When I think of the foods my mother used to make, it occurs to me that almost no one takes that amount of time to prepare anything anymore. It was a long time before I realized that foods most people think of as “Italian” were foods my mother rarely made–hers was a cuisine that involved a great deal of preparation that started outside of the kitchen, a discriminating taste for the very best ingredients, no matter how rare. I took a lot of this for granted when I was a child, it often made me impatient when she would scour the city’s live markets, or forests in parkgrounds, looking for exactly the right herb, or mushroom, or animal or vegetable for a dish my mother had decided she would make. I wondered how it was my mother seemed fixated on these ingredients, when everyone else’s mothers around me seemed far less concerned, and never seemed to make the same foods as she did, even if they too were Italian women from Italy. To me she seemed like a witch: particularly in an age where everyone’s children were fixated on “astronaut” foods, stuff that was packed up and created in labs and sent off to the moon with the spacemen. She’d buy us the peanut butter in tubes and the Tang so we’d leave her alone when she gathered malva blossoms on the neighbour’s lawn to make tea only she would end up drinking. But she’d shake her head at us. Rightly so.
My mother’s village was quite small. There were a limited number of families there, and she grew up on a property in the hills outside of Teramo, a place settled by what I’m told were seven families, formerly named after their seven homes–Le Sette Case. Seven is a big number in Abbruzzi, I’ve learned: there are entire feasts prepared on the first of May based entirely on that number’s prominence in the mythos of these people. Up to 30 courses can be served on that day’s celebration meal, and every course’s primary ingredients are also arranged in terms of sevens. So I don’t know how much of my mother’s retelling is the truth, or a simple example of local mythology, passed down even to her from its ancient source. What I remember of her land is that it’s surrounded by mountains, green fields, rows of corn leading up into the sky and vineyards throughout the lands closest to the house. It was a large stone farmhouse, like nothing I’ve seen here. An elevated main floor built above what used to be the stables and barns, presumably for heat. What I remember of the place was its massive elements: a tall staircase leading up to the main great doors; polished stone floors throughout the first floor, and marble on what we’d call a veranda here, exposed to the elements (and therefore very surprising); a focolare, that thing we might call its hearth, so large it could be entered standing, surrounded by stone. It was oven, fireplace, central heat, the preferred seat, the focus of the household (and the origin of the very word itself). It was never left to go out; it was never left alone.
My mother had her own house on the property too: a little stucco farm house with a couple of rooms and some land. She’d bought it from her uncle when he decided to stay in the States. It was her intention to go back to that house at some point, it was never her intention to marry my father and live in a city like Toronto. From her family home’s entrance, you could see the Gran Sasso and the Miale mountains, the lights of the city below us, and the family’s own contributions to the little town they built: a small church, a school house, a very large retail store (what they called the “Sale e Tabacchi”, “salt and tobacco”; a place where they sold food, wine, supplies of all kinds, dry goods, milled grain and other produce they’d grown, and animal feed), and their relatives’ houses. Remote and seemingly isolated, as cold as hell at night and as hot as hell during the day.
She had a knowledge about plants that made her seem almost magical–the doctor, lovely as he was, was never called on at our house unless my mother couldn’t get the plant she needed to get us out of our illness. We were careful not to tell the doctor anything about my mother’s doings, but on the occasions she offered her information, he listened very carefully in a way you never see MDs do now, they seem so intimately defensive, even around chamomile tea. She was uncompromising about what she gave for our pains and we often seemed powerless to do anything about it unless our strength returned. By then we’d be feeling better and we’d let her off the hook, anyway: no big thing. It wasn’t until I ran into the character of the friar in Romeo and Juliet that I recognized what she’d actually been doing in nurturing and gathering the odd herb, the strange root, the full bloom at the precise hour. It wasn’t until I’d invested the time in the lure of this kind of medicine myself that I “got” my mother’s fixation, and understood why she was like no one else I knew. For the longest time I didn’t even realize where my own interest came from, even though it seemed limited to an interest in scent and its sources. But even there, it was my mother’s fixation before it was mine. One of my earliest memories with her is a streetcar trip to the Simpson’s department store for an engraved gold atomizer of Miss Balmain; another is her “finishing touch” of Le Galion’s Sortilège whenever she got “dressed”. I still remember her favourite perfumes and their presence in our home, I now know my own choices lead directly back to those mixtures, though the specific bottles and labels will never be sold here again. I wear their “offspring”; the same themes, reinterpreted.
I remember the day when I learned the meaning of her name: Palmarosa. Not its literal meaning, that was always obvious. It has a significance and a significative form that is unique to my mother, unique to us. I’ve always thought of it as a strange name, it still is, I’ve only met one or two other women with it and all of them seem to be related to me. It’s always been very pretty, in my opinion, but for some strange reason I missed (again!) it’s connection with the plant world. It is a grass, a palm, after all: one used in the creation of perfume because of its proximity to the scent of rose oil. It grows in South America, Argentina and Peru. 
