Year of No Sugar (18 page)

“How about one dessert for the whole trip—our July dessert?” I countered. The look of abject horror on his face was impressive.

“Now, we're not going halfway around the world to torture our children with wonderful ice cream they can't have.” Oo! The “torturing your children” card. Well played!

“How about one dessert per week?” I re-countered. As you can imagine, this haggling would go on to consume a good portion of our evening.

_______

_______

Other ideas were floated: what about family voting on a case-by-case basis? Although this appealed to my democratic side, I'm reasonably confident that my otherwise very supportive family, when faced with an Italian gelato stand in all its glory, would nonetheless vote the No-Sugar Project out every time—quite possibly before breakfast.

By the end of our meal, we seemed to have reached some sort of loose consensus: we would, of course, have our July dessert in Italy. Very likely, (I hated to admit) we would end up having more than one dessert during the course of our trip. Whatever we had would have to be rare and special. So, basically, we were going to wing it.

On the whole, Italians seem to have gotten the sweets question right—enjoying little, wonderful, golf-ball-size scoops of gelato as a special treat is a lesson we “more-is-more” Americans would do well to learn. Then again, I've been to Italy four times in my life, and every time I've gone, I've been dismayed to see that the gelato scoops have gotten a little bit bigger. Ever so gradually, they're becoming more and more American. Sigh.

I wish it wouldn't. I adore Italy. I adore it just as it is, no Americanization necessary, thank you. I hate when we enter
a restaurant and they hand us the English menus; I hate that they
have
English menus. I love that my children have eaten wild boar and roasted rabbit in Italy. Why have they done this? In part, it's because the Italians have no concept of the children's menu, which is a wonderful, wonderful thing. The day I go to a sit-down restaurant in Italy and my children can order chicken nuggets with fries is the day I stop going to Italy.

Not only had I been lucky enough to have visited Italy before, but my first trip there had been when I spent an entire college semester in Rome studying art and architecture. That entire four-month period was a frenetic time—every weekend all the students rose at four or five a.m. to board an air-conditioned bus that carted us through a dizzying array of hill towns, Etruscan ruins, and crazy modern architecture. We often stopped in a given town only long enough to visit the church or the museum or the postmodern cemetery, reboard the bus, and move on. It must have seemed to the residents like an invasion of ravenous sheep: the professors leading the flock of us, sketching and photographing everything in sight. We were young; we were American; we were stupid. As we peered over the edges of our sketchbooks, we were easily confused. “Was that Gubbio?” “No, that was Assisi.” “I thought it was Orvieto…”

During that far-off time, we had done a drive-by visit of Florence in which I was able to see almost nothing—it was Sunday and raining, and all the museums had been closed. Ever since, I had longed to go back and see what it was I had missed—the Uffizi, the Pitti Palace, the Duomo…heck, Michelangelo
himself
was calling me, gently reprimanding me for having neglected
la bella citta
for far too long.

And thus, at long last, following the red-eye flight, I
arrived in Florence with my family bright and early one July morning, in a state of exhaustion that can only be described as hallucinatory. Within a day, we had mostly recovered and were fully immersed in Florence: our ancient apartment, the Ponte Vecchio just down the hill, the mazelike supermarket where you had to bring your own bags or risk having the counter girl roll her eyes at the ridiculous Americans. And it was
hot
—sweat running down the back of your legs hot—so every afternoon we returned to our little hole in the wall to sleep off the heat and the bottle of wine we had consumed with our incredible lunch. Almost overnight, we all felt we had been transported to another life and that we had left America far, far behind.

In some ways, it felt like we'd left the No-Sugar Project at home too. This is not to say we weren't
doing
No Sugar—we were. It just seemed to…
matter
less. We went through entire meals, entire
days
worth of meals, enjoying incredible tastes—freshly made al dente pasta; thinly sliced, delicately salty prosciutto; crunchy, garlic-rubbed crostini with pungent green olive oil—all without having to ever give much thought to The Sugar Problem. As long as we ignored the small table of
dolci
we passed by on our way to find the restroom, we found ourselves getting along for long stretches of time without the thought even occurring to us that we were missing something.

