Eating Read Free Page A

garden if you have one, into the ragù. Meanwhile, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil, cook a pound of tagliatelle until it’s al dente, and transfer the pasta with tongs to the ragù and mix thoroughly,saving the pasta water if you’re not planning to serve the ragù immediately. Drop a tong-full into each large pasta bowl, sprinkle with grated parmigiana, and serve while hot. The dish is even better the second day, as leftovers.
    In childhood, I became interested in cooking as I watched my grandmother Ida bake pies, preserve peaches and applesauce from her own trees, and roast chickens that she had fattened herself in the cellar when it was too cold for them outdoors. My grandparents’ old house, atop a steep hill in Auburn, Maine, had a primitive coal-burning furnace which kept the cellar warm but didn’t do much on icy days for the big, drafty parlors, despite heavy wood-framed storm windows. Ida was tall, handsome, and amiable. She carried herself with dignity and smiled often and easily. She was not a great cook and not always even a very good one, but she tried. Her grandchildren respected and loved her and went along with the pretense that her food was delicious. Or perhaps, being children, they didn’t know any better. At the age of ten, I did know better, for my parents would often take me with them when they dined out with friends on Sundays at country inns—including the Toll House, with its famous cookies—around Boston, where we lived when we were not visiting my grandparents in Maine.
    My grandmother was from Russia and said she liked cold houses with warm kitchens. Her husband, my grandfather, was born prematurely and kept in a shoebox wrapped in fur until he was old enough to survive, or so I was told. When I knew him in old age, he wore in winter what was called a pelt, a stiff canvas coat lined with a sheepskin, an echo, I thought, of his primitive incubator. On bitter winter days when the frost formed peaks on the storm windows in the unheated parlor, my cousins and I sat in the kitchen warmed by the big woodstove with its nickel trim and the words “Model: Home Fireside” in raised letters above a temperature gauge on the oven door.
    Prospect Hill, where my grandparents lived, was almost perpendicular, and with my friend Raymond Begin, who was smart and funny and spoke French—he would become a Roman Catholic priest in Canada—I skied down it on heavy wooden Norwegian skis with knobs at the tip. Then, with sealskins attached to our skis, we would herringbone back up. Afterward we would go across South Main Street to Cloutier’s store (pronounced “Cloochies”) for frozen Milky Ways and root beer.
    On stormy winter mornings, you could see from my grandmother’s kitchen windows the windswept snow swirl against the blackness of Mr. Jackson’s open barn doors across the road. Pete, my grandparents’ old English bulldog, slept on a braided rug in front of the stove, so that my grandmother had to pirouette awkwardly around him as she lifted her roasts and pies from the oven. From my perch next to the stove, atop the big box painted blue with a slanted top, like a saltbox, where the firewood was kept, I effortlessly absorbed from mybeaming grandmother, with her Oxford glasses on their gold chain, the ambience of warmth and safety from which the desires of a lifetime were formed, including the desire that persists long after her death to help her improve her cooking. Like the walls and ceiling of my New York kitchen today, hers were wainscoted, but the varnish was older and mellower than mine. The copper plumbing must have been added after the house was built, since it was bracketed to the walls rather than embedded in them, and it rattled and groaned whenever the brass faucets were opened over the heavy slate sink.
    In summertime, when the kitchen became uncomfortably warm and the fumes of melting tar rising from the street clutched at our throats, I would retreat with a book to a cool