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.

No rain on Tuesday, a lucky break that allowed me to ride my bicycle over the hills to my dentist in the upscale Salario neighborhood. I was early so I chained my bike around a signpost and walked over to the Coppedè quarter, famous for a collection of fairy-tale gothic/medieval/art deco apartment buildings from the early 20^th century around the Fountain of the Frogs, which the Beatles once jumped in. The quarter is charming and luxe but unless your name is Hansel or Gretel it’s boring as unbuttered toast—nothing to do except hang around your commodious apartment admiring the priceless art on the walls, which I suppose is the point.

Next day the rain returned, torrential. Welcome to Rome in winter. On the plus side, the showers and clouds have mostly kept the nighttime temperature above freezing; I think we got a touch of frost maybe two nights so far this season. My neighbors have dutifully wrapped the potted lemon trees on their terrace as protection. I never bother with mine, as a couple nights just below freezing doesn’t seem to hurt the lemons and I prefer low-maintenance terrace plants, coinciding with my low-maintenance lifestyle. The plants, mostly native Mediterranean varieties but a few North American desert types thrown in, seem to understand, and cooperate.

Speaking of plants, the artichokes have arrived. Italians eat more artichokes per capita than any citizens on Earth,^[1] and they eat them in winter which is their glorious season. First come a smaller pointy variety but then, just after Christmas, we get the giant globes known as mammole which now spill out from market stands, their long stems dunked in buckets of water so they look like bizarre flower arrangements on an alien planet.

Besides being massive, the mammole are noted for their lack of sharp, prickly inner leaves and almost no fuzzy choke, which Italians call either barba (beard), baffi (moustache), or peluria (down, as in goose down). Why they have so many words for what seems like the same thing to the rest of the world is a mystery, but it may be related to the controversial observation that the Inuit have so many ways to say snow. Bottom line: with a giant Roman globe artichoke, once you strip away the tough outer leaves, cut off the top and peel back the stem to its tender inner core, it’s all edible.

Romans are not known for innovation (if you want cutting-edge anything go to Milan), and they’ve been preparing artichokes the same two ways for centuries: alla romana is braised in white wine and olive oil with mentuccia, an herb that tastes like a cross between oregano and mint, and known as lesser calamint to us; and alla giudia or Jewish style, which means flattened and deep-fried—basically, artichoke potato chips.

Even if you like to deep fry at home (I do), it’s hard to make artichokes alla giudia without a restaurant’s massive frying vats, so mostly it’s what you order in winter at restaurants in the Jewish Ghetto. Sometimes we get a giudia jones so strong that we go to the Ghetto and order nothing but fried artichokes—like five each, and we don’t give a shit if the waiter thinks we’re crazy and we wash them down with a bottle or two of a good Nebbiolo, that northern grape that tastes like tar in the good way. Dinner.

But sometimes I bring artichokes home. This week I was feeling browned off on brown food—all those meaty winter stews which I love, but it was time for something else. Something lighter, fresher. Spicy? Okay. Then it hit me: Vietnamese. I would make a spicy chile-lime dipping sauce (nuoc mam chanh) and toss it with slivers of raw artichoke in a salad. I figured the sauce was perfect because the lime juice would act as an acidifier to keep the choke slices from turning brown—a different take on the usual raw-artichoke marinade of lemon juice. To make it dinner I picked up some squid at the fish market and cut them into rings, then dipped them into boiling water for like five seconds—no more or they’ll turn to rubber.

Details: in a mortar, combine a chopped clove of garlic and one or three chopped Thai bird chiles depending on your heat tolerance. Add a pinch of granulated sugar and pound away until you have a slurry.^[2] Add three tablespoons each of sugar, fish sauce, lime juice and water, then mix well or shake in a small jar. Thinly slice one or two cleaned artichokes and toss them with some of the sauce. Add the cooked calamari and more sauce to taste. Maybe some cilantro and basil.

You could be American and add more stuff (Italians would keep it simple) like, I don’t know, thinly sliced cucumber rounds? Shallot rings (rinsed under running water to render less strong)? Segments of blood orange? Or substitute shrimp for the calamari?

In the end, it’s all about the artichokes, and something different in the dead of winter. Whatever town you’re in, get out your chopsticks and go there.

^[1] Italy, Egypt and Spain together consume almost two-thirds of the world’s artichoke crop.

^[2] Lots of cookbooks will tell you it’s fine to simply chop the dipping sauce ingredients, or use a processor. Bullshit. Buy a mortar and pestle.

Alexandra and I don’t live together.

I have a small apartment in Rome’s historic center, streets packed with tourists.^[1] She lives in a small apartment with pink Barbie walls in Testaccio—ten minutes by bicycle from me yet a world apart.

Testaccio, just across the river from the ultra-touristed neighborhood of Trastevere, is mostly inhabited by Romans. The apartment buildings, ochre in tone and five floors in height, date from the 19^th century and rarely have elevators which is a dealbreaker for a lot of ex-pats. There you still find wine bars, restaurants and beer halls full of Italians after work. On weekends the patrons spill out of the bars and drink around benches in the central piazza, dominated by a Fascist-era travertine fountain depicting a tower of ancient Roman amphorae, those tall twin-handled terracotta jugs for oil and wine. The fountain honors the neighborhood’s history as the deposito or storage site of amphorae in ancient times.

Nearby are several dusty old hardware stores where they can show you the right way to hang a mirror on brick walls, and butcher shops. Lots of those, as Testaccio is traditionally where Rome’s butchers lived, it being the site of the old mattatoio, the sprawling slaughterhouse whose buildings are now occupied by modern art galleries, an architecture school and a vaguely socialist flea and farmer’s market called the City of Alternative Economy whose opening hours are impossible to divine. That might smack of gentrification, but in truth the mattatoio was outdated and unsanitary; it’s been replaced by a nearby modern public market with some of the best food stalls in the city. (And tourists do find their way there.)

