in silence. The owner stopped by our table to take a selfie with Max di MasterChef; some other diners did the same, all of them oblivious to our disastrous day. People were dressed up, and we looked like slobs having not changed or cleaned since the ordeal. After dinner Gianni announced he was retiring to the boat, but Donna wanted to show me the historic old center of town, up on the cliffs above the sea. I agreed to hobble up with her—the wine having sufficiently anesthetized my wounded feet.

By the time we scaled the steep road up to the centro storico it was after midnight. The main drag, lined with bars, was packed with young people drinking—just another Saturday night in a port town during summer vacation. They swarmed me. “Max! Max! Oddio! Look, it’s Max di Masterchef! Can we take a picture? Can we buy you a drink? Tell us about the chocolate sphere, how did you do it?” Their accents confirmed they were mostly young Neapolitans—citizens not noted for their reticence, even by the relaxed standards of propriety in Italy.

What could I say? “I’m sorry but it’s not a good time. A man just drowned in my arms, I’ve been interrogated by the Coast Guard commander, and I’m wracked with guilt that I might have saved him?”

No.

I said, “Guys, thanks for your support! I’ll have a Negroni, and a white wine for my friend!”

We slept on the boat. The next morning Gianni brought over the local newspaper with the headline news: “Dramma a Santa Maria Di Castellabate: muore noto medico romano.”

“Drama at Santa Maria di Castellabate: Noted Roman Doctor Dies.”

The article said an investigation was ongoing. I was glad to see my name was not mentioned, and I was never again contacted by authorities. I assume their “investigation” concluded, properly, that it was nothing but a tragic accident. Just one of those things.

After coffee at the kiosk on the quay, we gathered our bags and packed up Gianni’s car, another Mercedes—apparently the official vehicle of all Roman doctors. Fabrizio’s son was coming down from Rome to pick up his dad’s Mercedes. I put all of his belongings in the duffle he had brought along—his Panama hat, wallet, wristwatch, three phones and teeth—and dropped them at the Coast Guard station for his son to pick up later. It was Sunday, and Italians were all driving home from the beach. The normal three-hour drive from Agropoli to Rome took six. We didn’t make the usual stop to buy some local buffalo mozzarella at the dairy.

A few days later at the funeral in Rome, I approached Fabrizio’s daughter. She was a woman named Angela in her forties who it turns out was an acquaintance; she had been to a party on my terrace, but I didn’t connect her to Fabrizio that day on the boat. Rome is a small town, as its residents like to say. “Angela, I’m so sorry,” I said. I wasn’t meaning that cliché that everyone says at funerals—“I’m sorry for your loss.” This was different.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t save your father’s life,” I said. “I tried. I promise I tried. The Coast Guard never came for hours.” By then I was crying. She hugged me.

“Max,” she said, “non preoccuparti!” Don’t worry! “You know that Italy is a beautiful, ugly country.”

* * *

Of course every country has its ugly side. But the dissonance is particularly jarring in Italy, a place of such abundant beauty. Foreigners naturally focus on the beauty part—the art, the food, the sea, the fashion brands—ignoring (as tourists can) the pervasive Mafia influence, the ineffective and often corrupt governments, the violence against women that is still all too common. And yes, the apparent indifference of rescue workers to a drowning man.

The Italian’s fatalistic worldview can be partly attributed to the tectonic faults underfoot—earthquakes have killed hundreds of thousands of Italians in recorded history. Volcanoes smoke and belch fire daily. In this fragile and frequently violent land, the life and death of individuals outside the family is background noise.

Orson Welles distilled the bigger picture in The Third Man, playing the corrupt American businessman Harry Lime in postwar Vienna: “In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed. But they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love and five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock!” ^[1]

Apart from its chilling cynicism, Harry Lime’s monologue hints at some truth. Italy, like its famous pizza, was forged in a searingly hot oven whose embers still burn. The dozens of nation-states that comprise modern Italy were wrought into one land only during the time of the American Civil War, with equivalent violence. It has been argued that “Italy” is no more a country than “Scandinavia.” Italians can’t even agree on the word for watermelon. (Anguria in Milan, cocomero in Rome, popone in Tuscany, mellone d’acqua in Calabria).

Yet if there’s one thing that unites Italians, it’s television. Every home has a set in the kitchen, and it’s always on. The public and private networks beam the same mix of reality gameshows and car-chase local news, certainly the trashiest programming in all Europe, into every home the length of Italy. It’s not Michelangelo, but it’s not nothing. The literary form known as magical realism is associated with Latin America, but Italian culture has its own tradition of mixing fables and reality, from Pinocchio to Fellini’s Roma. Ambiguity could fairly be called an Italian invention, along with banking, pizza and the radio. You could argue the un-reality of reality TV fits into that category, whatever its cultural significance. In his autobiography, the German film director Werner Herzog wrote, “I watch trash TV because I think the poet shouldn’t avert his eyes.” I confess to averting my eyes when I appear on Italian television: That’s what I look like? I still don’t get it, but I’m happy to be a part of something Italians can agree on.

I came to Italy to eat well, hoping I might occasionally have the good luck to join Italians in their own kitchens. I didn’t expect to be in every Italian kitchen, every Thursday night. Sometimes you get more than you hope for. Sometimes you get what you could never imagine.

[1] The lines are not in the Graham Greene novel; Welles improvised them during filming.

“What’s that smell?”

Alexandra brightening my door, in blond braids and reeking of garlic and spices. Not her normal perfume.

“Ciauscolo!” she answered, holding up a long pink salami.

Ciauscolo! The rare spreadable salami from the Marche, the mountainous rural region of Italy on the Adriatic coast, east of Tuscany.^[1] Alexandra spent her formative summers in the medieval hilltop village of Cingoli, deep within the Marche, where pigs run (sort of) wild, foraging for acorns, and the resultant salami tastes like mountains and meadows if you can imagine that.^[2]

If North Americans know anything about Italian spreadable salamis they probably know about ’nduja, the funky spicy Calabrian specialty currently trending globally. ’Nduja, bright red and fiery, is made from ground pork, sun-dried chili peppers and salt. Basta. Ciauscolo, by contrast, has no peppers and is thus neither red nor hot. Instead, pieces of ground pork shoulder and belly from those acorn-eating pigs are macerated with garlic (lots), white wine, fennel seed, salt and pepper, plus aged prosciutto.^[3] Then you stuff it into small intestines and cold-smoke it over juniper wood before curing for a few weeks. What happens is a flavor possibly more complex than landing a man on the moon.^[4]

Then there is the texture, which is soft enough (at room temperature) to spread on toasted bread, preferably local casereccio, the word for any rustic loaf, and preferably straight off an open fire. What makes caiuscolo, and for that matter ’nduja, spreadable is fat. Lots of it. And so we have arrived at our theme.

Where would we be without fat? Surely uncomfortable sitting down, but also dining drearily. Of course fat is functional, as when you need to fry something, yet it is so much more. Fat is the velvet sheen on the steak, the molten quilt on the cheeseburger. Without fat our Christmas goose is cooked, but dry as a tire. We can dismiss the repellant term “mouth feel” while still conceding the point: fat is the silken thread that embroiders a tapestry on our tongue.

And to what end would we sacrifice this pleasure? It is now understood that fat doesn’t make you fat. Neither really do carbs—what makes you fat is consuming more calories, from whatever source, than you burn.

We know fat is the good stuff because it has protein, which is why our taste buds are programmed to like it. It was long thought that despite its obvious textural qualities in the mouth, fat can’t be “tasted” like sweet, sour, salty etc. But more recent studies have found a fat-tasting protein on the tongue, indicating the presence of a fat-loving gene. Moreover, some people appear genetically programmed to like more fat, perhaps too much—and even for those of us who aren’t so programmed, it’s now known that eating lots of fat will alter our fat-loving gene to make us want more.

And so we have Jack Sprat who could eat no fat—his wife could eat no lean. Together, goes the nursery rhyme, they licked the platter clean. They sound like a kinky-fun couple who possibly made special home movies, but I pity Jack; Mrs. Sprat got all the good stuff.

This brings us to a necessary digression on the importance of moderation in all things, best expressed by Keith Richards in his excellent autobiography Life, on the subject of drugs: “I was very meticulous about how much I took. I’d never put more in to get a little higher. That’s where most people fuck up on drugs. It’s the greed involved that never really affected me.”

Wise words from a village elder, and so it goes with fat. Given a bucket of bacon drippings, a dog will eat until it dies. We must endeavor to control ourselves, sadly even with bacon.

Which doesn’t mean skimming all the fat. I get it: sometimes fat is just unwanted grease, as in a pot of homemade chicken stock. You want to remove it—then save it for the next time you roast potatoes. Of course that would be schmaltz in Jewish cuisine, which is derived from the Yiddish schmalts. It can theoretically be any rendered fat but generally means the poultry kind. In Germany, Schmalz is specifically pork lard according to law.

Rendered beef fat, commonly called tallow, has been in the news thanks to its promotion by U.S. Health Secretary RFK Jr., he of the skinny Nantucket ties and too-narrow button-down collars, among other more seriously odious characteristics. Tallow is undeniably tastier than vegetable oil when making French fries (although the French fry theirs in horse fat), and may even be healthier if you listen to some proponents.

Whatever it comes from, rendered animal fat is not to be wasted. When I lived in Ghana among cassava farmers who earned a dollar a day, the idea that you would waste even one gram of protein was unimaginable. Meat itself was a rare treat, its fat a precious gift. Of course, when your work involves swinging a machete under the equatorial sun, you can eat a lot of fat and not gain an ounce.

I’m fairly certain you can’t find genuine ciauscolo in North America although I’d be happy to be proven wrong.^[5] Nor is anyone importing ’nduja from Calabria. But what you can find is a very good American-made ’nduja from a mail-order company in Seattle, founded by Calabrians. I encourage you to get some, and spread it, lots of it, on some fire-roasted rustic bread.

^[1] Linguistic note: the Italian name for the region is Le Marche (pronounced lay-MAR-kay) which comes from ancient Teutonic for “the borderlands.” English speakers call it “the Marche,” pronounced like the month of March or, sometimes, “the Marches,” which more accurately reflects the plural of the Italian name.

^[2] They don’t technically run wild but are fenced into large, free-roaming plots. Having raised and butchered my own pigs who occasionally breached their fences, I am keenly aware that they are too smart to be herded much less come when called.

^[3] I have written previously about the Italian aversion to garlic. There are exceptions.

^[4] I know, the entire Apollo Computer Guidance program could fit on an iPhone, but you know what I mean.

^[5] The real stuff from the Marche is a protected IGP.

Of course I took the title from M.F.K. Fisher’s 1941 book Consider the Oyster. I consider oysters favorably over clams, but here in Italy they cost way too many euros apiece in the fish markets, more in restaurants, because most get flown in from France or Holland. Okay in Apulia they’re now raising oysters, you see them on menus, but I don’t trust raw oysters from warm water which is why you eat them breaded and fried in New Orleans.

What we have are clams, and where we eat them, with spaghetti, is at the beach in summer.

Which makes no sense. Italy’s Manila clams, they came from the Philippines in the 1980s, are basically a crop—the fishermen if you can call them that sow the spawn in shallow beds, then harvest the mature clams, year-round. There is no “season,” technically. What’s more, most are raised in a small Adriatic bay near Venice; it’s not like the clams you’re eating at a Sicilian beachfront restaurant are hauled in on local boats but feel free to think that. They are trucked in from the Veneto.

The clam harvesters of Italy currently face many challenges, including successive droughts and floods, warmer water and the invasion of voracious Atlantic blue crabs, which probably came on a ship and decided to stay, devouring the clams and other native fish. Some days the clam nets are filled entirely with crabs, clicking their dangerous claws in defiance. As these are the exact same crustaceans considered a delicacy along the Chesapeake Bay, one reasonable response has been to encourage Italians to eat them. Authorities (right up to the prime minister) have been promoting crab dishes. But Italian culinary traditions change at the speed of cold molasses, and at any rate getting manicured Italian women to wrestle with a crab at the dinner table is a big ask. And so Italians stick to their clams.

I had my first spaghetti with clams in 1980, at a long-gone place in Bristol, Rhode Island called Tweet Balzano’s. Tweet’s was a legendary Italian-American restaurant a few blocks from the Narragansett Bay, with a menu heavy on Rhode Island seafood specialties like stuffed quahog clams (“stuffies” in the local parlance), fried calamari, steamers (soft-shelled clams), snail salad, and spaghetti with littleneck clams.

In my Providence days we went there whenever we could find someone with a car and a relatively low blood-alcohol count—it took about 45 minutes from downtown Prov—and I always ordered the spaghetti with clams in “white sauce,” which meant swimming in olive oil. It was not a subtle dish; like much Italian-American cuisine it tasted primarily of garlic. The waitress (this was before “servers” and they were never men) always brought around two large shakers—one filled with red pepper flakes, the other with some kind of processed “parmesan cheese”—and you were expected to douse the dish with both. It was delicious in the same way as a triple bacon cheeseburger, which is to say in the way of unbridled gluttony.

My first genuine Italian spaghetti alle vongole was in Venice in 1985 as a college student. It was a garden restaurant in Santa Croce, the less-touristed quarter across the Grand Canal from the train station. Anyone expecting spaghetti with clams à la Tweet Balzano’s would have been disappointed, but by that point, after two months in France and many culinary revelations, I had developed a nascent European palate and an open mind. Beyond the smaller portion size typical of pasta servings in Italy, and the mere hint of garlic flavor, most surprising was the size of the clams—about half as large as America’s familiar littlenecks. The dish came with the clams still in their gaping shells, along with a side plate for the empties. This is traditional in Italy and encourages slow, mindful eating.

Slow also was the train one morning in June, temperature volcanic by seven, down to Sperlonga, the ancient white village dangling on a cliff above the sea south of Rome. Below the medieval borgo are among the finest beaches in Italy, not breaking news: Tiberius had a villa there, with a natural grotto which you can tour. A small museum contains the excavations, notably a colossal sculpture of the nude and copiously endowed cyclops Polyphemus from The Odyssey, in the process of being blinded. I wasn’t going to the museum today. I had in mind spaghetti with clams.

But not just.

Her name was Inez which means virgin which she surely wasn’t. She was born in northern Spain, in coastal Galicia where they also harvest clams, but her father died when she was a baby and her mother met a Roman and moved there and so it went. Her hair was straight and blond and her eyes rare green, and she worked as a waitress at a beach club there in Sperlonga. I came to see her every summer and to eat clams and she knew all that.

