A Girl from the Hill

Feeding others. Fiore women were placed upon this earth with this mission. Give them your hungry, your famished, your voracious masses in need of a good home-cooked meal. Even if you’re not hungry, just have a little something. Once fed, you must be happy. The tradition in America started with Maria and Giovanni, Mary and John, who perpetually took in multitudes of Italian cousins coming to Rhode Island with no other place to go. According to Dahlia,

“My mother said it was her job to take care of people. And she did. I don’t know how she managed to feed so many with nothing, but she did it. Even when she was sick. And she never complained.”

To this day my mother is in awe of her own mother’s efforts, and her compassion for others above herself. So am I.

Maria received little reward, and little in return for her kindness, but it didn’t matter. “Her sisters had so much and all they would bring her was a dozen eggs,” my mother told me about her aunts, the Mollo women. “They had all that money and all she got was eggs. And they ate and ate everything she made.”

Maria took her commitment to nourish seriously, even wet nursing her cousin’s sick babies. She enjoyed the sound of children in her home and all of the Fiore boys and girls would bring their friends over to Marshall Street to enjoy fresh-baked cookies or a nice piping hot doughboy with sugar sprinkled on top.

Food nourishes the soul and the body, makes you feel better and can cure any ailment. Unless of course it kills you, as diabetes killed Maria, Phil, and Arlene.

My mother followed in her mother’s and sisters’ footsteps. Food made with blood, sweat, tears and love. How many mountains of pastena and butter did she make for me when I didn’t feel well? Any kind of macaroni for that matter, as the butter and cheese on it provided me instant remedy from any ailment. My sisters helped themselves to gravy sandwiches by soaking thick slices of Italian bread into my mother’s tomato sauce. The meatballs, with their hunks of garlic and fresh basil, basilico, tucked inside, were reserved for Sunday dinner. My mother fed the neighborhood kids too, who would stick their faces against our screen door and watch us eat homemade pancakes until invited inside.

My sisters and I can all can cook and bake. We know some of the recipes, but it isn’t the same as the Fiores. We all love food; love to eat, sometimes too much. My mother taught us how to make tomato gravy and all kinds of cookies at Christmas time. My sister Donna owns a café and cooks and bakes for a living. She stands as the only one of the four of us who has the stamina and determination of Sue and Phil on a perpetual basis, and experiences the great satisfaction that comes from constantly feeding others.

Even though it is a deeply personal, almost religious experience, giving and preparing food has become only a small slice of who I am, of what I do. It’s more of a hobby or a relaxing pastime than a chore that defines me. However small, though, I feel its power over me when duty calls and I take on the nourishment the masses, aka my family and friends.

As a young girl I loved to cook and bake for others, but marrying a man who considered a bowl of Lucky Charms as a dinner entre caused me to put down my spatula and wave the white apron of surrender some years back. Jeremy has come a long way since our early days together, and my daughter Julia’s taste buds are not as mature as t hose of her maternal relatives. Suffice it to say that neither possesses a palate sophisticated enough to truly appreciate my Italian cooking.

Like the Fiore women before me, my cooking must be appreciated, or alas you have slain me. When I cook, I am tearing off a piece of my own flesh and throwing it into the pot. Other than writing, there is nothing on this earth that gives me more satisfaction than preparing something to be loved and consumed by another human being.

I still make my father squid soup, because I know he loves it, and he loves the way I make it. Tentacles and all, sautéed with onions, butter, olive oil and tomato. When I bring my candied sweet potatoes to my in-laws’ each Thanksgiving, I wait and only exhale after receiving some much anticipated compliments. Of course I shrug it off as nothing on the surface. No one knows how much I relish compliments on my cooking, for if you like my cooking, you like me. And if you don’t absolutely love my cooking, you reject me and cause me immediate and irreparable emotional damage. That part of my Fiore heritage will never leave me, and I’m happy for it, even though I don’t truly understand it.

A good friend of mine was once told by her mother that cooking on Sundays, in her case Perogies and Gołąbki instead of macaroni and meatballs, was her secret for keeping her sons coming back home each week, as well as giving her grandchildren a reason to enjoy their visits. I believe that’s what my grandmother would have done if she could, what Phil and Sue and Alice and my own mother did by making their homes the food hub, the place to go to get a warm meal and a family favorite that cannot be matched in the outside world, inside your belly.