The butcher families of Testaccio were inventive masters at cooking organ meat, the cheap parts they kept for themselves. They called innards er quinto quarto or the fifth quarter—meaning after selling the desirable four quarters of red meat to Rome’s elite, they went home with that “fifth quarter.” Testaccio restaurants still specialize in so-called snout-to-tail dishes; it’s where you go if you have a hankering for intestines, stomachs, kidneys and hearts. That they continue to serve these traditional Roman dishes amazes me, as most younger Romans would sooner eat seagull^[2] than spleen.

For all this and more, Testaccio feels today as it might have been in the desperately poor years right after World War II, when it was the setting for a large part of Elsa Morante’s semi-autobiographical novel History.^[3]

But back to Alexandra and me. We generally see each other on weekends, which means most weeknights we aren’t dining together. Discounting evenings spent with other friends or family, we often eat alone, separately.

Of course I could, and do, go out. But in winter, when Rome by night is so often cloaked in cold rain that makes even the bronze church bells peel like a wet sponge, I stay home. And I don’t like eating takeout alone because…loser?

So what to cook?

Not for me those tired cooking-for-one recipes like, you know, buy a single chicken breast blah blah blah. Because…loser? In winter I like making soups, stews and rich meat sauces that cook all day, filling my apartment with their scents while I’m writing and pretending to stay in shape with a few dumbbell lifts. Even better if my neighbors exclaim Che profumino! Cosa stai facendo? I’m making cazzo dinner for one is what I’m cazzo making, and it’s not a cazzo loser chicken breast.

So the other day I decided to make a ragù Genovese, which despite its name is a classic dish from Naples.^[4] It’s a long-simmering meat sauce made not with ground meat like a Bolognese but rather with large chunks, which braise in the sauce for hours until you can shred them with a fork. There are no tomatoes (but for a squirt of tomato paste); what makes the liquid, beyond a good glug of white wine, are dozens of thinly sliced onions, which you caramelize and then cook, ever so slowly, until they melt. In that sense it’s a bit like French onion soup. After hours in this manner, you remove the meat and shred some of it back into the sauce, which you toss with pasta as a first course. The remaining chunks of meat are served as a second course of…meat. You could serve the meat with mustard, as I do, which would be French and possibly cause revocation of my Italian residency permit, but life is a series of measured risks.

Anyway, I bought a couple kilos of beef and veal shoulder chunks from a butcher at the new Testaccio market and went to work. I won’t reproduce a recipe because I stole it from my Italian daughter-in-law, who runs (with my son) a popular cooking YouTube channel and blog. You can find her recipe, in English, here.

The point is, I had a lot of sauce. After a few days eating various types of pasta with ragù Genovese, I got tired of it. But I still had a vat of that fucking sauce. I froze as much as I could, which was like a quart given that my small apartment has a small fridge with an even smaller freezer, most of which is occupied by bottles of vodka and limoncello (priorities).

Again, what to cook?

The correct answer, if you’re playing along at home, was a baked pasta. I boiled some ziti a few minutes shy of al dente, then tossed them with a few ladles of the ragù and a handful of cubed fresh mozzarella and grated Parmigiano. I used buffalo-milk mozzarella because I can, but a good cow’s milk version would be fine. Should you have neither, a soft melting cheese like Bel Paese or Fontina would be far better than commercial supermarket non-mozzarella. Transfer to a casserole dish and bake on medium heat for about an hour, until golden and crispy on top. With mine, I noticed it was browning too quickly so I covered it with aluminum foil for a bit. Whatever.

Okay, on one level you could say it’s just more pasta with ragù Genovese. But this was different. There was that crispy crust, then the gooey interior with melted cheese. It was a real transformation. And yes there will be leftovers. Good. I opened a bottle of 100-percent Sangiovese from the small biodynamic producer Tenuta Santa Lucia in Emilia Romagna.^[5] And though I was eating alone, I considered myself a winner.

^[1] I don’t mind the tourists—we are all tourists somewhere—although they could dress better.

^[2] The flying rats of Rome.

^[3] The Italian title, La Storia, is more lyrical as the word can mean both history and story. I highly recommend it.

^[4] It may have come to Naples from Genoese sailors during the Renaissance.

^[5] The English on the label makes me think it’s distributed beyond Italy.

I had always wanted to see the Cinque Terre, or Five Lands—a two-mile stretch of five picturesque villages along the Ligurian Sea, south of Genoa. I finally got my chance during Covid—and during the recording of MasterChef in Milan.

We were picking teams for an external challenge, one of those episodes where the contestants venture out and cook in the real world. Besides breaking up the potential monotony (for home viewers) of seeing us every week in the same studio, the external challenges demonstrate our ability to work on one of two teams. For this challenge, Jia Bi and Federica, our two captains thanks to winning a previous studio challenge, alternated choosing their team members. In the end Jia Bi was down to choosing between me and Eduard, a native of the Dominican Republic but raised in Italy. The contestant not chosen would sit out the team challenge and go straight to the next Pressure Test.

“Well Max is a great cook and he knows a lot,” Jia Bi graciously explained. “But he’s American, and he cooks in a different style than the rest of us. I’m worried the Italian judges will not appreciate his techniques.” And with that, she chose Eduard. Fair enough.

Then came the details: teams would be competing in the kitchen of a downtown Milan hotel, where they would prepare a “royal brunch” of four courses. Each contestant would be responsible for one course. Brunch is still a relatively novel concept in Italy—one of those American imports, like cheeseburgers, viewed with both fascination and suspicion. Which is to say it hasn’t yet reached the level of tired cliché in America that led Anthony Bourdain to savage it relentlessly. Some of the contestants needed it explained:

“It’s like a breakfast but then it becomes lunch.”

“So the first course is a pastry and espresso?”

“Not an Italian breakfast. Like an American breakfast with eggs.”

I heard muttering around the irony that they would be making an American meal while the only American contestant was sidelined. But the die was cast.