I arrived around nine, paid the bagnino for a lounger and umbrella, dumped my beach bag and went straight to the restaurant, under a gazebo, to reserve my usual lunch table and flirt with Inez.

“The clams are just in today,” she said, folding linen napkins.

The beauty mark on her cheek came in and out of view between tangles of her hair as she bent over the table. She was wearing a bikini top the color of strawberries under her white blouse. I wondered who she would swim with, and when.

“Don’t you prefer Atlantic clams from Galicia?” I felt like asking.

“When I can get them.”

Did she really say that? Wasn’t that from Spartacus?

Almost.

The famous snails-and-oysters scene, cut by censors in 1960 and not restored until 1991. The slave Antoninus (Tony Curtis) is bathing his master, the elite general Crassus (Laurence Olivier) who comes on to him using a culinary metaphor whose meaning would not fail a nine-year-old.

“Do you eat oysters?” says Crassus.

“When I have them, master.”

“Do you eat snails?”

“No, master.”

“Do you consider the eating of oysters to be moral and the eating of snails to be immoral?”

“No, master.”

“Of course not. It is all a matter of taste, isn’t it?”

As a matter of taste I took my table at one o’clock, the one by the seafront where Inez had put my name on a sticky note. I could have changed out of my wet swimsuit, but why bother? Red Smith, the late New York sportswriter, dissed the America’s Cup yacht race as a non-sport practiced by “rich men with wet bottoms.” At lunch at the sea in Italy, everybody has a wet bottom.

“The anchovies are good today.” Inez again.

“Marinated or fried?”

“Fried.”

I was thinking poached baby octopus to start, but I went with Inez and those fried anchovies, dusted only in flour and served with a lemon wedge, nothing else—no vinegar no tartar sauce and God forbid “mushy peas” like they do in England. Chips? That would be the crunchy bones and tails. Half bottle of local Pecorino, flinty and dry. I didn’t need to tell her my second plate.

The spaghetti with clams arrived, glossed in olive oil and glittered with parsley. I speared each tiny clam with my fork, twisted it out of the shell, then wrapped a strand of pasta around it. I did this more than two dozen times. On the beach, an old man was blowing up a plastic shark for his grandson.

“Are there enough clams?” Inez again. She winked.

When I was finished my fingers were sticky from the clams and I poured mineral water over them from the bottle, leaning over the rail onto the sand—an advantage to outdoor dining. It was hot and I wanted to swim. “Alla prossima,” I said to Inez. I’ll see you soon. It was only June.

Recipe: Spaghetti alle Vongole

1. Clean a mess of fresh littleneck clams under running water, eliminating any that are broken or remain open. Figure about three pounds in their shells to serve four people. Cover them in heavily salted water for several hours in order to purge the sand—thinking they are in the sea, the clams will open up to eat, in the process disgorging gritty waste. Rinse thoroughly.

2. Brown a clove of garlic (one clove!) in a large pan with a good glug of olive oil. Add the purged clams and a glass of white wine, cover and cook over high heat, stirring occasionally, until all the clams have opened and released their liquid. Dump them into a colander over a large bowl. Discard the garlic. Transfer the liquid back to the pan, pouring it through a fine-mesh sieve if you suspect residual grit.

3. Meanwhile, set a lightly salted pot of water to boil—a couple quarts, no more, as you’ll be using some of that water later and you want it super starchy from the pasta, to render the dish creamy. Cook spaghetti for half the time called for on the label. (Italians measure 80 grams, or three ounces, of dried pasta per person.)

4. Using tongs, transfer the partially cooked pasta into the pan with the clam liquid, along with a ladle of the starchy water, and continue cooking the pasta over low flame until al dente, stirring with tongs. As the pasta absorbs the liquid, add more starchy water as necessary; aim for saucy not soupy.

5. Add the clams in their shells along with some chopped parsley (and maybe red pepper flakes if you like), stir to combine, and serve with ice cold white wine. Lacking a view of the Mediterranean, loud techno music will approximate the Italian beach club ambience.

Italians currently have a problem with certain Americans but not certain American culinary traditions, notably the concept of grilling slabs of meat on an outdoor grill. I would call Italians barbecue-curious—not fully invested in the sense of actually owning a Weber, but open to possibilities. As an American in Rome, I am expected to be an expert in grilling by virtue of my passport.

I try not to disappoint. But there are issues.

From my 7^th-floor roof terrace I see a good deal of Rome, churches and monuments but also many other private terraces. And I can say with fair confidence that I have possibly the only Weber kettle grill in the historic center of the Eternal City.

So you might think I’m up there grilling all the time, wearing my Motown cap and my MasterChef apron.^[1] But no. The problem is, my roof terrace is up a narrow flight of stairs from my apartment level, which makes transporting all the necessary grilling shit a bit of a slog. Then there’s the issue of safety—on the roof of a 16^th-century palazzo, now divided into ten apartments, surrounded by other neighbors and historic churches, one can’t well leave an open flaming barbecue unattended; it’s not a suburban backyard.

In my quest to grill both safely and with minimal effort, I hit upon an excellent solution—the rotisserie. Using my electric-powered meat spinner (the technical term), I can impale entire chickens, shoulders of pork and other cuts, then light the coals, cover the whole bloody mess and open a bottle of wine as the grill does its job, allowing guests to revel in my brilliance.

This week I decided to spin a whole leg of lamb. I wanted to make it Greek style, which is to say bathed in lemon juice, olive oil, garlic, rosemary and oregano. As I have a something like a million lemons on my terrace tree, and an oregano bush the size of a hedge, this would indicate fewer trips up and down the stairs.

I also wanted to cook it until falling off the bone which is the Greek way and would allow the meat, over many hours, to become infused with smoke while developing a major crust. I know, the French faint at the thought, preferring their lamb medium rare—as do I when it comes to lamb chops and other precious cuts. But the leg is another matter.

About the bone: you can find a billion recipes online for a boneless tied leg of lamb on the rotisserie, the chief advantage being ease of carving. But a bone-in leg offers other pleasures, beyond the enhanced flavor from the bone itself and its ability to conduct heat throughout the center, assuming you’re not going for medium rare. Above all there is that inner cave dweller who compels us, now and then, to cook a recognizable piece of anatomy over an open flame—and I say that as someone who eats far less meat than I used to. In those moments, a primly bound boneless roast feels inadequate to the mission.^[2]

So on Saturday morning I pointed my bicycle to the sprawling Campagna Amica farmer’s market, just behind the Circus Maximus, beelining to the butcher for that whole lamb leg, then across the pavilion for a kilo of fresh new potatoes, still caked in the black volcanic soil of Lazio. A €3 glass of organic Pecorino white wine pulled from the tap (the imperative to support local producers begins at daybreak), and I was on my way home before lunch.

First I made a paste of olive oil, lemon zest, chopped rosemary and dried Sicilian oregano which we buy on the branch; I have a pot of fresh oregano growing on the terrace but sometimes I prefer the intensity of dried, the importance being to avoid any in a plastic jar sitting above the stove for a year. Then I reduced a dozen or so garlic cloves to slivers. Making slits all over the leg with a pointed knife, I pushed garlic slivers and herb paste deep into the meat. Salt, pepper, an olive oil massage, into the fridge overnight.

My plan was to roast the potatoes in a (disposal) pan under the turning meat, to soak up any juices. I often make Greek-style oven-roasted potatoes, cut into thick lengths like French bistro-style fries, in a sheet pan with equal amounts lemon juice, olive oil and chicken broth—a brilliant technique (not mine) that eliminates the fussy bother of parboiling the potatoes, as the liquid helps them cook while soaking into the spuds. Today I decided to sub white wine for the broth, just because. And to keep it simple, I figured the same mix could pass for a basting liquid—important because a lamb leg doesn’t have all that delicious fat like a pork shoulder.

So I mixed up half a cup each of lemon juice, olive oil and white wine, added a lot of minced rosemary, dried oregano and cracked pepper, then divided it in two. In the half for the potatoes I added sea salt; the half for basting I left unsalted, the leg already being salty enough. To the baste mixture I added, just for the hell of it, a good glop of mustard; I used a French honey Dijon because I had it.

And I went up to the grill. I used trad briquets instead of lump charcoal because as much as I like real wood coals, which burn hotter for steaks and grilled vegetables, the briquets provide a longer, slower heat desirable for rotisserie, and they don’t extinguish when you cover them. I lit a chimney of coals (maybe 20), arranged them on either side of the rotisserie, pan of potatoes in the center, and set the lamb and the kettle cover above. Every so often I added a few coals and a handful of wet hickory chips, but not too much. And a few branches of rosemary straight off the bush. More often I basted. All of this while reading Ferdinand Addis’s excellent anecdotal history of Rome, The Eternal City, on my teak recliner.

At five pounds, the roast took about five hours to reach 200F/95C, an ideal temperature for falling off the bone. The book took longer. A simple salad dressed in olive oil and lemon juice was the final link. By the time Alexandra and our three guests arrived (bearing six flavors of artisanal gelato for dessert), everything was ready. By midnight we were down to the bone.

^[1] Upon finishing MasterChef Italia the contestants are gifted their personal aprons, MasterChef logo and our names embroidered, with the strict proviso that we can only wear them at home and never on social media.

^[2] My son Harper is the family expert on pork barbecue; for more on his adventures grilling in Italy see here.

A welcome sign of summer in Rome: the army of workers erecting popup bars and restaurants along the quays of the Tiber. Beginning in early June, tourists and residents alike snake down marble stairs from the embankments for riverside dinners of—well, what’ll it be? Pasta Carbonara sure but also smashburgers and Tex-Mex. Local wines for a song, IPAs on tap, margaritas frozen or not. Live music? You might catch an excellent country western group with an Italian singer who could pass for Loretta Lynn. Who knows? Everybody goes.

Last year I went one steamy night to meet up with a group of American expats, seeking every now and then to speak English. One of the guests was not a fellow expat but a divorced tourist from New York, of middle age and medium paunch. He wasted no time telling the table of strangers, unbidden, that he was a bond trader with an apartment on Park Avenue before yelling at the waiter for the best bottle of local red. Soon arrived a fresh €20 Cesanese from the Castelli Romani south of Rome. Our trader peeled off a €20 note, then handed the surprised young waiter another €20 tip as the rest of us locals looked on, aghast.

Having failed at this late stage in life to master the saxophone, I can at least claim to have learned, generally speaking, to withhold unsolicited advice. But I was already one bottle in for the night (a cracking cold Sicilian Grillo as I recall), and so whatever.

“You shouldn’t do that,” I told him.

“Why not? I can afford it!”

“I’ve no doubt,” I replied, adding that I once worked on Wall Street myself—not mentioning as a lowly proofreader at an investment bank, my first job after college. “But then they come to expect tips like that from Americans. And the rest of us have to live here.”

I was thinking of that night last week when I saw an Instagram post by Keith McNally, the British-born New York restaurateur, owner of Balthazar and other hotspots. He posted a photo of the bill at one of his restaurants for $3209, presumably a large party, under which the guest had added a $5000 tip for the waitress.

Naturally the post got thousands of likes (McNally has 214,000 followers), with commenters singing the generosity of the guest. I get it—I spent years in America working for tips in restaurants. But from my position here in Italy it felt…creepy? The whole thing—the massive dinner bill itself (granted we don’t know how many guests), that obscene ostentatious tip, and finally the praise of the plebians for this blessed gift from the plutocrat. It can be hard to see how different America is from the rest of the world when you live in it. For those of us who don’t, the country’s dystopian restaurant culture opens a larger window into the so-called affordability crisis.

I believe them when American restaurant owners say they barely make a profit. When I worked in restaurants (and wrote cookbooks with chefs) I was aware that a 5 percent margin would be a good year. You can make as much in a money market fund, and no grease.

The question is, why are restaurant economics so different in America than in Europe? Why does everything from a cappuccino to a plate of pasta cost multiples more in America than in Italy, and still with almost no profit?^[1]

To be specific: how can a one-person wood-oven pizza Margherita in Bismark, North Dakota^[2] cost $20 (including 8 percent tax and 20 percent tip), while the same (better?) pizza in the historic center of Rome costs the equivalent of $10 including 22 percent tax and (let’s say) a one-euro coin tip? Do rents and other operating expenses really cost double in North Dakota than a European capital? As Italians say, c’è puzzo d’imbroglio (it smells fishy).

About those tips: Americans often justify their singular tipping culture by claiming that European waiters^[3] are paid a “living wage” instead of relying on customer alms. Let’s break it down. According to friends who own restaurants here, the average salary for a waiter in Rome is €1300 a month. But they get paid for 13 months a year (don’t ask, it’s the weird Italian bonus system). So they effectively make €1400 a month—at today’s exchange rate, the equivalent of about $20,000 a year. For that salary, they are also expected to speak at least English and preferably also French or Spanish.

I guess you could call that a living wage; the Italian poverty threshold for an individual is currently about €750 a month. But that’s a national average; in Rome or Milan, a waiter’s salary means living way out in the peripheries with a long commute, late at night, or living with parents.^[4]

So those “living wage” waiters, with bilingual skills, aren’t exactly living high.

To be totally fair, let’s dig a little deeper. Italian waiters also get, by law, cumulative severance pay of one month’s salary per year—meaning when they get fired or even just quit, they get another €1300 for every year they worked. Also included, again by law, is one month paid vacation every year, usually split between August and Christmas. Waiters also make tips—nothing like in America, but perhaps anywhere from €20 to €50 a night, depending on location and level of service.^[5] Those working in tourist centers frequented by American bond traders can make even more.

But to bite all the way into the core: Italian waiters, like all Europeans, also get free universal healthcare. Which means neither waiters nor owners have to deal with medical bills and insurance premiums. Yes, taxes are higher under universal healthcare, but it’s a fraction of what Americans pay out of pocket for their unregulated for-profit system.

So how does that affect restaurant economics?

In America, when you buy an overpriced pizza and tip your server 20 percent, what you’re really paying for is somebody’s healthcare. Follow that money up the chain, and your dinner is paying the multi-million-dollar salary of a hospital president^[6] or an insurance company CEO. As those jobs basically don’t exist in Italy, the price of your pizza in Rome does not include their salary.

