I was first drawn to cooking when I was a teenager and was maybe even more lost than most people that age. I gravitated toward the aromas of my family’s Italian-American kitchen in what now looks like an obvious attempt to find an identity amid the churnings of adolescence. I reproduced my mother’s eggplant parmigiano. I sweated over simmering pots of braciole. I rolled tiny meatballs just like my grandmother made and dropped them into clear broth, and I even found myself up at three in the morning watching my pizza dough rise, occasionally bringing the bowls of dough out to the family car and locking us both in for solitude. I asked relatives about forgotten recipes I wanted to revitalize, and I hunted through cookbooks for more direction. I remember being especially excited by Ada Boni’s Talisman Italian Cookbook, a slim volume my mother had hanging around the house, with somewhat vague yet romantic recipes. My attention to preparing food perplexed my family, and I realized myself that it was a bit obsessive, since I’d sometimes cook an extremely large amount of food even when there was nobody home to eat it. At around the same time, my younger sister was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder, a condition I got wise to when I noticed she was spending hours each day wiping water spots out of the bathroom sinks. I always wondered if my cooking wasn’t just an alternate form of this condition, but the truth was I didn’t care, since it was such a great feeling to lose myself in the kitchen.
A few years later I began to travel to Italy, so I could smell and taste the country’s food in its original home. Visiting the dry little hill town in Campania where my grandmother was born had a profound effect on me. It deepened my desire to cook. And I kept returning to Southern Italy, visiting Puglia, Basilicata, and Sicily several times. Every visit reconfirmed my love of Southern Italy’s flavors and the bold, open-arms approach of its cooks. Basil, lemons, olives, tomatoes, garlic, almonds, anchovies, fennel, Pecorino cheese, and capers: These were some of the flavors that motivated my cooking. Over the years, as my cooking has evolved, I’ve found myself really zeroing in on the flavors of Southern Italy, while altering them with my New York sensibility to produce a not necessarily traditional but very personal take on Italian cooking. The compulsive aspect of my cooking still exists, but in a more civilized form. It’s not something I dwell on. If I want to cook fifteen recipes a week using red bell peppers, who cares? I’m not hurting anyone, except maybe my own digestion. Motivation, I suppose, is considered by most people to fall into either of two categories: healthy or unhealthy (traveling to Italy to learn about cooking is healthy, if expensive; watching bread rise in your father’s Cadillac at 3 a.m. is not). But ultimately that doesn’t matter. I welcome anything that drives my desire to learn more. I feel lucky to have that desire.
Erica De Mane 