I was happy to sit out the external challenge and take my chances on the Pressure Test the next day; I generally did well on those, and my performance on external challenges was mixed. I could go back to my room and take a nap! As it turned out, it was explained that after the days’ external challenge there would be two days off—which gave me three days off in total. I made a plan.

The five towns of the Cinque Terre date to the Middle Ages when they were built as defenses against foreign invaders. They descend, impossibly it would seem, along terraces from steep mountains that collapse into the azure sea. In his Divine Comedy, Dante modeled Purgatory after the cliffs of the Cinque Terre. Even today it is difficult to reach them by road; they are connected by a nineteenth-century train line (mostly tunnels) along the coast—or you can hike between them, on vertiginous trails that wind through terraced vineyards and olive groves.

Wine and olives are still important local products; the region’s bracingly dry and aromatic white wine (“Cinque Terre” is a controlled denomination) is made mostly with the local Bosco grape along with some Albarola and Vermentino. It was said to be the favorite wine of Pope Paul III, who was possibly in a Cinque Terre state of mind when he commissioned Michelangelo to paint The Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel.

But today, tourism drives the economy. And like so many famously beautiful places in Italy, that’s the problem. These days the village streets and mountain trails of the Cinque Terre are about as authentic and evocative as New York’s Saint Patrick’s Day parade, and equally crowded with assholes.

But in late 2020, I had my chance to see the Cinque Terre without the masses. Tourism was banned; non-EU citizens could only enter the country with a residency permit. The Italian trains were still running, infrequently—reservations required, every other seat booked, masks obligatory. It was only two hours from Milan, via Genoa.

On my phone I booked a pre-dawn ticket from the local suburban commuter station. I packed nothing but a toothbrush and a phone charger in my pockets—no bag, no change of clothes for a one-night trip. This was guerilla tourism. Then I booked an AirBnb in the Cinque Terre village of Corniglia, high on a cliff above the sea.

The train arrived in Riomaggiore, the first of the Cinque Terre towns, in late morning. From there I set out on the mountain trail to Manarola, the second village. There was no one else on the trail, in any direction. The route traversed steep terraced vineyards where the grapes are harvested on hands and knees. Each row had modern plastic irrigation tubing threaded between the vines; I wondered how global warming would affect these ancient plots.

After two strenuous hours I descended into Manarola for lunch at Trattoria dal Billy, a cliffside locale over the sea. There were a few Italian families at tables along the outdoor terrace. I swooned, first over the view then over fresh local anchovies marinated in lemon juice, homemade tagliatelle with swordfish and shaved black truffles, and of course a bottle of Cinque Terre wine. I thought of my friends back in Milan, frantically making a “royal brunch” in a hotel kitchen.

Okay I didn’t think about them at all.

After lunch I took the rickety train one stop to the third town, Corniglia. From the seafront station I ascended a steep staircase with thirty switchbacks, up to the town proper and its commanding vista over the Ligurian Sea. I checked in to my modest room for the night, then walked over to the clifftop terrace of the Bar Terza for aperitivi—a strong Negroni and a bruschetta with tomatoes and fresh tuna.

My AirBnB host had recommended dinner at La Cantina de Mananan, a narrow stone cavern with chalkboard menus, one of which explained the rules of the house:

· Go ahead and order a full bottle of wine, you can take away what’s left.

· Don’t put cheese on seafood dishes.

· Don’t mix different dishes on the same plate.

· Finish your meal with a nice coffee and a grappa. We don’t serve cappuccino or similar drinks.

I liked this place already; then came the food. It was hard to choose dinner, but I settled on an antipasto of more local anchovies—this time dried and salted, then marinated in oil and topped with burrata cheese,^[1] followed by pansotti, a type of large ravioli stuffed with spinach and ricotta, in a walnut sauce. Dessert was a flawless panna cotta crowned with candied walnuts and caramel sauce. There was wine, naturally, and local grappa. It was late when I ambled back to my room along the cliff terrace; the town was asleep, the cobblestone alleys empty. There were no streetlights, only the Milky Way arcing above the sea.

Back in my room, another MasterChef contestant texted me to say the brunch challenge was chaos. It wasn’t until watching the show, months later, that I learned he had a meltdown on camera. He was baking thin-sliced potato rounds in an oven—until he realized the oven wasn’t turned on. In fairness all these new digital cooking appliances can be impossible to navigate, especially without reading the inch-thick owner’s manual.^[2] He panicked and started screaming; Chef Locatelli screamed back: “If you are given an oven you must work with it!”

“Who won?” I texted him back.

“We don’t know. They will announce it on Monday, back in the studio.”

The next morning I hiked from Corniglia to the fourth town, Vernazza, along the Sentiero Azzuro or Marine Path. Along the way I stopped in a trailside café above the sea for an espresso and a fresh-squeezed orange juice. In my life I have hiked portions of the Appalachian Trail, and I never saw a café like that. But maybe I was in the wrong section.

The port of Vernazza had a small, curving stone pier with the ruins of an eleventh-century castle and tower at its base. In the small Piazza Marconi, next to the fourteenth-century church of St. Margaret of Antioch, I lunched on a Neapolitan-style pizza with a very Ligurian topping: pesto. Then I took the train to Monterosso, the final village, for an afternoon of sun along the town’s wide beach. Paragliders were landing on the near-empty stretch of sand. Then I put on my Covid mask and took the train back to Milan.

[1] Preserved anchovies are an exception to the Italian rule of no cheese with seafood.

[2] If there is a human who actually prefers oven keypads over big dials, message me.

The wedding went off as planned, meaning no one got killed. Lina had figured on two murders. The first was her uncle Oreste, a lawyer for the Commisso clan of ’Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia. He showed up at the Ipomea Beach Resort on Capo Vaticano in advance of the wedding, to review the plans as he would be the officiant. Being divorced, Lina’s daughter Ottavia couldn’t get married in the church so a civil ceremony.

In fact Oreste had gone to negotiate the resort’s fee for the catering, which dropped by like half after his visit. But another clan of ’Ndrangheta controlled the beach resorts along the cape, and those guys hadn’t authorized this visita from the Commisso family, which ran the port to the south. So there was that.

