Delectations: Cooking Children, Part I

ANNA, just married, came to the United States in 1959. As a girl in Sicily, she had learned how to cook by helping her mother. Her mother showed her how to make pasta with anchovies and breadcrumbs, arancine (fried rice balls), stuffed peppers, sardines with fennel, squid with capers, and countless other dishes. Not only did she learn to cook them, she learned how to choose the ingredients in the markets, how to do initial preparations-cleaning fish, salting fish, making pickles of vegetables (eggplant in oil, peppers in oil or vinegar, mixed vegetables in vinegar). Her family made their own wine and grew many of their own vegetables. Her cousins down the road kept a few chickens and some goats, and she knew about fresh eggs, and cheese, and about killing chickens.

In America she had two sons and one daughter, Caterina, who is now 35. Caterina learned some of this lore shopping, cooking, and cultivating from her mother. But in her teens she lost interest. Anna with no great reluctance gave up making her help in the kitchen. And Caterina herself has not taught her own daughter even those few skills she learned. A culture of centuries has been killed stone dead in less than forty years.

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Digby Anderson

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ANNA, just married, came to the United States in 1959. As a girl in Sicily, she had learned how to cook by helping her mother. Her mother showed her how to make pasta with anchovies and breadcrumbs, arancine (fried rice balls), stuffed peppers, sardines with fennel, squid with capers, and countless other dishes. Not only did she learn to cook them, she learned how to choose the ingredients in the markets, how to do initial preparations-cleaning fish, salting fish, making pickles of vegetables (eggplant in oil, peppers in oil or vinegar, mixed vegetables in vinegar). Her family made their own wine and grew many of their own vegetables. Her cousins down the road kept a few chickens and some goats, and she knew about fresh eggs, and cheese, and about killing chickens.

In America she had two sons and one daughter, Caterina, who is now 35. Caterina learned some of this lore shopping, cooking, and cultivating from her mother. But in her teens she lost interest. Anna with no great reluctance gave up making her help in the kitchen. And Caterina herself has not taught her own daughter even those few skills she learned. A culture of centuries has been killed stone dead in less than forty years.