Food Tastes Better in Italian

This is an excerpt from a book I'm reading by the fantastic Jeanette Winterson: The Powerbook. It's a quick read and it's been consuming my attention on the commute to work recently. I've been taking it in in spurts, because I love the language and simply don't want it to be over-with. Ms. Winterson is known for studying love and its roots like a great mystery. She does this through comparisons to other worlds: logic, mathematics, history, horticulture, cooking... In short, she uses everything. She uses everything tangible to define the intangible, and she almost succeeds every time. You journey with her on her quest to define love, and everytime she experiences a breakthrough, you experience it with her.
Her prose is really poetry in paragraph form, and it's complex. I can read a paragraph and completely lose sight of its literal meaning, but I get the push of feeling behind it. It's almost as if her chapters are impressionistic paintings. You get the shape first, then take note of the brush strokes.

If you haven't read Written on the Body yet, I highly-recommend it. A great way to start. Be careful, though. Her writing has a way of conjuring old feelings for old loves. My friend Katy once said that Written on the Body takes her back to a time of love in her life where everything was symbolic. Everything meant something other than what it appeared to be and everything was such exquisite torture.

I dare you.

Anyway--enjoy this excerpt:

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I went into the kitchen. I love food. The clarity of it, the direct pleasure. I love it simple, absolutely fresh and freshly cooked. At my worst, like now, when nothing makes sense to myself, I'll cook something as a way of forcing order back into chaos. As a way of re-establishing myself, at least in this one thing. It steadies my hands.

Salsa Di Pomodori

Take a dozen plum tomatoes and slice them lengthways as though they were your enemy. Fasten them into a lidded pot and heat for ten minutes.

Chop an onion without tears.

Dice a carrot without regret.

Shard a celery stick as though its flutes and grooves were the indentations of your past.
Add to the tomatoes and cook unlidded for as long as it takes for them to yeild.Throw in salt, pepper, and a twist of sugar.

Pound the lot through a sieve or a mouli, or a blender. Remember--they are the vegetables, you are the cook.

Return to a soft flame and lubricate with olive oil. Add a spoonful at a time, stirring like an old witch, until you achieve the right balance of slippery firmness.
Serve on top of fresh spaghetti. Cover with rough new parmesan and cut basil. Raw emotion can be added now.

Serve. Eat. Reflect.

I put the steaming plate in front of her. She took a mouthful, then another.
'This is fantastic.'

'Food tastes better in Italian.'

Thickly, through a mouthful of spaghetti, she said, 'My husband is in Oxford.'