Okay, I must admit I wasn't being the Spanish Inquisition there the way I had been at home—but by the same token, I didn't have to be. Did I actually
ask
if there is sugar in the freshly made
pici
? No, but I already know the ingredients of
pici
: flour and water. Do I need to
ask
the ingredients of things like
prosciutto e melone
or
insalata Caprese
(tomatoes,
basil leaves, and mozzarella)? It would be like asking what the ingredients are in my morning eggs or my glass of water.

So what's up with that anyway? Italians have believed in fresh and local foods long before anyone ever dreamed up the term
locavore
. When I lived in Rome as a student, I had been amazed to attend the morning markets and find produce so fresh it still had dew and little bits of dirt on it. It took me a while to get used to the idea of going to so many different places just to compose a meal: the outdoor market for fruits and vegetables, the butcher for meat,
⁴⁶
the bakery for fresh bread and pasta. But after a while, the genius behind it made sense—get the foods from the people who are the experts in them, spend the extra time because, really, what could
be
more important? What, you have something
better
to do? Like what?

Unlike us ever-trendy Americans, Italians' belief in such things doesn't strike me as stemming from a desire to save the planet or preserve the polar bears or even to benefit their own health. No, food comes close to being a second religion there for the deceptively simple reason that
they know what's good
.

I got that phrase from my grandmother, who used to use it to approvingly describe someone who knew how to appreciate something important, usually food. Scratch that—
always
food. As in, “Of
course
he likes the schnitzel!
He
knows what's good.” Even though she was of German heritage, not Italian, the sentiment was exactly the same:
what
could be more important than really,
really
good food?

Don't get me wrong. It's not like sugar had suddenly
disappeared. We were having our share of sugar thrown at us on this trip, just not in the restaurants. On the two Swiss Air flights it took to get there, the flight attendants kept trying to hand us Swiss chocolate bars—and how often do you really think people say no to those? We arrived—at looooong last on nooooo sleep—to the apartment we had rented to find a huge dish of hard candies on the coffee table, little wrapped
Baci
thoughtfully placed by the bedside, and a huge tub of complimentary tiramisu ice cream in the freezer—specifically
per le bambine
, our landlord explained.

Need I mention the entire supermarket rows of nothing but four million kinds of snack cookies? The fact that they have approximately three gelato stands for every one tourist? (It's as if the people from Planet Gelato invaded years ago and no one noticed.) Sure, Europeans like their Cokes and their Nutella as much as anyone else. You can't say they don't have a sweet tooth, just that sweets aren't so
insidious
there as in American culture. What I noticed most of all was that it was a fairly easy separation if it's something you want to separate.

And crazy us, we wanted to. Though some days I was trying hard to remember why…

_______

Now, before I go any farther I'd just like to state, for the record, that I'm really, really lucky. I know. I have two incredible daughters who
like food
. REAL food, things like calamari and miso soup. Greta likes to brag about having eaten snails in Paris and is impatient with the kids' menu at most restaurants, choosing instead a flank steak or penne alla vodka from the adult menu. Ilsa is, if anything, even more enthusiastic: in Italy we could order her a cheese plate or a
crostini misti
—which includes chicken liver paté—and she'd be happy as a clam in butter.

Sometimes, when I forget how lucky we really are, I'll be reminded by the apprehensive look of a waiter or dining companion who will cautiously ask, “Do you think they will…?”

“Eat that? Sure!” I'll respond without thinking. Later, I realize what they were
really
asking: “Will your child melt down if anything other than mac 'n' cheese or pasta with butter fails to appear at their place setting?”

I'd love to take credit for all this culinary open-mindedness, but honestly, I'm not sure: are fussy eaters born or made?

