Memories In A Tube

I finished up the last of the gravy and meatballs yesterday.

It took a while. The recipe makes a lot and it isn’t really easy to divide, and there aren’t as many of us as there once were. Oliver’s in grad school. Lauren’s back but often out with her friends at meal time. Kim and I are here, but we’re just two people and getting older at that, so our meals are getting smaller over time.

I’m not the chow hound I once was, alas.

So it’s always kind of a race to get it eaten before it goes bad. I suppose I could freeze some of it for later, but honestly half the time I do that it just ends up forgotten because the freezer is just an opaque box were good intentions go to die.

You can’t have gravy and meatballs without cheese on top. It just won’t do.

At this point I know good cheese. I even own good cheese. We have one of those hand-cranked rotary cheese shredders and if you’re going to do this right you fill it with parmigiana reggiano or pecorino romano – both of which are readily available at your nearby Costco, imported directly from Italy and sold at a surprisingly reasonable price – and shred it fresh, right there at the table.

I could do that. And when we have other Italian dishes, that’s what I do. There is nothing quite like a good pecorino.

But when I make the old family recipe, I almost invariably reach for the grated parmesan that you get in plastic tubes at the grocery store. The kind that has just a bit of cellulose – sawdust, if you prefer – to promote free-flowage. The kind that made Anthony Bourdain nearly have an aneurysm in his rush to explain why it should never be served to humans because how hard it is to grate your own damned cheese you lazy bastard?

The thing is, though, that’s the taste I remember from when I was growing up.

I can douse my spaghetti and meatballs and gravy with this stuff, close my eyes, and it’s half a century ago and my parents are still alive and sitting at the little table in the kitchen with me and my brother. The biggest concern I have in the world is walking to school the next day. One grandmother is upstairs doing whatever she did up there instead of eating with us. She's come down later, or we'd go up to see her. The other grandparents are only a couple of miles away and perhaps we’ll see them the next weekend. My first cat is sacked out in the living room. It was a time.

The fresh-shredded parmigiana and pecorino are objectively better cheeses – tastier, better for you, more like actual cheese and less like a plastic tube of mid-twentieth-century convenience – but you don’t always want better. Sometimes all you want is a memory of a time and a place, shaken from a tube.