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Chapter Two

Al Dente

IT NEVER OCCURRED to me, growing up, that a wooden folding rack might actually be used for drying clothes—because in my house, we used it to dry pasta. We were an Italian-American home, a ravioli-every-Christmas-Eve home, the kind of home where everyone was present for family dinners on weeknights and kids spent their Saturdays making wine, ankle-deep in the stomping barrels of great-grandparents’ backyards. The kind of home that I now know wasn’t that common in 1980s suburban America.

My great-great-grandparents came by boat from Italy, and even four generations later, although only my mother was Italian and my father was full Irish, at the heart of my childhood home my parents built an Italian kitchen—a heritage-rich enclave—in the middle of suburban New Hampshire, where every couple of months my entire family would converge to make fresh pasta together. Although we tried to make our pasta as authentic as possible, this wasn’t Italy—it was Merrimack, a town with neither a butcher shop nor a farmers market—so, in true suburban fashion, we all piled into our boxy maroon Chrysler minivan and drove to Costco to get flour, butter, and eggs, in bulk.

Although Merrimack did have a slight rural bent, this was more a product of its age than of an actual lingering agricultural industry. By the time we moved there, it was just a typical American suburb, where my mother and I spent most of my childhood Saturdays on cold metal bleachers watching my sisters play soccer, and my father, clipboard in hand, coached from the sidelines. The town’s primary employers were Fidelity Investments financial services provider; BAE Systems defense, security, and aerospace company; Brookstone retail stores; and Anheuser-Busch brewery, whose Budweiser Clydesdales marched every summer in our Fourth of July parade—an all-American gathering, which always smelled of sweet barbequed meat tended to by pot-bellied, white-haired men. There were sparklers and stars, children with tangled hair and sticky fingers.

Run-down, but not decrepit, our town was a mix of under-tended relics of history amid half-empty plazas and strip malls. It was an old village with cemeteries whose graves dated back to the eighteenth century, including one we’d often bike to in the summers to do grave rubbings on pieces of wax paper. There were signs denoting the birthplace of great historical figures, such as Matthew Thornton, Merrimack resident and signer of the Declaration of Independence, but there were also dingy laundromats, neglected discount stores, and overcrowded schools.

As far as meals were concerned, we rarely ordered takeout or went out to dinner as a family in our town, but when we did, we went to a restaurant called the Common Man, a New England franchise built into a house, complete with attic bar and stone fireplaces. On the way there, I remember driving past a dilapidated bowling alley, one small Mexican restaurant, and three greasy Chinese joints.

In my memory, all the places in between rise before me like an overgrown forest, even though much of those swathes of pine trees have disappeared now. There were rolling hills and dense foliage that gave me the distinct impression of always being underneath something. Whenever I looked to the sky, there were leaves in the way. Although the town is larger than a village now, and the population is mostly middle class, those hills and forests, like the historical markers, were a reminder of the logging industry around which New Hampshire was industrialized. The story of Merrimack is told in red flannel and maple syrup, a story of long winters and hard-fought wars.

MY OWN STORY began inside a gray, distinctly New England house on a sleepy corner lot, or, more specifically, in a noisy, crowded kitchen with a peel-and-stick laminate floor painted to look like red brick. From my vantage point, hiding beneath a dark-stained behemoth of a kitchen table, that faux brick floor, always covered in stumbling, busy feet, stretched out like a crowded market in the midst of my family’s own small civilization.

The kitchen was divided in half by an island that protruded from one wall, a heavy wooden arm separating the dining half of the room from an area with three walls stuffed full of dark wood cabinets, white laminate countertops, and dated appliances. I have no idea how all our pots and pans were crammed into such a small space. And it’s an even bigger mystery how my mother, father, sisters, and grandparents all fit, too, but pasta making was group work, daylong work, and it required all hands.

Because I was shy, I’d hide underneath the enormous table my parents had been given as a wedding present whenever the kitchen became too loud. In all of our houses—ours, my grandparents’, my great-grandparents’—there was a table in the kitchen, even when there was a separate formal dining room, even when we couldn’t all fit around it. And I would crawl beneath the table and barricade myself from the racket and the clamor, piling books around me and peering out at the frenzied dance from beneath the hem of the tablecloth. Behind the protective shield of my coke-bottle glasses, I watched these days of my childhood unfold as rituals, a series of elaborate steps constructed to make all the moving parts work as a whole.

