The Hostess

Livia's birthday went very well. Bowling proved to be a big hit with everyone, especially Giulio who had to be held back from bowling on everyone else's turn. He even developed a technique of lugging the ball to the begining of the lane and then sort of dropping/hurling it onto the floor, where it would then very s-l-o-w-l-y roll down the lane before taking out the bowling pins. He would then throw his arms in the air in a celebratory V-shape and yell "yeah!" before running back to his seat. My mom and I have decided that the next time he needs to get out of the house we are just going to take him to the bowling alley and let him wear himself out taking turn after turn. After the bowling, pizza, cake and ice cream, and presents everyone came back to our house for prosecco, crackers, cheese, and hummis, and because everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and devour every crumb, I realized how much easier it is to feed people and have them leave happy than it is in Italy.
My mother loves having people over, growing up having 6 people to dinner on the weekend was a common occurence, we had it down to a science. My father would cook, the kids would move enough chairs to fit everyone around the dining room table and my mother would host, and then lead the clean-up effort after everyone had left. I always thought that one day when I was grown up my house would overflow with love and laughter as my many friends and family members sat around my beautiful hardwood dining room table enjoying fine wine and the wonderful food that I, in the intervening years, had learned how to cook, the children playing at our feet.
Fast forward 15 years later and I find myself with a living room/dining room that doesn't hold more than five adults comfortably and living in a country that is nothing but dead serious about eating well. Add to the mix the fact that I never learned how to cook really well and you find that --suprise, suprise!--I don't have people over for dinner very often. I know that we've all seen enough Olive Garden commericals to have this idea that in Italy we sit around tables groaning with food drinking red wine as the men lovingly pat each other on the cheek exclaiming "Momma mia! Thees ees a wonnaful pasta!". And perhaps they do (the cheek slapping I mean.) They just don't do it at my house.
Italian women, generally speaking, are wonderful cooks. Even the ones who swear they inadvertently poison dinner guests somehow are capable of rustling up a savory risotto and a mouth watering roast whenever you are invited to their house for dinner. And these meals always leave me feeling slightly depressed because I am always thinking, what am I going to serve when I invite them back? I had been led on thinking that I would be able to match their culinary talent, only to find that I have been severely out-played. It's like thinking you are going to be playing against the local YMCA in a soccer cup final and you get there and find that actually the English National Team has decided to come by and play instead.
I remember a few year ago I invited a friend/colleague of Lorenzo's named Barbara plus husband to our house for dinner for New Year's Eve. It was sort of a last minute thing, we had just moved into our apartment on Christmas Eve and there was still tons to be done. We decided around 3pm on December 31 to actually make a point of doing something for New Years, even though we were all exhausted from moving and my parents, who were visiting at the time, were both coming down with colds. I spoke to Barbara on the phone around 3:30 and despite the fact that she had hadn't been feeling well for several days she agreed to come and offered bring the actual dinner ("Something very simple"). I was thrilled because I knew Barbara was a good cook and it saved me the hassle of having to try to make something myself, other than the typical New Year's dish of lentils cooked with pork. While this dish sounds complicated all it involves is adding the right amount of water and leaving the thing to cook itself. When Barbara came she was loaded down with all sorts of dishes, all of which involved seafood and being re-heated on my stove or in my oven. At any rate, she was underwhelmed by the limited selection of pots and pans that I had on offer but somehow managed to make do and pulled off a meal that my mother called "One of the best meals that I have ever eaten." We found out later she felt so lousy because she was in the early weeks of pregnancy. Understandably it was hard to feel confident enough to invite them back. Whatever was I going to make them? I have learned how to make a few things in the seven years I have lived in Italy, especially various pasta dishes but I was hardly on Barbara's level. I got around it by reverting to my roots and serving what I called with great fanfair a "True American Hamburger" which they ate and complimented me on. We plumped out the meal by serving pasta as a first course and by overwhelming them with antipasta at the begining, various vegetables in the middle, and a large luscious dessert at the end. What you can't do in quality you make up for in quantity. Lorenzo and I had one of our biggest fights ever about an hour before they arrived because I felt that two kinds of prosciutto was more than enough to offer for an antipasta and he felt that we also needed mortadella and insisted driving 25 kilometers to get it. (It was a Sunday and all the local supermarkets were closed.) All future meals with them have taken place in restaurants.