The other murder was herself killing Gino, her ex-husband, possibly across his throat with the serrated cake knife.

Reason prevailed. The mob stayed away and Lina was civil in a relative Calabrian way to Gino and his new girlfriend. It helped that his latest American slut was shorter than Lina, with some obvious neck work. Had the bitch been missing a leg even better, but Lina took life as it came.

“Ciao Gino…” she said without emotion as he approached from around the horizon pool. Neither of them had seen Ottavia, who was holed up in her room before the nuptials with her sister Arianna. The groom, a Roman producer for Netflix Italy, was circulating among the guests, speaking in Italian and English. Lina liked him okay although he seemed a bit young for Ottavia, who at twenty-nine was six years older. He could be a decent starter husband, but for Ottavia he was already number two.

“Ciao Lina!” Gino was drinking a flute of Franciacorta, possibly too quickly. He eyed Lina’s glass of sparkling water and smiled sort of. “I’m so proud of you.”

She gulped her glass dry and said “Ma va fannculo.”

Gino laughed. “I see sobriety hasn’t chilled your Calabrian blood.”

“Shall we try my German side? Geh und fick dich.”

“You look beautiful as always, darling. Salute!” He tipped his glass in a toast, downed his bubbly and turned away.

And that was that. Was she rude to tell her ex to go fuck himself in two languages at their daughter’s wedding? She didn’t think anyone else had heard. Anyway, had it not been rude of Gino to fuck her friends while she was on her many “retreats” over the years, drying out in the mountains of Umbria? Had it been rude of Gino to encourage her drinking, laugh at her antics, beat the shit out of a guy who dumped a bucket of ice water on her head from a hotel balcony because she had been drunkenly singing at four a.m. with her friends, endlessly, “Hit the road, Jack! And don’t you come back no more no more no more no more…?”

Hit the road, Jack. That’s what the hotel manager in Almería had told them that morning after the ice bucket incident. Fuck them all. Sti cazzi. She was the Queen of the Night, the dance club organizer, the event planner, the one who made sure everyone got on the plane for the week on Hydra, or Zanzibar, or in Tangiers. Without Lina, dov’è la festa? Nowhere that’s where. She was the party. She was in control of everything. Except herself, and Gino was fine with that as long as she spread her legs, blacked out, every night. But not anymore.

The offshore breeze picked up as the sun dropped toward the sea, bending the bougainvillea branches that draped over the terrace along the beach. The cone of Stromboli rose from the horizon across the sea, and a column of black smoke puffed like a bong hit from its summit.

“Lina!”

It was her friend Beatrice from Rome. They hugged and kissed. “We never see you anymore!”

“Early to bed,” said Lina. “I work in the morning.”

“I understand.” Beatrice paused. “Senti, do you want to do a line? I expect this will be a late night.”

“Only weed for me now.”

Beatrice had been at Lina’s fiftieth birthday party last year, the last time Lina drank. Of course it had been a big party on a boat on the Tiber, and of course Lina had organized everything. Now she couldn’t remember much about that night, but she did recall Bea hoarding coke. Now she was—what? Offering a sympathy snort? Fuck her too.

“You know we are all so proud of you, Lina. And you look amazing!”

“Thank you for coming. It means a lot to Ottavia that my friends are here.” It didn’t mean much to her personally to see her old club friends, most of whom had probably fucked her husband when she was passed out or drying out, including Beatrice. But it didn’t mean nothing. And really, how could she blame them? Gino was too handsome to be a husband.

“Of course we are here for you!” said Beatrice. “Lunch next week in centro?”

“I’m taking a week off. I won’t be in Rome until October.”

“Where are you going?”

Lina pointed her empty water glass at the smoking island on the horizon. “Him.”

Iddu, in the local dialect. Him. The angry volcano had erupted massively that summer, sending up a mushroom cloud like Hiroshima. The island was evacuated, but not before a tourist died; he had the bad luck to be under a falling chunk of red-hot rock. Life and death on Stromboli was a complex calculation of probabilities, but now what passed for normal life under the volcano had resumed.

Lina leaned over the railing of the ferry as it eased against the pier, scanning the black lava beach. A few pale-skinned Germans on their September school vacation were sunburning. In the small port, past the boatmen advertising night tours of the lava flow around the other side of the island, she hired a three-wheeled Vespa Ape, spewing blue smoke like a chainsaw, which buzzed her down the Via Vittorio Emmanuele to her rented villa above the narrow Via Regina Elena.

The house was perched over the Grotta d’Eolo—a small cove, ringed with jagged volcanic cliffs, into which thundered waves at high tide twice a day. Behind rose Him, the 3,000-foot chimney from hell, and even in his tranquil moods he cast his long shadow across the shore. The terrace of the villa was covered in black lava powder from the daily belching. Iddu was spewing flame and ash about every ten minutes since the summer Big One. On the door someone had posted a schedule of the siren tests, which could be heard through the town and in Ginostra on the other side of the island where there were not even Ape taxis or paved roads, just mules. The siren was meant to give people enough time to head down to the shore for evacuation. Since summer the government of Sicily, with money from the EU meaning Germany, had been working out a new automatic warning system. But this was Italy so there were problems. Lina wondered how they could predict the next Big One. She wondered what would happen if one of the tests coincided with an actual eruption. How would anyone know it wasn’t another test? But that was her German side thinking; Italians never thought about shit like that.

Part of her liked the danger, why she always came back. She knew the real danger was tsunamis caused by earthquakes, more frequent than eruptions; a major tsunami could kill everyone on the island before they had a chance to reach higher ground, up the slopes of Him. One disaster you fled up; the other down. Either way, eruptions and tsunamis fell into the category of shit she couldn’t control, which released her from any concern, like the needle she occasionally missed.

