Natalia Ginzburg was an Italian writer known for her incisive essays and novels that often explored family life, memory and the quiet struggles of everyday existence. In one of her essays about English cooking, she wrote, “A dull sadness weighs on every place where food is served or sold.” It’s a line that struck us recently as we found ourselves standing, awash in that special kind of white dust found only on graveled roads, in front of a family farm stand, somewhere between hope and resignation.
We didn’t grow up with sad food, exactly—just food that was dutiful, functional and guided by the best intentions and worst recipes. Between the two of us—partners raised on opposite ends of the culinary spectrum—we had two mothers. One had the credentials—a dietitian trained in the 1940s—and she cooked like someone who had learned nutrition by way of ration cards, postwar pamphlets and pressure cookers. She was even trained to pressure cook spaghetti (the carb, not the sauce) using that tiny boiler room that thinks it’s a rocket ship, if you can imagine.
Meals were neatly balanced, relentlessly beige and always approved by a father, whose palate never fully left the Dodge City train station diner of his childhood. He liked what he liked—salt, starch and seasoning that meant nothing more than salt and pepper, never straying from his memory of meatloaf on a divided plate.
The other mother was an adventurous spirit, but not in the kitchen. She was trapped in the age of convenience cooking, where dinner was assembled more than made. She cooked the life and flavor out of almost everything—except baked goods, which somehow escaped that fate. Her casseroles were a different story: determined and dutiful, constructed from instructions on the backs of soup cans and cereal boxes—cream of mushroom, dried onion mix, crushed saltines, frozen spinach—ingredients with more shelf life than flavor. She trusted the recipes, followed them faithfully. And we paid the price at the table.
Though she never said so, we suspect now that she may have felt outmatched, maybe even a little cowed, by a Dad’s side of the family. That was where great-grandmother Myrtle May held what we would now call a “side hustle,” working a few days a month at the local diner. Those were the days advertised for her chicken ’n dumplings and “Myrt’s pies,” which drew fanboys and fangirls who came just for her cooking. She was famous thereabouts, and she delivered that same appeal at family gatherings.
John T. Edge, founder of the Southern Foodways Alliance, once wrote that “the kitchen is where memory and identity simmer together.” Myrtle May’s chicken ’n dumplings weren’t just a recipe but a living story, passed down one plateful at a time and shared love. Her dumpling recipe was never properly documented—no handwritten 3x5 card with her secrets survived her estate. Some of us have spent a lifetime chasing that magic, but we should probably lay down the quest. What’s missing isn’t just the technique for dumplings as soft as pillows yet never mushy—it’s her love and time with the family that made them unforgettable.
Maybe that’s why we drive now—out into the hills, into the fields, down the gravel roads—to find food that feels different. Food that feels like ours.
We’d made the trip this week to find heirloom tomatoes. Eating seasonally, we’ve looked forward to tomato season all year. Around here on Snob Hill, it’s not “tomato” or “tomahto.” We say ta-may-ter—just for the fun of it, you understand. After all, with a master’s degree in English, we’re fully qualified to mess with pronunciation whenever we please. Why settle for boring when you can sound like you’re ordering something fancy at the county fair?
Fresh sliced Black Krims, Brandywines, Green Zebras or Cherokee Purples—or whatever beauties the soil yields—paired with fresh mozzarella, drizzled with a good balsamic, olive oil high in the acids that give it that unmistakable olive taste, scattered with fresh basil, coarse salt and cracked pepper. This isn’t innovative cooking—though we seek that too, in quiet rebellion against the casseroles and calorie counts of our mothers. No, this is honest food. Simple. Dreamed of. A brief seasonal ritual. One plate, five ingredients and a moment that tastes like memory.
But this year may be the dream deferred, we thought, standing before a tomato-less table, staring at zucchini the size of green zeppelins. Corn whose tassels were crawling with ants. And tucked among the summer’s overgrowth, a sign—handwritten in the familiar script of someone trying to sound optimistic: “Tomatoes, maybe next week. Be patient.”
And so, we must wait.
Because eating seasonally isn’t just about what’s available. It’s about what’s possible. It’s about restraint, rhythm and the pleasure of anticipation (or so we keep telling ourselves). Our gardening friends have warned us recently—“Too much rain.” “They’re slow this year.” “It’s not a good tomato season.”
Still, we return. We believe. Not in abundance—but in the quiet promise of arrival. Tomatoes don’t appear on demand. They show up when they’re ready, and only then. So we’ll keep making the drive. Maybe next week. Maybe the one after. We believe in tomatoes the way some people believe in miracles, or Mercury in retrograde.
Because when they do arrive—when they’re soft and strange and sweet in the way only a height-of-summer tomato can be—we’ll remember why we waited. And when the oil hits the cut side of a Black Krim, and the juice runs just a little too far across the plate, there won’t be any sadness at all. Just be present, just be present, we will tell ourselves, for we know this, too, shall pass.
Edna Lewis, the great Southern cook and author, said, “Real flavor comes from time and patience, and from knowing the earth that gave it birth.” Ginzburg and Lewis never met, but we like to imagine them sharing a meal—one that might convince Ginzburg to never render the same disdain for our blended Midwestern and Southern food as she did on the English.
Around here, food is patient and particular, steeped in memory and stubborn love—never dull, never rushed. And Lewis would certainly have appreciated Jed Clampett’s parting wisdom:
“Y’all come back now, y’hear?”
“Roadside Stand” — a silver gelatin black-and-white photograph by CB Adams, made during his many excursions to Cairo, Ill. Shot with a vintage medium format Rolleiflex, this image evokes the complex spirit of the town Huck Finn described as “a good place to be, but... a low-down place to live.”
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