In preparation for the pasta-making ceremony, my big Irish dad would wrestle open the drying rack in the corner. With the body of a bear, legs and arms so thick I couldn’t wrap both hands around them and touch my fingertips, pale Irish skin, freckles, and my same ice-blue eyes, he was an intimidating figure, at least according to more than one boyfriend whose hands he gripped perhaps just a little too tightly. In our kitchen, it was his job to create order. He was the dad who brought a Fodor’s guidebook on every family vacation, who made chore charts that rotated weekly based on birth order, but he was not much of a cook. So when we made pasta, it was my father who started early, who laid out all the equipment in stages: drying rack in the corner by the back door, pasta machine on the edge of the counter, rolling pin and flour on the opposite side of the kitchen, waiting for the dough.

When we weren’t eating, I would sit beside my father at that enormous kitchen table, doing my math homework. I was bookish, a word person—still am. I liked flowery language. Math was a constant struggle, the bane of my honor-roll existence. It wasn’t that I didn’t like math, or that I couldn’t see the beauty of geometry and imaginary numbers—it was that beauty didn’t get the equation solved. As a math major in college, my father’s interest in numbers was an obsession. He built himself a lifelong career in Internet technology sales and marketing from the ground up with his intuitive understanding of supply and demand. My father loved helping me with my math homework, took pride in trying to engender in his eldest daughter a fascination with the shape of the world as he saw it. We would spend hours together, huddled over a textbook, his big finger pointing, guiding me across a page: So, if you divide both sides of the equation by (abc) then you can isolate x . . .

This is why it was his job to establish the order of pasta making, and once he did, my mother and Nana, my grandmother, would begin to work the chewy-tough spaghetti dough into long flat ribbons, wide as a palm and a quarter-inch thick. My mother would hunch over the counter, brushing from her eyes the wild, curly hair she could only tame by pinning the sides back with plastic combs in tortoiseshell and black. With brown eyes and olive skin, she looked the part of a Mediterranean matriarch. Her beauty routine, like her cooking, was meticulous. The bathroom closet was always packed full of creams, lotions, powders, and makeup. She still paints her nails every weekend and wears the same pattern of rings every day, on the same fingers: her diamond engagement ring and gold wedding band in the traditional location, plus a thin band of jade on her right-hand ring finger.

Although we learned to make pasta from my great-grandmother, my mother was always the center of our household. She has a master’s degree and a long impressive career, but she will tell you that her greatest achievement in life is her family, and that responsibility was both heartwarming and overwhelming. My sisters and I would often get the overly dramatic Catholic-mom guilt if we wanted to spend a Saturday night at a friend’s place. You don’t want to spend time with us, with your family? She emphasized the “with your family” part, giving it a gravity that seemed to imply the family might not be there when you got back. Traditions mattered deeply to her. Every Christmas Eve, after evening mass, after ravioli dinner at my grandparents’ house; after she had prepared the morning’s two quiches, raspberry coffee cake, and ham frittata; after the coffeemaker was readied—even if all this took until midnight—we were still expected to gather around the television to watch the silent animated film The Snowman. Traditions, to my mother, were a road map to your past, how you remembered, ritualized, who you were as a unit. Because this is what we’ve always done.

My mother could exude warmth and engender fear in equal parts. My childhood friends knew she would yell at them for breaking house rules, but when a hungry teenage boy showed up to work on a science project or play guitar with me in the backyard, my mother was always there, offering a “snack,” like leftover chicken drumsticks or homemade pepper and onion pizza. She was a force, a presence. As a public school teacher, her voice echoed throughout the house, from one story up and a hallway down, when she yelled for help moving a piece of furniture, or to tell my sisters and me she could hear us fighting. She talked with her mouth full and she interrupted. She had only one speed, and it was go.

I assume her ability to direct a flock of eighth graders to sing and dance on cue for the school’s annual play had something to do with why she didn’t mind the chaos of a crowded kitchen, the clutter and noise that sent me beneath the table. She was in her element there, surrounded by family, shouting over everyone, her palms gripping a wooden rolling pin, her brown arms flexing softly as she bore down on the dough.

