This tomato sauce is my debut back into the Maio family.
I’m standing over the cast iron pot watching bubbles grow and burst while my spoon traces spirals around the edges. I separate a dollop of sauce onto the edge of the wooden spoon and inspect the chunky blend of crushed tomatoes, onions, spices and herbs. It tastes tangy and sweet but still unfinished. I take a bay leaf from the sprig resting in a basket to one side of the stove and throw that in before pausing to pull my hair back and pin up my bangs. Usually content to rest in gentle waves at my shoulders, my hair is ballooning out out in all directions in this heat. I switch on the ceiling fan and tune in the kitchen radio while the sauce simmers.
I blame the radio for telling me all the things that I’m not ready to hear, and the things I’ll never be able to forget. Today it’s a weatherman saying that back in St. Paul, it is a measly one degree outside, with a wind chill dragging the temperature well below zero. The report doesn’t say what one degree feels like—how after you dip into single digit temperatures, what was once a soft and tingling cold becomes a sharper, more visceral experience of pain, like an assault. The radio just reports. For a moment, standing in my grandmother’s kitchen in Florida’s 80-degree winter, I forget what that assault on my skin feels like, and I have no desire to remember it.
I’ve temporarily traded my dusty kitchen in St. Paul—where none of the cabinets and drawers ever fully closes because of the cold—for the faintly humid, sunny kitchen that my grandmother and my aunt share in southern Florida. We are a mile from the beach, but haven’t been outside all day. I’ve been tasked with making the manicottis for dinner. The meal also includes a traditional Italian antipasto, baked ziti, meatballs, langostino, and a host of other things I can’t even pronounce, one of which has to do with wrapping chicken liver in bacon. For now, though, I’m focused on my dish, which will be my first contribution to a Maio family holiday since I was a little girl frosting snowman cookies with my aunt Tricia.
I learned to make the manicottis when I was small. They're memorable because you make them the same way you make pancakes and crepes. Only instead of maple syrup and cinnamon, I was taught to cook tomato sauce from scratch and let it simmer before stuffing, layering, and coating the crepes in sauce, ricotta cheese, parsley and parmesan.
“Don’t hold back,” my aunt Trish says as I start covering a casserole dish in a base layer of sauce and cheese, “or Uncle Mikey will complain that there’s not enough sauce. But don’t let Nonni see, because she doesn’t like the shells to get soggy. And make sure you don’t get the pan too hot, or the shells’ll burn.” She squeezes my shoulder and peers at my stack of tiny crepes awaiting their filling. All in one breath, she says, “Good. If they like it, you’ll hear all about it. If they don’t like it, you’ll still hear all about it.”
She rushes out of the kitchen to start cleaning and preparing for the family’s imminent arrival. I flip the next crepe onto the growing pile before ladling another scoop of batter into the pan. I pause to take a swig of orange juice straight from the carton in the fridge before checking on the sauce again.
Trish shoots me a sideways look and grins. We have the same dark, deep-set eyes, only hers are browner. Mine have always had a bit of green in them—evidence of the Irish in me, my grandmother would say. “Don’t let them see you do that, either,” says Tricia, eyeing the carton over the top of her small, square glasses. “And check that juice, I think it’s expired. You’re like Poppi was, a little too adventurous with your food. Careful you don’t make yourself sick.”
She disappears from view to gather extra place settings from the patio and reemerges balancing three chairs at once. I abandon my expired orange juice and my post at the stove to help her carry in the rest.
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I always trusted food by smell and taste, not expiration dates. Yogurt had its own bacteria to keep it fresh, my dad would say. You can cut the mold off anything but tomatoes, my mom explained. But steer clear of tomatoes once they’ve turned.
Whether it was ten years living on a boat with my mother, where food was always spoiling, molding, souring in the volatile and non-insulated climate—or whether it was a few years living with my father on artist’s wages, where a heel of bread and a corner of old cheddar could become a makeshift grilled cheese—food was always unabashedly simple.
My culinary skills to this day are limited to Italian pasta dishes and single pan stir-fry. But as I polished off the jug of pulpy and only slightly off-tasting orange juice while the manicottis baked in the oven, I wondered why I trusted my gut so blindly when it came to food. Once again I found myself blaming the radio.
