2009-11-23 07:50:25

PAULA BUTTURINI KEEPS THE FEAST AT THANKSGIVING: THE PURPLE INTERVIEW

Filed under: Paula Butturini, The Purple Interview
Posted by: John

I can’t think of a better way to mark the passing of Thanksgiving than a conversation with Paula Butturini, journalist, cook and author of a splendid new memoir Keeping The Feast: One Couple’s Story of Love, Food And Healing in Italy. In the memoir, which will be published on February 18, Butturini tells a story that is the stuff of epic fiction, a Life And Fate (and food)  for the baby boom generation.

In 1989, while most Americans watched the fall of the Communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe from a distance, Butturini and her husband John Tagliabue covered the events as journalists, and their saga is harrowing. Working respectively for The Chicago Tribune and The New York Times, Butturini and Tagliabue experienced firsthand the brutality of the dying regimes.

Just days before the two were married, Butturini was beaten by Czechoslovak security police in a demonstration in Prague. Just weeks after, Tagliabue was shot by a sniper in Romania and barely escaped with his life.

This memoir is the story of their struggle to overcome the injuries and make a new life together, and the role that food played as a healer in the process. I can’t recommend the book highly enough. It’s a tour de force of memory, language and emotion, one of those rare cases when a journalist rises to the level of art in her prose.

Full disclosure: Paula is an old friend, and I’ve enjoyed many a delicious meal at her table. I can’t possibly feel detachment about this book, but I can say that the conversation below gives an authentic taste of its richness. Don’t pass it up.

In the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving. May the conversations over the dinner table be as good as the food.

Q:What is a signature dish of your Thanksgiving table, something that has a particular meaning for you on the holiday, or perhaps a dish that has simply become part of the mix through long years of habit?

A:For us, Thanksgiving means, not one signature dish, but a long, seriously gravy-stained list of signature dishes that my husband, John, and I cook up every year and serve to a crowd of American friends, who are invited precisely because they wouldn’t be celebrating the holiday otherwise. There’s the turkey, with John’s stuffing, of bread, apples, onion, celery and fresh sage. There’s the gravy, which I make with pan drippings, homemade turkey broth and a splash of brandy. There are potatoes, mashed with lots of milk; butternut squash and apple chunks cooked together with a bit of brown sugar; braised baby onions flavored with fresh thyme; baby green beans; glazed carrots with lots of fresh parsley; and, since we live in Europe — where people as a rule think rutabagas are food fit only for pigs — we fall back on a mixture of braised turnips and carrots to resemble the mashed rutabagas my mother used to make back in Bridgeport, Connecticut every Thanksgiving of my childhood.

The only thing missing is a bowl of corn to remind us of the first Thanksgiving: the Europeans can’t seem to grow sweet corn, and the cow corn on offer is not fit for table food. Luckily, in Paris one can generally find fresh cranberries in specialty food shops, and one of our friends who’s a great cook always brings us a vat of fresh cranberry sauce with orange and almond slivers, which cannot be beat.

We finish up with John’s apple pie, and my maternal grandmother’s pumpkin pie and the world’s best pecan pie, made from a recipe a colleague’s wife was kind enough to give me decades ago when I lived in Dallas. I’m no pie freak, but UPI reporter Preston McGraw’s wife, Margery, made an old-fashioned pecan pie so luscious — more savory than overly sweet — that my Yankee soul (can an Italian-American be said to have a Yankee soul? I’m not sure the old Yankees of my childhood would have ever accepted me as one of them.) surrendered utterly to its charm.

Thanksgiving is not a holiday in France, which presents a logistical problem: how to eat all that food when most people don’t even get out of work till 7 or 8 p.m. We get around it by skipping appetizers and first courses and just settling in to a long, main course followed by pie, and then the grown-ups rush the children home to bed, since everybody has to be at school and work as usual the next morning. As a child I loved Thanksgiving because it was the only meal of the year in which I felt like my family was eating the same meal as all our non-Italian-American neighbors, the only holiday of the year where there wasn’t a whiff of garlic about the table.

Q:What is your earliest memory of loving food?

A:Eating pitted black olives off the tip of each of my fingers. I have no idea how old I was, but it was unrivaled bliss.

Q:You write beautifully about asparagus. Tell us a little about your love for this under-appreciated vegetable.