While Mom and Nana worked the dough, Meaghan and Caitlin, my all-Italian sisters, with their rich brown hair and liquid eyes, would scatter around the kitchen like chattering monkeys, pretending to help, mischievously throwing handfuls of flour against the counter where it would explode in small dusty clouds. Both dark skinned with glasses and curly hair, my sisters, practically twins, operated as a unit. When the family gathered around old photo albums and flipped through the mid- to late-1980s, even my mother had to pull out a print and look at the year or caption on the back to figure out which of her younger two she was looking at. They were a neat line from my mother, clearly her daughters in both physical appearance and temperament. I was the crooked line.

Although I am the eldest, we are all the same age apart—each just twenty months from the next—so age alone doesn’t explain why they ended up so similar and I so different. Meaghan and Caitlin were tough in body and light in spirit, in contrast to my physical frailty and fascination with darkness. Never much interested in intellectual pursuits, they both loved spicy food, salsa dancing, and shouting. They always shared a unique bond of dance routines and soccer practices and nicknames. While my family was in the early stages of making pasta dough, they never had the patience to stand still long enough to help. They’d hold contests to see who could scramble up the inside of the kitchen doorframe faster, their backs against one side of the frame, their bare monkey feet against the other, powering their tiny bodies up to the ceiling. As for me, I waited. I had only one job, and it came later in the process.

It was Gampi, my grandfather, who manhandled the pasta machine, a clunky metal contraption with rolling plates and munching teeth. The edge of the counter was chipped slightly from the vice grip of the machine, which my grandfather tightened with his gnarled fingers. By the time Mom and Nana had the dough rolled flat enough, Gampi was ready. The two women gingerly carried the dough over to their father, husband, together, palms crossed beneath each other at the sagging center. They lifted it vertically and guided one swaying end gently into the patient metal rollers of the pasta machine. Gampi began turning the hand crank—nothing automated here—and the dough was pulled down into the machine. They ran the floured sheets through the machine three or four times, each pass thinning the dough to nearly tissue-paper consistency, too thin for human hands or clunky rolling pins to achieve. The dough grew even longer in their hands, its excessive thickness stretched and redistributed as length, until Mom called me over to drape the yard-long cool cloth of dough over my pale freckled arms.

Gampi lifted and unfolded the machine from itself, raising the slicing attachment into its place over the edge of the counter. These were the crucial moments that moved so slowly, requiring full cooperation and attention. I had to feed the dough back towards the machine at just the right pace. Too fast and the pasta bunched up on itself, and the entire flattening process had to be repeated. Not fast enough, and the dough pulled apart, a slow yanking pressure until it snapped like popped bubblegum. Mom and Nana guided the dough up and over, down into the machine at the perfect angle, making sure never to let it brush up against the edge of the machine where it would snag and tear. And Gampi turned the crank quickly, more quickly than you would think, pumping it insistently, until magically, out of the bottom of the machine grew dancing sprouts of spaghetti like freshly cut wheat, into my father’s waiting hands.

Dad gathered the pasta like yarn, spread between his two palms so that the damp dough wouldn’t stick back onto itself. He backed slowly, slowly away from the machine, bent at the waist, until the dough was just about to pass clean through. My mother came around to catch the other end, and I watched, having again retreated beneath the table, as my parents took the sweeping strands of pasta, together, towards the drying rack. Meaghan and Caitlin would leap to attention, pretending to carry the pasta too, tiny brown hands reaching up underneath the sagging blanket, inches above their palms. My parents never shooed them away. When the pasta was resting safely against the drying rack, everyone exhaled slightly. One batch down.

In all this work emerged an extended dance, all of us bowing and swaying around each other, backs pressed against walls to avoid collision, sliding from one spot to the next with broken pieces in our hands, the disparate parts that would eventually become a meal. Our cooking was a collective effort that blended the Irish in my father and the freckles on my skin into the Italian of the rest, across centuries and state lines and homelands, our family a single unit in the pursuit of the perfect pasta. There is no such thing as too crowded a kitchen.

LATER, WHEN WE cooked our new creation in steaming copper-bottomed pots, the pasta rolling in the boiling water, Gampi taught his granddaughters how to test its doneness, how to tell when the pasta had reached al dente perfection. He dipped a clawed wooden spoon into the pot and gathered a few wet strands into his callused palms, letting them drip dry over the sink, and then flung them against the kitchen wall. Nana scolded, but Gampi knew my mother would never tell him to stop. From where she stood in the kitchen corner, looking on fondly, I could see how her memory flooded with these lessons from her own childhood. If the pasta sticks, clinging to the white paint, not sliding more than a millimeter down the wall’s smooth surface, then it’s ready to eat.