For better or worse and alone among developed nations, America has chosen a casino society. Sometimes you hit the jackpot with a $5000 tip—but sometimes you bet the rent and go busto. Those waiters and baristas with outstretched palms are just one aspect of a society that, like Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, always depends on the kindness of strangers. You can argue for or against that system; sometimes it works out pretty well, and America has led the world in everything from culture to technology, although maybe not much longer. Other countries have chosen the more boring path of reliable social safety nets, and cheap pizza.

So when in Rome, do as we do. Go down to the river, enjoy the food and live music, and know that if you slip and twist your ankle on the marble steps (it can happen after a bottle or three of Cesanese), your ambulance and emergency care will cost you nothing. But do us all a favor and don’t leave a ridiculous tip.

^[1] For the record, inflation has also surged in Europe since Covid.

^[2] The “Daisy” at Fireflour Pizzeria is a Margherita by another name, and it looks authentic based on Google Maps photos. Current online menu price is $16 before tax and tip.

^[3] Italians don’t have “servers,” they are either waiters or waitresses. Mostly waiters.

^[4] Multi-generational households are common in Italy—a chief reason Covid was so deadly here, as kids brought it home from school to their vulnerable grandparents.

^[5] Tips in Italy are always cash (there is no way to add a tip to a credit card bill) and thus presumably never reported as taxable income.

^[6] For more on America’s “nonprofit hospitals” see here.

If the popularity of Mother’s Day brunch is any indication, something we most honor about our mothers—the imperative to nourish—is what we seek to deny on their special day. That is, our gift to them is a day free of presumed drudgery in the kitchen. By contrast, Father’s Day is often observed with a gift of cooking utensils—namely, barbecue gear—because “dad cooking” is fun, and outdoors, and vaguely dangerous.^[1]

Our mothers’ daily cooking, like daily anything, can be unexciting; its virtue is keeping us from a childhood diet of orange-colored snacks and sugar water. But the image of an aproned mama, or grandma, serving forth homemade dinners is perhaps second only to Christ-on-the-cross in Western iconography, especially here in Italy. The familiar can be boring, even when venerated.

My own mother, who never worked outside our middle-class suburban home, was an accomplished and adventurous home cook. Although her lifetime overseas travel itinerary consisted of four days each in London and Paris, she regularly whipped up Chinese-ish chop suey,^[2] relatively Russian beef stroganoff, sort-of-Swiss fondue, and any number of Italian “noodle” dishes, there being no pasta in Midwest America in those innocent days.

In my mind I can readily conjure images of her, in an apron of hot pink and orange (her favorite colors), setting out platters of Thanksgiving turkeys and pumpkin pies. But more commonly I picture her whirling hollandaise sauce in a blender to accompany steamed artichokes, her dinner-party showstopper.

In short she was following the latest cooking trends—straight out of fancy New York magazines back when magazines mattered—with enthusiasm and curiosity.

She never made any dishes from her own mother, having grown up in a severely dysfunctional inner-city Detroit home of Slovak immigrant parents named Joseph and Mary. Joe was generally drunk and checked out, which made him the better parent. Mary was a sadistic manic depressive who beat my mother (the baby of three daughters) every Sunday after returning from Mass, apparently taking the wrong inspiration from those images of flagellated martyrs.

In a career move inconceivable today, Mom left home, and the whip, at age 14, moved to Toledo and became a dance instructor. (Thanks for teaching me how to waltz, Mom.) She once told me that she was a virgin upon meeting my father in her mid-20s because in the Detroit ’hood there was no access to birth control, and getting pregnant meant the rest of your life married to a dull and possibly alcoholic factory worker like your dad.

She had in mind something else. Anything else. College was not an option but library books were, and she inhaled them—the usual bestsellers of the era like Doctor Zhivago but also psychology, European military history and anything about art and culture.

Thanks to her, our family’s version of suburban life showed signs of mild resistance. On a block of traditional Cape Cods, Dutch colonials and faux Tudors, our house was mid-century modern, all glass and overhangs. That was more a reflection of my dad’s taste as a former furniture designer for Herman Miller,^[3] but the Japanese rock garden instead of a boring lawn was Mom’s, as well as her hot-pink-and-orange interior designs.

She got out of the house. While working at the local city arts council—fundraising to commission a public sculptural installation by Alexander Calder—she became friends with Françoise Gilot, the artist who, apart from her own distinguished career, had two children and a decade-long relationship with Picasso, 40 years her senior.^[4] Her bestselling book about their love affair enraged Pablo. Naturally Mom had a signed copy, which I now treasure.

Much weirder was Mom’s decades-long friendship with the flamboyantly gay comedian Rip Taylor (they met at one of his nightclub shows and somehow hit it off), who had no family of his own and regularly flew in from Vegas to spend Christmas with us. He too loved to cook, often taking over our kitchen and filling the house with smoke as he pan-fried pork chops. He and Mom both died in 2019.

Today I never cook anything my mother made, not even her excellent but mild chili, which she made with ground beef and kidney beans (sorry Texas). Her kitchen lesson to me was not what she cooked but that she cooked, and that it was only one side of her life. She is always at my own side, in the kitchen and on the dance floor, even though I rarely do fondue, or the waltz.

^[1] Does anyone still give Dad a tie?

^[2] The origins of chop suey are disputed but it was probably invented by Chinese restaurant cooks in San Francisco in the 19^th century.

^[3] The Michigan manufacturer of iconic mid-century furniture such as the Eames fiberglass bucket chair.

^[4] Their daughter is the jewelry designer Paloma Picasso. Gilot, who later married Jonas Salk, died in 2023 at age 101.

May has arrived and with it the rising tide of tourists here in Rome. Which means the return of shorts on city streets. Although I disapprove of shorts in the city (any city) I realize I have lost that battle, indeed the war. Military tradition calls for a farewell address by the surrendering general, so as I hand over my sword, not wanting to sound like a sore loser or a get-off-my-lawn crank, I will endeavor to add some cultural context to my lost cause.

First let me acknowledge that I own and wear shorts, generally on vacation at the sea, or trekking in the mountains, or even on my roof terrace at home. Never on the town, never ever cargo shorts, never with socks, and especially (attention: Germans) never black socks.

I am hardly the first to rail against cargo shorts so I won’t belabor their awfulness beyond noting that those puffy pockets, even emptied of gadgets and pet frogs, cause a man’s hips to swell out, interrupting what should ideally be a clean, narrowing line from the shoulders (the broadest point) on down. Considering that few of us have bodies like Michelangelo’s David, tailors help us out by making suits with padded shoulders. Cargo shorts pad the wrong place.

The larger problem is that shorts of any kind make grown men look like schoolboys.

Personally, I put on my big-boy pants in the second grade and never looked back. Why would I choose to look like a lad unless absolutely necessary? Which would be rarely. Granting that individuals differ in terms of metabolism and heat tolerance, the fact is that humans don’t ventilate profusely from their calves. It’s not like your throat, where a tight collar and tie on a scorching day could literally kill you. It may be possible that in the history of mankind someone has fainted from hot knees, but it’s hard to see. Moreover, lots of men wear shorts when the temperature is not even close to hot. So what’s going on?

I believe shorts are part of society’s creeping infantilism.

It’s happening throughout the Western world—today I must sadly report that even some Roman men wear shorts around town—but it began in America, the locus of infantile adulthood. Consider that in America, adults age 18-20 can vote and fight in wars but not legally drink a beer. (The drinking age in virtually all non-Muslim countries is either 18 or 19.) One result is that colleges in the U.S. have become adult daycare centers. A movement led by college presidents called the Amethyst Initiative seeks to promote a debate about America’s exceptional drinking age; the school leaders, who did not sign on to be babysitters, argue that infantilizing college students has led to clandestine binge drinking—as opposed to in most countries where college students drink like (relatively) well-behaved grownups in public places. Indeed it could be argued that making booze taboo only increases its allure.

To cite a culinary example of infantilism, we have the odious adult baby-talk word “veggie,” now even condoned by the New York Times.^[1] Too harsh? Okay, vegetable is a hard word to say, especially if you’ve been binge-drinking in your dorm room. At least Brits have the self-dignity to reduce it to “veg.”

Moving back to shorts, I believe how we dress reflects how we think about ourselves, especially in the absence of dress codes. Menswear chat groups I follow are filled with lost souls scratching their heads over what the hell to wear—to work, to a wedding, or just out for a drink. The default comfort level appears to be whatever worked in grade school.^[2]

Many people, even some libertarians, fear what could happen in total anarchy. Lacking governments, police, rules, many assume society would default to chaos. We have the example of power blackouts where people not normally prone to criminal behavior are suddenly happy to smash shop windows and carry off electronics.

But if the experience of today’s anarchic dress norms is any indication, a society without rules would find men reverting to their inner five-year-olds. Am I the only one who finds that possibility more terrifying than angry mobs storming Best Buy to liberate Vitamix blenders?

^[1] The paper’s vegetarian cooking newsletter is called The Veggie.

^[2] For the record, my Catholic grade school required black slacks, white dress shirts and leather shoes, the optimistic assumption being that at least half of us were destined for the priesthood. Sock color was free choice, orange being popular.

Sleepovers at Alexandra’s offer many comforts, not least of which is waking up in the pink. Everything pink, in several shades, walls and floral curtains, in a style Italians have recently taken to calling molto Barbie. Her south-facing windows wash it all in morning sun, and between the time when you wake and when you finally decide to fight gravity and throw off the (pink) covers, the colors have shifted.

And yet…I would sooner eat raw badger liver than paint the walls of my own apartment pink, that color being so firmly associated with the feminine side—especially in Italy. This “rule” defies logic, frequencies of the color spectrum being objectively gender neutral. But it prompts reconsideration of other accepted cultural norms, here as regarding cuisine.

You will not be shocked to learn that Italians get upset when people mangle their iconic dishes (peas in pasta carbonara, balsamic vinegar on a caprese salad) to the point of parody. My Instagram feed overflows with videos of Italians, often married to foreigners and living abroad, rolling their eyes at what passes for Italian food overseas.

While it’s well known that Italian ingredients like Parmigiano Reggiano and Prosciutto di Parma are “protected” by territorial designations—meaning the names can’t be attached to cheese from Wisconsin or ham from Nebraska—not so many foreigners know that Italy also has official versions of iconic dishes. For example, the correct preparation of Bolognese sauce has been certified by that city’s Chamber of Commerce. Unlike ingredient protections, these “serving suggestions” don’t carry force of law—no Italian grandmothers are in prison for substituting veal over beef in their Bolognese sauce—but they do carry enormous cultural weight, signifying there is a right way (and by implication many wrong ways) to cook something.

Italians consider their cuisine part of their cultural patrimony; your “riff” on it is invalid and possibly criminal, like the tourist who was recently caught carving his initials on the Colosseum. Mind you it’s fine for Italians to experiment with their cuisine, and many Italian chefs these days are doing exactly that. But they own it; you’re just visiting.

I get it—that’s harsh and frankly stupid. Anyone can cook whatever they want. Anyone is free to substitute ingredients, plop meatballs on spaghetti or make carbonara barbecued tofu for all I care. Cooking at all should be encouraged.

And the truth is, what now passes for canonical Italian cuisine is recent. Consider that before 1861 there was no country called Italy, and certainly no “Italian cuisine,” only hyper-local dishes. Well into the 20^th century, you could find residents of rural Sicily unaware they were part of something called “Italy.”^[1] Even on the mainland, geography discouraged integration. While the supposed difficulty of crossing the Alps is a myth—passes through the range have been known and used for millennia, most famously by Hannibal and his elephants in 218 BC—the real obstacle has always been the rugged Apennine ridge down the spine of Italy, not easily traversed.^[2] Until the advent of trains (and their tunnels), residents of the peninsula’s Tyrrhenian coast rarely met those on the Adriatic side.

Not that they would have understood each other. Before “standard” Italian (basically Florentine dialect) became widespread thanks to television, most Italians spoke only their local dialect (and still do at home).^[3] These are not “accents” but proper languages that are often not mutually intelligible. Indeed it’s thought that the charming propensity of Italians to speak with their hands was born of necessity—so a man from Modena could chat with his compatriot from Palermo.

But hand gestures could never make the parched mountain landscapes of the south suitable for raising cows, which need the rich grassy meadows of the rain-soaked north. Nor could they make olive trees grow in the shadow of the Matterhorn. This is why southern Italians prefer pork over beef, olive oil over butter, and sheep’s milk cheeses like Pecorino over cow varieties like northern Taleggio. “Italians” weren’t cooking the same thing for dinner.

That all changed in 1929 with the publication of the first modern Italian cookbook. Ada Boni, born into an aristocratic Roman family, dedicated her life to codifying Italian home cooking. Her book, The Talisman of Happiness, became to Italian housewives what The Joy of Cooking was in American households—an encyclopedic reference work.^[4] As my friend Katie Parla, a Rome-based American expert on Italian food, has noted, Boni’s passion for promoting a step-by-step guide to pan-Italian cuisine happened to coincide with Mussolini’s vision of a united, orderly Italian culture—in which women, generally pregnant, took their proper place in front of the stove. But the book was not political and continued to be a bestseller in the postwar decades. To Boni we must credit the 20^th-century concept of an Italian cuisine.

End of story? I don’t think so. Consider that Boni’s recipe for pasta carbonara would make modern Romans cringe with its ingredient list including butter, onions, white wine and parsley. Either Boni was riffing on Rome, or today’s Romans are riffing on Boni, or everybody’s riffing on each other.

In my own international kitchen, cupboards overflowing with ingredients from China to Turkey and Peru, I riff judiciously on Italian, in ways that (if I may say) improve on the baseline.

The first is not cooking vegetables into mush, which is the Italian way. Some vegetables wear their mushiness proudly, such as cicoria ripassata—chicory boiled, then re-cooked in a pan with olive oil and perhaps a hint of garlic, rather like African American collard greens. Unfortunately, Italians also tend to cook non-leafy vegetables like broccoli, asparagus and Brussels sprouts into mush. If you’re like me, you prefer fresh spring asparagus boiled, broiled or grilled for a few scant minutes, then eaten by hand while still bright green and snappy. That makes you not Italian.

Riffs on vegetables suggest new versions of that classic late-night pantry dish known to Americans as midnight pasta, the most famous being spaghetti aglio e olio, tossed simply with toasted garlic and oil, possibly adding red pepper flakes and parsley. As a young man that was my go-to hangover carb recharge at Angelo’s Civita Farnese, the century-old red-sauce joint on Providence’s Federal Hill. Photos on Google Maps reveal it’s been sadly “renovated” since my day; one hopes the waiters are still old and surly.