A:I love the peculiar taste of green asparagus but, even more, I love what the appearance of seasonal asparagus means: that the hell of  winter is just about over for another year, and that life in general is going to be a tad easier for awhile, thanks to the promise of spring and sun. Asparagus is one of the many things I won’t buy out of season from some far-away land. It tastes best — physically and psychologically — when you eat it more or less locally, when it shoots up from its long narrow beds shouting “Spring is FINALLY coming.” I can’t get enough of it in March and April, and I never like to do much to it, other than cook it for five minutes in a big spaghetti pot of boiling, salted water. I like it best seasoned with a little butter and freshly grated Parmigiano cheese and run under a broiler; or dribbled with a good olive oil and a squeeze of fresh lemon juice. I also like it cooked with veal, and I love it in risotto.

In much of Europe, people prefer eating white aspargus, which involves mounding dirt and sand over the fast growing stalks so they don’t ever see the sun. The stalks develop into thick, stubby shoots, which have to be peeled before cooking, and they have quite a different flavor. In Germany, whose winters are particularly long and hard, spring means weeks of asparagus feasts, when restaurants and home cooks serve them with hollandaise, black forest ham, poached eggs, wild mushrooms, cream sauce, boiled new potatoes or all of the above. It’s not to my taste, but absolutely fascinating to watch an entire nation feeding its need to put winter behind it.

Q:You have another recipe for a slice of Hungarian bacon hot off the grill. Describe your memories of that meal.

A:Our next door neighbors were Hungarian-Americans with two boys about my age, and since there weren’t any girls in the neighborhood, Johnny and Bobby Vincze were my best friends. One summer day their mother invited me over for a backyard cookout, neither the standard hamburgers and hotdogs of most 1950s cookouts, and not the Italian sausage patties my father used to grill, but for a special smoked Hungarian bacon  that Mr. Vincze skewered and cooked over a wood fire in their back yard. Maybe it was late, maybe we were all just starving, but all I know is that when that fatty bacon chunk started dripping grease into the fire, my mouth literally started watering. I couldn’t get enough of it. It’s called sutni szalonna and basically it was a Hungarian farmer’s field lunch. Once the meat started sizzling, Mr. Vincze pressed the bacon chunk with its dripping fat all over slices of fresh, moist Hungarian rye bread. Mrs. Vincze then topped the bread with diced vegetables like onions, tomatoes, bell peppers and cucumbers.

It was a very tricky thing to maneuver because you had to keep the bread absolutely horizontal while you tried to eat it; otherwise, all the vegetables ended up on the ground. The parents were like a four-handed machine, trying to keep the fire going, and the fat hot enough to drip off the bacon, and piling up the vegetables. I can still see us kids standing around the fire, eating, and me praying there’d be enough for a whole lot more. I could have eaten the entire thing myself that day. When I moved to eastern Europe as a foreign correspondent decades later, I was so disappointed on my first trip to Hungary, because I never saw sutni szalonna on a restaurant menu anywhere. I didn’t know then that it was peasant food. I’ve never had it again since I was eight or nine, and I’m not even sure I’d want to, because my memory of that picnic lunch is so absolutely perfect just as is.

Q:Throughout your life, you tell us in your forthcoming memoir, food has been more than sustenance, more than pleasure, more even than medicine. Can you talk in the largest sense about what your favorite meals have meant to you?

A:Food, at its most basic, like water and air, is not just part of life, but a metaphor for life itself. It’s not only the thing that keeps us alive, but also the thing that distinguishes us from other forms of life: neither monkeys nor dolphins cook their meals… It’s no accident that food plays such an important role in religious life, no matter what the religion: when the ancients felt the need to praise or appease their gods, they generally chose food for their  offerings; as humans we fast and feast, for much deeper reasons than simple availability or want. Think about it: what would a birthday be without a cake? What would a wedding be, without a feast? What would a summer evening be without a walk to the corner ice cream shop? Food, at its best, is a celebration of life. The simplest meal, eaten among good friends who like to laugh together, among relatives who appreciate each other, is the staff and stuff of a good life. A healthy appetite is a potent symbol to a good doctor, a signpost pointing in the direction of health. A patient with no appetite is, simply, in trouble. My favorite meals are the simple ones, where laughter, good talk, and honest food are served up in equal portions.

Q:As a reporter in Communist-era Poland, you saw how Poles managed to cope with a severely restricted food supply and somehow make do. Can you describe that era in Warsaw in terms of grocery store shelves?

