🍝"God, I'm glad I fell in love with an Italian"

A love story

Apr 30, 2024

Thank you for reading Beyond Survival, a publication about life after trauma. This edition is about falling in love with my partner through food. It was originally published in Scoop magazine.

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My Italian girlfriend and I fell in love over food.

I met F at a picnic in the park in the middle of the pandemic. I couldn’t keep my eyes from wandering toward her, as she sat chatting and tucking her carefully highlighted hair behind her ears. After she left, I made an excuse to text her. I lied and said I’d be in her neighbourhood the following week and wondered if she’d like to take a walk. She knew it was a ruse, but agreed to meet me anyway. Our first date, we talked for three hours. She flew to Rome the next morning, delaying what I hoped would be our second date. The pandemic restrictions made it impossible to eat out, but I wanted to cook for her.

The first meal I made for her was Alison Roman’s Shallot Pasta. It combines frizzled shallots, meaty anchovies and rich tomato paste into a textured sauce that balances sweet with umami flavours. It’s one of those dishes where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, though making pasta for an Italian was obviously a risk. She devoured it and I sent her home with a tub of extra sauce which she ate as a Bruschetta.

The next time I saw her, she assembled a lavish aperitivo board with cheeses, tapenades, hommouses, truffle mustard, artichokes, sun-dried tomatoes, olives, breadsticks and crisps (potato, lentil, chickpea). She introduced me to taralli, a kind of circular cracker that is traditionally Puglian, from Italy’s southern tip. Every bite was different, the whole spread dense with moreish flavour.

With every meal we shared, our relationship grew. She made Pollo Alla Cacciatora, chicken thighs cooked with white wine and vinegar, and crispy roast potatoes. I baked her a batch of heart-shaped brown scones, and introduced her to smoked Irish mackerel. She made white pizzas rich with mushrooms and truffle oil. I made a simple tray bake dish of fresh Irish salmon, cherry tomatoes and red onions. As we ate, our conversations became deeper and more meaningful. We talked about our families, our pasts, our traumas and our dreams. Each time I left I thought “that was a really good date,” which, I suppose, is why they kept happening.

Heart-shaped brown scones & a plate of tuna pasta

Our first Christmas together, I flew to Rome to meet her family. On Christmas eve, we sat outside a restaurant close to Piazza San Cosimato and ate pasta. Cacio e Pepe for her, Carbonara for me. The pasta arrived in small pans, perfectly al dente and rich with luxurious sauce. For dessert, we bought tiramisu from a tiny cafe and ate it huddled in our coats close to Piazza Navona. Instead of a full bird on Christmas day, we ate polpettone - minced turkey rolled in a meatloaf. F’s sister in law prepared two lasagnas - a traditional tomato sauce-based one and a pistachio and mortadella lasagna which is common in her native Sicily. For dessert, a towering Panettone, a Milanese specialty which reminds me of the barm bracks we eat at Halloween.

Italian food is very popular in Ireland. When you sit at an Italian dinner table, it’s easy to know why. The food is enormously comforting in the way only carbs can be. It relies on a relatively simple palate of a few, high-quality ingredients. Tomatoes, olive oil, salt and cheese together with fresh pizza or pasta dough are the basic building blocks of so many beloved dishes.

I joked that there should be some sort of grant program available for people who date Italians, fall for their food and have to upgrade all their basic ingredients. My ‘good’ olive oil (that I used for dressings and garnishes) is the one that she uses for cooking. Her ‘good’ olive oil has a fancy, colourful label and costs more than a top-quality wine. Her pasta is nothing like the 49c bags I bought in bulk from the supermarket. She likes the Rummo brand, which cooks up to be spongy but firm, the sauce clinging to its mottled texture. She can get reasonably good Italian produce in Dublin. When one of her friends finds a hard to source Italian cheese, they put up the culinary equivalent of the bat signal to alert the rest of us.

One evening I shook a big pinch of table salt into the boiling pasta water while she winced and explained that Italians only use sea salt for cooking pasta. To me, sea salt is used for elevating cooked food. It’s minerally saltiness adding dimension to everything from brownies to soups. But the Italians shake it liberally into pasta water that’ll be poured down the drain.

Our different approaches to meal times do sometimes cause tension. I’m happy to dunk packaged ravioli in hot water and eat them with cheese at my desk, while she feels strongly that they ought to be served with sage butter. She picks leaves from the sage plant, melts a bath of butter and spends ten minutes taking the dish from passable to amazing.

Italians have an expression: “buono come il pane” which means “as good as bread”. When something is really excellent, it is compared to bread which I think says a lot about both Italians and their bread. They believe that food is to be savoured. It is a crucial part of the day, an opportunity for both pleasure and connection. I often eat at my desk under the pressure of a looming deadline. When I’m writing, food is little more than fuel. I batch cook at the start of the week, happily repeating meals until my rations run out. I think about food economically; what will it cost to buy and prepare this? How much washing up will there be? Do I want to spend an hour coaxing a risotto into deliciousness? I enjoy cooking, but consider it work and am not always willing to spend the time it takes to make a dish sing.

On this and so many other things, F has a lot to teach me. She is fiercely proud of her country’s cuisine and has strong opinions about how it should be eaten. I commiserate when we encounter pizza toppings that she feels are an insult to her heritage. I made the mistake of once telling her family that I ate pizza with pineapple on it. The room instantly fell silent and I thought I might have to find alternative accommodation for the night. “I don’t do it anymore,” I said feebly, as they shook their heads in disgust.

When someone in my life doesn’t like Italian food, I make sure to break the news to her gently. “Really?,” she says, “she doesn’t like pizza?” I listen patiently and agree that it is madness not to enjoy pizza which, to me, feels like a hug from the inside. I love how the base is both doughy and charred, the perfect seasoning of the tomato sauce, the gentle salinity of the cheese.

Most Sunday nights, we eat Italian. When she puts a bubbling plate of food in front of me, I make the same joke. “My God, it was a great idea to fall in love with an Italian”. Gathering over food is the cornerstone of our relationship. I never feel closer to her than when I sit opposite her at our tiny fold out table and say “Amore mio, how was your day?”

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