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. 
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 
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.
