Aftertaste - Meredith Mileti [59]
It’s a little after eight when Chloe and I finish up at the Pennsylvania Macaroni Company where, in addition to the prosciutto, soppressata, both hot and sweet sausages, fresh ricotta, mozzarella, and imported Parmigiano Reggiano, all essential ingredients for pizza rustica, I’ve also picked up a couple of cans of San Marzano tomatoes, which I happily note are thirty-nine cents cheaper here than in New York.
I’m planning a feast. Today my father and I will cook Italian peasant food, fried, heavy, greasy stuff. We will make Chloe a fried pizza with plain tomato sauce. She’ll get it all over her face and love it. Kid food. It will take all day, and the smell of garlic, oil, and the fried dough will hang in the air for a week. I can already feel my spirits begin to lift.
There’s already a line at Bruno’s coming out the door and snaking its way along Penn Avenue. Chloe and I join the line, which, this particular Saturday morning, looks to be made up of mostly the well-heeled sipping their Starbucks lattes while waiting for the biscotti flavors of the day.
Bruno’s opened years ago, when I was still in high school. I used to come here often then, mostly to do my homework on the worn wooden tables, sipping lattes and nibbling the biscotti ends, the burnt, crusty little bits that Bruno sold for a dollar a bag because they were too small and too well-done for most people to want them.
I’m sure Bruno won’t remember me. After all, it’s been over twenty years, and even if Bruno is still around, he’ll be well over eighty. Chloe and I brave the long line anyway and are finally rewarded a good fifteen minutes later with a black pepper biscotti for me and a vanilla one for Chloe. We are waited on by a young woman who has a thick hoop running through her top lip and another at the top of her ear. No sign of Bruno. Although I’m tempted to ask about him, I don’t.
When we arrive home, my father is sitting in the kitchen, the newspaper open in front of him, putting the finishing touches on the crossword. “Good morning, ladies,” he says with a smile.
Chloe strains in her stroller, arching her back and reaching for me to release her. Seeing my hands are full of groceries, my father moves to free her. “Watch out, Dad, she’s a mess. She’ll spoil your sweater.” Chloe’s hands are greasy from the sausage and the biscotti, which she has managed to completely dissolve by gumming it into a glutinous paste, most of which is now smeared all over her face.
“Ah, I see you’ve been to Bruno’s,” my father says, dampening a paper towel and handing it to me.
“Yes,” I tell him, wiping Chloe’s face and hands. “We brought you some. Black pepper and cornmeal are still my favorites.” I put the packages down. “We didn’t see Bruno, though. Is he—”
“Retired. Or semi anyway. I see him there every once in a while. His family, a son and a couple of grandkids, run the business now.”
“Hey,” I say, fishing around in the groceries for the bag from Bruno’s. “I got the fixings for pizza rustica. Want to help?”
“Well, okay, but I’ve got a few things to do this morning,” he says, studying his watch. “If you start the dough, I’ll help you when I get back.”
Once my father leaves, I finish putting away the groceries, taking inventory, as I do, of the contents of his refrigerator. As a cook I generally believe that you can tell a lot about people by what they keep in their refrigerators. What comforts them, what they need to have on hand to sustain them. Bon Appétit magazine publishes an interview with a different famous person each month, and often the interviewer will ask the celebrity to name three things that can always be found in his or her refrigerator. The answers are generally too finely crafted to be believable. “A bottle of Stoli, fresh raspberries, and beluga caviar,” or, “San Pellegrino, fresh figs, and key limes.”
Doesn’t anyone else in the world have the wizened