T’s May 19 travel issue is dedicated to pasta in Italy, diving deep into the culinary traditions, regional variations and complex history of the country’s national symbol.
WHEN STEFANO SECCHI was growing up in Dallas, the end of each school year meant the beginning of a great adventure. His parents, intent on maintaining a relationship with their relatives in Italy, put him and his two brothers on a plane and flew to Sardinia, where the large Secchi clan gathered around and tended to the family farm. He remembers the sheep and cows that grazed on the hillsides, the tomatoes, wild fennel and pumpkins that grew in such abundance. He remembers the long sunny days and the surrounding sea. But most of all, he remembers Sunday lunch.
What an epic production it was. What a labor of extraordinary love. His nonna, Gavina Secchi, started her work early in the morning, and when many or all of his seven aunts and uncles and their families gathered around the table around 2 or 3 p.m., everything was ready: the local cheeses and salumi with them started? the endive, the radicchio or the rocket that came next? The culurgiones, a hearty, rustic dish of pasta shells stuffed with potato, mint and pecorino and nestled in either tomato sauce or goat butter. the meat, usually lamb or wild boar or suckling pig. The eating and talking went on for four, five, six hours and he had lost count of “how many bottles of wine and how many incredible stories and how many arguments about politics” there were. “Sometimes we didn’t finish until 9 at night,” he told me. “It was crazy.” And good luck.
And now, a fading image in a mental scrapbook, a relic from a distant past.
Secchi, the 42-year-old chef and co-owner of the Michelin-starred Italian restaurant Rezdôra in Manhattan, said that when Gavina Secchi died at age 96 a little less than a decade ago, the lavish Sunday meals disappeared with her. But they were on life support even earlier, as members of the Secchi clan, like so many other Italians, got an education, moved into professions like banking and academia, left their rural environments for urban ones, and dispersed to various cities: Milan, Turin. , Rome. “No one wanted to work with their hands anymore,” he said. And no one had the kind of life—firmly rooted in a community, connected in predictable rhythms—that allowed for a weekly gathering of so many relatives over such painstakingly prepared food for so many hours.
The story of Secchis is the story of many Italians, and I find it difficult to tell because it is the eulogy for a tradition – il pranzo della domenica, or “Sunday lunch” – that so colorfully, calorically and cacophonously mixes the passions of Italians. : family, food and endless conversation. Sunday lunch also invokes one of my favorite Italian phrases, “il piacere della tavola,” which strictly means “the pleasure of the table” (or sit-down meal) and has no English counterpart because, well, Americans and the British do not I do not know this pleasure as the Italians do. Does anyone have?