Hanging on the kitchen wall, above the large table, was a framed print of Norman Rockwell’s Freedom from Want, wherein an elderly matriarch places a giant turkey onto a crowded white-clothed table. This was the image I saw whenever we ate together, and it seemed perfectly familiar to me: the commotion of elbows knocking into each other, the shouts to pass the mashed potatoes or gravy, the slightly outdated formality of the wallpapered walls and crystal dishes. Dinners, for my family, were a raucous, celebratory affair. Food was tradition. Food was connection. Food was family.

I carried the lessons of this kitchen with me, embedded in memory, even as I grew up and moved away, missed family dinners and, later, skipped the meatballs. I was taught that if you worked hard, and worked together, food was the great reward. Now, years removed from my childhood kitchen, the shape of each family member blurs slightly in my memory, allowing me to see the patterns rather than just the people, the choreography, the larger ritual being enacted. I learned that cooking was our way of communicating with each other, and that in the spinning around and between each other, we were saying, Be careful, I’m right here, I love you.

WHEN I WAS about five years old, there was a giant gathering at my great-grandparents’ house in Dedham, Massachusetts. This was the small city my great-great-grandparents, Nona and Papa, picked when they arrived from Italy by boat, the town in which my grandfather and mother both grew up, a little less than fifteen miles outside of Boston. We visited Dedham often when I was a girl, and this time, we were there for a sort of family reunion, though I didn’t know most of my mother’s extended family well. Someone—probably my grandfather—had wrapped a long white banner of dot-matrix printer paper around the house: a family tree. A line stretched down its center, names branching off from that line written neatly with colored markers in dark green, blue, red. I could barely even pronounce some of those long and flowing names, with clicks and extended vowels and heavy second-syllable articulation: Corsini, Squillante, Berlusconi, Salvaimo. First names like the grapevines lacing around their brittle bushes: Margherita, Paulina, Oresti, Antoni. And way down towards the right side of the house, in the present day, Marissa.

In need of a break from the noise, I remember standing against the side of the house in my pink floral dress, looking back and forth between the strangers scattered across the green summer lawn and the road map of names lining the house, trying to figure out how these people belonged on this map, and how they were my family.

I had escaped the legions of aunts, big lumbering women, all of whom looked exactly like Nona, slightly hunched and limping with ulcers here and there, the flaps of fat on their upper arms waving as they charged towards me. The aunts always wore pantyhose, even then, in the middle of a New England July, but they never hesitated to take off their shoes. Their brown, toughened fingers, knotted like the bark of Papa’s apple trees, tangled in my thick blonde hair and laced around my wrist in amazement at how much of the bone they could see. I was dragged to the banquet table of fat, round meatballs and tiny chicken and pork tortellini three times after I ate of my own will, with stops along the way for the aunts, their red dresses billowing out like tents, to show the uncles how my mother had not been feeding me.

Tomato sauce splattered lightly across the cream collar of my dress, I retreated behind the corner of the tidy house. The lawn rolled out easily into the neighbors’ lawn, with no fences to separate them other than Papa’s rows of tomato plants and grapevines and apple trees. The neighboring houses were owned by cousins, children, old friends who shared ocean voyages, Saturdays at the salon, childbirth and child-rearing, grape crushing, garden planting, and wide, stretched-out knee-high stockings. I was young and pale and blonde, distanced from their bulging bodies and thick accents by generations and my suburban American culture. My mother and sisters fit; their appearances matched the second- and third-generation women in that backyard, and so did their personalities. Meaghan and Caitlin happily danced in the attentions of these distant relatives, while I retreated.

My parents had a videotape of the day, just an hour or so of panning footage. I don’t remember who was filming or who narrated—probably my mother’s brother, Paul, the aspiring artist of the family. But I do remember watching the video once as a family, many years later, laughing and pointing at our younger selves, at how much we’d changed. Since I’d hidden for most of the day from the loud, brash voices of my extended family, I only made one appearance on the tape. The cameraman was speaking to Papa, who sat on a folding chair in the backyard, his banjo slung across his lap. I crept into the right corner of the camera’s frame, my hair-sprayed bangs framing big glasses. I looked deeply concerned, my eyes wide and mouth pinched. I glanced at Papa, opened my mouth as if to speak, then darted my head up and to the sides, sharply, like a chicken, and wandered offscreen.

