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In Florida, where Rick's grandparents had moved, his grandmother met us at the doorway of her house and greeted us both with warm hugs. This was followed by a harangue. "Ricky, how come you never write to us? What kind of work are you doing now?" When Rick told her we had come to Florida to pick oranges, she wrung her hands. "When are you going to do something with your life? You need to get a good job, have a family!"

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

Despite this inauspicious beginning, Isabelle took to me right away. I baked bread and was interested in her recipes -- so I must be OK. I should call her Grandma. We talked about the differences in kneading bread dough and pasta dough, and she was only too glad to demonstrate. I watched her intuitively measure the ingredients -- about a teacup of flour and an egg for each person, she said -- and skillfully knead, roll and shape the pasta dough.

In "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking," Marcella Hazan devotes five pages of detailed instructions to the hand rolling of pasta, prefaced by the caution that the hand rolling method "is not a matter of following instructions but rather of learning a craft." Certainly Grandma was an expert craftsperson. She tried to teach me to shape the "little hats" with a twist of my thumb, but my clumsy efforts only emphasized her easy skill. Fortunately, she was generous. "You're good at other things," she said. "You can bake bread."

Still, bit by bit, I was learning from her. I'd follow her around the garden, where she'd actually planted dandelions, and accompany her on trips to the nearby farmer's market to watch her select the freshest greens, broccoli, and other vegetables. On Sunday afternoons, I watched as she and Grandpa went out to the driveway and threw a white sheet over their Dodge Dart, then covered the car with hundreds of the little pasta hats set out to dry. I stood by as she cooked the tomato sauce, formed the meatballs loosely with her hands and fried them in enormous skillets. Some of them she put in the simmering sauce, while others she fried longer.

As the smell of the frying meatballs floated through the house, the children (and some of the adults as well) gathered around Grandma, licking their lips and begging for a sample. She put a few of the meatballs on a plate, cut them into quarters and dispensed them to her fans. They disappeared instantly, and the children (adults, too) pleaded for more. "No more before dinner!" she admonished, as she lowered the pasta into the gigantic pot of boiling water.

Sunday dinner at the Micucci's was very definitely Italian: lots of relatives with a good proportion of children, lots of wine in pitchers on the table and poured into water glasses, lots of food passed around on enormous platters, lots of arguing, loud conversing and scolding of children. First, always, there was pasta, Grandma's pride. Grandpa ate slowly, savoring every mouthful; Grandma yelled at him in Italian to eat faster. He shrugged, tilted his head, and lifted his empty glass until someone poured him more vino. Grandma, exasperated, went back to the kitchen to get the next course.

A meat dish usually followed the pasta course: roast chicken, braciole (a stuffed beef roast) or, on Thanksgiving, a small turkey -- but the pasta and meatballs were central. After the pasta and meat, but before the dessert, there was a big lettuce salad served with a vinegary dressing, and a plate of the crisp-fried meatballs.

Grandma watched everyone, especially the children, with an eagle eye to see how much they ate. She seemed to have a meatball calculator in her head, for she could remember exactly how many meatballs (those served with the sauce and those served alongside the salad course) each person had eaten, and she judged their character accordingly. Had I still been a vegetarian, I'm certain I would have quickly fallen out of favor.

According to Grandma, a child who ate only one meatball not only lacked appetite and appreciation for good food but also was not destined for success. On the other hand, those children who gorged on as many meatballs as they were allowed were sure to go far in life -- they had good taste and knew how to behave. "That Little Frankie is a good boy, he's gonna amount to something," she'd say. "He ate four of my meatballs."

After my marriage broke apart, many years later, I experienced a long period of alienation from pasta. I had reached my saturation point. Pasta was quick and easy and my children loved it -- but so many dinners of it in the waning years of marriage had left me bored, glutted, simply tired of it. I made soups and baked breads, pizzas and quiches; cooked rice and couscous; roasted, baked, boiled and mashed potatoes. Anything but pasta.

And then slowly, imperceptibly, this began to change. One day, a couple of years after Rick and I split up, I realized that I was no longer enjoying my liberation from pasta, but was actually longing for it. I remembered our family Sundays of making pasta with the silvery Atlas pasta machine, draping the long ribbons of fettucine over the rungs of the wooden clothes dryer, the kitchen floor powdery with flour, and Rick stirring a simmering pot of tomato sauce and meatballs.

How could one not feel nostalgia? I restocked my kitchen cupboards with various pasta shapes, including the orecchiette or "little ears" that reminded me of Grandma's little hats. She had died by then, the result of terrible burns she'd suffered when her nightgown caught fire one morning as she reached over to stir the spaghetti sauce she was making for a big holiday dinner. I missed her, perhaps as much as her own grandchildren did -- and I needed her back in my kitchen.

I wasn't the first one to reach for the phone. Rick had called me just weeks before to ask for my recipe for pizza dough, and I had given it. I'd always been the one to make the pizza and the pasta dough, while he made the sauce and the meatballs. But we each had to carry the food traditions on our own now, the way our children would, picking and choosing what to keep and what to let go.

I already knew how to make the spaghetti sauce, and Rick had let me take the little Italian pasta machine, which had been a wedding present from one of my friends -- so now I could make pasta at home too. But the meatballs? I didn't know the recipe, and I hesitated to ask.

Our son, then 18, had become a vegetarian, and excelled at baking bread and cooking vegetarian Italian food. Our daughter, then 11, had only recently realized that the meat she was eating was once a cow -- and she wrestled with the concept, considering and reconsidering becoming a vegetarian, yet always coming back to the same conundrum: "I can't become a vegetarian!" she'd exclaim in frustration. "What about Dad's meatballs?"

Finally, I did ask Rick for the recipe. He put me off for a couple of weeks with mumbled excuses, but one day he tentatively handed me a piece of scratch paper with "Micucci Meatballs" scrawled across the top. Since that day, two years ago, I've made the recipe only a few times, but I've looked at it many more times, each time reflecting on how this scrap of paper, written in Rick's spidery handwriting and given reluctantly yet generously, has become both a part of my recipe collection and a part of me. I had married into a rich and lively food culture and bound it to my own cultural heritage. Even divorce wasn't strong enough -- not nearly strong enough! -- to sever that bond.
salon.com | Feb. 8, 2000

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