My grandfather travelled there as a young man and very possibly came across the plant while he was there, as it doesn’t grow in Italy where he lived as a child, and returned to live as an adult. I’d never seen the plant mentioned before, and my interest with plants and medicine was there, but untapped. I’d found a bottle of the oil in Michigan, at a vendor’s stall in a market, and asked if a sample vial was available…then asked where it came from, what it was used for, how it was gathered, what it looked like…as if the curiosity flooded from me all of sudden. South America resonated with me and I remembered my grandfather; images of my mother in the garden, in the forests, in the markets all flashed back to me. I lost my grandparents early, one of them even before I was born: all I remembered about her father was his extreme height, his very gentle voice, and his brilliant blue eyes, his elegant face. I could imagine him sailing across the ocean, and wandering through the jungles as a young man. It was part of the story of him I’d been told–the part that was so much less my mother’s experience of him than her own myth about him, something less terrifying about him than the man he actually was to her, and to the rest of her siblings. Suddenly it was as if all those experiences linked us together, across time and space and even life and death. I remember the hair at the back of my neck standing, the gooseflesh. So out of nowhere, out of the ordinary, out of the extraordinary.
I knew where the wild thyme grew, where bolete mushrooms could be found (not the false ones, though, that grow under spruce trees–leave those ones there), when to pick dandelion leaves for salad (and where) and why basil has to be grown near tomatoes. Carnation petals have a thin end–pull them out of the cluster and that part of the carnation tastes sweet and peppery. Lilac flowers taste of honey; violets and pansies as well. Nettles and black malva and chamomile are everywhere around us–though the leaves of sunny chrome yellow coltsfoot blooms, everywhere around us too, contain enough cyanide to kill. Tiny artichokes small enough to fit into your fist are a staple in my mother’s cuisine, as are crêpes, made by the hundreds and combined or wrapped or filled in thousands of dishes; chestnuts as well, for the flour, paste, and roasted nutmeat they yield; peppers with an intensity to rival the hottest Indian cuisine. Before I was five she’d made me notice the difference between the saffron that came from Spain, and the saffron that came from 
Aquila, not that far away from where my mother was born. It was slight, but it was there in colour and fragrance, in the intensity of the finished flavour. She had a fixation for Bertolini essences, glass bottles with little metal covered stoppers, sold in tiny boxes bearing the turn-of-the-century typography and the depiction of an aquiline-nosed crone, gazing at a bottle (featuring a depiction of herself, gazing at a bottle...). She made liquers with these: Millefiori, Vermouth, Rhum, Caffe Sport, Triple Sec, Amaretto, Banane, and the essence that defied description, Alkermes. As deep blue-red as garnets and beets, it stained everything magenta and tasted of red currants, rose, pomegranates, heat, and spun sugar. Actually, nothing really tastes like it; nothing has its perfume. It’s unmistakable, and it went in every one of our birthday cakes, soaked through the Pan di Spagna until every golden inch was as pink as rubellite tourmaline. Colour, texture, aroma, and the ability to chemically alter your state: my mother’s birthday cakes took longer than a day to make, a labour of several steps, an assembly of various flavourings and extracts and techniques. Clouds of egg whites, their “reds” (my mother’s word for yolks) beaten to the ribbon stage; a baking powder drenched with the essence of vanilla; lemons juiced, peeled, zested. Then, as filling, a thick, cooked cream, flavoured with the tart lemon peel, its quantity halved, and that half flavoured again with cocoa as black as coffee. There was nothing juvenile about these sweets–each thin slice we were allowed on our special day was its own allure of layered sensations, until finally it wasn’t just the alcohol content that made our heads spin. It was as if she wanted us to use every part of our ability to sense as we grew older, not just the dessert but everything else; like her intention for us was that we be perceptive enough to know where we came from, know who made us. Know what was involved in the effort. And since there was a lot of effort involved, she seemed determined that we begin to figure this out early.
It didn’t register quite so easily, of course. What we loved about her traditions, our traditions, we often gave up in the name of being like the other children around us. It made it easier for us to be the “translators” we were, the facilitators between her and the outside, foreign world–because we had to fit into both in order for us all to thrive. My mother was frustrated with us, but patient. We would recognize it one day, we would be made to understand her point, she’d worked hard enough, she knew.
Decades later, in a remote trattoria in Reggio Emilia, I was offered a dessert that instantly brought me back to my third birthday, the first time I realized what she’d made especially for me, the memory of the flavour of the brilliant liqueur flooding back so quickly I could barely name it. I knew it right away as my mother’s birthday cake. When I asked the waiter for the name of what I was given, he answered, “Zuppa Inglese“–what translates literally into “English soup”–an Italian metaphor that teases the English for their supposed and lingering affection for cakes in general (Victorians and their “tea time”), and their savvy predilection for making use of dry cake in trifles. The Alkermes, the waiter told me, was really the most English thing about the dessert, since it could only be obtained, for the longest time, from the English herbalists who’d retained all the secrets of its creation.