The whole idea with midnight pasta (spaghettata di mezzanotte here) is that you use whatever you have on hand, which means riffing is in its genes. For Italians that can mean tossing in some anchovies, or canned tuna, maybe capers.

My own vegetal version is, I suppose, a take on the American dish called pasta primavera, but more restrained. Most primavera recipes, like so much American cuisine, throw in the kitchen sink with every vegetable in the spring harvest; the result tastes like everything and nothing. I make mine with just asparagus and some cured pork like pancetta. If you leave out the pork and its velvety fat, add more olive oil.

It goes like this:

Parboil asparagus, plunge into ice water to retain color, then cook penne rigate in the same water. Meanwhile, brown some chunks of guanciale or pancetta in a glug of olive oil with a clove of garlic. Remove the garlic; leave all the fat, which is your sauce. Cut the asparagus into diagonal lengths the same size as the penne and keep aside. Use a slotted spoon to transfer the al dente pasta into the pan with the pork, stirring to coat over low heat while adding a bit of pasta water to extend the scant sauce. Grate in some Parmigiano, toss well to integrate, add the asparagus and serve.

Or another version, courtesy my American friend Bruce Rubin in Orvieto. This one features agretti, also known as barba di frate or monk’s beard, a springtime grassy green with a taste somewhere between asparagus and artichokes. I’m told agretti is now showing up in some American farmer’s markets, so keep a lookout as now is the season. Italians would never mix agretti with pasta—it’s a side dish on its own, dressed with olive oil and lemon—so this is definitely Bruce’s riff. But given agretti’s long stringy shape, it’s a natural paired with spaghetti. Plus it rhymes. Large spaghetti (spaghettoni here) will perfectly match the width of the agretti. Prepare as for asparagus above, but hold the pork, add a generous squeeze of lemon and some red pepper flakes if spice is your thing. A pinch of sugar? Go ahead.

Having moved to Italy at age 63 I can hardly come out against change, which is good at any age. I’m always changing, and changing up Italian food, within limits: hold the peas in carbonara, please. Some rules, even silly ones, carry weight. While it’s possible that Paleolithic bachelors painted their caves pink before layering on those exquisite hunt scenes, I draw the line at my pink Oxford-cloth dress shirt.

^[1] The one book to read is The Pursuit of Italy by David Gilmour.

^[2] During World War II, German defenses in the Apennines delayed by nearly a year the Allied push to liberate Italy, at huge cost of lives.

^[3] So foreign is the concept of “standard” Italian that they gave it an English loan word: standardizzato.

^[4] Pointedly, both books came out in the years between the wars, and both reference joy and happiness in their titles.

I stood with bandaged hand, sunburned and bleeding sweat, before the fire. It was a charcoal fire in a kettle grill, which I had stoked nearly to the rim and into which I was now feeding long branches of rosemary that sent up curls of flame like solar flares. “The Old Fox is on fire!” yelled Giorgio Locatelli, one of the three Michelin-starred chef-judges of MasterChef Italia.^[1] That was my nickname on the show, the Old Fox. I scanned my body to make sure he was speaking metaphorically, having already filleted my left hand while trying to fillet a fish in front of several cameras.

We were on a helipad at the end of a long pier on Lake Iseo, a glacial teardrop two hours east of Milan in the foothills of the Alps. Every season the show moves out of the studio for several episodes to engage in external team challenges, generally in scenic locations around Italy. We had left Milan before dawn in a tour bus. We had no idea where we were going other than what we could see from the tinted windows: east on the A4 autostrada toward Venice. We passed Bergamo as dawn broke, the morning sun sending orange rays across the industrial landscape of Italy’s wealthiest region. The factories appeared cast in bronze as early rush-hour traffic merged onto the highway. Before Brescia we left the highway and navigated several roundabouts with signs pointing the way to Lago Iseo. Soon the road narrowed and threaded into the Alpine foothills, finally delivering us to the day’s scene of torture.

The big H on the helipad had been covered with the MasterChef logo, a lower-case m encircled by coils like an electric stove burner. Behind me, across the water, lay several islands with high castles and Renaissance churches. One island was owned by the Beretta family, they of the handguns. In 2016 the late artist Christo had installed his project Floating Piers between the mainland and two of the islands. Busy stoking the coals of my grill, I was not enjoying the view.

Chef Locatelli started dancing and singing: “Come on baby light my fire!”

But I wasn’t thinking about the Doors song. In my mind was another song from that era, by Harry Nilsson, that summed up my situation during the autumn of 2020: “Jump Into the Fire.”

We were down to ten—two teams of five on this external challenge. Our protagonista that day, meaning the principal ingredient we were meant to cook with, was agone, a small freshwater shad caught on the lake at night, in long nets. The fishermen, it was explained to us, salt the catch for two days followed by a month of air drying. Finally they press them into containers and marinate them in olive oil for several months. Of course this is a preservation technique that pre-dates refrigeration; I was familiar with similar dried fish while living in West Africa but also from my years in Maine, where people still harvest alewives every spring as they move up rivers from the sea to their freshwater spawning grounds. The alewives are then dried and smoked. Our challenge was to cook a multi-course meal using the preserved shad and other local ingredients—such as other species of fresh (not preserved) fish from the lake, polenta and so on—for the local fishermen and their families, who would then judge the winning team.

We had two hours.

Scanning the supplies in our mobile pantry as the giant boom-mounted clock ticked, my fellow Team Red members started getting all chef-y. They were younger than I, mostly by decades, with many hoping to parlay their MasterChef appearance into careers as celebrated chefs. I understood that—even though at age 63 it wasn’t my goal. But today I was getting worried about their menu ideas. There was talk of making a shad mousse. I looked out at the ten fishermen and their wives, now gathering at long tables on the other side of the helipad. They reminded me of lobstermen in Maine, with swollen, scarred, callused hands from a life of dragging heavy traps and nets. Their skin was bronze as beeswax, like the Maine fishermen at the bar in Rockland who joked they got their tan at “Steel Beach” meaning on the boat. They were drinking coarse local wine and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes.

I asked my teammates if they had noticed the piles of firewood outside the houses when we drove in, then pointed at the grills next to our cook stations. I said we need to grill the fish, not make a mousse.

My teammates were skeptical. What could an American possibly know about cooking? I plowed on, noting we had 40 preserved fish in our crate, for 20 guests. We could grill half, cook the other half some other way, then decide which to plate.

Someone said, “Then we have no room for error.”

“So don’t fuck it up!”

I scanned the pantry in desperation. There were oranges, cinnamon and cumin. I could give them a Moroccan flavor, different but still grilled the way they understand.

More raised eyebrows. The clock was ticking. Team Blue, on the other side of the helipad, had already finished their huddle and were busy gathering ingredients.

I pressed on. “Ragazzi, tempo stringe!” Guys, time is tight! “What do you say, Jia Bi?”

Jia Bi was our team captain, 53 years old, Shanghai born but raised in Italy; she worked as an interpreter in Apulia at the port of Bari. She was squinting at us in the bright sun. She mopped her brow with the bottom of her red apron. “Max is right,” she said, as the camera crew circled us. She gave everyone their tasks—me on the grill—and said “Andiamo!”

Two hours later we squatted, dripping in the sun (there were no chairs no shade), watching the fishermen and their wives eat. Jia Bi had decided to go with my grilled fish. The diners were arrayed across tables set up on the jetty as camera and sound crews hovered over them; we couldn’t make out their reactions. But finally it came time to vote. Show staff members started gathering their ballots as we were escorted back to the harbor.

Hours passed; we waited. Finally the director summoned us back to the helipad. Locals stared and applauded as we marched through the town. The mobile kitchens had been dismantled, the helipad now bare but for the MasterChef logo. We took our places and gazed around the lake, unsure what was coming. Part of the show’s schtick is that on external challenges, the winning team is announced by some visual gimmick, like red or blue confetti erupting from a cannon or, at night, color-coordinated fireworks.

Then we saw it, a large ship rounding a point up the lake, steaming our way. Well, not literally steaming, more dieseling, although when it was built in 1926 the 79-foot steel passenger ship La Capitanio (named after a beatified local nun) was in fact steam powered. But appearances being everything in Italy, the current owners managed to create “steam” from the smokestack using mass quantities of dry ice. We watched as the ship drew slowly near—my team in our red aprons and the other guys in blue, a few yards away. Finally the Capitanio arrived about fifty yards off the helipad.

And then its smokestack erupted in a cloud of red steam. “Abbiamo un papa!” I yelled. We have a pope! That got a laugh, but the point was Team Red won, and we would avoid the elimination round back in the studio the next morning. After several minutes of cheering and high-fiving for the cameras (as Team Blue quietly sobbed in their own corner of the helipad), Chef Locatelli announced that the vote was 13-7 in our favor. Not even close. Antonio, a 22-year old graduate student in chemistry, also on our team, was softly crying. He explained to the judges that today’s challenge reminded him of summers with his dad on their boat in Liguria, fishing for squid at night—just like in Maine.

“The guests singled out Max’s grilled fish as the best plate,” said Locatelli. “Another bullseye for you, Max. They appreciated that it was a treatment very similar to their traditional method, but you took it a step forward.”

It was dark when we finally climbed on the bus for the long drive back to Milan. It had been a good day on the lake. As we collapsed into our leather Pullman seats I was thinking about those fishermen. Every day, out on the water in their flat-bottom boats, they brought home food for their families and the world beyond. Fishing—that was work that meant something. Not like us, spending three months of our precious time on Earth making a reality TV show. Reality. No, reality wasn’t “competitive cooking” on TV with an official paper towel sponsor. It wasn’t even making a floating “art installation” across the lake. Fuck us. Fuck Christo and the fucking ship he came in on, which was possibly La Capitanio. Reality was netting shad from small boats.

As our bus trundled through the narrow, dark streets of Iseo, I looked out at the modest cottages of the fishermen. From every window, in every home, flickered a warm glow. But the fisherfolk were not sitting around the primeval hearth. They were all glued to their TV sets.

Recipe: Grilled whole fish with North African flavors

This is a no-recipe recipe, which is how I made it on Lake Iseo when my team won the challenge, cooking for the fishermen who harvest and cure lake shad. My idea was to grill the whole fish over coals, as they do—but with some vaguely North African flavors to make it just a little different.

“Vague” is the key word—there’s no set portion or ingredients list, whatever you want. But basically I would make a type of Moroccan chermoula sauce, which is a fistful of chopped cilantro, parsley, some toasted and ground cumin seeds, salt, chopped garlic (remove the strong-tasting green shoot), paprika and cayenne pepper to taste. Mix it all up with a glug of olive oil and some lemon or orange juice. Add toasted ground caraway seeds for a more Tunisian flavor. Try coriander. Maybe turmeric.

Take some whole fish like dorade or red snapper, coat them inside and out with the sauce. Add some preserved lemon bits and whole olives inside, but then go easy on the salt. Grill over hot coals, first making sure the grate is super clean and coated with some olive oil. Toss in some rosemary branches and cover for a few minutes to infuse with the smoke. Done. Serve with extra chermoula sauce.

If you’re not big on whole fish you could make this with tuna or swordfish steaks—or make skewers with the pieces.

[1] Technically, Michelin stars are awarded to restaurants, not chefs; their various restaurants have collectively won many.

Italians consider sunshine their birthright and feel cheated when it fails to arrive, especially along any seashore in summer. Even in cities, a cloudy day with a bit of wind will have residents beginning conversations with “Che brutto giorno!” and finding ways to avoid going outdoors. But the Tuscan countryside is an exception. Those melancholic hills, cloaked in silvery olive groves and dotted with ochre stone farmhouses, somehow gain when glossed in rain—even as the fog flattens the landscape and makes everything look like a late medieval altarpiece before the painters figured out perspective.^[1]

So it was without regret that nine of us gathered one rainy February weekend in a farmhouse owned by a Roman friend named Massi. We’d only met recently, through other friends, and this was my first invite to the country place. The sprawling stone casale near Siena has been in his family for generations; his sister maintains the compound next door. Most of the surrounding places have been bought up as summer homes by Brits including the rock star Sting—the region is now known as Britaly—but of course the grapevines and olive trees are still tended by locals. Arriving from Rome on Friday evening, I steered the car along slippery roads that wound like watch springs around the hills. Beyond the exertions of the windshield wipers, we saw few signs of human life.

Arriving way after dark, we parked at the end of a narrow driveway through the woods. The door of the house led directly into an eat-in kitchen, commodious and mercifully unmodernized, included a vintage six-burner gas stove, mismatched freestanding cupboards and two massive zinc-topped dining tables pushed together in the center of the room. But what caught my eye was the indoor grill—basically a counter-level tiled fireplace with a cast iron cooking grate, under a chimney shrouded in a decorative tin apron. Everything was blackened with soot. We would cook here. As Massi hauled firewood and charcoal in from the carriage house, we made a shopping list for Saturday morning. There was only one thing on it: Florentine steaks.

Tuscans do eat other things than giant steaks, which come from the region’s pale white Chianina cattle and are cooked blood rare (you don’t get asked your preferred doneness level). There may even be vegetarians in Tuscany.^[2] For them, there are beans, generally the brown borlotti which are similar to North American pintos. Indeed, the two ingredients that define Tuscan cuisine are beans and red meat—not just the famous steaks but also pork (notably the heritage Cinta Senese breed), lamb, rabbit and game like deer and wild boar.^[3] Tuscans are also famous for using up stale bread in both soup (ribollita) and salad (panzanella). And they have distinct pastas, among them pici, which are long hand-rolled strands that look like very thick spaghetti. Then there are the famous pecorino cheeses, whose grassy perfume comes from the meadows on which the sheep graze.

Beans aside—and they usually are eaten as a side—all this meat and cheese and white flour prompts a question about the so-called Mediterranean Diet, which of course favors plants, whole grains and olive oil over red meat, cheese, white flour and animal fats. Italians are known to roll their eyes over the Mediterranean Diet because that’s not how they eat. We could start with magazine photos of a typical Mediterranean Diet, which reliably show a fillet of salmon—a cold-water fish that has never set fin in the Mediterranean. Or the fact that, according to the United Nations Food & Agriculture Organization (FAO), every European Mediterranean country except Spain consumes less seafood per capita than most Scandinavian countries.^[4] And any visitor to Italy who has enjoyed an Aperol spritz at an outdoor table in late afternoon will recall the platters of salami and prosciutto served with drinks.

