The Book wasn't cool. It showed up at my house, sent by my mother, and got tucked away.
It looked corny to my mid-twenties eyes. It had cheesy pink hearts on the cover, potted petunias and an inexplicable, bandana-wearing chicken under the words: "Family Favorites."
Tortilla Espaqola: A potato omelet that calls for a bit of culinary acrobatics, from a treasured recipe collection put together by the author's mother, Norma Roig.
(Photos Renee Comet / Styled By Lisa Cherkasky For The Washingto)
|
|
I didn't appreciate my mother's recipe book, although this seems impossible now. It took me a decade or so to understand finally what I should have grasped a long time ago.
This book of mine -- of Mom's, of ours -- is now amply splotched with red sauce. It is frayed and overstuffed, nicked from too many packings and unpackings in northern California and New Orleans and Annapolis and Miami Beach. It is, quite frankly, saggy.
But it might be my most precious possession.
Inside is our family story wrapped in a lesson book. It is told with the understated eloquence of my mother, Norma Roig. I might have expected as much from this pretty lady, a once shy -- and maybe still just a bit shy -- youngest daughter who at 60 doesn't seem to mind that her own mother and siblings even now call her "Babe."
There are recipes in the book from the Spanish city of Huelva where I was born -- the homeland my father, Manuel Roig Loredo, left with his young family when I was 2, but never left in spirit. And there are the second-generation Italian concoctions of my mother's family, the huge proportions and exquisite ingredients proclaiming: "We have arrived."
Mom somehow knit these two families, these two cultures together. That molding was most often done in the kitchen. On her side, the tone was set by her parents, John and Antonette Franzia, such headstrong chefs that they built separate kitchens in their big stone house out among the grapevines.
On my father's side, all culinary knowledge flowed from his parents, Manuel Roig Meca and Josefa Loredo Dominguez, who conjured flavors from memory rather than the written word.
Flipping through the pages of my book rouses the scents of my childhood. The vinegary shock of Mom's antipasto, that sharp whiff of Parmesan rising over rows of hollowed-out zucchini. And garlic. Garlic everywhere, in everything, and Dad saying, "too much garlic" and no one listening to him.
My parents never meddled much in my life, so Mom hardly asked over the years about the recipes she bequeathed to me, with instructions typed out so precisely:
RECIPE: mushroom gravy
SOURCE: Antonette Franzia
can do ahead