Of the two, Ilsa might be the one most interested in food, possibly because she is always hungry. She's the child who takes twice as long as everyone else at the table to finish her dinner, and then five minutes after the plates have been cleared asks if there's anything to eat. Frequently, she will ask when lunch is, entirely unaware that we've already eaten it. The ongoing Ilsa refrain is “Mommy, I'm still hungry. Do you have any food in your purse?” And because I'm Ilsa's mom, I always do.
⁴⁷

This combination of appetite and willingness to try new things came in handy the night we went to the Teatro del Sale in Florence—an absolute high point of our trip. It had been highly recommended to us by a very gracious local, and she assured us that it would be fine for the kids as well. All we knew was that it involved dinner and a show of some sort, we should call to reserve our places, and go early in order
to “join”…whatever
that
meant. I was nervous what we were getting ourselves into. Me being the only one who could speak any Italian in our family, I felt it was all on my shoulders whether we had an exciting, truly “Italian” evening or ended up embarrassing ourselves in some uniquely “We're not from here!” way. Would we get fed? Would there be some terribly inappropriate show? Would we even
find
the place? But my curiosity was too great; we
had
to try.

We arrived at 7:30 on the dot, dressed up and out of breath from hurriedly walking several blocks in this unfamiliar part of town, nestled in the labyrinth of residential streets that spiral off from the historic Centro. After some confusion, I ascertained in my mishmash Italian that we each had to fill out forms—the kids too—and pay a small fee to “join” the “cultural circle.” Once this was accomplished, we were given gorgeous membership cards that put my Vermont driver's license to shame and we stumbled inside, where we could now pay for our evening's attendance at…whatever this was.

It wasn't cheap—at thirty euro per person, I fervently hoped this included everything. I learned it did, once the helpful man at the cash register began speaking English unprompted in order to be sure we understood the way the evening would work. Oh well, so much for my flawless Italian.

It would be a buffet, he described. VERY long. There would be, as he put it, “surprises.” Wine and water were self-serve by carafes in the lobby, and please, he cautioned, take it easy. I wondered if the emphasis on pacing ourselves over the course of a “VERY long” meal was because we had small children or because we were Americans. And I was a little apprehensive. I mean, how long was
long
?

Turns out,
long
is about two hours. Heck—practically
every Italian meal we ever
had
took about that long. I could see, however, that it would be easy to go overboard in an atmosphere such as this one. At the far end of the room there was a buffet table featuring a battalion of help-yourself casseroles, salads, and breads; couscous, hummus, warm potato salad, lentils, shiny beets. Just when we thought we had amassed plenty of food on our plates and found seats, suddenly a man's head appeared in the window of a glass wall that showcased the kitchen—a Willy Wonka's factory of delicious handmade delicacies where all
kinds
of things seemed to be going on—and he began to bellow as if announcing the contenders in an important boxing match. (“
And in this cor-NAH!
”) Although I never managed to catch it all, it became clear that every few minutes he was heralding the presentation of a new dish, and that if you wanted to try some, now was the time to sidle up to the window and receive a bread-plate-size portion of it.

The girls caught on very quickly to this arrangement and soon it was hard to keep them from popping up and down like little Jack-in-the-boxes. We tried nearly everything as the tiny courses rolled out one by one: chicken meatballs, fish soup, tiny clams in spicy broth, roast chicken and potatoes, tubular pasta with meat sauce…As advised, we tried to pace ourselves, but the girls were in heaven, particularly Ilsa.

“When's he gonna yell again?” she kept asking.

“These are so yummy, I just can't stop eating them!” she proclaimed about the mussels dressed with lemon juice, garlic, and olive oil.

“If this is still here when I grow up, I might want to work here,” she said later, adding, “I could eat all the leftovers after!” At another moment, she explained that she was sure to return
to Florence someday. “I would come here so I could eat this yummy food!”