On the surface, at least in Italy, the Mediterranean Diet would seem to be more stereotype than reality—rather like the cliché of Italian men zipping around on Vespas wearing linen suits and silk ties. (Reality: t-shirts and track shoes.) Could the Mediterranean Diet, like those tailored playboys swanning about Rome in Fellini films, exist only in the imagination? The truth is complicated.

The Mediterranean Diet was codified by Ancel Keys, an American nutritionist and physiologist who came to Rome in 1951 at the behest of FAO (the organization is still based here) for a convention to address food deprivation in Europe after the war. Keys was already noted for a book he had written on the physiological effects of starvation, and for inventing the military K-ration (K as in Keys). He observed that despite vitamin and protein deficiencies attributed to postwar poverty, Italians had far fewer heart attacks and less coronary disease than well-fed Americans. So began a yearslong study across seven countries with his biologist wife Margaret, in which they compared diets and cholesterol counts from America to Europe and Japan. Their conclusion was that a largely plant- and seafood-based diet lowered cholesterol (a new field of study) and increased longevity.

No argument there. But how do we square that with what Italians really eat? Was the Keys study flawed?

Possibly, in one sense—the postwar desperation under which the Keyses conducted their study. Cities bombed out, farms and roads laid to waste, hungry Italians were looking for food wherever they could find it. Often that meant foraging for weeds and catching fish. Was the research inherently flawed by the extreme conditions after the war? Were Italians devouring veal meatballs by the bucketload until the war interrupted their carnal saturnalia?

For help I turned to my sister-in-law, a nutritionist and executive at the Gates Foundation, where she works to promote food security in developing nations all over the world. She sent me some academic studies on the history of Mediterranean eating habits that pointed strongly to a plant- and fish-based diet going back to ancient Roman times. I already knew that a primary condiment across the Roman empire was garum, a fermented brew made of fish, much like modern Southeast Asian fish sauce. The studies introduced me to written accounts stretching over centuries that documented an Italian diet heavy on plants, including plant-based fats like olive oil instead of butter.

So how did Italians, and in particular Tuscans, come to embrace red meat? In a word: affluence. As Italy’s economy exploded in the 1960s and 1970s—the country became famous for its cars, fashion, even Olivetti typewriters—its citizens started to eat…differently. “I imagine there’s been diversification into more meat consumption with income growth throughout the Mediterranean,” my sister-in-law told me. “That happens everywhere.”

Especially with children. Obesity is on the rise in Italy (although far below the U.S.) but notably among kids, who are not set in their dietary ways and easily tempted by ubiquitous fast food and processed snacks. That said, Italians are well placed to return to meatless cuisine when deprived, and you don’t have to go back to World War II. In his 1988 book A Tuscan in the Kitchen, the New York restaurateur Pino Luongo recounts living through the 1966 flood of the Arno as a child. While that inundation is best known for damaging priceless artworks in Florence, it also wiped out crops and cattle. Families survived on dried pasta and whatever cheese they had: every night, Luongo’s mother made spaghetti with ricotta cheese, seasoned with cinnamon and a sprinkle of sugar. The children never complained.

* * *

Rain, if not actual floods, was our only concern on Saturday morning as we set off in two cars for the butcher, in the nearby hilltop village of Pienza. The town, a Unesco World Heritage site, is dominated by an imposing Renaissance cathedral built by Pope Pius II who was born there. Around the church and its trapezoidal piazza radiate narrow streets lined with trattorias and shops selling the famous local pecorino cheese. There are dozens of varieties—bright red wheels coated with tomato purée and olive oil, others wrapped in walnut leaves or coated in ash. Some are aged for years and enjoyed with honey as an aperitivo or dessert, others are fresh and made for melting over beans or in sandwiches.

After stocking up on cheese, walking around the town, dodging puddles and ducking into the cathedral during a downpour, we sat down for lunch at Osteria Sette di Vino, a small warm trattoria with a simple handwritten menu. As we ran through the offerings, someone took charge of ordering wine—there were three choices: a house red Chianti, in straw-wrapped bottles, a Brunello di Montalcino (a half-hour drive west of Pienza) and a Nobile di Montepulciano (20 minutes to the east). No pasta here—plates included bean-and-bread soup, beans with olive oil, beans with onions, chickpeas with rosemary, various bruschette topped with everything from strips of lard to pecorino with truffle oil to fegatino—a local chicken liver pâté made with capers, anchovies and dessert wine. A specialty of the house was a grilled slab of pecorino topped with rigatino—paper-thin slices of bacon traditional to the coastal Maremma region of Tuscany. We ordered pretty much everything, including fresh anchovies in pesto sauce, marinated artichokes, grilled sausage, and sweet-and-sour onions. Dessert revolved around almonds from the local groves—either almond biscotti dipped in vin santo or a local specialty called serpe di Pienza, a coiled serpent-shaped almond cake.

After lunch, at the meat shop, the butcher hauled out a massive whole side of Chianina beef prime rib, then cut us four bone-in steaks about two inches thick; we figured that would be enough red meat for the nine of us, combined with a chain of sausage links about the length of a lion’s tail.

Back at the farmhouse that evening, we lit a thick layer of natural wood charcoal in the fireplace and got it glowing. I spread the sausage links around the edge, where the heat was lower, while others drizzled olive oil over the steaks, then a sprinkle of fresh rosemary from the garden and some black pepper. At this point, well into several bottles of wine, an animated discussion transpired on the subject of when to salt the steaks. I mentioned that Americans typically salt steaks before cooking, the better to season them fully. The Italians scoffed. “That will only draw out the moisture!” said one. Indeed, Italian tradition is to serve rare steak with a salt cellar at the table, from which diners generously dust each slice just before eating. I argued that I didn’t think salting two-inch steaks an hour in advance would dry them out measurably—but nor did I think the salt would penetrate much in the way of seasoning the whole steak, so it’s a wash. In the end, I usually end up sprinkling salt on each slice anyway.

“Max, how are the sausages doing?”

Like many Italians, Massi has a way of dismissing your stupid American ideas with a return to some important matter at hand—in this case, not burning the sausages.

And so we ate, a lot. There was salt on the table. All over the table. There were no sausages or steaks left over, and not much wine. The rain beat down all night. The ping pong table in the courtyard was as useless as the swimming pool.

As luck would have it, on another rainy day in Rome months later, I was reading an essay by Emiko Davies (an Australian-Japanese cookbook author who lives in Tuscany) about the first known mention in the West of Japanese cuisine. She was reporting on the chronicles of a Florentine traveler named Francesco Carletti, who detailed his culinary adventures in Japan during the 1590s. His diary is the first known description in the West of Japanese cuisine—and the last for centuries, as the country would soon close itself to foreigners until the late 18th century. Beyond Carletti’s enthusiasm for strange Japanese ingredients like miso, what caught my eye was his lament over the lack of red meat: “They eat meat very little because of a certain superstition of theirs.”

So could it be that Italians have always preferred steaks over weeds from the meadow, or a fish full of bones? Could Italians have been, since medieval times, more like modern Americans firing up the barbecue than we imagine? Granted, the High Renaissance of Carletti’s Tuscany was a time of prosperity—the “one percent” of Renaissance Florence and Siena invented modern banking. For them, meat was maybe a status symbol. I don’t know. But on a rainy weekend in Tuscany in a stone farmhouse with rare steaks sizzling on a blazing hot kitchen grill, I saw a Mediterranean Diet of many colors, but mostly red.

[1] The first record of a painting to employ perspective was a 1415 rendition (now lost) of the Florence Baptistery by Filippo Brunelleschi; perhaps all those flattened, foggy Tuscan landscapes inspired him to invent the graphic idea of horizontal lines converging on a distant point that we now take for granted.

[2] Saint Catherine of Siena eventually ate nothing except the daily Eucharist; she died at age 33 of a stroke, doubtless caused by what we would today call anorexia.

[3] Tuscans are known as the most enthusiastic hunters in Italy.

[4] The fish eating capital of Europe is Portugal, which like Scandinavia lacks a Mediterranean coast.

If Romans are fond of saying they don’t live in Europe (which starts in Milan), Calabrians would be justified in claiming they don’t live in Italy. Yes, every region of a country only unified since the 1860s lays claim to its “otherness.” But Calabria stands apart, and not just for its Arabic-sounding dialect. Another chief Calabrian distinction is culinary: here on the toe of the Italian boot, the only region of Italy surrounded by both the Tyrrhenian and Ionian Seas, live the only Italians who eat seriously spicy food. Here everything is hot—sometimes even sweets, such as a local honey flavored with ‘nduja, the spreadable cured spicy pork that is now enjoying trendy food status around the world.

Another thing about Calabria, related to food, is the Church. Modern Italy is largely secular; only 19 percent of the population report weekly church attendance—less than half that of the U.S.^[1] But national figures belie significant regional differences, and the farther south you go, the greater role religion plays in daily life. The most important religious rituals, and the biggest meals, happen during Holy Week.

* * *

I arrived by train on the afternoon of Good Friday. The station at Pizzo was packed with Easter travelers—mostly younger Calabrians who had moved north in search of work but always come home for Pasqua. My son Harper and his Calabrian wife Eva were running late due to a road closure, so I ambled out to the far train platform and the view across the Tyrrhenian Sea. Far on the horizon, the volcanic island of Stromboli was smoking. Finally they arrived and we set out over the hairpin road into the mountains behind the sea, stopping to let herds of sheep cross, that leads to Dasà.

Their village is regionally famous for its annual Easter procession called the ‘Ncrinata. The word in local dialect means “encounter,” and versions of this ritual exist throughout southern Italy and Spain. It’s a re-creation, with life-size wooden statues hoisted on shoulders, of the mythical meeting on Easter morning between Mary, St. John the Apostle and the risen Jesus. The story is not actually in the Bible, and its origins are unclear, but here’s how it goes in Dasà:

Despondent Mary, mourning the death of her son on Sunday morning, encounters John who tells her that the crucified prophet has risen from the dead. She has doubts; he leaves and then returns, at full sprint, with the resplendent son of God tagging along; joy ensues as Mary casts off her black mourning veil and a brass marching band strikes up, followed by fireworks. Spectators, many in tears, rush forward to touch the hem of Mary’s dress.

Dasà’s public staging of the ‘Ncrinata, a tradition for hundreds of years, takes place on the Tuesday after Easter because two nearby towns host their own ‘Ncrinatas on Easter Sunday and Monday. Around noon on Tuesday, hundreds of people pour into the town’s narrow streets and squares, jostling for position. Balconies along the route sag under the weight of spectators. Preparations for the big event take weeks. A key logistical detail is the proper timing of the moment when Mary’s black veil, attached with small threads to her head, is torn off by a string. To foreign observers it can seem a bit like a marionette show or, less charitably, Barbie doll play. Except the dolls are monumental solid wooden sculptures.

The most sacred statue is that of Mary, the patron saint of Dasà where she is known as Santa Maria della Consolazione or St. Mary the Comforter. Her cult is such that every home in town has several framed pictures of the statue. She’s on a bumper sticker. There’s a mural. On the day of the procession, banners with her image unfurl from balconies. The statue dates from at least the 15th century; its home on non-procession days is the oldest church in town, which was built a few years before Columbus discovered America.^[2] At one point Italy’s cultural authorities offered to pay for a replica of the statue, hoping the citizens might avoid parading the relic through town, on shoulders and over cobblestone roads. The offer was ignored.

Another statue of Mary (there are several in town) stars in a lantern-lit Good Friday evening procession along the stations of the cross, situated throughout the town. It’s a moving ceremony: town residents, including children, all dressed in white robes and turquoise shoulder capes, carry tall brass candle lanterns and guide Mary along the way.

It was nearly ten o’clock when we finally sat down to dinner at Eva’s parents’ home. Being Good Friday, the menu was fish: a first plate of spaghetti with stewed calamari, cooked for hours until soft as butter, followed by baked dried codfish imported from Norway and known locally as stocco—a traditional Friday meal in Calabria. Unlike baccalà, which is cod that has been preserved in salt, stocco is air dried on racks—a preservation technique well suited to frigid Norway but impossible in southern Italy, where the intense sun would spoil the fish.^[3]

You might ask why a preserved fish from Norway is so popular on the toe of Italy, and the answer is an earthquake. On December 28, 1908, a powerful quake centered under the Straits of Messina between Sicily and Calabria, followed by a tsunami, killed around 80,000 people—about the same number as first-day deaths at Hiroshima.^[4] The towns of Messina (on the Sicily side) and Reggio Calabria were almost completely leveled. Survivors—maimed, homeless and hungry—wandered aimlessly through the ruins. Countries around the world rallied to send aid. Norwegians sent what they had a lot of: stocco. Ever since, Norwegian stocco has been a staple of Calabrian cuisine.

Stocco can be a hard dish to like. To the American palate (and even many anchovy-loving Italians) it’s on the wrong side of fishy, although I’m guessing no cat has ever turned it down. You could call it an acquired taste, but on first bite you may resolve never to acquire it again.

In Dasà, the Saturday of Easter weekend is what tour itineraries would call “free time”—an unsupervised day with no formal events until Midnight Mass. I woke early to meet Harper for a one-hour hike up the mountain road to Arena, another village like Dasà but organized dramatically along a high ridge and boasting the ruins of an 11th-century Norman castle, mostly destroyed by another earthquake in 1783. In places the road had no shoulder and bordered a cliff edge that dropped off to steep olive groves, with views beyond the valley to the distant sea. The olive trees were ancient and gnarled, and the branches hung over the road drooping with silvery leaves and bracts of infant olives, in April the size of sesame seeds. On the high side of the road, on terraced land above a steep incline, were barking dogs and chicken coops made of rusty old bed spring frames. Orange trees flowered, the air perfumed by the scent of their blossoms.

I woke early on Easter morning and walked down to the café owned by Salvatore Cognetta. You might think Salvatore would be closed on Easter Sunday, but then where would residents get their morning cappuccino and cornetto? In that sense the café functions as a public service, like a pharmacy.

