Of course we have two kitchens

My mother’s house has two kitchens. Of course it does. As did the homes of all my relatives, growing up. And the homes of Italian friends. One in the kitchen. One in the basement.

Yeah, a kitchen in the basement. We’re not talking a hotplate and a microwave. We’re talking a full-on kitchen. Oven, stove, counters, sink, fridge. The whole nine. Sometimes a freezer, too.

Why? Hello? Cooking is messy. And God forbid an Italian woman permits a mess made in her kitchen. (If you happen to have read this post, you see that I come by my kitchen neurosis organically. But, in my defense, I never objected to the people living in my house making a mess in my kitchen. I had issues when they failed to clean it up. Big difference.)

Italian women are more proactive. It’s really a simple equation. When you have a kitchen that nobody is allowed to use, it will never get dirty. Problem solved, before it even begins. The Italian lady’s upstairs kitchen is pretty much the same as the kitchens in the Ikea showroom. For show, only.

The difference; it all works. The stove fires up, the water runs, the fridge is plugged in and cold. The oven will heat up, even though nothing will ever be baked in it. So you could, theoretically, cook an entire Thanksgiving dinner in the upstairs kitchen. Pity the poor fool who tries. He’ll be in for an ass-whooping the likes he has never imagined.

The real diehards go to great lengths in service of the theatrics. You can boil coffee in the upstairs kitchen. You can cut cake in the upstairs kitchen. Cake and coffee are for company, so it’s fair use. But if you want to fry meatballs and make a big pot of spaghetti sauce that glops all over the Western Hemisphere, you better do it in the basement. Or you may end up wishing you’d never been born.

The cellar kitchen serves a secondary purpose. Italians are thrifty. Not cheap, thrifty. An Italian will never throw away a pot, unless it has a massive hole in it. A pot might get dented and scratched, its finish dull and worn. It won’t get thrown away. It goes to the basement. Same for the old fridge, the old stove, the old salt and pepper shakers. Old flat ware, old dishes, old dishrags, wooden spoons. The sugar and creamer set received at the wedding shower, out of style since Red Skelton walked the earth? Basement.

Nothing ever dies in an Italian house. It goes to the basement, where it lives in perpetuity. Sounds cheap, doesn’t it? No. An Italian will spend like a drunken sailor on food, when it’s time to feed the family. It’s in their DNA.

Let me paint a picture. If you’re a salmon, the drive to return to the river of your birth and start the next generation is unstoppable. You’ll swim upstream until your fins fall off. When you get there, you bash your skull against the waterfall rocks, praying you become dinner for a hungry grizzly bear who, if you’re lucky, puts you out of your misery by putting you in his stomach.

An Italian shares a similar death-defying drive. But it has nothing to do with procreation. The mysterious, illogical force that drives an Italian: “Mangia! “Eat!”Mangia. And mangia. And mangia more. As long as she’s breathing, an Italian won’t rest, running a treadmill, bolted to a gas stove—a life-long quest to mangia every single person she’s ever met to at least 800 pounds.

So she faces a dilemma. To meet this generous, yet warped goal, she has to cook. A lot. Pretty much 24/7. Day and night, night and day, unleashing unstoppable torrent of spaghetti, lasagna, manicotti, sausage, meatballs, bread, cookies, cake and red wine, coming at you like the mighty Mississippi.

There’s the rub. Cooking messes up the kitchen. And having a messy kitchen for more than 15 seconds is clearly verboten. It’s in the Writ of Italian Catechism. (Section 2113, between Serving Your Family Wonder Bread and Being Seen In An Olive Garden.)

In other words, a mortal sin.

What’s a good Italian girl to do? Not a thing. The minute you close on your new house, the Cellar Kitchen Fairies show up. Although I’ve never witnessed this ritual, I’m pretty sure it’s how it goes down. I’m sticking with my theory until somebody disproves it. These guys don’t exactly look like fairies from central casting. A bunch of well-dressed, burly, cigar-chomping goombahs, descending from nowhere to haul a stove, refrigerator, sink and tables into your new basement. Where did all the stuff come from? Don’t ask.

They joke and laugh and swill grappa the whole time, making you wonder if they’re going to set your house afire with their blowtorches, splitting time between sweating copper pipe fittings and roasting espresso beans floating atop their Sambuca.

