“Meaning?”
“On cold mornings, my mother used to make cornmeal porridge, just like her mother before her, with a touch of vanilla and nutmeg.” To Marble, cornmeal porridge was this close to heaven. As the hot porridge cooled, the top formed a thick film and when you broke the surface with a spoon, up came a wisp of steam with the spicy, milky aroma.
“But that porridge didn’t come from my grammy’s tradition,” Marble said. “Her family adopted the habit while living in the Caribbean, then carried it back home to the UK. And the spices, originally, were imports from Asia. So, I guess that makes me a product of the food diaspora.”
Marble smiled and leaned toward the coffee CEO. She could smell the bergamot in his cologne.
“The Italians make something thicker than corn porridge, a polenta, which they serve with salty meats and sauces. But that didn’t begin until Christopher Columbus brought corn over to Europe from the New World. What you will find in my book, instead, is an ancient polenta made with fava beans and spelt that more closely resembles what the ancient Romans would have been eating long before that. There’s also another one made from chestnuts.”
Coffee Man was nodding. After the show, he asked for Marble’s business card and pressed his own card into her hand and invited her to visit his company headquarters the next time she found herself in his city. She might just do that, she told him. His hands were manicured but calloused. The next time she saw him, he would explain to her that he liked to do his own gardening and that he also played the guitar. He wanted to see her again, he would say, he wanted to get to know her.
And Marble would tell him that she liked that idea, even if she was feeling increasingly unsure of who she was, exactly, this person that the coffee guru claimed he wanted to get to know. Until a few years ago, Marble would have described herself in an elevator pitch as a London-born art-history-scholar-turned-food-expert. She would have added that she was a mum. Nowadays, she simply said, I write about foods with a strong sense of place. Because it was a catchy line, though imprecise, and because that was all she wanted to say of what her life had become.
Recipe for Love
Marble’s residence in Italy was the result of a predictable story. She had arrived from the UK for her art history studies and she had stayed for the love of a man. But in the beginning, it was just the art. And the food, of course. One day, she was looking at an ancient Roman mosaic of a bowl of mushrooms when she came up with the idea for a book on stories surrounding traditional recipes.
The book started out as a hobby, a labor of love. Later, when Marble started getting requests to do TV shows and conferences she thought, Why not? Weren’t people always reinventing themselves? Marble’s formula was simple. She would research one traditional recipe, then seek out an anecdote from a modern-day family or community or restaurant that used it.
Terrain and climate aside, food was often about who had colonized whom, who had been based where during wartime, who had been forced to feed what to their children when there was nothing else left. And, of course, it was about geography, too, so Marble decided to narrow her focus to traditional foods made with indigenous ingredients or foods that had been produced locally for more than a millennium.
One of the more perverse facts of life is that making a living examining art and archaeology would have been an enormous, if not impossible, challenge for Marble, while it was quite possible to make fabulous sums of money by talking about eating. She’d seen the reality TV shows, she’d seen the book titles on the Internet. So Marble came up with a plan. She would say that she was talking about recipes when she was really talking about history and culture and everything else.
The first step of Marble’s plan had been to change her name. She undertook a carefully orchestrated campaign to be sure that all social media conversations referenced her preferred name, Marble, not Mabel. Then she applied for a grant to support her research into the stories behind the recipes. Ancient foods as characters in cultural narratives and family histories.
And that was how she met her husband. She was invited to speak to moneyed tourists about farro grown in Umbria, and there he was, on a weekend break from Rome, taking the class to practice his English.
There he was.
Chemistry is a funny thing. Much later, Marble would be able to list a number of things that had helped to create a bond between her and the man she would eventually marry but, the truth is, the chemistry was there from the start, like a breeze that slips through an olive grove, causing a universe of tiny leaves to flash silver in the sunlight. Not only sex. Chemistry. The latter wasn’t only about the former.