Salvatore is from a famous Italian family of bakers or pasticcieri; his father was considered one of the best in Italy, and he carries on the tradition. I generally avoid Italian cornetti as inferior to the French croissant—more like a piece of soft, sweet bread than a flaky pastry. But Salvatore’s cornetti rival anything in Paris: whisper-thin layers of butter-glazed parchment, so tender and delicate that every bite flakes into confetti-like fragments. At the standup bar, cornetti are served on a napkin, there is no plate, and when you are finished eating, you can’t help but leave the counter and floor looking like a child has just been served. Every morning Salvatore rises before dawn and bakes three types: cream-filled, chocolate-filled (Nutella) and vuoto (“empty”) meaning plain. I always get vuoto because Salvatore’s cornetti need no enhancements.

He told me that in Rome most cafés buy frozen raw cornetti, mass-produced, and toss them in the oven. “Look, I freeze mine too,” he said, “but I make them myself, with lots of butter.”

Salvatore knows Rome—his son has a rare heart condition that has required surgeries and frequent follow-ups at a major children’s hospital in the capital.^[5] He tells me that the hospital has a full café with baristas and an expresso machine, which he avoids: “The vending machines make better coffee.”

Easter lunch, with some twenty guests, was up the street at Cousin Bruno’s. A lawyer and amateur painter, Bruno is clearly one of the town’s more affluent citizens, but his only ostentation, if you can call it that, is a large late-model Audi parked outside his family’s townhouse. We arrived carrying trays of pork meatballs made by Eva’s mother Rosa—she won’t let anyone else make them because they never use enough pecorino cheese (“There should be more cheese than pork!”)—and her signature fried cheesy rice balls. In Calabrian dialect the oval-shaped rice croquettes are called braciole di riso, which is odd since in most of Italy braciole means chops or steaks.

After the antipasto course of meatballs and rice croquettes, Bruno and his wife Paola served up their first course of baked pasta—tube-shaped noodles in tomato sauce with salami, hard-boiled eggs and chunks of provola cheese. Next came platters of rabbit stewed with black olives, over which the conversation centered on how Chinese people eat ants, locusts and dogs. After all this food and many bottles of wine came the palate cleansers: whole cucumbers, peeled at the table, sliced in half and salted; peanuts in the shell; and lupini beans. Then Bruno opened several bottles of spumante as Paola brought out bowls of local strawberries, which you dip in the sparkling wine. Finally came the desserts, various pies and tarts, and Bruno cracked open his five-liter jug of homemade aged grappa (yes, he has a copper still) which closely resembled kerosene in color and strength. Everybody went to bed early.

Easter Monday, called Pasquetta in Italy and a national holiday, brought an outdoor lunch at a neighbor’s farm on a mountain terrace just outside of town. We sat, twenty-five of us including four priests, along a vast table under a grape arbor with views across to several hilltop villages and a colossal concrete cross rising above a local cult or monastery called the Association of the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

The first course was penne pasta with white beans in a light tomato sauce, the beans having been grown on a nearby farm by another guest. We passed around jars of homemade powdered hot peppers, present on every Calabrian table, and dusted our plates. Next came spicy fresh sausage off the outdoor barbecue. The meal was served with Cirò wine, a Calabrian red made mostly from the ancient gaglioppo grape around the hilltop village of Cirò, on the Ionian coast across the mountains from Dasà. There, sea breezes in the morning and evening help protect the vines against fungal diseases. Our host also tended gaglioppo vines, some of them many decades old, along his sloping land. After a simple dessert of sliced fennel and local oranges, out came cold bottles of homemade limoncello and an almost-black anise-flavored liqueur.

Tuesday: another Easter holiday, another massive lunch, this being the day of Dasà’s ‘Ncrinata. After the midday procession we retired to Eva’s family home and ate lasagna with a Neapolitan-style ragù of tomatoes, pork and carrots, followed by goat stew and, finally, roasted split goat heads. You scoop out and eat the brain first, then flip over each half and devour the tender cheek meat. I could have eaten a dozen. For dessert, Eva had made a traditional pastiera, the Neapolitan cake with ricotta cheese, orange flower water and a basket-weave crust. Another early-to-bed evening.

On Wednesday Harper and Eva were making a video about ‘nduja in the nearby town of Spilinga, where most of the commercial product is made. We toured an agriturismo where bathtub-sized vats of the ground pork-and-pepper mix were getting stuffed into casings of all sizes, then into a curing room hung with hundreds of ‘nduja, from the size of baseballs to ones as large as a car bumper. There they would age for months; some were coated in a thick impasto of white mold, which is harmless and washed off before shipping to stores. In another room hung rows of homemade ‘nduja, made by town residents, which the factory kindly offers to age for them in the temperature-controlled warehouse.

On leaving, Tomasso, the young proprietor, who had taken over the business from his father, handed me a plastic shopping bag sagging under the weight of ‘nduja products. There was, besides ‘nduja, spicy capicollo (a large salami made from the throat and shoulder; soppressata (a flattened, smaller salami); salsiccia (a dried link-type sausage dating from pre-Roman times); an entire slab of Calabrian pancetta, and jars of that ‘nduja-flavored honey—all of them just hotter than hell. And thankfully vacuum sealed as I was about to hop on the train back home. It was doubtless not the first time that a second-class train car pulled into Rome from Calabria heady with the scent of hot peppers and cured pork. It probably happens every day.

[1] In 2023, according to the Pew Research Center.

[2] A few years ago the iron cross atop the church façade was struck by lightning and destroyed, on a clear day.

[3] Stocco is short for stoccafisso which is the Italian adaptation of the Norwegian word stokfisk or “stick fish,” a reference to the wooden racks on which the fish is dried.

[4] The tectonic fault line under the Straits of Messina is one reason why a bridge or tunnel connecting mainland Italy and Sicily has never been built.

[5] The pastries may be better, but medical care in Calabria is inferior to that in the north.

It was Bastille Day and we had met for aperitivi at Joséphine, one of the few French wine bars in Rome—me and a few French friends who live here, along with some Italians. It was a small space, now sadly closed, near Piazza Farnese and the French embassy, run by a lovely Parisian woman named Diandra, with only a few tables and a carefully curated list of Gallic wines. Diandra, who opened only when she wasn’t working as an international flight attendant on Air France, served small appetizer plates characteristic of her homeland: a pâté of sea scallops, a cheese selection with walnuts and conserves, glistening paper-thin slices of cured duck breast, crusty baguettes and, with everything, small terrines of sweet French butter.

Italians do not spread butter on their bread. So there was some awkwardness when my friend Frederic, an interior designer from the Gascogne region of southwest France who has lived in Rome for decades, demonstrated for the Romans the proper application of butter on a piece of baguette before mounting slices of meat and cheese. Another friend, an Italian film producer and well traveled, eyed the terrine as if it contained spackling paste. “I’m afraid of butter,” he announced.

I think he was kidding.

A remarkable fact about Italians is their general lack of curiosity, bordering on hostility, to the cuisine of their neighbors. To be clear: when Italians travel to France, Spain or Greece, they enjoy the local food. (Possibly less so in Germany.) But they rarely show interest in it back home. I know of no Italians who make any kind of French or Greek dishes in their own kitchens. Ever. As for dining out, Rome has more Mexican restaurants than Spanish tapas bars, certainly none near the Spanish Steps. Greek places are mostly gyro joints. I know of literally four French restaurants in the capital, not counting Joséphine.

Ethnic cuisine, meaning non-European, is another matter. Thanks to Asian immigration, Rome has dozens of decent Indian, Chinese and Japanese restaurants, although fewer Korean, Thai or Vietnamese. They are popular, but as Romans are generally averse to spicy food, the menus lean toward mild. As for grocery shopping, the Esquiline neighborhood behind the train station, on one of Rome’s seven hills, has a vast international public market where you can find everything from green papayas to dried Persian limes and Kashmir paprika; nearby are several well-stocked East Asian supermarkets. I ride my bicycle up there almost every week to shop. Most of the customers are themselves South Asian. There are not many Italians, by which I mean European Italians—the immigrants and their children, like my fellow contestants on MasterChef, are also now Italian, even if many Italians have a hard time accepting that.

I have a Roman friend, an artist of noble birth who is half Swedish and went to college in New York—not exactly an insular rube. She once confessed to me her fear of Chinese food: “I’m always afraid of what they put in there.”

Before you accuse her of being hopelessly parochial, let me introduce you to Wei Wei, my Chinese tutor from years ago in Maine. Wei Wei was of diminutive physical stature but not short on opinions. “My husband says I am too judgmental,” she once told me. “I hate my husband to say that!” She once counseled me that in restaurants in southern China, “never order fighting tiger and dragon. You will get cat and snake together. That’s so gross!” The implication being that you must never combine those two otherwise acceptable meats, sort of like the Italian revulsion to putting meatballs on top of spaghetti.

Indeed southern China is notorious for its cuisine of exotic animals, some of them endangered species and others possible disease vectors. I consider fried insects to be safe and sustainable, and I have enjoyed them at night markets in Guangzhou. But even up north in Wei Wei’s native Beijing, where dog is often on the menu (“make sure it’s prepared clean and nice,” she advised), there are no-go food zones. “When I was a little girl,” she recalled, “my mother wouldn’t let me get snacks from the street vendors because they never wash their hands and you don’t know where they put them.”

In that context, I can forgive my Italian friend’s aversion to the mystery food of Rome’s Chinese restaurants. That said, while Italians can be picky and suspicious eaters, they don’t suffer from the larger American fear of food. For example, I have never, ever heard an Italian question the safety of raw eggs in pasta carbonara—whereas virtually every American recipe acknowledges the presumably grave danger, often recommending overly complicated and possibly ruinous solutions such as double boilers, pasteurized eggs, and so on. In Italy as in America, shit happens—and, as a result, so do feces-borne salmonella outbreaks. But cases are rare, perhaps due to Europe’s stringent food safety regulations; Italians just get on with their lives and crack the eggs.^[1] Likewise, Italian grandmothers pre-taste the raw mix of their pork meatballs with no concern that tomorrow they’ll be passing a tapeworm the length of a bucatini strand.

When I try to understand Italy’s relationship with foreign food, I find it helpful to think of the country as what might be called a net exporter of cuisine. I’m using an economic term but I mean it in a cultural context. The obvious example is pizza, arguably Italy’s national dish, enjoyed all over the world. According to Wikipedia, there are even five pizzerias in North Korea,^[2] after Kim Jong Il brought over Italian pizza makers to train the local cooks.

Speaking of Asia, we could look at Thailand—a country with about the same population as Italy. It’s possible there is more pad thai being stir-fried overseas than in all of metro Bangkok. I might be inclined to consider China and India as net cuisine exporters, except their huge size probably indicates more native cuisine at home than abroad.

Net importers of cuisine would have to include the U.S. and most northern European countries. As an extreme example take Greenland, that noted autonomous territory of Denmark. The national dish of Greenland is suaasat, a stew made of seal meat and blubber (like fat but with more blood vessels) along with potatoes and barley. Seal is a primary source of protein for indigenous arctic people, including those native to other European countries like Norway and Finland. But you will not find seal steaks alla fiorentina in Italy. On the other hand, according to Google Maps, there are even more pizzerias on Greenland (population 57,000) than in North Korea. To look at customers’ uploaded photos, some of them appear better than the pizza in Milan (sorry Milan). You can even get a pizza with reindeer meat (unavailable in Naples), drizzled in crème fraîche (ditto), with a bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape (good luck with that here).

You might as well ask for butter in Rome.

[1] Italian supermarkets do not refrigerate eggs because in Italy eggs are not pre-washed, leaving their natural germ-resistant coating intact. On our farm in Maine we never refrigerated freshly laid eggs from our chickens and ducks; sometimes we found eggs under trees, not knowing how old they were. We ate them, and survived.

[2] Yes, there is a Wikipedia page called “Pizza in North Korea.”

Italians eat few chickens. They’re mostly for special occasions like the flu, when you make chicken soup.

But Alexandra is on the usual Italian-woman springtime ritual of dieting before beach season, so I’ve been cooking more chicken, and more breasts. Fortunately I know from chicken, having raised and slaughtered hundreds of them (and ducks and geese) on our Maine farm decades ago.

As do the French. Which led me back to Richard Olney’s 1974 book Simple French Food. To call this classic a cookbook is to call Moby Dick a whale book. It is poetry, as few cookbooks are, and Olney—a fellow Midwestern expat, he to Provence—taught me as much how to think about food as to cook it. Indeed I take issue with many of his fussy techniques, which I think he would appreciate as one who writes, in his improvisational recipe for onion soup: “The mind rarely registers weights and measures in terms of visual bulk.”

Yet until my newfound, and romantically motivated, interest in chicken, I had not cracked Olney in six years living in Rome. Nor cooked much chicken.

Americans eat a lot of chicken. When the New York Times listed its 50 most popular recipes of 2025—after eliminating drinks, desserts and vegetarian plates—almost two thirds were chicken, many of them breasts.

Americans’ fondness for chicken breasts reflects two customs. The first is the general American reluctance to deal with bones. The second is the American fear of fat. I will hardly be the first person to observe the irony of obese Americans obsessing over fat, and many theories have been proposed to explain why Italians (among other Europeans) are thinner than Americans despite a diet heavy on processed pork like salami and white-flour pastas.^[1]

One plausible theory is that Italians don’t snack between meals, with the exception of small bites during the aperitivo hour because in Italy it is considered improper to drink alcohol without food.

Another credible explanation is that Europeans eat more slowly—there are bones to sort through—which may explain why they eat less, as eating takes more time.

In America, the palate for chicken breast has inspired countless adaptations of classic Italian dishes not previously associated with poultry, often substituting for Italy’s ubiquitous veal—as in Chicken Milanese and Chicken Marsala. Even Italian vegetarian classics like Eggplant Parmesan have been re-purposed with chicken cutlets. (“Chicken Parm” is not an Italian dish.)

I was having none of that. I wanted to revisit some classic French ways with chicken. Re-reading Simple French Food made me realize how much I miss not just French cuisine, but French techniques. You will search in vain for the phrase “stew onions gently in butter” in any Italian cookbook. I finally settled on Olney’s recipe for a whole roasted chicken, blanketed under the skin with a ricotta-zucchini-Parmigiano stuffing and thus tangentially “Italian” without going down the Chicken Parm path to perdition. It’s a dish I had made dozens of times in America, for family and guests, always to acclaim. Although unmentioned by Olney, the brilliance of this dish is that the stuffing protects the breast from drying out, allowing the thighs to cook longer than could otherwise be recommended, tenderizing them further. What follows is my updated version.