They refuse to take money for this act of baffling kindness. The only thing they expect in return is sustenance. After all, they just built you a friggin’ cellar kitchen. Would it kill you to give it a shakedown cruise? So you roll out the antipasto, braciole, ravioli, calamari, tripe and scungilli, topped off with homemade cannoli washed down with steaming espresso.

You know, just a light Italian snack.

Their work complete, they pay their respects and exit. In the quiet, amid the cigar smoke, Mrs. regards her new/old kitchen with tears in her eyes, throws her arms around Mr. and says, “Your cousins are amazing.” To which Mr. replies, “I thought they were your cousins.”

No matter. The Ikea kitchen is safe. If somebody so much as drops an ice chip on the floor up there, there will be hell to pay.

You think I’m kidding? When I was a kid, two of my friends, brothers, had an Italian mom even more OCD than my OCD grandmother. Like, clear-plastic-slipcovers-on-the-sofa OCD. One hot summer day, they implored me to accompany them to their mother’s show kitchen, the one upstairs. I was like, are you nuts? We had been best of friends for years and I had never even seen that kitchen, let alone set foot in it. They assured me it was safe. I was wary, but followed, stepping gingerly. Their mother was at the market, dad was working. We had nothing to fear, yet we skulked around on tip-toe, like cat burglars walking on potato chips.

The hubbub: a brand new, sea green, side-by-side refrigerator had been delivered. And, wonder of wonders, it had an automatic ice maker. “Watch this,” the older brother whispered, as he filled a glass with perfectly formed, frost-wafting ice cubes from the door dispenser. “Whoa,” came my profound reply. “Wait! This is the best part. Shut up. Ya gotta be quiet. Listen,” He slid the glass over and cold water magically flowed in. He held it near me in time for the ice cubes to shatter from the shock—pop, pop, pop! They were that cold. “Can you believe it? It’s amazing! OK, we gotta get outta here!” But we didn’t dare. He knew if we left the tiniest, subatomic shred of evidence, we would all three of us be killed and our bodies used to compost the fig tree in the backyard. We meticulously swabbed the crime scene of any sign of our unauthorized invasion. Every chip of ice, every drop of water, every footprint and fingerprint carefully erased. In all likelihood, our track covering was insufficient. She was Italian, after all. They probably both got the scungilli kicked out of them later that day.

My family is not quite so neurotic. Almost, but not quite.

On a scale of one to 10, my buddies’ mom was a 16. Mom’s closer to an eight. So we -kinda- cook in her Ikea kitchen. Simple stuff, like boiling pasta, frying eggs, heating soup. We don’t use the oven much (she’s clever, my mother – somehow she figured out how to connect the oven to the smoke alarms. Turn on the oven, empty, and the smoke alarms start screaming. So you relocate your little baking project to the cellar oven. Mission accomplished.)

And we never use the dishwasher. No self-respecting Italian would ever switch on that Godforsaken contraption. Why she owns one, nobody has yet explained to me. I guess maybe the same reason her house has 743 table lamps, none of which have light bulbs in them.

So, the kitchens have two of almost everything. Two sets of dishes, two sets of pots—most of the hardware, in duplicate. Ingredients are a different story, since we actually eat in the Ikea kitchen. Some screwball Italians don’t even do that. They cook and eat in the basement.

But we eat upstairs, most of the time, when we’re two, three or four. Over six, it’s back to the basement.

Even with COVID-19, we were eight for Thanksgiving, down from our usual four score and seven. But eight is too many for the kitchen. (The house has 743 bulb-free table lamps, but no dining room.)

Eating in the basement is a bit more tricky than cooking down there. Every six seconds, somebody needs something from the wrong floor. Kenny needs grated cheese. Karen needs Coffee-Mate. Mom needs butter. Michele needs Lactaid. We need a ladle. We need the red pepper. We need napkins. We need hot sauce. Somebody has to go upstairs to fetch all that crap. That would be me. And Beth. (She weighs six pounds. She’s quicker, so she’s usually two-thirds the way up the stairs before I even get out of my chair.)

My phone says I did 33 floors that day. If I did 33, Beth did at least 100. The system sucks. But it’s not all bad news. You burn so many calories doing the stairs, you can eat stuffing and cranberry sauce ‘til it hurts, without gaining an ounce.

TO BE CONTINUED

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2020 move