She found a broom and swept the black grit off the terrace. A hot flash pounded through her chest and face and she had to sit down. After a minute, drenched in sweat, she went inside, turned on the AC, stripped off her soaking clothes and lay on the bed. When the fever passed after five minutes she stood naked before the mirror. She looked fucking hot for fifty-one, which in that moment was her own opinion but shared by everyone. Still she wondered if menopause would make her fat but decided that was something she could control. Then she changed into her bikini, grabbed a towel and walked down the narrow lane, framed in hibiscus and verbena blooms that sagged over the villa walls, to the Grotta.

Above the turquoise pool, a multi-lingual sign explained what to do in the event of a tsunami. “Take quickly distance from the shores.” That was the English part, below a cartoon of a big wave crashing into the island, which was represented by the volcano wearing a sad face. Him. Like he cared. After a swim she headed back to the villa, showered, dressed, smoked half a joint and hiked into town for dinner.

There were many restaurants on Stromboli but for Lina only one: Bar Ingrid, on a bluff overlooking the sea across from the parish church of San Vincenzo Ferreri. The pizzeria was named after Ingrid Bergman, the island’s most famous foreign visitor. It was the seventieth anniversary of the filming of Stromboli, which had united star and director, Roberto Rosselini, in art and scandal.

“Buona sera signora!” The old lady at the cash register was still there, same cigarette in her mouth, still remembered her, still pointed Lina to her usual table on the edge of the terrace. The restaurant was about half full and so were the wine carafes on the tables. And the negronis and gin-tonics and Aperol spritzes that Lina tried not to see. Keep walking…

“Well if it isn’t the mother of the bride!”

Lina turned and saw him, the English speaker, a young African man sitting by himself. He had been at the wedding, a friend of the groom. “Lina is your name, right?”

“That’s right. And you are Ladoke.”

“Not many Europeans can pronounce my name, much less remember it. Would you like to join me, Lina?”

She looked around and pulled up a chair. He called the waiter. “Can I buy you a negroni? They are quite good.”

“Thank you but I don’t drink.” She turned to the waiter and ordered a bottle of sparkling water.

“I see,” said Ladoke. “Are you alone?”
“Yes, but not lonely,” she said, wishing she hadn’t put it that way.

“Same here.”

She’d only exchanged a few pleasant greetings with him at the wedding and hadn’t really studied him. Now she saw he was handsome in an unconventional way. He had a severe brow, almost Cro-Magnon, which gave the effect of his eyes being recessed in deep craters, as if his eyeballs were actually inside his brain. His dreadlocks were tied back in a bun.

“Remind me how you know my new son-in-law?” she asked.

“I’m a film producer in Lagos. He interned for me. I taught him how to make very bad movies, which is our specialty in Nigeria.”

They laughed, and found themselves staring into each other’s eyes. Lina pulled away her gaze first and broke the awkward silence with another question.

“What brings you alone to Stromboli?”

“Google Earth.”

Lina laughed again, sending water up her nose.

“No, I’m serious! You see I was looking on Google Earth for places to go after the wedding, and I saw this volcano sticking out of the water. And what amazed me was that it was just this perfect round cone. It looked like some movie version of a volcanic island.”

“It was a movie. Stromboli.”

“I know it. Rosselini. The volcano actually erupted as they were shooting the film.”

“Lucky for Rosselini.”

“Anyway I decided to come. Do you think I made a good choice?”

“That depends on your idea of a bad choice.”

“I would define bad choice as letting you go sit by yourself at that table over there, instead of dining with me.”

Okay, thought Lina. So it begins.

Their gaze met again. This time Ladoke broke the spell. “Your eyes are almost African,” he said. “They are so dark.”

“For a white person, you mean?”

He laughed. “I suppose that’s what I mean.”

“My father was Calabrian. Probably some Moorish blood in there. But my mother was German with blue eyes.” She stopped herself. That was more than she generally shared with strangers. “How old are you, Ladoke?”

“Thirty-one.”

“I could be your mother.”

“Mother? In Africa you could be my grandmother! But I do not ask women their age.”

“You are polite.”

“Perhaps, but the truth is I don’t care about a woman’s age.”

“And what do you care about?”

“Right now? Pizza! Shall we order?”

They signaled for the waiter, who asked if they preferred beer or wine with the pizza.

“Just more water,” said Ladoke.

“You are not drinking with your dinner?” asked Lina.

“I don’t always drink, and anyway I had one negroni.”

“You’re not just saying that to make me feel comfortable?”

“Is that such a bad thing?”

“No. But sometimes when I sense people try to make me comfortable I feel—”

“Uncomfortable?”

She smiled. “Funny how that works. I suppose you will be returning to Africa.”

“Africans always return to Africa. But I hold a British passport so I can stay as long as I like.”

“And how long do you like?”

He shifted his gaze out across the sea, then turned to her again. “Let me ask you a question, Lina. Have you ever seen a Nigerian film?”

“I don’t think so.”

“We start with questions. What if the husband sleeps with the housemaid? What if the schoolteacher gets the daughter pregnant? What if the drug dealer gets run over by the taxi driver? All good questions, but we don’t wait for answers. In Lagos we just start shooting. We never know how it will end—although it always ends badly, usually a result of evil spirits.”

“That’s a funny way to make a movie.”

“It’s a terrible way to make a movie! But it’s a good way to live. I like questions, but I distrust answers.”

Ladoke was staying at the Ossidiana Hotel near the port. After dinner they exchanged phone numbers and said goodnight in the Piazza di San Vincenzo. They hugged and kissed cheeks; she briefly imagined the taste of his lips, but interrupted her own thoughts and said, “I hope to see you around.”

Ladoke laughed. “We could always hope for dinner tomorrow around eight o’clock, same place.”

“Yes, let’s hope,” she said. “Ciao-ciao!”

And so it began. They had dinner at eight the next night, then met the following morning at the Ficogrande Beach for a swim. He let his dreadlocks down, and in the water they swirled around his head like tentacles.

“You look like an octopus!” said Lina.

He laughed and reached for her hand in the water. They briefly embraced, then she pulled away and dove into a wave.

