The owner of the small grocery store in Gaminella was also the butcher. George
explained to me that he had an adjoining room where he slaughtered and
butchered the cows and calves that he bought from local farmers. Then he
quietly pointed out to me a scar on the man’s forehead where a frisky cow had
gouged him. I wondered if Zio Silvio brought any of his animals
down to the store to be slaughtered. It made me a bit queasy to think that the
meat that we ate was once part of a live cow in the next room. However, my
vegetarian days were still far in the future.
We decided that we should cook a nice roast for dinner to
celebrate our arrival, so I plucked up my courage and walked up to the meat
counter. Behind the glass, instead of rows of meat, poultry, and fish, cut and
covered in plastic and lined up neatly, I saw a few large chunks of meat
arranged on pieces of white paper. None of the shapes looked like the ones I
had memorized from my cookbooks and that appeared regularly in my supermarket
in California. I couldn’t recall from
which part of the cow my favorite cuts had come, and so I had no idea what to
ask for, except for rump roast, which seemed pretty obvious. I asked the
butcher about buying a piece of meat from the “rump” (and here I patted my
rump). He grinned at me, much to my embarrassment, then pointed to several
strange-shaped hunks of meat in the display case. I asked how much, and he
quoted me a per pound figure that was about three times the price of what I had
paid in California for rump roast. I looked at George to make sure I had
understood correctly. I had. I looked again at the meat. I felt as if I were learning about shopping all over again but,
with a large family, I had to buy large quantities, and any mistakes I made
were expensive. I pointed to what looked like chunks of stewing beef, which he
called “bollito,” and the price was
more reasonable, so I just smiled at him and asked for a pound. It was probably
just as well as I had never tried to cook a roast in a wood-burning stove.
The store didn’t sell fresh fruit or
vegetables—we would have to drive to the nearby town to find them—and the eggs
they sold were very expensive. The salami and cheese were also expensive. By
the end of that day I began to realize that just about everything in Italy was
expensive! I had been under the impression we
would live like kings on our American dollars, but I was shocked at how quickly
our money was suctioned up by daily necessities. And I couldn’t even find all
of them! That one shopping trip taught us that we had to cut our costs, and
that George had to find a job, and fast.
After paying for our groceries
in the small store, Zio Silvio drove us to the main town of the area, Cerrina,
where we found a bakery, a larger butcher’s store, and a green grocer. One
thing I had learned from my home study of nutrition was that growing bodies
need fruit and vegetables. After traveling for a week, and I was anxious to
get the children’s food consumption back on track as quickly as possible, so we
stopped at the green grocer’s first. The fruit was stacked up in front of the
little store on a stand, just as I remembered outside the shops of my childhood
village in England. Again, the posted
prices were much more than what we had paid in the States. The grocer came out
when we walked up, smiled, and said, “Buon
giorno.” After purchasing onions and vegetables for the stew which he placed in bags for us, we told him we wanted apples. He asked how many we wanted,
and then he selected them and again put them in a bag for us. However, I saw that one of
them had a brown spot. I was too insecure, in both the local customs and my
vocabulary, to point it out. I flashed back to childhood memories of shopping
with my mother in Stanmore village and realized
why she seemed so often loud and bossy to my childish ears. She would watch the merchant
carefully as he selected for fruit or vegetables for her, then call out, “No, not that one!” I had vowed never to speak up obnoxiously like that when I grew up, but as I watched the green grocer slip me
a ringer on that first morning in Italy, I realized I might have to rethink
that vow.
I have always loved freshly baked bread, and the
smells and sights in the Cerrina bakery set my heart beating. Behind the chrome
and glass of the display case were cakes and pastries, but I zeroed in on the
bread trays behind the assistant. On them I beheld an array of different kinds and shapes of
loaves and rolls, most of them white, but all calling to me. For the arrival lunch,
George’s cousins had provided some really good rolls, and I saw some similar
ones in the bakery. My mouth watered as I told the woman behind the counter to
put too many into the white paper bag. Unlike California, no cellophane came
between the delicious, crunchy crust and me. But also, unlike California, the
bread wasn't loaded with preservatives, and before we could eat all the fresh
rolls I purchased that day, they would be hard. You’d think I would have
learned from the children’s breakfast that morning!
Zio Silvio walked us to his favorite “deli” where I let
George make the selection of salami and cheeses because I had no idea what was
good and what was not. The cheese for the children didn’t come in handy thin, plastic-wrapped, yellow
squares, but in wedges carved from large wheels or blocks. The selections were mostly
shades of white, some riddled with blue, but not a yellow one in sight. It all looked delicious to me, but I wasn't sure which of them the children would eat. Luckily they all loved salami.
I don’t
remember if it was at this point, or later, when we unpacked the groceries at
home, that I slumped with the realization that not only had we just spent a
good chunk of money, but very little of what we had bought was on the usual menu of
the children. Any parent of preschoolers knows how fussy they can be, so I had a
brief vision of mine slowly starving to death. However, it was brief,
and I would not be discouraged. We had just arrived, so things could only get
better once we all adjusted. We stored the groceries in the tin cupboards and tiny
refrigerator then I hurried to check the laundry on the makeshift clothesline.
I turned over the draped clothes so the damp side
faced the slanting sun, then after negotiating lunch with the children we put
them down for their naps. The laundry was almost dry by sundown, so at least we
had clean, dry clothes, and we had food in our refrigerator. Nothing that day
had gone quite as we had expected, but neither had there been any major
disasters. We had slept, eaten, done laundry, shopped, and learned how to heat
the house. We had successfully survived the first full day of our new life in
Italy.
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