A:Polish grocery store shelves were very, very visible in the last years of Communism for the simple reason that there was almost nothing ever on them. For the nearly three years I lived in Warsaw and traveled around the country, grocery stores were pathetically low on supplies. I’ll never forget the first day I walked into our corner grocery, and saw maybe half a dozen jars of pickles stretched across a 20-foot wide shelf, and two shelves down, maybe a dozen cans of tripe standing forlornly, with a foot of air space between them. The only shelf that looked somewhat full was the one stocked with plastic bottles of cloudy vinegar. It was haunting and ghastly and weird and absolutely other-worldly. This was 1987, nearly four decades after World War II had ended, and the supermarkets looked like the Germans had just marched out a few weeks earlier. The longer I lived in Communist-era Poland, the more I understood that no one was going hungry there, but everyone had to spend an absurd amount of energy trying to gather in and hoard the most mundane ingredients: from sugar and flour, to chocolate or bananas. A Polish friend once told me that life in Poland in those days was always full of ridiculous highs and even more ridiculous lows. To find a lemon, a real lemon, in the old days, Kasia said, could make you feel like a prince among men; to stand in line for hours to buy a box of less-than-mediocre chocolates, was often enough to make you weep.

Q:As  a Texan, I have to ask. What’s the best meal you ever had south of the Red River?

A:I am going to have to hedge a bit here, because I can’t just describe one meal. I’ve got to talk about a series of birthday meals I ate in the late 70s and early 80s on the 6th of January, the feast of Epiphany, which celebrates the coming of the three kings to the stable in Bethlehem. A former UPI colleague, Raymundo Perez — whose name comes from “el rey del mundo” or “the king of the world” used to take a few of us to Mi Tierra Cafe in San Antonio to eat a big feast of roast cabrito — baby goat — to celebrate his birthday. And every single time I go back to Texas, I manage to find myself some cabrito no matter where I am. The only rivals to those cabrito memories are: 1. the tamales Ray’s grandmother used to make for him, and which he would share with a few of us lucky souls; and 2. the sausage that used to be served up with grits in an Oak Cliff diner in Dallas, around the corner from where I used to live. I can’t remember the name of the place any longer, but it was proof positive that American sausage, back then at least, improved the further south you went. I remember driving to my new job in Dallas from Plainville, Connecticut, in the dead of an unusally frigid winter, 1977, and realizing that once I’d gotten south of Jersey, the breakfast sausage started to taste like prime meat, no longer like the leftover gristle and bone bits that used to masquerade as American sausage links in Connecticut when I was a kid.

Q:1989 was  a watershed year for the world, but it was  a personal crisis and turning point for you. You were working as a reporter in Prague when the so-called Velvet Revolution began. What happened to you there?

A:I was covering the initial student demonstration that eventually led to the ouster of the Communist regime on Nov. 17, 1989 (How’s this for coincidence, John? I’m writing the answer to this very question 20 years to the day after the demo…). I was actually trying to head back to my hotel to file my story to the Chicago Tribune Foreign Desk, when the police suddenly charged the crowd — a totally peaceful crowd, I should add — and began beating people indiscriminately. A police truncheon came out of nowhere and knocked me out cold in the street. I remember going down and thinking, “It’s just like the cartoons,” because I did literally see stars. They must have hit me at least twice out in the street, because I had two head wounds that needed stitching, one near my forehead and the other toward the back of my head. Then the cops dragged me and the L.A. Times correspondent who had tried to help me out of the crowd and into a building entryway, where they beat us some more. I was lucky I was wearing a long parka that was as thick (and attractive) as a sleeping bag, for it gave me a lot of protection. But my colleague, Tyler Marshall, was not so lucky: he was wearing a brand new, light beige Burberry trenchcoat. By the end of our encounter my head wounds had bled all over Tyler’s new coat, and a year later, once the Communists were long gone, the coat — still covered in my blood — was mounted in a nearby store’s window display, to remind people of what had happened to the students that night. It’s probably not surprising that I never refer to the Czechoslovak ouster of Communism as the Velvet Revolution.

Q:Your husband is the New York Times reporter John Tagliabue. He went to Romania in December 1989. What happened next?

A:John was shot by a sniper in Timisoara, Romania, two nights before Christmas (and five weeks after I had been beaten senseless in Prague). He was sitting in the front passenger seat of a car with two other American reporters in the back, and a French photographer at the wheel when the shooting broke out. The car was heavily damaged in the attack, but only one bullet found its mark, entering John’s back from the right side and exiting from the left. The bullet tunneled under his spine, close enough to knock off the tip of one of his vertebrae, and smashed his pelvis before it made its exit. Nobody every found it. The car came to rest, providentially, at the gate of one of Timisoara’s hospitals, and soldiers carried him straight upstairs to the operating theater. The surgical team managed to do an emergency operation right away, but the hospital — like most other hospitals in the country — had no modern antibiotics, and John was near death by the time the authorities agreed, days later, to let a German Red Cross plane fly us out to a top flight hospital in Munich.

Q:During his long and difficult recovery, doctors used a treatment that will come as something of a surprise to most people, a substance called “wound sugar”. What is wound sugar and how did it help John?

