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concave nubs landing in a nearby heap. She’d sit for hours, because there was no reliable machine for this endeavor, no dried pasta from a box that could emulate the density and pliancy of her strascinat , no alternative to doing the work, no matter how numbing it was. And even if there had been an alternative, she wouldn’t have taken advantage of it. Dried pasta from a box didn’t advertise how long and hard you had labored. Dried pasta from a box didn’t say love. When you ate a bowl of Grandma’s strascinat , covered in the thick red sauce that she and most other Italians simply called “gravy,” you knew that every piece of pasta had the imprint of her flesh, that the curve of each nub matched the curve of her thumb.
    Another of her signature dishes was a sort of casserole made with many alternating layers of mezzani , a noodle similar to penne, and thin slices of fried eggplant. The eggplant was the tough part, the messy part, because the dish required scores of slices, especially if you were making enough for a dozen or more people, and Adele was always making that much. Each slice had to be a particular weight: too thin and it might get mushy and fall apart; too thick and it wouldn’t cook to a silky enough state in the center. Each slice had to be dredged in flour and given its own discrete space in scorching oil, so she had to deploy several stovetop pans at once or a big electric fryer, the kind that plugged into an outlet and sat on the counter.
    Some cooks recall landscape artists at their easels, pausing to ruminate as they apply dabs of paint to a brilliant canvas. Grandma recalled a mechanic under the hood of a car, clanging and huffing and covered in gunk. Cooking was steamy, sweaty drudgery for which she didn’t just roll up her sleeves. She wore something ratty and sleeveless—the fewer obstructions to movement, the better—along with comfortable slippers or flip-flops, even though she preferred heels in all other circumstances. She stood just four feet, eleven inches tall, not counting her hair, which got her all the way up to five foot three if she’d just come from the beauty parlor.
    She did as much of this cooking as possible outside of view, in a space where she didn’t have to worry about the mess. By the time my father turned sixteen, she had a whole second kitchen, in a two-family house that she and Mauro bought on Fifth Street in the Battle Hill neighborhood of White Plains. They rented out the second floor and lived on the first floor and in the basement, where Grandma churned out her fried eggplant and strascinat. She never had to sully the nicer kitchen on the ground level, and she could bask in the wonderment visitors expressed at its sparkling cleanness, which seemed to contradict the freshly made banquet she was laying out for them on the table in the center of the room. Where had all that food come from? Why weren’t there any telltale signs of its production?
    Although she and Grandpa didn’t have all that much money, they had food to share and made sure that anyone entering their home knew it. They had it in part because they sold it, in a tiny store in White Plains that was a cross between a delicatessen and a bodega. Mauro opened it to supplement his erratic work and undependable income as a stonemason. It succeeded in part because its hours were longer than those of larger grocery stores, many of which shut their doors early in those days. Because of those long hours, Frank, who was five and a half years older than Jim and eleven years older than Mario, often had to head straight from school to the store to relieve his father.
    Certain nights of the week were devoted to certain meals, and that schedule rarely varied. Sunday afternoon was the big weekly feast, antipasti followed by a pasta course followed by meat. Monday was soup night: something light, like minestrone, a retrenchment from Sunday’s excess. Tuesday was a dish of peas and pasta, or what the Brunis