Free In Maremma by David Leavitt Page B

grandfather had invented it.
    Later, we shared the story with various friends in Semproniano—Aldo and Gianni, Pina and Giampaolo—and were surprised at how little it impressed them. For example, although Aldo stocked Kit Kat bars and M&M’s, he had never heard of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. In any case, as we soon learned—and notwithstanding their acute devotion to Nutella, that chocolate and hazelnut paste that European children spread on their breakfast toast—most Italians disdain peanut butter on the grounds that it is bad for the liver. (Just as
Americans are obsessed with their hearts, Italians worry endlessly about their livers.) Even more inconceivable, to our friends, was the idea of peanut butter as a sweet, to be combined with chocolate!
    A few weeks later, when we returned from a trip to America, we brought a box of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups with us. “Il signore who ate here, the one called Reese? This is what his nonno invented,” we told Pina, who eagerly sampled one. “Well?” we asked.
    â€œDiscreta . . . ma non mi stupisce” (“Not bad . . . but nothing to write home about”).
    This meant we got to keep the rest for ourselves.

18
    A STUBBORN LONGING for familiar things—even things at which, back home, one turned up one’s nose—became, with the passage of years, a distinguishing feature of expatriate life.
    During DL’s twelfth summer, he and his mother discovered from a cooking show called The Romagno-lis’ Table that pasta could be served with a sauce that wasn’t red. The recipe in question was for spaghetti alla carbonara, and the next evening, with a sense of adventure, they prepared some. Of course they had to approximate: instead of pancetta or guanciale, it was salt pork, Creamette spaghetti, and “Parmesan cheese” from a green cardboard shaker. The olive oil was a pallid yellow and came from Spain—or was it Greece? Even so, as they ate that first carbonara, it seemed to them for an instant that they could hear the Tiber flowing outside their kitchen window.
    When we first arrived in Italy, naturally, we disdained anything that tasted too much of America, exulting instead in the Italian-ness of the things we found at the grocery store: peppery olive oil, Parma ham, wheels of pecorino cheese that the salumiere cut with a wire. Though rarities in America at that time, in Italy such foods were ordinary; you could take them for granted.
    In those early days every trip to the grocery store, especially a stroll down the pasta aisle, sent us into a rapture. We studied the classics of Italian cooking—Ada Boni and Pellegrino Artusi—in the hope of learning how to make every dish we prepared rigorously authentic. Italian cooking, a poet friend had told us, requires above all obedience to the rules; we offered out obedience and as a result became proficient cooks. Soon we could make ragú alla bolognese the way the Bolognese do, and arista di maiale the way the Tuscans do, and spaghetti alla carbonara the way the Romans do (as opposed to the way DL’s mother had had to do). Soon wonderful food became something we felt we could count on (a very Italian attitude). And then, one morning, about three years later, we woke up wanting . . . peanut butter. So we went out and bought some (a Dutch brand) and for a few days ate little else besides peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for lunch.
    In this way it began. We questioned other Americans and discovered that they, too, often fell prey to culinary nostalgia. On visits home we lorded our superior knowledge of Italian cooking over our friends and families, even corrected their errors. (“No, you never put Parmesan cheese on mushrooms!”) In Italy, we stole shamefacedly into the McDonald’s on Piazza di Spagna to savor a Big Mac in an invisible corner, and as often as not ran in to the director of the American Academy on the way