Food talk or not...and a recipe: Butternut squash sauce with sage and pine nuts

Food, in my world, does not make for polite conversation.

I love to cook. I love to eat. And I love to write about food. But in general, I don’t want to talk about it.

Not sure why this is. With rare exceptions, I also don’t like to talk about novels. And although I don’t fully understand the reason for this either, I suspect the two are related. Food and fiction are too intimate, too personal, too deep down for me. I get all funny inside about them, a piece of me squirms away, ducks for cover.

I’ve got none of that foodie-food chitty-chat in me, the cross-referencing and score-card tallying that can dominate gatherings of food-loving people. In fact I often avoid such occasions specifically to get out of having to participate in conversations about the best candied bacon and fennel foam paella ever eaten while balanced on one’s head all the while watching a perfect sunset over the Caspian Sea.

But even if the conversation is more sincere and more sensitive than the bizarre one-upmanship that foodie culture spawns, even if it is real and well meaning and spiced with stories, I find myself growing quiet, pulling in, listening, but rarely moved to speak.

As strange as it may seem, if I don’t know you really, really well, and even sometimes if I do, I’m more likely to be comfortable discussing sex than lasagna.

There are exceptions to my food-talk aversion, though. My friend Karen Ciancetta is one.

She’s a yoga buddy, and over the past few months as the conversations pinged around the room before and after class or at the coffee shop where some of us have taken to gathering on Saturday mornings, I found myself leaning forward, elbows on the table, and listening, really listening to Karen talk. She told stories about pasta, and gnocchi, and her Italian grandmother -- a clean sheet spread on the bed and then ravioli ravioli till the whole thing was covered – and she sat, spine still straight, shoulders still down, the post yoga glow in her cheeks as she wove her stories, her fingers feeling the air – the memory of gnocchi near -- and I wanted more. Her talk made me hungry. For pasta, yes. But, also, much to my surprise, for conversation.

Here, for once, was a woman who talked about food and didn’t make me want to run away to a barren mountaintop.

So I invited myself over. Could I come watch her cook? Take pictures? Listen to her stories?

There was one dish that she kept coming back to week after week in the yoga chats, and I wanted to taste it. A simple pasta with squash sauce. Sage and pine nuts and sharp Italian cheese. It sounded wonderful, and her face always took on a special light when she mentioned it. The glow of a woman who knows she’s at her best. No worries, no need for primping and posturing… or false modesty. Just a simple, hey, I got this.

Could she make the squash sauce?

Yup.

When I arrived, I was tense in that harried mommy-trying-to-extract-herself-from-a-house-full-of-children kind of way. She put a glass of sangria in front of me. Briny, metallic green olives and a wedge of rosemary Manchego cheese. Did I mention there was sangria? Oh, so it was going to be that kind of afternoon. Oooooo - K.

Apricots, too. From the farmer’s market. They glowed an impossible iridescent orange. I started snapping pictures as if they might fade.

And a story, before the first sip of sangria even, she was off about her Italian father, how he insisted that there always be food and drink for people when they walked in the door. Karen looked more Italian by the minute as she spoke, her shoulders rising and falling with her voice, her hands in and out. Her father’s traditions and his eggs, cooking was her mother’s job but her father made eggs. Good eggs. She bustled and talked, sipped sangria, readied her kitchen. And sauce, he made sauce when they were growing up. It wasn’t so much a story as a painting, a portrait of her father. It felt, in a non-fussy way, like an invocation – we were here to make sauce, and somehow talking about her father was the apt beginning.

Somewhere in the first years of the squash sauce, there’d been a recipe. She still had it. A faded piece of magazine gloss clipped from a long-gone issue of Cooking Light. Sometimes she took it out, sometimes not. She’d long since tweaked and adapted and improvised her way to her own creation – one that fit her kitchen, her sense of what was important and what wasn’t. The recipe, for example, insisted on a ton of grating, up and down, up and down with a stubborn squash. Phooey. Who needed it? Worked just as well to whack the thing into a few pieces and toss it in the microwave till it was soft. Then scoop it out. No bleeding knuckles. No sense of annoyance that leads to why bother that leads to a jar of Prego and surrender.

Karen has an unusual combination of discerning taste and why-the-heck-not that I find refreshing.

Often, she uses a butternut squash for the sauce, but on this day, she went with a kabocha that she’d picked up from the farmer’s market. It looked a bit different from the kabocha I was familiar with, but the deep orange flesh still brought me back to the winter I’d spent on a mostly subsistence farm in Hokkaido, Japan. In February, when it was many degrees below zero and the sky routinely dumped three to four feet of snow on the steep mountains and gentle valleys, breakfast, lunch and dinner all meant kabocha, soft and sweet in soy and sugar, over rice, in soup, cold, hot, and toward the end of the season, slightly moldy. I loved it until I hated it, and still every day, kabocha. For years, I couldn’t eat it after that winter in Japan. And then one day, I wanted it again. The memories had gone sepia and sweet, and my love returned, this time with nostalgia as part of the mix.

Karen softened the squash in the microwave. Cut a handful of sage from her garden and then sautéed the sage and pine nuts in an olive oil and butter mixture.

All the while she told stories. Of picking wild blackberries around her family’s summer house on Sacandaga Lake. Her mother consenting to pies as long as she didn’t have to make them. And the first woman in her little country town to serve things like beef tartare at her parties. The woman hired Karen, her sister, Christine, and a friend, all high-schoolers at the time, to cook and do light cleaning. The woman would leave recipes for things like beef Wellington and braised celery on the counter and the girls would muddle their way through.

Stories and more stories. Out came the pine nuts and sage. In went the garlic and squash and a bit of water. A few pinches of salt. The kitchen air was sweet and warm now, with a light, heady layer of buttery sage on top. Simmer, simmer, talk, talk. The pine nuts and sage went back in, an ivory and green speckled island against the orange.

Then the pappardelle in the water. And at the end, after the grandma sagas and the thoughts on children, and aging and good friendship, the stories of jobs lost and careers won and the relative, Mary is her name, who grew up in a sea of brothers and had to cook and cook and cook at every family gathering, and the memories of Italy and the tales of love, at last the sauce was ready and the pasta was done. A quarter cup of pasta water stirred in – consistency, you just get the feel for it. Then a half-cup grated parmesan, something sharp to bring all the sweet and sage into focus.

The rich sauce was lovely and a perfect match for the wide, egg-based noodles. And after two hours of conversation that floated and flitted around food, circling as gentle and unambitious as leaves in a breeze, I was full – of stories and the pleasure of good company. Finally, the kind of food talk I could take.