Requiem for a Nonna, the final chapter of the Nonna Diaries

By Rob Curran

Nonna's memorial weekend was bittersweet, but also sour, salty, and even a little umami. The food, predictably, was excellent. 

The first thing the family ate was fresh fish from the restaurant on the dock near Nonna's apartment in Miami, Monty's. It's a laid-back place, the kind of joint where Vince Vaughn's "Bad Monkey" character might order a plate of crab legs and a dirty martini, then smoke a cheeky cigarette out the back, dressed in flip-flops and a Hawaiian shirt. 

The Texas contingent, Nonna's step family, screeched into Monty's half-an-hour late, almost running over the valet in a van that had probably been tailed by DEA agents since taking a U-turn at the other Miami Monty's. Nonna wouldn't have expected it any other way. 

Nonna's Italian children and grandchildren were all there, and all finessing our massive faux pas in that dignified way they knew Nonna would have done. They made us feel that, perhaps, nobody had noticed our tardiness.

Also in attendance was family friend Buzz Kemble. 

"I heard you went to the wrong funeral!" said Buzz, who does not mess with finesse. 

If Vince Vaughn wants to play the lead in the Buzz biopic, he will have to work a little harder on his suntan, on his tooth bleach, on his Texas accent and on his cocktail tolerance. When my older daughter was two years of age, she saw a red cup bouncing along in an alley beside a bar. "Buzz!" she cried. After Miami, Buzz went SCUBA diving in the Philippines, surely becoming the first 90-year-old Texan to have ever dropped backwards into the Coral Sea. Presumably, he left his walker and his red roadie cup on the deck.

At Monty's, I ordered a fried-fish sandwich and instantly regretted it when the fresh red snapper landed in front of one of my table mates with a thud like it had just been winched onto the "Deadliest Catch" boat. Several times, I made envious eye contact with the sea creature, with its skin like pork crackling and flesh like little fluffy white clouds.

The second family meal was the next afternoon at a swanky restaurant situated in the South Beach public parking lot. I don't remember what I ate because we were mostly there to share memories of Nonna. I do remember thinking it was spectacular for banquet-style food, and yet still not a patch on Nonna's home cooking. The setting, on the other hand, was very Nonna. There were three walls of ocean-facing windows and a veritable field of flowers on each table setting. You had a sense she would emerge from the kitchen at any moment bearing her famous roast beef with creamed mushrooms.

The third family meal was the best of the weekend. At Hottestplate.com, we have striven to find keys to some of the ancient larders of culinary knowledge. We were fortunate that Nonna agreed to crack open the door to the aristocratic Italian kitchen; we were never under any illusion that she would spill all the secrets guarded for so many centuries by Popes' and Caesars' households; the vast majority of them are now sleeping safely with her in the kitchen from whose pantry no chef returns. Generously, Nonna's youngest and oldest sons revealed a few more of her secrets for that final meal in Miami, and this final installment of the Nonna diaries. 

The first secret was that no leftovers are sacred. Going through Nonna's fridge after she had passed sounds weird, but it felt right. What could be a purer connection with the person who had bonded with us all so strongly over food, and what else could have given her one more chance to display her famous hostessing skills. 

The second secret revealed that afternoon was that pasta sauces are hiding among the leftovers. Nonna's sons found anchovy paste, cucumber, carrots, dried red peppers, olive oil, garlic and pecorino cheese, and instantaneously came up with a two-course menu for 10 diners.    

Nonna's youngest son is perhaps the world's foremost water-skiing film-maker. He has made countless pastiches of movies and tv shows, all in the same location (his house and the nearby lake), all featuring the same star (himself) and all with the same twist (his waterskiing). The film-making was a recurrent theme in Nonna's youngest son's conversation that weekend, despite the protests of the rest of his Italian family. "Rob looks like 'Columbo'? I have made a film about 'Columbo'...with water skis." (If you've ever wanted to see a man in a trenchcoat water ski and smoke a cigar at the same time, it's on YouTube.)   

Nonna's youngest son is also a gifted cook. Which brings us to the third secret: how to cook with garlic without overwhelming the sauce. Nonna, as we may have stated elsewhere, had told me about one method of just-the-right-amount of garlic infusion, which is to drop whole garlic cloves into your sauce while it cooks and then remove them before serving.

Her son showed me another, deeper garlic secret. He cut the clove in half, lengthways, allowing the skin to fall away. He trimmed each end of the clove. Then, with a small knife, he removed a vein that's visible in the very center of each garlic clove. That vein, he told me, as his mother must have once told him, is the most pungent part of the clove. After removing the vein, he put the clove in a mincer and added to a pan of heated olive oil. He started a pot of water boiling for the half-packet of rigatoni. Nonna liked to cook certain sauces with rigatoni, because of how the sauce works with the grooves. He diced the dried red peppers and added to the heated oil. He pooled the oil in one side of the pan, and cocked the handle of the pan against the pasta pot, to concentrate the heat without burning the oil. In a large pan, he heated the cucumber, celery and carrots in about two inches of water and brought to a simmer (I recently made this dish with cucumber and par-grilled salmon...any leftovers would probably work). Once the pasta was al dente and the vegetables soft, he drained the rigatoni in a colander. In the large pan, he combined the rigatoni, the vegetables and what was left of the oil and water (in my version, I added the salmon at this stage in the proceedings) and simmered the whole mixture for about four minutes. The magic of the dish was reducing the whole mixture with the pasta sitting in the sauce. In this way, the flavors seemed to cook into the rigatoni, which was nice and soft by the time it was all scooped into pasta bowls.

Meanwhile, Nonna's oldest son was preparing the cacio e pepe. He shredded the pecorino cheese into a pasta bowl and added freshly cracked black pepper. He then held over the water boiling for the three-quarters packet of tagliatelle. I wasn't observing this one as closely so I could be missing an ingredient. The key was heating the cheese and pepper in the bowl, then throwing in the tagliatelle once it was cooked and drained. "Prego!" as Nonna would say.  

The servings were not huge, but Nonna would have smiled on the small quantities of pasta. Oftentimes, the difference between a delicious, Italian-prepared pasta dish and a watery one is the proportions: nothing spoils pasta like too much pasta. 

The next night, Nonna's middle son, the one who moved with her to the U.S., ordered a top-notch pizza from their favorite local joint.

For the last family meal, we returned to Monty's. This time, I had the red snapper, which tasted just as good as it looked. It was a rare second chance to catch the one that got away. The Middle-Aged Man and the Seafood, Hemingway might have called it.  You think to yourself, at times like that: "who is it I know who would like to hear about this snapper, and about my journey with it?" But Nonna was no longer at the dinner table.