For the first few years after our move to Paris, there wasn’t much I could do to ward off romesickness until a friend told me about a hole-in-the-wall Italian food shop a twenty-minute walk from our apartment. I passed it by two or three times since I only knew on which street I was supposed to be able to find it; I had no street number to look for and the shop (surprise!) had no sign.
But when I finally pushed open the door, my nose — as much as my eyes and ears — told me I was in the right place. I could smell the mortadella and prosciutto di Parma, the pancetta and bresaola, all the different sorts of salami. Even the chest-high glass display case couldn’t keep me from breathing in the sharp, full smell of Italian cheeses, few of them as pungent as their French cousins, but beautifully, delightfully stinky in their own Italian way: gorgonzola, pecorino romano, parmigiano reggiano, provolone, and container after container of mozzarella, in all its shapes and sizes. I could smell the tiny black olives, salty and sharp, and the big fat green ones, sharper still.
I could see the jumble of new provisions just in from the delivery truck; and over the blaring of an Italian song in the background, I could hear Sebastiano, the tall, skinny one-man-show who runs the place, speaking non-stop in that easy patter Italian tradesman so often have, greeting everyone who walked in — no matter what language they spoke — with a warm bath of Italian words that made me feel as if I were suddenly back near Rome’s Campo dei Fiori, picking out the raw materials for the day’s three meals.
The shop not only smelled and sounded like the thousands of tiny alimentari — tiny grocery stores — that dot Italians towns and cities, but made me feel as if I were actually there. That feeling only increased when I picked up a flyer that told me that the shop was part of the very same dairy cooperative — Cooperativa Latte Cisternino — where I used to buy much of our food when we lived in Rome.
My daughter and I pop down to Sebastiano’s place whenever we get a serious craving for real Italian mortadella, sliced in the Italian fashion, so thin that it’s practically transparent. Supermarkets all over France sell packaged Italian mortadella but it’s nearly always sliced to French meat-eaters’ proportions — thickly — which completely ruins the experience. Whenever Julia and I buy mortadella from Sebastiano, we never get more than a few steps outside the door before we break open the package and steal a slice or two for the walk home.
I need to stop in at Sorrento’s the next time I’m back in Bridgeport. Now that most of my mother’s generation of relatives are dead, Sorrento’s is one of the few repositories of knowledge left about things Italian-American in Bridgeport. I’ve been thinking for some time that I want to try making my grandmother Jennie’s old recipe for “pizza gain” as she called it, a two-crust, calzone-like pizza eaten after the Lenten fast, and filled with all kinds of meats and cheeses. One of the ingredients is “fresh cheese” and nobody I ask can tell me what it is. I bet Sorrento’s is going to be able to straighten me out.
Maybe that’s what I’ve always liked about Italian food shops: you always come out with more than just a sack of groceries. The last time Julia and I were at Sebastiano’s, I told him in passing that I’d just been interviewed by the big Italian glossy magazine called “Grazie,” which was interested in the Italian food memories interwoven into Keeping the Feast. Sebastiano, who doesn’t speak English, suddenly seemed interested in the book too, and told me he’d like a copy to show his English-speaking customers. So I walked out with a sack of parmigiano, pecorino romano, mortadella, green olives, artichoke hearts and an unexpected book sale. Grazie, Sebastiano!