Author: Mara L.

This past weekend I met up with Jens, at Christie’s, the famous fine art auctioneer. Jens had emailed me. They had a large collection of William Egglestone’s work on display. Not, of course, that I could buy one. But I love Egglestone’s work, and hadn’t had a chance to see it for a long time.

Looking at the images, I thought that Egglestone tricked me into missing something: food. Here’s my new, entirely unsupported and widely speculative theory. Without my theory in place, I would find it hard to describe what, to me, is the core of Egglestone’s work. Perhaps the glorious colors, a certain ‘feel’ of the south, a love of the land, and a deep sadness. Oh dear! I’m rambling. But with my theory in place, things are easy: The core of Egglestone’s work is the lack of food on tables that could carry food.

My two favorite images are American kitchens. Or rather, one of them definitely is. It’s one wall of an old-fashioned kitchen (here), the kind of kitchen that is reminiscent of the time when women spent lonely lives slaving away in the kitchen, and when a stain was a stain on the housewife’s reputation. Brrr! Not for me, who loves to love her kitchen. My second favorite (here) is a table, perhaps in a kitchen, but more likely in a diner. Again, no food, the tabletop wiped clean. How sad! How much would one like to see the foods of bygone times.

However, it’s not like I’m not getting the point. Of course, the melancholy would be gone if a lovely cake stood there, and the quiet beauty of the images probably too.

So, no culinary notes today, but I recommend looking at the pictures.

I’ve been back to Manhattan for a few weeks now, and I’m finally resuming my culinary duties on Jens’ blog. Part of this year’s readjustment (after my summer at home, in Italy) is about fish. I’m a pasta-eater, a cake-eater, and a fresh fruit-eater. But not a fish-eater. What a shame that none of my foods are sold in Manhattan in the very way in which I enjoy them in Italy. I admit that, given that my second (or third) home is Procida, an island near Napoli, it might seem that I should be a fish-eater. But that would be mistaken. Really, Procida is a rather poor island, with none of the international high-life that you find next door, in Capri. We eat Spaghetti with all kinds of things from the sea thrown into it – small things, quite deliciously blending with the tomato sauce. And essentially, it’s still spaghetti.

No culinary author should say she doesn’t love fish. But I’ll just go ahead and say it. However, what else is there to eat in Manhattan? Nothing else seems as fresh and fragrant as I would like it to be. Fish, if you buy it at the right places (including Citarella’s, Balducci’s, and others) is crisp, hard to the touch, and luminous. So, I am coming around, learning to live on a diet of fish. And I’m telling myself that it will help sustain my Manhattan health. But this brings me back to my deepest culinary puzzle, whether what’s good for the body is good for the soul, and whether it’s not obvious that the soul is more important. Can anyone be made happy by fish?

There are few recipes that combine two features: I brought them home to Italy from New York City, *and* my family likes them. From the point of view of my family I have sold my soul to the propaganda of ‘healthy eating,’ a notion they can only use with very audible citation marks. So, how come that I am cooking a dish for them, one that is, according to the standards of healthiness that I have come to adopt, very healthy? I have no explanation, but I report that my hypercritical mother has become a fan of this super-light lasagne. After years of juggling between two cultures (a battle that Italians fight in the kitchen), this is a heart-warming success. I invited Jens when I cooked my lasagne the second time this summer. Since he is happy to document the traumas of the expatriate, he agreed to take some pictures.

The cultural consensus is brought about by a trick. My lasagne is neither the abhorred “Vegetable Lasagna” that, from the point of view of my family, only weaklings will eat. But it is also not the heavy, meat-and-pancetta dish that makes you feel like you have to go on a diet for the next three weeks. It is a miracle consisting entirely of fresh lasagne sheets, tomato, and béchamel sauce (my version).

Buy fresh lasagne, or make it yourself (I don’t bother), but don’t get the dried variety – it will lie for years in your cabinet, for as much as you plan to prepare it, as it happens you will never have the time to first cook it is a pot, lay it out nicely on kitchen towels, then make the lasagne, and then wait for it to be done in the oven… Put a large tin of very good Italian tomatoes in a pot and cook it, adding lots of basil at the end (the basil should not actually cook, just give off its scent; some olive oil goes into the pot first, then some salt and pepper; don’t do this in a pan: the acidity of tomatoes ruins the surface of pans and soon all the bad things that presumably are in these surfaces will be in your food). Take a second pot, some butter and flour into it, mix it up into a nice batter, add milk, stir it, more and more milk, until you have a nicely reduced, but still large quantity of milk. Now add lots of parmiggiano, and start layering. (I know, this is not real béchamel sauce. But it’s a fabulous variant.) First some tomato in your lasagne pan, then pasta, then béchamel sauce, and so on, always adding lots of fresh basil leaves in between.

Even with the largest quantity of parmiggiano you can possibly dare to take, this will be super light and fragrant!