NO ONE WHO meets me in person, who sees my auburn hair, lily-white skin, ice-blue eyes, and rampant freckles, believes that I am at all Italian. When I was six years old, waiting with my mother in the lobby of the studio where my sisters took tap-jazz class, I heard for the first time what would be the defining joke of my childhood. My mother introduced me to another mom, who commented that she couldn’t believe how different we looked from each other. My mother smiled, put her arm around my shoulder, waist-high to her and said, “Yup, that’s Marissa—the milkman’s daughter.” Although I was puzzled at the time—we didn’t even have a milkman—I understood pretty quickly that I did not fit into this crowd of authentic Italian women.

Italian women cook. This is what we do.

In my earliest kitchen memories, I’m peering out from beneath the small round oak table in Nona’s kitchen in Dedham. Nona’s kitchen was even smaller than ours, and was always full—with the women of my family, but also with the Italian friends and neighbors. The kitchen steamed with the humid scents of boiling water and aging cheese, the stinging pinch of garlic and tomatoes sticking in their tousled hair. These women always sounded like they were yelling—mostly in English, with the occasional ingredient named in Italian—but this was just their natural volume. Thick hands dug deep into bowls of ground beef. Dots and smudges of white flour stuck against sweaty olive forearms and in strong black eyebrows. A unit. A pack. Because this is what we’ve always done.

Nona, limping and white-haired, could barely manage a flight of stairs, but she could command a room with the clang of a ladle against a pot. My mother managed to work a full-time job, raise three children within three years of each other in age, get her master’s in education part time in the evenings, and have a hot meal on the table every night. You better believe we sat still, bowed our heads, and gave thanks. Nobody was allowed to skip family dinner. This was the power of food. And it was always women, with the occasional exception of a communal cooking fest or a summer evening cookout, who made the food.

But not me. Worse than my bookish, quiet nature, worse than my skinny hips, the thing that most distinguished me from the loud, vibrant, powerful women of my family was my complete lack of abilities in the kitchen. I was a terrible cook. My mind was too everywhere-all-the-time, too chaotic and stormy to focus on any one thing, whether walking in a straight line or following a recipe. I bumped into doors and walls, smacked myself in the face with dancing, expressive hands, dropped and tripped over things constantly. And this clumsiness escalated to dangerous levels within the confines of the kitchen.

I’m the one who, while carrying a fresh batch of pasta across the kitchen, tripped over an untied shoelace and dropped a whole wet pile to the floor. When I was a teenager, my mother left me alone to reheat leftovers for my own dinner because everyone else had basketball practice or parent-teacher conferences, and I ended the night standing on a kitchen stool, crying, scrubbing mashed potatoes off the ceiling. One high school afternoon, a friend invited me to her house for lunch and asked me, while she ran to the bathroom, to watch the hot dogs she had set to sizzle in a skillet. She returned to find me, mouth twisted in worry, staring intently at the charred, black meat. At age ten, I made cookie dough so rubbery that when my six-year-old sister tried a bite from the bowl, the tough sugary mass stuck so hard against her baby canine it pulled clear of the gum. She ran crying from the kitchen to my mother, while I stood, guiltily, holding a bloody, unbaked cookie in my hand.

I don’t remember any single moment of humiliation, any one action that caused my mother to point, furious, and ban me from the kitchen. I just know I was never really invited—nor did I ever really want to be. I preferred to stand just outside, to hide beneath the table, to watch, sensing there was something that set me apart. Food was the bedrock of my family, the means of expression, and the solid foundation on which all of our connection was built. But I wasn’t an Italian goddess in the kitchen, so I had to be something else.

WHEN I WAS young, I attributed most of the difference between my mother and sisters and me to body type. Both my sisters have been taller than me since adolescence, and both had round, full bodies, the bodies of women, bodies described as curvy or generous or soft. I always assumed it was the self-possession that came with an adult female body that made them boisterous, more playful and extroverted than me. They knew something about being a woman, something that made them want to curl their hair and wear makeup, something I was missing. I aligned my failures in the kitchen with a general disdain for anything I deemed too girly.

Once every few months, to indulge their taste for the spicy, my mother and sisters would have what they called “girls’ night out.” They would dress up, taking the excuse to use their curling irons, to wear heels and eyeliner, and head out on the town for a more international approach to fine dining, and to catch a romantic comedy at the theater by the mall.