That night over dinner he took her hand, which she allowed for about five seconds before withdrawing to fish a cigarette out of her handbag.

“You know Lina, in Lagos we pay small boys to guard our cars on the street. I think you maybe have one of those boys in your head.”

She laughed. “You want to know more about me because you like me, and that makes me close down.” She sliced her hand through the air in front of her face.

“You think I like you? Are you sure?”

Again he was making her laugh.

“Lina…”

“Stop. Please.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. It’s just that I am in a place of profound change in my life. I need to concentrate on my own life. In fact I’m moving to Berlin.”

“Berlin! But why?”

“Have you been?”

“Not in many years, it was winter during the film festival. It impressed me as a place under constant change.”

“Rome never changes,” she said. “I’m tired of Rome.”

“So you are restless. I imagine Berlin is a good choice for someone making changes.”

“I suppose it depends on your idea of a bad choice.”

He laughed. “You know Lina, we Africans don’t need self-help books or phone apps to stay focused on the present moment. It’s all we have. But should tomorrow ever come, we will certainly worry about it.”

She lit a cigarette. “You’re analyzing me.”

“I’m observing you. I can see the gears turning. Do I like him? What does he want from me? In fact I desire nothing from you but your presence in this moment.”

And he leaned across the table and kissed her lips.

After dinner he walked back to his hotel, hoping she would follow. But when he looked back at the piazza she was gone. He walked on, feeling the blood drain from his hard-on.

In fact Lina had gone back to the bar to watch the Messina-Reggiana football match. It was the big rivalry—the Derby dello Stretto between the two teams on either side of the Strait, Calabria versus Sicily, and both had loud fans on Stromboli. Far below the terrace she could see the Laurana, the twice-weekly overnight ferry to Naples, lumber into port, her reverse engines groaning. The twin stern gangplanks swung down and the crowd of passengers surged onto the boat. Lina would be on that ship next week; she dreaded going back to Rome but needed to organize for Berlin. Maybe Ladoke would sail with her? Maybe they would share a cabin?

“Goal!” Hachim Mastour, the Reggiana attacking midfielder, put the Calabrians in the lead. Lina cheered; Mastour was also a native Calabrian but of Moroccan parents. She pondered the futility of tracing her own North African blood, which probably dated to the Saracen invasions of the ninth century. Around the bar, in front of the big TV, Italians were ordering more wine and grappa; the German tourists were downing bottles of Messina beer. The Laurana raised her gangplanks and shuddered away from the dock. Soon her cabin lights were a dim glow on the dark horizon, and then she was gone.

The cash register lady came over to Lina’s table and set down a shot glass filled to the rim with the bar’s homemade limoncello.

“Ma no!” said Lina. “Non l’ho ordinato!”

“But it is your usual digestivo,” insisted the old lady through a fog bank of cigarette smoke.

Lina returned a courteous smile. “Grazie tante, signora.”

Lina stared at the bright yellow drink for a few minutes, cocking her head left and right as if arguing with it. Finally she convinced herself it looked like cloudy piss and pushed it away, turning back to the match.

Her phone chirped. It was a text from Ladoke. “Dear Lina, I’m on the overnight boat to Naples. You are an amazing person. I shall never forget you, and Stromboli. 🐙 ”

She lifted the glass of limoncello and downed it in one swallow, strapped on her headlamp and retreated down the Via Vittorio to her villa. There were no street lights on Stromboli, and in the blackness her lamp caught the eyes of cats stalking rats along the side of the road. By the small red home of Bergman and Rossellini, sprays of star jasmine filled the night air with sweet perfume. She walked on past the school and football pitch where the road narrowed between the close white walls of villas. Her footsteps echoed off the walls, as if her sandals were hollow gourds. Just past the Via Siena she sensed someone behind her, which a furtive glance confirmed. A tall figure, a man, no headlamp, was following her. His steps were silent, no echo. Only islanders walked around barefoot and without headlamps. She quickened her pace, as did he. On she walked, it was all downhill now, turning on the Via Barnao which ended above the beach at her place. She had her key in hand, and when she reached her gate she whirled around to confront the stranger, key wedged between her knuckles as a weapon. But he was gone.

Back inside, Lina locked the door and lit up a joint. Her hands trembled, and as the dope took hold she felt pulsing waves of adrenalin rushing to her brain. Escape hormones, she knew them. Get away. She had to get away. But where? The Laurana only ran twice a week in late season. And she couldn’t stay in town with the stranger following her and the bar and the limoncello and who-knows-when she’d go for a gin-tonic. No.

Ginostra.

She could walk to Ginostra on the other side of the island, overnight. In the morning there was a boat from there to Lipari where she could reach the daily hydrofoil to Naples. Maybe she could catch up with Ladoke.

But you could only reach Ginostra over the volcano, there was no coastal path across the lava shards. The trail to the crater had been closed since the eruption, you could only hike up two-hundred-ninety meters where a guard stood. She knew the guard, and she knew right now he was drinking at Bar Ingrid. And she knew the way. She quickly packed up her roller bag and stuck it in a corner, changed into her ankle boots, jammed three hundred euros in her jeans pocket, grabbed a bottle of water, slipped new batteries into her headlamp and ducked out. The stranger was nowhere, and soon she was on the summit trail, which began just up from her villa.

It hit her when the trail steepened. As her headlamp followed the switchbacks through the low juniper, she realized this is the movie.

Stromboli.

Bergman plays a Lithuanian refugee in a resettlement camp after the war; she meets an Italian soldier returning to his life as a fisherman on Stromboli. They fall in love, or at least he does. She sees, in his stubborn ardor, a decent enough man who could get her out of the camp. And so it began. But Stromboli turns out to be a trap. Her new husband is a brute. The local women, apparitions in head scarves, avoid her. The parish priest counsels her to accept her new life, but she is going mad. She decides to climb the volcano and then down to Ginostra. There would be fishermen on that side who didn’t know her, wouldn’t or couldn’t warn her husband. They could help her escape.