We actually do a fair amount of entertaining in local trattorias and pizzerias, as do many other people. Space is a problem in many Italian homes and by eating in a restaurant the wife is exempted from the stress and exhaustion of preparing a meal for many people and then cleaning up afterwards. Lorenzo is great, he cooks and cleans up afterwards, but I know men who would be hard pressed to say where their wife keeps the knives and forks. The other fall back is to order pizza, something that is always suggested when people plan to get together, especially among younger people who are not super friendly yet, but would like the chance to try and hang out more. I always suggest pizza when trying to think of what to cook and then, thinking of the fresh, homemade pasta we had at the other person's house the first time we went there, I chicken out and go for the standard three courses with Lorenzo initially helping and then pushing me out of the way and doing it himself. Strange that the only time I feel relaxed about cooking for people is when our good friends Adrianna and Luca come to dinner. She is English so she won't push back her chair in disgust if the roast is a bit dry. Luca, in being married to her, is used to Italian food being prepared by a non-Italian and therefore eats everything.
I'm giving the impression that I do nothing but have tense small dinner parties on the weekend followed by sniping at my husband over how I tossed the salad. We actually do lots of group dinners with friends at restaurants especially with Lorenzo's colleagues. 20+ people sitting around a long table, usually with the men at one end and the women at the other with the men talking about who arrested who and what il dirigente (the boss) said about it, and the kids running around. No one makes any comment about the kids making too much noise or tries to show off with the wine list if there is one. Eating out in Italy is not a status thing like it is in the States. It is about going somewhere to relax, because you don't feel like cooking yourself, and because you want something good to eat, not about bragging where you got reservations for the weekend. One of my favorite restaurants is up near Lake Como and it is also a favorite of famous football players and movie stars. The owners would no more turn me away from the door than they would George Clooney because they know that all anyone wants to do in Italy is to have a good meal.
Which I suppose is where all my stress comes from, I don't feel very capable of providing this aforementioned good meal. I go for the cheap trick of plying everyone with wine, or wowing them with the unfamiliar, like Sunday brunch where I make pancakes and American coffee. Not everyone worries like I do. Terry often has us over for dinner, and they are completely unpretentious meals where 10 of us sqeeze into her living room. Or at Theresa's, where we often have homemade pizza and the meal is about as simple as it can get. Theresa did grow up in the States and is as happy with homemade lasagna as she is with McDonald's. This is under-rated quality. Perhaps the hardest thing about being Italian is that when you leave Italy you find yourself suffering over the poor quality of the food. I remember driving out to Denver with Lorenzo two years ago and we stopped overnight in Lincoln, Nebraska where we found next to our motel a Perkin's Restaurant. Somehow I felt that whatever was on offer at the Perkins couldn't be much worse that anything else we might be able to find in Lincoln, and decided that we just have dinner there. I stupidly suggested we have one of the dinner specials instead of something off the breakfast menu and 15 minutes later found Lorenzo glaring at me as he tried to digest a Perkin's chicken strip. What was he eating, and where had I taken him to eat? he wanted to know. I suddenly had this vision of the four of us in 10 years in a restaurant somewhere in the US with Lorenzo and the kids glaring at me over their dinners. I decided in that moment that the kids would learn how to eat crap with smiles on their faces if it was the last thing they did. They would learn to crave chili dogs and Oreos if it killed them.
Of course some people will never be happy, no matter how good the food is. When looking over the photos from our wedding my father-in-law made the comment, "Oh, there's the restaurant where we didn't get a lot to eat," when picture from the reception came up. If I remembered correctly there had been aperativi, antipasta, two kinds of pasta, steak, three kinds of contorno (vegetable dishes) including platters of fried zucchini, fruit salad, wedding cake, coffee, spumante, and wine. My one regret from my wedding day is that my dress prevented me from eating very much. "What do you mean," I asked. "You didn't like the food?"
"I didn't say I didn't like it, I said there wasn't much of it."
"Did you leave that table hungry?"
He had to admit he hadn't.