yourlifeisatrip

by Elizabeth Weinstein

“If I have to hear one more time about that roast chicken your father had in Tuscany....” my husband says, shaking his head. He feigns disgust, but in truth my husband is amused at the way my family compares every meal we eat to some better meal we had once upon a time. And the best of those meals were always in Italy. The ‘roast chicken in Tuscany’ has become our tagline for the holy grail—the holy food grail.

My parents lived in Italy a generation ago and, culinarily speaking, came of age there.  During our growing-up, my brother and I were lucky enough to spend a year and several seasons in that country of hot, meaty broths that simultaneously console and inspire; fresh spinach with warm, oily garlic; pan-fried steaks bright with lemon and salt; and tortellini alla panna that could make you cry.

But it is indeed the roast chicken that does a Marcel Proust number on me—or rather would, if only I could have a bite of that chicken I ate 45 years ago at a restaurant called Cecco’s in Pescia. Just tonight if I could have a taste of pollo al mattone, a fresh chicken flattened whole between two bricks and roasted crisp and succulent on a spit with—with what seasonings? Was it really only salt?—then I would remember what it was like to be five years old and travelling with my parents and my big brother from Lucca back to our temporary home in Florence. I would be able to feel again the warmth of being safe with my family and at home in a foreign country.