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By Toby Sonneman

Feb. 8, 2000 | Rick courted me with the seductions to which I was particularly vulnerable: good food, stories and a rich ethnic heritage. When we met in Washington in the early '70s, we discovered that we had both grown up in Chicago in what could be described as ethnic households.

My upbringing was overwhelmingly Jewish, so the kosher kitchen -- with its strict rules against certain foods or food combinations, and its dual sets of plates, silverware and cooking utensils -- dominated my idea of cooking until I left home and replaced this elaborate cooking system with the healthful but often lifeless dishes of the hippie era. Stir-fried vegetables with brown rice was the standard of the day, made in such a way that no genuine culture would claim it.

Recipe: Spicy meatballs Crispy, juicy instruments of seduction. By Toby Sonneman

Then Rick came along and started cooking for me. Dinner. The aroma of garlic and basil filled the cabin where we lived, and steam from the big pots of boiling water and simmering sauce left its fragrant breath on the windows. Rick moved between the pots with a kind of fluency -- salting, tasting, stirring and adding herbs, pausing to sip from a glass of red wine -- a slow dance. He lifted ribbons of glistening fettuccine from the colander and lowered them gracefully onto our mismatched rummage-sale plates. He sprinkled freshly grated Romano cheese over the al dente pasta as if he were sowing seeds, then ladled on the savory garnet-colored sauce, redolent with herbs and wine.

It was a world apart from what was then widely considered Italian food in the United States: overcooked spaghetti covered with a thick porridge of bland raw-red tomato sauce with lumps of ground beef and topped with a yellow crust of Kraft Parmesan. Until I tasted Rick's fettuccine, I didn't know Italian food could be so good.

"You've got to taste the Micucci family meatballs," Rick said one day, invoking the name of his maternal family. He knew that I'd protest -- I was a vegetarian. If I could live for two years without eating chicken soup or the wonderful sticks of salami that my parents sent from the Rumanian Deli in Chicago (Rick ate them with great pleasure), why would I suddenly cave to meatballs? Meatballs placed low on the list of carnivore enticements; my mother had never made them, and I could only recall some unappealing version of "Swedish" meatballs I ate at a smorgasbord when I was a child.

But Rick's passion for the meatballs began to wear down my resistance. "Just try them once," he insisted. "They're really an essential food -- my grandmother makes these every Sunday for the family gatherings."

He knew that this tactic would work eventually: I have always been a sucker for good stories, and Rick's tales of his Italian-American upbringing were as attractive as the food itself.

"When I lived in Chicago, Grandpa and I used to go out and walk along the railroad tracks and fields collecting mushrooms for Grandma to put in the sauce," Rick told me, softening me with vegetable talk. This idyllic rural image startled me; it was so unlike my urban upbringing of the same era, just miles away on Chicago's South Side.

"And dandelion greens," Rick went on. "My grandmother used to cook a lot of dandelion greens, so my job was to go out and get the greens from the dandelions in our yard and in the surrounding fields. The greens are best when the dandelions are young, but if they had turned bitter, she boiled them first and drained off the water before she added them to a dish."

"You should really meet my grandmother. You'd like her," he added. "She lives for food."

Rick's memories of his maternal grandparents were so vivid because his family lived with them in the '50s, when Rick was a child. And since both his parents worked full time, Rick was left in his grandparents' care during the day. His grandmother, Isabelle, was born in Chicago in 1902. Her parents had left "the old country" just before the turn of the century and they lived in a tenement whose occupants had come from the same region in southern Italy. So when Rick's grandfather, Frank Micucci, immigrated from Italy to the United States, he came to that very Chicago tenement and met Isabelle.

Soon after Frank and Isabelle married they moved to a house near Midway Airport in South Chicago, but in many ways they continued to live as if they were still in an Italian village. Rick's grandfather grew grapes and made his own wine with a barrel and press he kept in the basement and brought out each fall. Rick's grandmother tended a bountiful garden, canned her own tomato sauce, fruit and vegetables, made her own pasta and cooked everything from scratch.

Even their work involved food. They owned a deli on Cicero Avenue in Chicago. Rick walked there after school every day and sat on the pickle barrel, content with a delectable chocolate-covered frozen banana, his daily treat. When the deli closed, after dark, they all went home for dinner, but Isabelle's work wasn't over. She stayed up until midnight every night making fresh pasta to sell at the deli the next day.

All of this was intriguing, but still I resisted the meatballs -- until Rick began to wax euphoric about the Sunday dinners. They were incredible, Rick said. "All the relatives came, usually at least 20 people, and Grandma made all the food herself."

He described how she'd pour a mountain of flour on her huge wooden cutting board and indent the top of the mound so it looked like a model of a volcano. Then she'd break a dozen or more eggs into the hollow and mix and knead the dough together. A yard-long dowel served as her rolling pin, and after she'd rolled out the dough, stretching and pushing it with the dowel, she'd cut it into strips or, more often, shape little bits of dough with her thumb into tiny shallow bowls that everyone called "little hats." These were set out to dry on the dining room table, which she'd covered with a sheet. The table filled the whole room --"the biggest oval table you've ever seen -- at least 20 chairs fit around it," Rick said.

Next page | I gave in and ate a meatball. My vegetarian days were over