But I draw inspiration from memories of my grandmother's food anyway. I have to, since they're the only childhood memories of home-cooked meals I have.
While other girls might have been helping their moms make meatballs or osso bucco after school, my mother worked from the time she was 10, scrubbing floors and doing laundry for strangers. So she never learned even basic kitchen skills, and when she had kids of her own, she simply kept the freezer well-stocked with our favorite frozen foods and showed us how to safely operate the microwave.
I taught myself to cook in my 20s, desperately hungry for the homemade food I so rarely had growing up, and I'm proud of my achievements behind the stove.
I know Angela would be, too. In the last years of her life, she was more than happy to turn the wooden spoon over to me, letting me show her a few recipe upgrades.
And though her efforts often missed the mark, certain flavors from her kitchen whisper to me through the years, asking me to mine my best memories of this family food and to redeem her dishes.
I can still taste the tangy, rich flavor of her tomato sauce, rippled with orange currents of beef fat, soaked into a warm Italian roll.
This gravy was at its best whenever she made her trademark Sunday dish: braciole, thin slabs of beef rolled with a garlicky bread-crumb filling and braised. My grandmother stuffed her braciole with a scant mixture of bread crumbs, Romano cheese, and a flurry of dried herbs.
The meat rolls emerged stringy and livery, dry in spite of a long bath in the tomato sauce. Even as a child, I knew this couldn't be what it was supposed to taste like. As a food-crazed adult, I set out to bring this dish back to my table, but better.
