Erica De Mane

My path from nervous, uncertain cook to creative good one was slow but exciting. When I think about some of the strange and occasionally inedible meals I made for friends and family during my early forays into cooking, it’s amazing that I had the drive to persevere and come out the other end. Of course the more I cooked the more familiar I became with proper techniques and the way ingredients work together, but I believe some other things I did, beyond cooking, also had a lot to do with making me into a good cook.

For instance, the more I cooked the slower I ate. I was sort of a food inhaler as a teenager; now I found myself taking the time to let flavors reveal themselves on my tongue. Spicy and bitter, qualities that take a moment to open up in your mouth, became more pronounced. As tastes lingered on my palate I uncovered subtleties. At restaurants I starting noticing layers of flavor, a bit of cognac in a sauce, or maybe a touch of ground nutmeg. Diet sodas began to taste like poison. I sensed that I was on my way to enlightenment.

At about the same time that I noticed myself chewing more slowly, I developed an overwhelming desire to travel to Italy so I could taste straight from the source. On my first trip to the south of that country I was astonished by how the cheeses tasted there. Mozzarella and caciocavallo with flavor that wasn’t just salt. Sausages made in little villages in Campania that tasted like no sausages I ever ate back home. Wines from local grape varieties with aromas I couldn’t have imagined. Even now, when far more excellent Italian products are available in this country, I go back as often as possible to taste more new things. A recent trip to Liguria put me in touch with the taste of basil grown in Ligurian soil, which is softer, with less pepper and mint tones, than basil I’ve tasted in Palermo or Naples or New York. Sampling regional food where it is made has raised my standards of taste.

Reading cookbooks in bed has become part of my life. Taking the book out of the kitchen eases some of my fears on cooking, giving me time to let new ideas sink in before I try to execute them. And I find it refreshing to get into someone else’s culinary head. When I get bogged down, recycling old ideas and feeling trapped, I buy a new cookbook. I even read books on subjects I really have no interest in, such as macrobiotics, just to take myself to a new place, but usually I’m attracted to cooks with a Mediterranean mindset but a different approach.

Thinking seasonally is something that comes naturally to me, partly, I believe, because my father, like many Italian-American men in our Long Island neighborhood when I was a kid, kept a vegetable garden. There was much competition between these men over these little gardens. My father and Lou, the guy across the street, held a tense tomato race one summer, each constantly eyeing the other’s plants for progress. That Fourth of July, Lou invited my parents for a backyard dinner. Knowing my father would spend the evening surveying his garden, he did some fast work. It was early in the season and his tomatoes were still hard and green, but Lou went to the supermarket and bought a big bag of large, bright red, obviously non-local tomatoes and rushed home to somehow rig them to his plants. When my father noticed the huge things hanging on the vines that warm July night, he experienced deep confusion. Lou’s howling laughter relieved him, but I knew my father considered it a somewhat heart-rending joke.

My father’s garden was 100 percent Italian in spirit. Aside from his wonderful beefsteak tomatoes, he grew wild arugula (when stores hardly even carried the milder domestic variety), basil, oregano, rosemary, zucchini, and eggplants and peppers with surprising protuberances. My memories of these vegetables, and of the anxiety that went into my father’s gardening, left a big impression on me. I’ve never liked eating tomatoes in January, originally out of respect for him but now also out of respect for myself.

Thinking about cooking occupies a lot of my time, and lately I’ve come to realize how much I myself have a distinct style. That might sound obvious for someone who cooks as much as I do, but it took me a while to realize that I wanted to cook simple dishes with bold strokes of Mediterranean flavor. Often nowadays when I eat out or at someone else’s home, I think, this tastes like something I would make; these are my flavors (as if I owned them); or these are not flavors I would put together.

I sometimes try to figure out when exactly I went from being an acceptable home cook to a good creative cook. I now realize it was just about the time I realized I had a real style of my own going.

Happy Spring cooking to you.