Into the Flames

I was placing a bag of sugar on the kitchen counter when the smell of smoke wafted into my nose. I turned around and looked through the doorway at my husband and said to him, in a sort of detached tone that can only be used once you’ve eaten hundreds of pandemic meals together, “I think I’m on fire.”

From there, things moved quickly: I pulled my sweater over my head and stamped out the flames. I rushed into the dining room to be close to my 13-month-old daughter and have my husband assess the damage. Cinged hair, as small as confetti, speckled my face and sweater, but I was otherwise fine. Neither of us could fully reconstruct the incident, but my husband had seen the flames high behind my skull. To say it could have been much worse is an understatement.

Knowing the baby was hungry, that we were all hungry, I checked the soup, determined it was undamaged and got dinner on the table.

This is actually what pulls me toward cooking: not the chance of getting burned but the attention that’s required, the physicality, the closeness to the flame. All of this is most apparent for me when I grill pizza, a favorite summer activity for the past 15+ years.

I grew up in an Italian-American family where my Nana made her own pizza on Friday nights for decades and then once a month when my brother and I arrived. Her rectangular crust was sturdy and reliable: it could be cut into squares, wrapped in tinfoil, and stored into lunch boxes. No bending or flopping, unlike the light, lovely varieties with less bread-like crusts. In college, I spent an afternoon watching her make the dough, but the recipe amounted to, essentially, add enough flour and water until you have a smooth ball. Bake. The real lesson was teach yourself, kiddo.

So when I read about grilling pizza in a food magazine in the early aughts, I thought it was genius. The process yielded the incredible charred crust of a pizzeria pie, but it still cost less than $10.00 total to make, which fit my post-grad budget perfectly. My first attempts produced tasty little personal pies, and I was hooked.

It became a party trick. I’d knead out the dough in the morning and it would rise in the summer’s heat. At night, I’d attend to the fire, creating a hot side of the grill and a cooler one. Someone would serve a salad and, while everyone else was eating their greens or caprese, I became a backyard conductor with my tongs. Bring up the fire, call in the dough until it’s just charred and chewy, then allow it to settle it for its brief bake. Ask the sauce to add its restrained flavor, sprinkle a staccato helping of mozz before the final, closing flourish of basil.

In reality, the process is unglamorous. I’m the clown: juggling utensils as my face turns more and more red from the heat. The trickiest part is getting the dough just right on the grate. If overstretched, you’ll wind up with thin, crispy patches that can’t hold sauce or cheese. Too thick and it’ll take too long to cook, which can lead to the hot side cooling, and a backlog in the assembly line. The results are oblong, misshapen, and best consumed immediately upon being removed from the grill. This means that, as the cook, I’ve essentially missed every meal I’ve ever made in this capacity.

Last summer was the first time in ages I didn’t get around to grilling pizza. I’d given birth to my daughter months earlier and dinner was now an affair of efficiency – pastas or easy soups or takeout. Now that she’s older, I want her to experience the joy of family food rituals – the pasta e fagioli my nana made on most Sundays, the cannoli my great aunt Elena brought to Christmas, the Swedish apple pie my mother baked after we’d spent an afternoon picking fruit in a nearby orchard. Just last week, my daughter ran over to one of our basil plants and shoved a handful of leaves into her mouth before grinning at me. This, too, felt like an important lesson in her culinary education.

Like all parents, I worry about her constantly in our violent world – that we might get into a fiery car crash or a school shooting or that our gas stove might actually combust, not just toss out the occasional spark. I also worry about the passive violence of raising a girl who watches her mama cook every night. I fear that domesticity will be baked into her, as was into me.

Or was it my love of my Nana, my mother, my aunt Elena that led me to read cookbooks like novels and instilled in me a desire to master the recipes of my ancestors? I have to remind myself that I’m no longer the little girl in a one stoplight town. That I have choices and privilege and power, from my flour-white background to my ivy-tinged education and marriage. Remind myself I’m the mother now, with the scar across my lower abdomen to prove what I’m willing to endure.

I want my daughter to see me at the grill. To know I’m afraid of the flames, but that I get close anyway. That’s where it’s hotter and brighter and tastier, my love.

This essay originally appeared on an episode of iCRV radio, where I occasionally chat with my friend and mentor Stephen Gencarella. Thanks to Dave Williams for producing the episode and having me on!