A:Wound sugar consists of sterilized sugar crystals, which the doctors in Munich decided to use to try to keep John’s enormous wound from getting re-infected, and which also was meant to foster the growth of new flesh so they could eventually sew him back together. A trench wound is never a pretty sight, and John’s back looked as if it had been gouged out with a scoop, from one side to the other, with a tunnel going under just his spine. Every day the doctors would help John into a sterilized bathtub full of camomile syrup and warm water, to wash out the wound. Then they would hose the wound out with jets of water and fill the hole to the brim with sterilized sugar. The final step was carefully bandaging his back so the sugar wouldn’t fall out. The dry sugar crystals would work by osmosis and dry out any bacteria that might be lurking in the bottom of his wound. Once that liquid was thoroughly dried up, the bacteria would die, and new flesh could start to grow up from the bottom of the wound. It was a long, slow process that took weeks of care, but after days of the most high tech antibiotic treatments in the intensive care unit, it was simple sugar and camomile that helped John heal.

Q:Again and again, you write, food came to the rescue. Can you think of a meal during those years that exemplifies everything that a proper feast can do to restore the human soul? Is there one, in particular, that comes to mind?

A:I remember a Sunday lunch with friends at their house on Lake Bracciano, an hour north of Rome. John, who was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, was unable to work at the time and was trying, in vain, it later turned out, to head off a full-fledged clinical depression. Our friends had prepared one of their usual Sunday feasts on their terrace overlooking the lake, and we were ready to dig into a plate of simple pasta with tomato and basil sauce, followed by one of their signature dishes, “stretchy chicken,” — a name that referred to the carving skill of their grown son, who could slice a perfectly cooked bird so finely that one chicken could easily feed however many hungry mouths were sitting around the tables. Amid all the talk and laughter among old friends, all sorts of fresh vegetables kept appearing from the kitchen, followed by a huge green salad, and finally a homemade apple tart, with ice cream and coffee. All of us, save John, whose multiple medications were wreaking havoc on his digestive tract as well as on his brain, had eaten our fill but dinner wasn’t quite over yet, for in the stupefying heat of an August afternoon near Rome, the true last course was everybody’s afternoon nap, in armchairs, recliners and sofas inside the house and outside on the terrace. Our host put on his beloved Sunday opera show, and drugged by the food and wine and heat, we all stretched out for a much needed rest, drifting off to the sound of droning bees and losing sight of the bright blue lake that lay down the hill below the house. To awaken slowly, sated and surrounded by old friends, was medicine and magic, friendship and family. It took John — and by extension, me — a very long time to heal, and that meal and hundreds like it, helped keep us going till we got there.

Q:Your book isn’t about a religious journey per se, but time and again, one comes away with the feeling that meals have a sacred value for you.  Can you talk at all about the spiritual quality involved in ‘keeping the feast?’

A:There is definitely a spiritual quality involved in “keeping the feast,” The book’s own title comes from St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians: “Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” That spiritual quality might best be described as trying to be fully human, trying to meet the obligations I believe each of us has to take care of ourselves, and the people we touch. It’s not capital “R” Religion, perhaps, but it’s definitely a lifelong walk down a spiritual path. Meals do have a sacred value for me and it has nothing to do with the sophistication of the food or the beauty of a setting, but rather in the idea that one is obliged — for one’s own good and that of those around us — to celebrate and truly live the life we’ve been given, no matter what or how many terrible things fall our way. Dreadful things happen day after day, year after year, to everybody, and the challenge of our lives is to take in whatever happens and put it to some good use: to celebrate it, to learn from it, to think about, to digest it, to make it ours and make some good come out of it. For me, the easiest place to do that is around a family table, or a table filled with true friends.

Comments (2)

2 Comments »

1. I, too, have had many great meals at the table of Paula; every one better than the last. Many of my favorite foods I first tasted in Paula’s kitchen.

   That said, my beloved deceased grandmother truly made the best tamales anywhere, and I’m honored that Paula mentioned this in her account. And, yes, we had some wonderful Jan. 6 birthday cabrito dinners at Mi Tierra.

   Comment by Ray Perez — November 23, 2009 @ 3:44 pm

2. Always a great meal under Paula’s roof. I’m no cook, but here’s simple advice from Paula that I follow to this day when making any kind of red sauce. Paula told me: NEVER fry the garlic in oil. It will get bitter. Instead, add the minced garlic to the cooking sauce to keep it sweet.

   These days, folks take senseless pot-shots at journalists — along with lawyers and politicians. I always think of our courageous colleagues Paula and John. In pursuit of truth, they both ended up deserving Purple Hearts, and have my undying admiration.

   Comment by Barbara Howard — November 24, 2009 @ 6:48 am

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