The radio is how, in my earliest memories, I learned that people—even famous ones—don’t last forever. Kurt Cobain died in 1994, but radio stations in Seattle were more alive than ever with the reverberations of his guitar riffs and rasping voice. They announced it on our drive to school one morning and began playing Nirvana’s discography from start to finish. I sat sandwiched between my father and my older brother in the cab of our old pick-up truck waiting for someone to say something, but we were silent the whole way.
The radio also taught me that people I knew and loved might one day vanish just like Kurt Cobain. It started when we heard a book review for the non-fiction bio-thriller The Hot Zone on the way home from my last day of kindergarten, my brother’s last day of sixth grade. That summer, he read the book cover to cover and retold stories of human encounters with epidemic diseases at the most inappropriate times. My father assumed I wasn’t listening, or wasn’t understanding, while my brother relayed gory details about the Ebola virus over a bowl of Apple Jacks one morning. “And then your fever gets worse and you start bleeding everywhere and usually go into a coma,” he was saying. “Once it gets you, you’re a goner.”
I stared at the floating bits of cereal in my bowl and imagined the tiny circles were broken and degrading cells under attack by evil Ebola infections. As soon as they left the table to clear their dishes, I started crying. My nose was running and tears fell into my bowl, disturbing the even surface of the milk the way I imagined the virus chipping away little by little at my insides.
My father found me with my head bent over my cereal bowl, still bawling. I couldn’t explain the Cheerios or the Ebola virus because all I really knew about either one was that I didn’t trust them anymore. When he asked what was wrong, I said “what if we all get sick and die today?” in between snot-filled breaths and hiccups.
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The plot details of The Hot Zone faded from my memory along with the long days of summer. That fall, the movie Independence Day came out. Aliens were suddenly much cooler than viruses and decidedly less threatening to my personal safety, based on physical distance alone. My young mind was at ease.
But during yet another car ride home from school, everything came crashing back. While my dad was telling a story about his day at the studio, I overheard the words ‘outbreak’ and ‘virus’ on an otherwise monotonous news report playing on NPR, and my thoughts went reeling. Something called E. coli was poisoning all the Odwalla juice on the west coast, and the company was recalling the product, said the muffled voice from the car stereo.
Everything faded away into white noise after that. All I was certain of in that moment was that our refrigerator was home to not one but two jugs of Odwalla juice. For the rest of the drive home, I picked at the fuzzy bits of yarn that had built up on my sweater as I ran through various scenarios. Each one ended in my death by flesh-eating virus, with a spilled bowl of cereal and an empty Odwalla carton as the key pieces of evidence in a gruesome crime.
I snuck downstairs in the middle of the night to pour out the juice. The far-off expiration date was nothing but lies to me now. Even its thick, goopy texture seemed suspicious and alien. I watched it slide down the edges of the carton and into the sink drain and felt vindicated. I cradled the empty jugs in my arms and took a few uneven steps toward the back door. I stopped to put on my dad’s slippers before shuffling out to the recycling bin to destroy the evidence once and for all.
The next morning, my father announced that there was only milk and cereal for breakfast. We must have finished all the juice already, he said after a pause. I strategically oversold my love for milk that morning, cupping the glass in both hands and downing it in two gulps. My seven-year-old logic aligned milk with all things neutral and safe. There were no stealthy viruses or other threats; regardless of the date on the carton, the soured smell dutifully announced its expiration.
And so began a long career of trusting my nose and ignoring expiration dates.
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More than a decade later, standing in my grandmother’s kitchen, I hesitate for a moment as I peer through the oven window at the gently bubbling tray of manicottis, each one tucked under blankets of sauce and cheese. I wonder if there is too much sauce and if everything cooked through evenly. I crack the oven door and the smell of parsley, garlic, and roasting tomatoes fills the kitchen. Then I remember that I don’t need to know what it looks like; the smell alone tells me it’s done. Or rather, ready. Ready to be served to twenty of my closest and relatives, ready to spark inevitable arguments over taste and texture.
It’s what brings us all together, keeps us warm, full, safe. And as long as I pass it on, this recipe will outlast us all.