Bereavement Soup
Sometimes tears are just what is needed, in the soup.
This past weekend, we lost from our planet an irrepressible spirit, a young-ish man of riotously generous heart and humor, a man so effusive, so free with his opinions as to be a force of nature akin to the Meltemi or Sirroco wind: You knew it was coming, always, but when it arrived you had to run for cover. Grinning. In fact you were often laughing so hard that you fell. From grace. From your high-horse. You loved the falling.
Last fall in Florence plans for dinner out with our previously-unsinkable friend and his partner had to be scuttled due to a dodgy tummy. This was long before the scaly, evil claws of Stage 4 cancer had scourged and dug their insidious and unstoppable way into his sweetly innocent liver, spine and lungs. But on that night, our penultimate night in Florence for the season, he, they, were still game to get together—but at home. I had a big batch of hand-made tortellini from the previous days excursion up to Bologna, and envisioned a classic tortellini in brodo as a perfect salve for the tummy.
But where to find an estimable brodo?
“Just make it yourself,” said my wonderful cook and friend Judy Witts Francini, when asked where in Florence I might source a homemade broth worthy of the adorable tortellini, and of us.
“I’m renting a crappy little apartment with barely a colander in the kitchen, Judy. I wish, but no.”
Then my language teacher directed me to C. Bio, a sort-of health food store near the Mercato Sant’Ambrogio that sells whole wheat pasta and rusks, etc. Also right near my flat, and the very last place I’d imagine to find an honest, umami-rich broth. Yet there it was—barely opaque and old-parchment-colored, verging on translucent, actually—in rather flimsy plastic tubs topped with shrink wrap. And virtually warm from the stove.
Transporting this delicate broth safely across Florence from Santa Croce to Santo Spirito was no mean feat, but once in their apartment the work of warming “my” broth with the tortellini took only a moment. I’m pretty sure this is illegal in Italy, but I found some nice blanched spinach in the fridge and laced a bit of it amongst the floating dumplings, for an extra healthy note. It was a lovely evening full of warmth, healing laughter, and the blessing of being introduced to a new friend.
Little did I know it would be the very last time I would ever lay eyes on that beautiful man.
**** This seems like the right moment to revisit a sadly related essay I wrote in 2009 for my now-retired blog, Roadfoodie.
Bereavement Soup
1.30.09 Mar Vista, CA
There is something about death and illness that triggers a desire for soup. Both to cook it and to eat it. What happened in Mar Vista two days ago was so awful that the only tolerable emotion my friend, the chef Jill Davie, could identify was an auto-drive soup imperative. I was riveted, a helpless spectator as an extraordinary transformation took place, from relief to disbelief to tears and, later, to a rich—if ephemeral—condolence.
I arrived at 4 pm; after not having seen Jill for six months, I would be staying at Villa Jilla for three nights. She was on a high: the restaurant she’d been wanting to open for a year and a half, since she left her position as chef at Santa Monica’s Josie, was finally becoming reality. Fresh out of a meeting with her two partners, she revealed to me that finally the restaurant was going to become a reality. It would be a pretty little place on Rose Avenue in Venice. The neighborhood was right (booming), the building tiny, but big enough for the concept (a neighborhood creperie), and the people involved: perfect.
She received a text from a friend: A private plane had crashed at Santa Monica airport —about half a mile from both her current and childhood homes; “Was your dad flying today?”
No, her dad wasn’t flying today, thank God. Every few years, there is a plane crash at this throwback of a charming, urban airport; I lived within a mile of it for thirteen years and could recall two. Most of the planes are so light that fatalities and serious injury rarely occur.
She joked to me: “Maybe we can see the smoke if we go outside.”
Later, we would recall this with horror.
At 5pm, we watched the local news. There was a picture of the plane: it was sleek and bright-red—an experimental Italian aircraft—in a pool of fire-retardant foam. It looked like a broken toy in a bathtub. The two people on board had actually died, we now learned, in complete shock. The news continued, with more bad and sad Los Angeles news: a high-speed, wrong-way driver on I-10 had killed a police officer, the father of two. A recently-fired man had shot his wife and five impossibly beautiful children. A rapist had struck again. My small-town self leaked quiet tears as I watched.
Then another text came in, from a different friend of Jill’s: “Is it true? Was it Paolo?”
I watched her face over the next fifteen minutes, as the texts rolled back and forth and the truth she tried vainly to push away like a tsunami became inescapable. Her disbelief turned to breathless, face-squinching nausea, like a participant in that carnival ride where the huge, people-lined barrel spins so fast that everyone is centrifugally glued to the edges, and then the floor drops out. I’d never met Jill’s friend Paolo, but he’d had an eleven-year-old daughter and had just moved in with his girlfriend of four years. They were happy. He was a successful club owner. Everyone had plans.
My immediate urge was to run over to Whole Foods and secure the ingredients for a chicken soup. One thing I know how to do is cook, and in the absence of understandable answers, cooking is perhaps the least difficult of the options that spring to mind. But when it comes to cooking, I don’t hold a candle to chef Jill; my thought of chicken soup was, to her inspiration, as a poppy is to a double parrot tulip.
She opened the refrigerator. In the then-absence of regular employment (not counting her show on Fine Living, and acting as a spokesperson for Sunkist), Jill had been dabbling in catering. (As we all do, in those between-job times.) I have always found the contents of her refrigerator to be blissfully schizophrenic, often mysterious, and sometimes frightening. Now it all came out: carrots, many pounds of celery, a plethora of small, cheese-and-tequila-filled pork sausages, jumbled falafel, peeled garlic, last week’s Romesco. A butternut squash appeared. I peeled and chopped and harbored secret doubts that such an odd amalgam could become ambrosial. I hadn’t reckoned with the visceral instincts of a CIA-trained chef who had managed some of West Los Angeles’s most respected restaurant kitchens. At 11:00 pm I went to bed, having become tired and also extraneous to Jill’s fierce focus on the bereavement soup. I heard dim sounds of cooking in the dark house, rested my feet on the reassuringly plump firmness of my black and white dog, and fell into a fitful sleep.
In the morning, a large pot sat wordlessly over the barest whisper of heat. The house was filled with a haunting, consoling aroma that didn’t know if it was curry, pork, butternut squash, or something eloquently its own self. Later, when the heartsick best friend—who had driven up from San Diego—warmed up the soup Jill had made for him, his tears added salt to the elusive bouquet.
The soup was insignificant in the larger scheme of grief. But in its small, secret way it had brought a brief return of balance to hearts adrift in a heartless sea.
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Tidbits For The Week of June 24, 2024
Brigit’s What I’m
CURRENTLY LOVING ➡️ Precious memories with the best of friends. Do not be elusive, my loves. THINKING ABOUT ➡️ How important it is to hold our loved ones close and let the little shit fall away. LISTENING TO ➡️ "Long, Long Time," by the brilliant Linda Ronstadt.
Dear, dear MTJ... 💔
Beautiful and heartbreaking. Thank you.