17. Touch it
As essential to the meal as a glass of red wine: the touching of bread, sweeping it across the dinner plate, relishing every last drop.
MARIA ROSSETTI SFREDDO. MY GRANDMOTHER. To her daughter, she spoke in her native Veneto dialect. To my father and my sisters and me—with the exception of a handful of Italian words—it was in heavily accented English. Regardless, to my young ears, it all sounded pretty much the same. (Her favorite term of disgust, son of a bitch, sang forth as a five-syllabic, operatic sonamaBEE-che!)
One word in particular flowed often from my grandmother’s lips during our visits. I was convinced it was Italian. It certainly wasn’t English. Opening the bread drawer in the kitchen, she’d reach into a brown bag, hand us a dry roll, beckon us to the stove, and pointing to the pot of her slow-simmered sauce, say Toucha! Toucha!
The word worked its way into our family speak and became the word for sauce. Is there any toucha left? we’d ask. A neighborhood friend who spent much of her day in my house came to call it that, too, proud that she’d learned a ‘foreign’ word.
My mother, of course, knew from the start (though never let on) that what her mother was saying was Touch it! ...which we did, and often, to all sauces, meat drippings, and salad juices with a chunk of dry, unsalted bread.
My father’s parents were of German stock, loving and generous and...quietly reserved. They didn’t yell, or slam cabinet doors, or hug with a ferocity which stopped your breath. Dinners there were politely formal and lacked the rollicking open theatre that was the norm in my Italian grandparents' home.
Toucha. My father, who’d not studied a foreign language and spoke English with a decidedly hometown Baltimore-ese, embraced the word. I wonder, if for him, saying it offered something of a way in, a bridge maybe, to my mother’s noisy world.
Toucha. Touch it. The sauce, yes, and all the deliciously freeing chaos served along with it.
