003: A reintroduction.
Food Thoughts From Abroad.
[A quick note to say that there is an audio recording of this Newsletter! So if you’d prefer to listen as you walk, drive, do the washing up, etc., you’ll find a very rudimentary iPhone voice memo above. Also, I find that Substack looks best in browser; there’s a link at the top of the email!]
Happy New Year, you brilliant bunch!
I write to you not from the windswept shores of East Cork but the chaotic, beautiful blur that is Rome. I’m here studying for my Master’s in Food Policy. It’s a jam-packed schedule; I chose it as it was the only course that had the breadth I wanted: rural development, nutrition policy, sustainable food systems, anthropology of food, so on and so forth. At points, it has been ridiculously, frustratingly full-on, but I’m proud of the balance I have managed to delicately strike.
So then, a reintroduction.
I moved to Rome on the first of August. I would love to be able to write that I fell in love with the city the moment I moved here, but I didn’t. Being the ripe old age of twenty-three, I should probably have clocked that being an adult means acknowledging you actually don’t know what you’re doing half the time. Looking back, I think I had been telling myself that I was totally ready for the move. As if preparedness were a prerequisite for change.
I had spent a big chunk of my childhood living in mainland Europe, I had spent formative pre-teen years running around a city whose language I didn’t speak, and I had already moved to a different country and navigated the work permits and tax rebates. But Rome still hit like a freight train.
My first full day here, I didn’t move. I physically couldn’t bring myself to leave the apartment. An unbelievable deluge of fear, unlike anything I’ve really felt before, drenched me. I lay curled on my bed, in sheets that weren’t mine, in an apartment that felt cold and devoid of life. And I cried. What the hell did I think I was doing?
This sounds a tad melodramatic, and it was. Looking at it now, I think I was a bit mad. I had conflated panic with regret. ‘Listening to my body’, attempting to ‘be in the moment’, actually just freaked me out. Feeling totally adrift was to be expected. In fact, it was necessary.
Navigating those first few weeks, I leaned heavily on food and the familiar. Desperate for pockets of comfort - in food, in my cookbooks, in the trust I placed in my knives. The first proper meal I cooked was a fennel and pork ragù. The rhythmic roll of the knife, patiently waiting for the soffritto to soften, the smell of fennel seeds toasting. The kitchen was and always will be a place I feel more rooted.
My grocer, Guiseppie, gave me a huge bunch of parsley on my third visit within a week, unceremoniously placing it in my bag. While I desperately tried to remember the Italian translation (pretzemollo) I did know that this was significant: I wasn’t just a visitor, but someone who would return. The transaction doesn’t have a ‘proper’ name, although the bundles of aromatic herbs or vegetables are often called odori: literally ‘aromas’. I had read about odori in Rachel Roddy’s brilliant cookbook ‘Five Quarters’, chronicling her life in Testaccio - the neighbourhood which once felt so foreign and was now just across the river from me.
Food has always been about relationships, about people. It is a conversation, but here it’s not limited to the table. The herbs change depending on what I buy. When I bought tomatoes at the end of summer, I’d be given a handful of pungent basil; if I said I was cooking lentils, a bundle of bay leaves would be slipped into my bag. It’s about fidelity, yes, but also a shared understanding of how to cook; it’s being gently told: You’ll need this.
I am incapable of subtlety and left the grocers beaming with delight, then proceeded to call my Dad and tell him about my magical bouquet of parsley. It was like crossing an invisible line. I never liked parsley; I believed it to be boring and lifeless, providing nothing apart from its chlorophyll. Readers, I was wrong. It is peppery and citrusy and ever so slightly bitter. I now feel bereft if I don’t have a large bunch wrapped carefully in the bottom of my fridge. Parsley now tastes of home.
After five months here, I can confidently, wholeheartedly say I love this city. I know I will never be Roman, no matter how long I live here. But it does slowly feel like it’s ‘mine’. I trust my feet to take me where I want to go without a map. When friends come to visit, I know which restaurants I want to take them to, which alleys to walk down, and which viewpoints will take their breath away as they still do mine.
My friend Lily and I hosted, if you don’t mind my saying so, a bloody fabulous New Year’s Eve dinner party. We only got round to eating the pavlova at 2 am. The candles had burnt down to the wick, an impressive amount of washing up had been done despite the equally impressive number of empty bottles, and the tablecloth was peppered with all manner of stains. It was then that our conversation turned to new years resolutions.
I, like many, have a funny relationship with new years resolutions. So often, the focus is on leaving behind who you were in the previous year. The language tinged with shame, I didn’t go to the gym, I didn’t read this book or that one either, we didn’t call one another enough, I should have just …
January, it seems to me, is a terrible month to decide to “turn your life around”. It’s a month that calls out for quiet, not the frantic, guilt-tinged pressure to keep resolutions. Aside from a gloriously crisp and clear New Year’s Eve, it’s been miserable as sin here; the banks of the Tiber have burst due to constant rain, and the city I associate so strongly with the warmth of golden light has been perpetually grey. So, instead of resolutions, we settled on lists. Yes, it is just a rather rudimentary change of a name, but a list for the year ahead felt more realistic. We asked ourselves: how do we want to feel, where do we want to be this time next year?
I knew that on my list, aside from finding ‘my’ martini, and continuing to wear red lipstick irreverently, I knew that I wanted to write. And I wanted to keep sharing what I write. 12 pieces over the next 12 months.
I haven’t worked in a restaurant kitchen since May. I have kept cooking and eating voraciously. But my initial thought was to question what right I have to write about something I am no longer doing?
Over the last few months, my thoughts have wandered back to the many pieces of writing stuck in my drafts. I still think these scribbles are of value, at least to me.
I’ll keep them as honest as possible, and I apologise in advance if tenses are sometimes blurred. I don’t want to rewrite what, at times, are quite uncomfortably honest pieces of writing. I also don’t want to limit myself to just chronicling that year in a kitchen; I want to write about being in Rome, about the joy of the table, about being twenty-three, eating and drinking my way around a city that is both unchanging and full of surprises.
So, next time: lobsters, prep-lists, and finding joy in the repetitive.
Thank you for being here,
Merry xx
So good! I felt like I was with you in Rome the whole time. And I know those emotions you felt at the start all too well
the excitement when i felt upon receiving the email notification for this!! love it!