But Bergman doesn’t know the volcano, doesn’t know the way. The film ends as she collapses in exhaustion at the summit, just as the volcano begins to erupt.

Lina wasn’t worried about finding her way to Ginostra, but another thought stalled her on the path. What the fuck am I doing chasing a thirty-one-year-old African across the Tyrrhenian Sea?

Or any man. She didn’t chase men. Men chased her. Because she was in charge. She imagined Ladoke in his berth, praying for a text from her, checking his phone as the Laurana heaved and swayed in the sea, forcing himself not to text her again until she responded but then finally relenting and sending her a second message: I will wait for you in Naples. But it didn’t come.

Surely it was the poor signal on the volcano, or the shitty wifi on the boat. She would return to Bar Ingrid and then Ladoke’s string of arduous messages would chime like church bells. Then he would know who was in charge.

By the time she got back to Bar Ingrid, shoes and calves blackened with lava dust, the match was long over, Reggiana won. The Germans had gone to bed, there were only a few locals around the tables, arguing about the penalty kicks.

“Buona sera signora!”

Lina sat at her usual table and checked her phone. Nothing. Her thumbs hovered over the screen. No. I won’t text him. She set down the phone and exhaled. That was easy, just a little willpower. The waiter approached.

“The kitchen is closed,” he said. “Something to drink?”

“Sì grazie. Prendo un gin-tonic.”

Lina could drink a lot of gin-tonics in an hour—exactly how many no one had ever counted—so when the bar closed an hour later she staggered down the Via Vittorio in a blur. Several times she felt the dark barefoot stranger was following her, but when she turned there was no one in the road. Her mind was consumed by two thoughts: shame over drinking, and the realization, bordering on panic, that there was nothing to drink in the villa except her perfume. The last time she drank perfume it ended badly, in the emergency room of the Tiber Island hospital.

At the Via Regina Elena she detoured down to the Grotta, intending to rinse the volcanic soot off her legs. The sea was cold as she waded to her knees, still in her hiking boots, and she quickly withdrew. But the waves called to her as the third-quarter moon dipped almost to the horizon, sending jagged shards of light across the sea. Somewhere out there was Ladoke, in his snug berth, bound for Naples.

Behind her Iddu was growling, his mouth spewing crimson fireworks like an uncorked bottle of Franciacorta. She scrambled clumsily up the high promontory at the head of the Grotta, cutting her wet shins on the sharp lava stone, not caring. At the summit, fifty feet above the waves, she pulled off her headlamp in a defiant swipe and hurled it into the churning sea. She watched as it briefly bobbed in the wake, then sank, the LED glow disappearing. Lina closed her eyes and leaned forward into the wind. And then she was no longer in charge.

Deep in the bush near Koforidua, driving our Tata pickup along a rutted red dirt track, I saw the setup in a clearing between banana trees. Under a canopy of rusty corrugated roofing sat a blackened fifty-five-gallon oil drum perched on rocks above a fire, two more barrels connected to it by a battered copper pipe. A guy in a grimy American charity t-shirt (“Des Plaines Park District Volunteer”) was feeding four-foot-long mahogany trunks into the fire, which enveloped him in smoke.

My passenger Hayford was a cocoa farmer and village agent for my brother’s Ghanaian battery company; I was writing a book about the business, and giving Hayford a lift home. “You want see?” he said in pidgin English. “This is where we make the alcoholic.”

In Ghana, alcoholic and amateur alike consider this jungle moonshine the national drink. Known generically as akpeteshie or apio for short, it’s a powerful distillate of palm wine. It goes by hundreds of names in tribal languages but also English slang. You might be served Kill Me Quick, Holy Water, Yes We Can, Liquid Fire or African Ice. They will all taste roughly the same, which is to say like gasoline with floral notes of cheap tequila.

There is never a label, no marketing campaign, no billboards with attractive couples toasting on a terrace above the sea; apio is served at makeshift bamboo bush stands along dirt roads and footpaths, poured from whatever used bottle is available, into whatever glass or plastic cup is on hand. It is always served as a shot; there are no apio-and-tonics and God save us from frozen apio margaritas.

The strength, as you might imagine with homebrewed hooch, varies but can be roughly measured by the number of times the drinker pounds his chest after downing a shot.

Apio is not a pensive high. A shot, make mine a double, leaves the brain behind and goes straight to the knuckles and toes. Apio does not inspire poetry; it inspires swinging a machete in a field of cassava. My first taste of apio brought back memories of vineyard workers in the Rhône delta, rough men with hands like tamarind pods who would gather at the Bar du Commerce in Saint-Laurent-d’Aigouze at seven in the morning and down shots of Pastis before heading out to the fields in the searing Provençal heat. How do they do that? A question posed every morning by the art history student, himself swinging a shovel in the harvest of Romanesque sculptures but fortified only, and he now realizes insufficiently, by café au lait. Apio made this clear.

And clear it is, like water, those stinging shots. The drink has lower-class connotations—in a country with essentially no middle class—but lawyers and businessmen in the capital of Accra also keep a flask at home, tucked behind their bottles of Johnnie Walker and Tanqueray. Women drink it although rarely in public. It’s said that apio stimulates the appetite and is thus favoured by women who, after a day cooking and tasting before the fire, have no interest in actually eating the meal they’ve prepared. A shot of apio and they’re hungry. This strikes me as rationalization but I’m not one to judge.

Also: apio costs roughly one-tenth that of Western brand liquor, which explains not just its appeal but its history. In the 1930s the British masters of then Gold Coast banned apio, deeming it vaguely immoral. In reality, apio was cutting into their sales of Scotch and gin. Hence akpeteshie which in the Ga language of Accra means “the secret thing.”

It starts at the palm tree—a date palm, an oil palm, a raffia, they all make sap which must be extracted. In a perfect world the sap is tapped from live trees, which is slow. In the real world, meaning the developing world where people live on a dollar a day, the trees are cut down, then slashed and burned at the base to speed the sap, which is collected in plastic jugs. Farmers in Ghana understand deforestation, but the children need school books and so palm trees meet the machete.

