The other day we ate lunch in St. George, Utah at the Italian restaurant Buca di Beppo.
Perhaps I ought to preface this by telling you that, due to our life in the boonies, going to a real sit-down restaurant is a very big deal. As city dwellers in Florida, we ate out all the time. Now we have been away from it for so long that Subway is a big deal, I am ashamed to admit.
But I adore Italian food (Idee food our family calls it, lovingly). As a collegian I can recall the time that I ate spaghetti almost every night of the week. I bought jars of little mushrooms and the ‘shrooms worked out perfectly, one per forkful of spaghetti. As a cook, if I have a signature meal, it is my spaghetti sauce, thick with meat and shrimp, a meal in itself even without the pasta.
So we were sitting in Buca di Beppo, as I said, and they have those wonderful red and white checkered table cloths. The walls are literally covered with photographs, large and small, depicting the Italian life. Staring over my wife’s shoulder, I spent the meal ogling a huge photo of Sophia Loren, the Italian epitome of feminine pulchritude, holding up a forkful of spaghetti. “Everything you see,” she once said, “I owe to spaghetti.”
The word itself, by the way – spaghetti – is the plural form of the Italian word spaghetto, which is a diminutive of spago, meaning “thin string” or “twine.” The proper method of polite consumption, in fact, is to twine it around one’s fork before raising it towards one’s waiting, open mouth.
Despite all this gushing over spaghetti, I must admit, we each got pizza. There are too many crappy pizzas for sale in national chains to pass up the opportunity to get an authentic delicious pizza at a place that knows how to make them. I loved my Supremo Italiano and my wife enjoyed her veggie pizza.
Finally, allow me to praise Italian cookbooks. Italy is perhaps the home of the world’s oldest cookbook: De re coquinaria (On Cookery). A collection of hundreds of ancient Roman recipes by the famous epicure Marcus Gavius Apicius, it dates from the 1st Century AD. Anyone who can follow the directions of a cookbook can be a good Italian chef. I make an Agnello con Peperoni (lamb with sweet peppers) that is out of this world.