I stayed home with my father, relieved to have narrowly avoided getting roped into what I thought of then as far too girly a night. We’d order a couple of pizzas, wasting none of our time in the kitchen, and he’d let me watch him watch sports on ESPN while I ate off a paper plate on the pale lavender carpet of the living room floor. Surrounded by floral furniture and light periwinkle walls dotted with collages of family photographs, and framed art class creations from us girls, I made my first little rebellions against the culture of womanhood, a culture that seemed to me based mostly on the proper applications for lip gloss, or burning the edges of your forehead on various hair-heating devices, and a far too adventurous approach to food.

Although my father and grandfather participated in our family’s communal cooking sessions, by and large, my family followed more traditional gender roles, with stay-at-home moms doing most of the food preparation and working dads earning money outside the house. But more important, to me, was that my father and I shared a pickiness in our food tastes. We both ate spaghetti and meatballs but eschewed the spicier offerings like sausages or less-Americanized choices like tiramisu and cannoli.

My father sat on the couch, opposite the television, while I sat cross-legged on the floor by the coffee table. He’d drink a Sam Adams straight from the bottle while we watched the Celtics rattle the backboards at the Garden, him leaping up with each basket made. We’d laugh as I imitated him, launching myself into the air, coming down on one knee, and pumping my elbow backwards, yelling, “Yeah, baby!”

These nights with my father were my private victories. A dividing line emerged in my brain, one I struggle even now to articulate, because the truth is, it was pretty arbitrary. All I knew at the time was that, somehow, I shared more in common with him than either of my sisters, despite the fact that they actually played on the basketball and soccer teams he coached. I must have sensed that I was missing out on something, watching my sisters from a distance as they learned to use chopsticks and hair straighteners, wrinkling my nose at the mysterious cardboard containers they brought home, bottoms spotted with grease from thick yogurt sauces, or round aluminum plates with crumpled edges full of seaweed rolls and thin strips of ginger. I decided I didn’t want to learn that way to be a woman. I know now these were little more than introvert rumblings: I preferred staying in to going out, and because my father did too, I thought that made me less of a girly girl. This was my idea, at the time, of feminism, of political identity: I began to define myself by what I chose not to do—ignoring any kind of beauty regimen, and making a statement with what I refused to eat.

MY PARENTS STILL live in that house, and have for more than twenty years. It underwent constant change while I was growing up, each of the rooms stripped to the studs and rebuilt at least once in my lifetime. But I still remember my solitary moments there, the moments that set me apart—beneath the kitchen table, silent in the crowd of a family meal, on the living room floor with a slice of pizza. I remember ice-skating with books in the living room, a hardcover under each foot allowing me to glide across the lavender carpet.

I don’t remember the moment I knew I would move far away from there.

The year I finished high school, my parents took us to Europe for nearly three weeks, and one morning, our last in London, I volunteered to run down the street from our rented flat to get breakfast from the corner market while my sisters slept in and took showers. I don’t remember what I bought. But I remember so clearly the rush I got from walking through the city, even just a few blocks, on my own. Although I’d often been to Boston, just an hour south of my hometown, I’d always been with friends or family, and the same applied anytime I had ventured outside our suburb. As far as I could recall, this was my first time alone in a city, on the cusp of eighteen and leaving for college, and I saw my life as one big possibility. I could picture a future, an adulthood, here, in a way I never could imagine in Merrimack.

I imagined mornings, wrapped in a trench coat and trendy scarf, where I’d take the subway to my job, something smart and creative, like bookstore owner or editor at a boutique publishing house. I’d know my local shop owners and buy wine and cheese for park picnics on the weekends. I’d be the kind of person who always kept fresh hydrangeas in her house. Although it was late June, the London breeze whipped my newly short hair around my ears, which were buzzing with the certainty that my future would begin in a city.

I was a quiet, clumsy girl surrounded by brassy, confident women who were comfortable in heels or in the kitchen. People who met my family for the first time assumed I was adopted. Rather than be left out, branded the too-awkward tomboy, I chose a different identity for myself. Somehow, food and domesticity became all muddled; without even realizing it, I’d conflated cooking with regressive gender roles. My father was my closest physical analog in the family, so I took my first steps in self-identity towards him, away from the rituals of our shared kitchen, away from femininity. Food became my mutiny.