The sugary sap is then fermented in plastic barrels for a day or so. The resulting frothy, sweet palm wine is also consumed, often as a ritual around baptisms and funerals.

But some ends up in the still. There it boils into steam before condensing in the copper pipe as it passes through cold water and, finally, drips into a flask.

Weeks later I spent a night with my friend Jonah, a cassava farmer in Otareso, a village with no electricity. Night there is like camping except no one is on holiday. After a dinner of roasted chicken giblets, the men came around Jonas’s makeshift bar to drink apio under a kerosene lantern. They were immigrant farmers from Benin, which is even poorer than Ghana, and so we spoke French. Someone had a boom box. We played Congolese soukous and danced, and pounded our chest with every shot.

An old Boston blueblood, of the sort with a townhouse on Comm Av and a bank account funded before recorded history, once said, when asked where he bought his suits: “I don’t buy clothes, I own them.”

I was thinking of that doubtless apocryphal anecdote recently while planning to write about how not to buy clothes, in advance of the holiday shopping orgy. Then the New York Times beat me to it, sort of, with a guest essay by Isabel Cristo, identified as a fact checker at New York magazine.

The essay, headlined “Buy Better, Buy Less, Feel Smug About It,” considers well-made clothing as a possible antidote to over-consumption. She begins by positioning quality clothing as the latest itinerary along her personal pilgrimage to shop responsibly: First she dug vintage but that became trendy, then the vintage shops filled up with second-hand throwaway shit from Zara. Now she fears quality is also on the road to ruin: “If we’re not vigilant, ‘quality’ risks becoming a trend in itself.”

I get it—she works at a New York City magazine dedicated to finding, defining, celebrating and inventing trends. To a hammer, everything looks like a nail etc. I used to be an editor at those magazines. She has my sympathy, but not my agreement.

Because buying quality clothes, then taking care of them and wearing them forever, is contrary to the meaning of trendy. By definition, it’s anti-trendy. Even boring—possibly more boring than the dinner-table conversations in the townhouse of that lock-jawed Boston WASP with a wardrobe full of Brooks Brothers sack suits from the JFK era.

Ms. Cristo then seeks to equate the quality-clothing “trend” to the Slow Food movement, which began here in Italy in 1986 as a reaction to the global infestation of fast-food chains. In her trendspotting worldview, Slow Food devolved into yet another trend in which “social elites patronized gorgeous wood-paneled restaurants and expensive specialty grocery stores, buoyed by the knowledge that their habits were morally, as well as nutritionally, superior.”

Well.

This would come as a surprise to the 700 citizens of the mountain village in Calabria where my two sons live. There are no Michelin-starred restaurants in Dasà, but every Wednesday a truck comes around selling fresh produce (notably the fiery round chiles famous in the region, which are stewed with potatoes). On Friday the fishmonger arrives, announcing her catch of the day from a speaker mounted atop the truck which will definitely wake you up if you missed your alarm. My older son Harper gathers olives from his trees and takes them to the local frantoio (olive oil mill) to press his oil. His father-in-law gathers porcini mushrooms in the forest, not that he would ever tell anyone where. This is what Slow Food means for people who don’t work at magazines.

Back in New York, our style writer, having established that quality clothes are a new trend, laments how said trend is debasing quality. “Today,” she writes, “you can buy garbage at every price point. Raw material and labor costs have surged, and many luxury brands appear to be cutting corners to sustain their profit margins.”

Doubtless true. But for people like me who have spent a lifetime caring, quietly, about well-made clothes, luxury brands are for amateurs. They can be well-made (the knitwear sold by family-owned Brunello Cucinelli comes to mind1), but mostly they’re about status, which is unrelated to quality. When you buy a garment from a company with “immersive” stores on luxury shopping streets in city centers around the world, you’re paying their rent. Also for their full-page ads in Condé Nast magazines. (Those magazines again!)

By contrast, genuine quality clothes are typically made in cramped ateliers by artisans who don’t advertise except maybe on social media, like once a month because…they’re busy making clothes. If they have physical stores at all, they are usually small and off the main shopping drags. Their online stores, should they exist, are not “robust.” It takes work to find them, and to order from them.

To name one personal favorite: Anatomica in Paris, with in-house designs that are sort of French chic and sort of Japanese streetwear and sort of American preppy. They have some stuff online, but really you need to go. (Easy for you, I can hear Americans. But I drool over cool shops in New York and LA that I can’t fly to for the weekend.)

None of this stuff is cheap, but no more than bullshit luxury brands. And you’re paying an honest price for materials and labor, not overhead and marketing.

In the real world, this is not how most of us buy clothes. I cop to having bought a pretty nice open-knit beach shirt at Zara last summer, and I happen to like Uniqlo t-shirts which are good quality for under $20. That said, spending more on quality clothes can save money in the long run. This is particularly true with footwear.

Take Chelsea boots. As a young man I used to buy Blundstones, those globally ubiquitous hipster boots. Blunnies are nominally Australian, but since 2007 they have been made in the usual cheap-labor countries around the world, from Thailand to Mexico, of cheap materials. Which is why they currently cost $200. I’m told their quality-control has improved recently, but I recall needing to replace mine every few years after the cheap rubber soles split and disintegrated. Meanwhile the uppers are of a dull corrected leather that will not take a shine, although that could be a feature to some fans.

Or you could spend $600 on a pair of genuine Australian-made boots from R.M. Williams, as I did ten years ago. They are made from fine leather that takes a shine and lasts forever, with care. The leather soles eventually wear out (mine haven’t yet) but are Goodyear-stitched to allow replacement—either by the company in Australia ($125 plus shipping) or by many local cobblers. They will be the last Chelsea boots you ever buy. In short, you will own them.

So this Christmas and beyond, let’s give ourselves permission to shop at Zara. But let’s also think about owning a few more quality clothes, and taking care of them. In this way we can avoid fashion trends. And the trend of calling everything a trend.