But first consider this: a recent article in the Wall Street Journal informs that Americans are changing their habits and now embracing the thigh over the breast. Meanwhile, Italians have taken a shine to chicken breasts, which I’ve recently noticed have gotten larger here—more like those boob-enhanced American chickens that I used to raise in Maine.

Stuffed and roasted chicken, hommage à Richard Olney

Olney’s recipe calls for spatchcocking the chicken, but as he then carefully re-shapes the bird into its natural form, and having personally made it both ways, I see no point in the bother.

1. Using first fingers and eventually inserting your whole hand, gently separate the skin from the breast, thighs and legs, being careful not to tear it. This is easier than it sounds. Rub the whole, on the skin and back side, with olive oil, dust with salt, pepper and dried herbs (I like herbes de Provence which includes lavender), and let sit for an hour or two.

2. Meanwhile make the stuffing. Coarsely grate a pound of zucchini, add salt and let it rest for half an hour. Squeeze out all the liquid through a sieve or towel. Sauté in a bit of butter until dry and lightly colored. Grate or mince an onion, then stew gently in butter without coloring. Mix the two and set aside.

3. When the vegetables are cool, add 1/3 cup or so of ricotta^[2]; a couple tablespoons of softened butter; a handful of bread crumbs (preferably homemade; I regularly run stale bread through the food processor and store it in the freezer); one egg; a handful of grated Parmigiano; salt and pepper; some chopped fresh herb like marjoram (I used the Roman herb mentuccia, rather like a cross between oregano and mint and known as lesser calamint in English, because I had some). Also because I can, I added grated fresh black truffle which I buy in season at the local farmer’s market. The possible absence of a fresh truffle in your pantry is not a dealbreaker.

4. Spread the stuffing under the chicken skin, all the way down to the legs, smoothing as you go.

5. Transfer the bird to a large casserole (a round terra cotta type like the Spanish cazuela being ideal) and bake in the lower half of a 450F/230C oven for ten minutes before reducing the heat to 375F/190C for 1-1.5 hours until the inner thigh reads 195F/90C. Should the breast arrive early to the browning party (every oven is different), tent with foil. Let rest before carving at table.

Olney counsels against serving the pan drippings as they are too fatty, but no law forbids saving them and, when chilled, removing the fat, to be used in cooking potatoes another day, while the gelled stock becomes a sauce for tomorrow. Or simply pour the delicious fatty drippings right over the stuffed breasts, when Alexandra isn’t looking.

^[1] The real Mediterranean Diet.

^[2] Try to find something better than those supermarket tubs of ricotta, which are made from acidified and stabilized milk. In Italy, genuine ricotta is made from the whey of cow, sheep or goat milk. I used buffalo ricotta, which is mild; sheep ricotta would be more intense.

Hats, meaning men’s hats, have been in the news lately.

First came a New York Times lifestyle piece about a purported renaissance in male headwear (presumably beyond ubiquitous baseball caps), based on some recent film portrayals and also the runway shows at Milan Fashion Week. Then came the pictures of Trump wearing his USA golf cap while saluting the solemn transfer of remains of the first fallen soldiers in the Iran War.

I have thoughts on both.

As for Trump, we could leave it with the X post by California governor Gavin Newsom: “Take your hat off, you disgusting little man.” On point, but there’s more to say about society’s lost hat etiquette, and (briefly) about Trump, to wit: Best case scenario, he’s a cretin with no clue that saluting war dead might be cause for hat removal—and no flunkies who would dare correct Sir Leader. Worst case? He knew it was improper but didn’t want to muss his hair.

Moving on, about those ball caps. For years I’d been assuming that Americans visiting Rome were all wearing them because they’re being tourists and it’s hot and the visors give a bit of shade. Fine. Then I went back to America a couple years ago and realized that basically all American men now wear ball caps, all the time. And not just outdoors. Presumably they come off at bedtime, but I can’t be sure.

I’ve been meaning to write a post about the badly dressed reporters at the New York Times, based on their videos posted on the site.^[1] For today and specific to hats, I want to call out the Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie. I hesitate because he is my favorite Times columnist, a brilliant young thinker who puts today’s chaotic politics within the context of American history, in ways that always surprise me.

He also shares my passion for cooking, and often includes recipes in his political columns. I really really want to believe that Bouie does not wear a ball cap at the dinner table, but he appears to wear one indoors, a lot—on his video appearances at the Times and even his “official” portrait on his personal website.

So that might make him just another American dude in a baseball cap; no news there. But Bouie is otherwise, and especially by the low standards of the Times, rather well dressed. He wears sport jackets—tweed in winter, seersucker in summer, and generally with a tie. It’s classic Ivy History Prof, lacking only the tobacco pipe.^[2] But then the whole effect is ruined by the ball cap. Why bother dressing up? Jamelle, if you’re out there, lose the cap!

Rant concluded, on to some apparently forgotten rules about hats:

• Hats are for outdoors. Take them off inside.

• Exceptions are public indoor spaces you’re “just passing through,” like banks, train stations and museums.

• Do not ever eat while wearing a hat. Anywhere. Not at home, not in public. Especially in Rome. I’ll see you. So will all the other locals, who will dismiss you inwardly as a cretinous American.^[3]

• While we’re in Rome, hats come off in churches, but only for men. The Times recently suggested, in a travel story, that this rule applies to men and women. The writer obviously did not go to Catholic school.^[4] I remember when hats, or veils, were required on women during Mass; now they are merely optional.

We conclude with traditional hats, which the Times now suggests are making a comeback. I have my doubts, not least because we no longer have a hat infrastructure. There are simply no places anymore to hang your hat in restaurants or even homes, to say nothing of planes and trains. That mostly leaves chairs; you may not care if someone sits on your stupid Yankees cap, but a butt will ruin a nice fedora. Today, wearing traditional hats requires a certain commitment, like flying with a cello.

Also, trad hats can give off a cosplay vibe on younger men, same as bowties. Proceed with caution. If you are in your twenties or thirties, wear a fedora with appropriate other clothes so as not to look “ironic.” Jamelle Bouie would look great in a fedora—or, in summer, a wide-brimmed Panama above his seersucker suit. Just not indoors.

About those Panamas. Real ones are hand woven in Ecuador, the best coming from the town of Montecristi. (The name Panama refers to the fact that they were carried to the isthmus for onward sale to the world.) Good ones, the finer the weave the better, are expensive. Some cost thousands of dollars, but few people beyond connoisseurs are likely to judge the difference between a $500 Panama and a $5,000 version, both of which are easily left behind or sat upon. I own two Panamas, one rollable for travel, from Brent Black of Hawaii, considered the finest modern Panama presser and a dedicated supporter of the weavers in Ecuador.

As for felt winter hats (fedoras, trilbies), my favorite shop in Rome is Troncarelli, a tiny overflowing space in the historic center, selling Italian-made hats since 1857.

The best authentic French berets are made by Laulhère.

My last hat tip is on tipping. Gentlemen can no longer be expected to fully remove their hat on greeting a woman outdoors, but it’s a nice gesture to quickly lift it, or at least tip the brim with your finger. A tip of the hat says a lot. Even with a stupid Yankees cap.

^[1] Talking about men. The female Times reporters still generally dress well.

^[2] I always assumed Bouie was an academic historian, but in researching this post I discovered he has a plain old B.A. like me.

^[3] Even Germans, noted for their summer attire of cargo shorts, Birkenstocks and black socks, remove their hats indoors.

^[4] Related point: Journalists, please stop calling JFK Jr. a WASP.

If you live in Italy and drive cars, sooner or later you need to get an Italian driver’s license. If you are American you will need to enroll in driving school—even if, like me, you have been driving all over the world for more than half a century. U.S. driver’s licenses are not convertible to the Italian version; as far as Italy is concerned, you’re a neophyte behind the wheel.

It may stretch the bounds of credibility for anyone who has driven in Italy, but the process is rigorous—requiring months of classroom instruction followed by a head-exploding written exam (in Italian) that even many Italians fail, then at least six hours of driving instruction and a final test behind the wheel. Which is how I found myself last Friday driving an inspector around Rome, demonstrating parallel parking and proper U-turns. At one point he asked me to pull over. I was worried. Then he handed me his phone. On the line was his daughter, apparently one of my fans from MasterChef Italia; she wanted to say hello, and ask how did I ever make such an amazing chocolate sphere that was my crowning achievement on the broadcast five years ago.

At that point I figured I would have to run over a child to fail my driving exam.

The chocolate sphere, mostly air, inflated my standing in the competition and my ego. It went like this:

We entered the studio and faced, on the stage, a giant upholstered armchair turned away from us. As the lights came up the chair rotated; seated in it was Iginio Massari, the 77-year-old maestro of Italian pastries. A spotlight revealed the three chef judges up on the balcony; today they would relinquish the floor to Maestro Massari.

“Welcome to the MasterChef Skill Test,” said the maestro. One contestant was crying like a Beatles fan in 1964.

Americans could be forgiven for scratching their heads, but in Italy, and indeed beyond, Massari is venerated as a god of la pasticceria. He makes an appearance on almost every season of MasterChef Italia, and families crowd around the TV for his dessert-making episode.

Chef Giorgio Locatelli, one of the judges, gave us the big picture: “You are about to confront a very tough Skill Test. There will be three levels; each has the possibility of salvation. The last will be for the elimination. Tutto loud and clear?”

“Sì Chef!”

Chef Bruno Barbieri continued the plan: “We decided to address a culinary theme that is very interesting but not well known. L’involucro!” Wrapping things.

A contestant muttered “porca miseria!”

Picking up on our groans, Barbieri continued: “You are right to be worried. The challenges include technical skills, artistic skills and of course the challenge of flavor.”

Then Maestro Massari lifted three cloches, under each of which was a hollow chocolate sphere the size of a softball. One was made of dark chocolate with a lacy filigree etched into the surface; another was white chocolate, with round holes cut through the dome; the last was another dark chocolate sphere accompanied by a small jeweler’s hammer, also made of chocolate.

As the orchestral music swelled on the soundtrack, he poured hot chocolate sauce over the filigreed sphere, melting the dome and revealing yet another dessert inside. Then he took the hammer and smashed another dome, to reveal a different fine confection inside.

“Your job,” he said, “will be to create a chocolate sphere with a tiramisù inside. You must also prepare a hot chocolate sauce for the final serving.”

“Guys,” said Barbieri, “you must also make the tiramisù. From scratch.”

“Including the savoiardi?” asked Monir Eddardary, our Moroccan-heritage contestant,^[1] referring to what Americans would call lady fingers although the Italian ones are crispy, not mushy.

Barbieri scowled. “Monir, have you ever seen a tiramisù without savoiardi?”

But Monir’s question was justified. In Italy, almost everyone buys savoiardi at the supermarket. Today we would have to make our own, while also sweating that fucking chocolate sphere. I had made savoiardi before, in fact with my daughter-in-law Eva, and I remembered the ingredients are simple: separated eggs, sugar and flour, with the need to whip the egg whites. But I couldn’t remember the portions, and panic was setting in.

Massari approached our work stations, which had been arranged galley style with rows of contestants facing each other, and gave us a brief course on how to temper chocolate—a professional cooking technique that ensures melted chocolate will stay glossy and crunchy after re-hardening in desserts. After heating the chocolate pieces in a bain-marie to around 120F, he deftly poured the molten blob onto a cool marble counter top, then used two offset metal spatulas to spread and turn the mass.

“Work quickly and keep moving the chocolate,” he explained, “to bring it down to almost room temperature.”

He touched the chocolate in several places with the back of his pinky. “Now it’s ready. There will be thermometers for anyone who doesn’t have this pinky skill.” In other words, all of us.

Then he poured the chocolate into plastic hemispherical molds, spreading it to the rim with a ladle and swirling it around to be sure of even coating. The final step was loading the molds into a blast chiller^[2] to cool, before unmolding. The idea was to put our tiramisù into the upturned bottom hemisphere, then gently set the other hemisphere on top. We each had enough chocolate and molds to make six hemispheres—room for error.

“You have seventy minutes!” said Barbieri. “Cinque, quattro, tre, due, uno, now!”

Ignoring the giant boom clock, Massari checked his Rolex.

As we frantically worked, Barbieri chatted with the maestro: “The order in baking is fundamental. For this dessert, what would you do first—the sphere or the tiramisù?”

“We would want to make the chocolate sphere first,” said the maestro, “because the room temperature is good. But now they are all lighting the ovens to bake their savoiardi, which will increase the room temperature by five degrees. Then the chocolate will stick to the forms.”

Luck was with me, as Monir was directly across from me at our galley station, and he appeared to know the portions for savoiardi batter.

I copied him slavishly,^[3] then quickly squeezed out the batter through a pastry bag onto a lined sheet pan. Into the oven, on to the chocolate.

The show cut to my post-challenge interview: “I once tempered chocolate, but it was years ago.”

As I poured my chocolate into molds, Maestro Massari came by to greet me.

“Good evening Maestro!”

“Are you sure they’re ready to go?”

“Sì Maestro.”

“Ok bene.”

Into the blast chiller they went.

I finished my tiramisù and put it in the blast chiller; ideally it would rest overnight, but whatever. Then I made my chocolate sauce. With minutes remaining, I unmolded my spheres, then cut decorative holes in the top dome with a small round cookie cutter I heated with a kitchen torch. As I put the finishing touches on my dish, the studio erupted in a cacophony of beating ladles and wooden spoons, like some drunken noisemaking ritual at midnight on New Year’s Eve.

None of the other contestants could release their chocolate spheres from the molds.

They banged and clanged on those molds like demons. They whacked them on the counter. Chef Antonino Cannavacciuolo mimed a drummer performing a virtuoso solo. Barbieri covered his ears. Finally he looked up at the clock and shouted, “Five, four, three, two, one, stop! Finally, silence!”

The judges surveyed the battlefield in disbelief. “The only one whose chocolate sphere came out of the mold is Max.”

Another contestant whispered, “he even made three holes. Bella bella bella.”

I poured my hot chocolate sauce over the sphere, revealing the tiramisù. Maestro Massari inspected my creation: “The chocolate is tempered, but it’s not uniform—you didn’t mold it well, one sees here.” He pointed to the uneven edges where my two spheres joined. “But the presentation is what we wanted. Now I will taste.” He took a bite and pronounced, “this is an excellent dessert! Bravo!”

Locatelli asked me who I have made desserts for. I said mostly my children.

“And you made desserts with them?”

“Yes.”

“This is really very beautiful.”

Cannavacciuolo said, “Max you worked hard in your career, also very important work. Where did you find all of this energy to cook?”

“It’s very simple,” I said. “I adore cooking. And when I finish my work I want to cook.”

He nodded. “When someone is passionate about something, it’s not a burden but a gesture of love. It is indeed very simple.” Then he gave me a fist bump.

The cameras cut back to the maestro: “Max, this is the best dessert that I have ever eaten on MasterChef. And I’m happy to tell you, run to the balcony!”

As I watched from the heights, Massari summarized the day’s failures. “Half of you didn’t properly temper your chocolate. Someone didn’t put their chocolate in the blast chiller for enough time.”

Barbieri said, “Let us now thank Maestro Massari for joining today.”

“It was my pleasure,” he said. “The MasterChef school is not just a cooking school. It’s a school of life.”

After he left, Locatelli addressed the losers. “Aspiring chefs, you not only embarrassed yourselves but you embarrassed us, in front of the number-one baker in the world. This is unpardonable.”

They stood, stone-faced, heads bowed over chocolate-stained aprons that might as well have been bloody surgical scrubs.

To this day I don’t know why my chocolate hemispheres popped right out of the molds. Maybe I did a better job tempering the chocolate? Or maybe it was karma? Which could be the same thing?

I told the driving inspector’s daughter that it was just my lucky day. Then I got my license.

^[1] Monir now owns a Moroccan restaurant, Amina, in Milan.

[2] Professional restaurant refrigerators that rapidly chill ingredients without freezing them. We had several in the studio.

[3] I don’t consider this cheating as we could all plainly observe each other working.

It seems reasonable to believe that in the beginning there was nothing. The void. And it must have been really something because its ongoing nature has occupied philosophers, scientists and mystics for thousands of years. Fittingly for something that is nothing, it goes by many names—śūnyatā (Buddhism), wuji (Taoism), fana (Sufism), shunya (Hinduism). They all consider the void a place of renewal and enlightenment, where we let go of material attachments and endless desires stuck on replay. Rather than negation, the void is a place of promise, like the womb.

Beyond Eastern religious philosophies, ancient and medieval Western scientists called the void aether, taken from the name of the Greek god of the upper sky, himself son of the gods of Darkness and Night. To early scientists, aether was the fifth element or quintessence after earth, fire, air and water.

Then there’s the void of the empty luggage rack on Trenitalia 9310 from Rome to Turin last week, where my suitcase was last seen just before Milano Rogoredo station.

To be honest, my first reaction on realizing that my bag containing a €5,000 hearing aid, several rare pieces of jewelry and a few sets of custom-made Italian suits, sweaters and shoes was now being picked through on a park bench was less Zen than Fuckkkkkk. But after arriving in Turin, filing a police report and an insurance claim with the train line (which might possibly cover a small part of the loss), I embraced the void. And bought some socks and underwear.

Then I started to think about the void in cooking.

You could start with water. Taoists compare the void to water, which flows freely into any container and takes its form. As water will find its way, according to Taoism, so will the void. This metaphor helps us navigate unexpected challenges, such as when the pasta water boils over into the void below my stovetop.

Speaking of scorching, we could move on to alchemy—a form of cooking—in which the initial step of physical transformation is nigredo or decomposition through burning. This blackness was, for alchemists, the primal chaotic void necessary before purification. Carl Jung was strongly influenced by alchemy when he developed his idea that humans must pass through a deep melancholic journey—the “dark night of the soul”—before psychological healing. Shakespeare talks of alchemy in his sonnets, many of which have characters passing through nightmarish evenings to reach purification.

I felt the blackness that first night in our Turin hotel as I tossed and turned, recalling ever more cool stuff in my bag, never to be seen again. That tie I loved! That scarf Alexandra gave me! (She next to me, soundly asleep.)

Blackened Creole redfish (do they still make that?) might fit the definition of nigredo in cuisine. But a more conventional understanding of the void in cooking would look at the prevalence of empty spheres—like the chocolate sphere that was my triumph on MasterChef Italia. More on that next week, but for today I want to talk about another dish full of empty space: the soufflé.

A soufflé, of course, is mostly void. You whip egg whites to create millions of tiny bubbles, the air inside which expands under heat. But the thermodynamic explanation, like defining love as a function of dopamine receptors, falls short. A soufflé is magic. Serving it is theater. Eating it is a sublime passage between crisp crust and oozy interior. I am almost certainly the only person in Rome who makes them because they are French and Romans don’t make French food. I make them a lot. I have it down.

Soufflés cause needless angst in the kitchen. The secret “ingredient” is the dish—it must be made for soufflés which is to say straight-sided, allowing the mixture to rise maximally. So outfitted, you can easily make showstopping savory dinner cheese soufflés, or swoon-inducing chocolate dessert versions. You can make them in individual ramekins but I prefer the drama of a large single soufflé—I use a two-quart model made in France by Apilco, roughly seven inches diameter, which serves four.

To make a savory soufflé:

Separate 6 eggs. Make a bechamel sauce: Melt 4 tablespoons butter, add the same of flour, cook on low heat, stirring to prevent burning (no nigredo here) for a few minutes to cook out the raw flour taste, then slowly add 1-1/2 cups warmed milk, stirring for another couple minutes until thickened. Off heat, add the egg yolks and a cup of grated cheese—half Parmigiano and either Cheddar, Gruyère,1 Gorgonzola or whatever you like. Salt and pepper, a bit of mustard powder. Want more? Add either a handful of cooked and well-drained spinach or chopped ham, but resist the urge to kitchen-sink a soufflé; keep it simple. Beat the egg whites with a pinch of tartar into soft peaks. Fold everything together gently, transfer into a buttered soufflé dish and bake on the lowest rack at 400F for about 40 minutes. More time will give you a drier soufflé, less time will be more molten—as you prefer. Also, every oven is different; experiment.

By the way, Turin is a lovely place to visit even without clothes. It was the seat of the Savoy kings, who still sit astride bronze horses in the many colonnaded squares—in reality no more heroic than their current trashy descendants, living in exile since the war and reduced to stomping their feet and demanding return of the crown jewels. My wardrobe all week of the same selvedge jeans, sneakers and wool-silk cardigan I had been wearing on the train did not seem to diminish the city’s overall elegance.

Believed to lie at an intersection of white and black magic, Turin has been famous for centuries as a center of occult studies—the 16^th-century French mystic Nostradamus is said to have practiced alchemy there. Today you hear as much French as Italian. I imagine someone there is making a soufflé.

Youth—lacking perspective, judgment or risk assessment, and with a naturally addictive personality—led me down some exciting yet dangerous paths, a few of which I still tread lightly. One of them was garlic. That path I got off when I moved to Italy.

When Americans think about Italian cuisine, they often think about garlic. Lots of it. The truth is that Italians eat very little garlic and almost never raw, the better to prevent indigestion and fitful sleep, according to Italians. The American says there is no such thing as too much garlic. The Italian says why does everything in America taste like garlic?

I’m being harsh. Other cultures use lots of garlic, around the world. Not Italians. Even close to home, Mediterranean cuisines heavy on raw garlic, such as Middle Eastern meze dips or Catalan allioli^[1], are regarded by Italians as unserious novelties. In Italy, even cooked garlic is used sparingly: When making a tomato sauce, Italians brown a clove of garlic in olive oil, then remove and discard it; the idea is to lend a hint of garlic to the dish, not overpower it. Garlic in salad dressing? Italians might soak a crushed clove in salted vinegar for 15 minutes, then (again) discard it. Add olive oil.

An American-style style red sauce—laden with handfuls of garlic (and diced onion and peppers and every dusty spice shaken from a greasy jar above the stove^[2]) comes from Italian American cuisine, which is not the same. Somewhere along the line, Italian immigrants blending into America’s melting pot decided to toss the kitchen sink into their own bubbling pots.

Here’s what it boils down to: American cooking is additive—more is more—while Italian cooking is subtractive. In the Italian kitchen, less is almost always more. So garlic (in small amounts) is rarely combined with onion—pick one. Likewise basil or parsley. Olive oil or butter. In this way, the simple and direct flavors of a main ingredient (the protagonista in Italian) can shine. It could be sweet grape tomatoes from the slopes of Mount Vesuvius or an Alpine taleggio cheese from grass-fed cows or tiny Adriatic clams. Whatever it is, you don’t want to hide it under handfuls of extraneous other stuff.

Of course, it helps to have optimal ingredients. In Italy (and Europe in general) food is less industrialized than in the U.S. Quality overrules quantity, and groceries are more expensive as a result.^[3] When Trump’s trade marionettes met with EU bureaucrats on tariffs, the subject of American meat came up. Maybe Europe could avoid punishing “emergency tariffs” on wine (a clear national security threat) if it accepted U.S. beef and poultry? The Europeans replied, in so many words: Not happening dudes. You can put a thousand-percent tariff on Chianti and you still won’t sell your chlorine-washed chicken and artificial growth-hormone-laced beef over here. Full stop.

I don’t want to suggest that the meat and produce sections of an Italian supermarket are brimming with artisanal products, lovingly harvested in straw baskets by noble contadini. As in America, agriculture in Italy is mostly done by immigrants, and there are plenty of large mechanized farms, as well as sprawling greenhouse operations. Wine in particular has suffered from mass production and the trend away from hyper-local grapes to internationally recognized varieties like the dreaded Merlot—although that is changing thanks to a younger generation of vintners committed to native cultivars and natural fermentation. And to be completely honest, the heirloom tomatoes you can find at just about any American farmer’s market in August are better than what you find in Italy. (There, I said it.) But generally speaking, Italians are more vigilant about the origins and quality of their food; they care about what they eat, they watch MasterChef every Thursday night, and you can’t fake them out.

None of which is to knock Italian American cuisine, which I grew up on although I could do without the dried “Italian spice” jar. Nor do I diss the inclusive American palate—only to point out other paths…

Which brings me back to garlic. Withdrawal is hard. But the benefits extend well beyond breathing easy. There comes a glorious liberation when you realize it is possible to eat, and live, allium-free, or in my case allium-lite. There’s the joy of tasting tomatoes in August (we’ll get there) as they were meant to be, adorned with only salt. The understated elegance of salad dressing with a whisper of garlic aroma. The sublime recognition, Zen-like in its profound simplicity^[4], that you can taste more from less, when less is more.

[1] Like Provencal aïoli but generally made without eggs.

[2] The dried “Italian spice” sold in America does not exist in Italy.

[3] Naturally, Italian specialty ingredients like Parmigiano, prosciutto and olive oil are considerably cheaper here than in the U.S.

^[4] The Buddha lived during the period of the Roman Republic and traveled widely, but there is no record of him dining (cross-legged) in an Italian trattoria.

All I wanted was a cold refrigerator. And a slightly colder freezer. But last Sunday morning the freezer felt…damp. The frozen bananas, which I pulled out to make my morning smoothie, were slush bananas. There was power—the light came on—but no cold, no humming. On Monday the tecnico confirmed that what my frigo needed was a new frigo. It was six years old. Whatever.

This was going to take a while—the fridge is built in to the kitchen with matching cabinetry, and the model is hard to find. Fortunately I have a terrace, and temperatures in Rome this week are more or less in fridge range although not cold enough for frozen foods. Unfortunately we have dive-bombing attack seagulls emboldened by a lifetime foraging for pizza crusts and mortadella panino remains, so after putting my fridge contents in armored containers—homemade rendered duck fat and beef tallow, Parmigiano rinds, Sicilian blood oranges, Sardinian bottarga roe—I hauled everything outside.

Then I made a plan to cook for a few days without a fridge.

Two days earlier I had bought a couple dozen Normandy oysters, which can last a few weeks in the coldest bottom compartment of a refrigerator (cup side down, covered with a damp cloth) but only if it’s really cold, like just above freezing. Outdoor temps here during the daytime have been reaching 15C/60F which is too warm for oysters, so they had to meet the knife, soon.

Oysters fall into that category of stuff I want in Rome but can’t always have, as they are flown in from France (sometimes Holland) and are expensive when you can even find them. Someone is now farming oysters in Apulia (the heel of Italy) but I don’t trust them as Mediterranean waters are too warm. In America, when you hear about people getting sick from oysters, it’s usually in New Orleans, from the Gulf crop. I don’t go there.

My local seafood vendor, by definition expensive as he’s in Rome’s tourist center, charges €5 apiece for French oysters, which right now equals about six bucks. This is tough to swallow, no pun intended, for someone who lived 20 years in Maine and paid 50 cents each for the most bracingly fresh and salty oysters on the planet, and sometimes gathered them for free in the frigid mudflats.

Instead I ride my bike up the Esquiline hill to the big indoor public market near the train station, where Bengali vendors sell you everything from Persian dried limes (pulverize in a mortar and sprinkle over watermelon salad) to Indian rose water (add a few drops to your morning smoothie). The vast seafood emporium, wet floor glistening under fish scales, houses a dozen or more vendors, mostly also South Asian and for whom your patronage will apparently allow their daughter to marry into a good family from the way they chase after you, propelling themselves across the slippery pavement like Olympic speed skaters while shouting their catches of the day. Competition is fierce because they all have pretty much identical piles of shrimp, squid, farm-raised orata and, depending on the season, massive corpses of tuna and swordfish. But only one has French oysters, and he sells me a wooden box of 10 or 12 (they go by weight, oddly) for just €12.

What else to use up in a dead fridge? Scrounging around the top shelf, among the containers of sambal oelek, gochujang, chunjang, doubanjiang and pickled Sichuan heaven-facing chiles (all of which I figured would be fine at room temp for a week), there was a jar of mignonette sauce that I think I made a year ago. It seemed okay—basically it’s shallots in vinegar—and while normally I’m a lemon juice purist with my oysters (I keep mignonette around for guests) I decided my dead fridge indicated it was a good time to use it up. Covering all my bases, I picked a few lemons.

Sometimes I think I would like to be an oyster. It must be a contemplative life, suitable for writing or just thinking about writing like I do in the shower. But then I realize the best oysters are cold and withdrawn, like characters in Haruki Murakami novels who live in dark caves and tunnels resembling the inside of my broken refrigerator and never go out for sushi or for that matter oysters.

On Saturday I rode my bike to the Campagna Amica farmer’s market, mostly to get some fresh air. Without a fridge I couldn’t buy much beyond bread, but it was good to see other people loading up their shopping bags with whatever they wanted.