A dash of kindness, a splash of grace
Italian chef Lidia Bastianich supplies the most critical ingredient of all
Lidia Bastianich is one decidedly busy woman: chef and television personality, restaurateur and bestselling cookbook author. A line of food products carries her name; so does a line of stoneware and another of cookware.
The food empire she heads with her two children encompasses six restaurants, two Italian vineyards and a travel agency that organizes culinary trips to Italy. Her website, is a riot of recipes and videos, and cooking tips.
Bastianich, 66, has no doubt forgotten more about Italian cuisine than most of us will ever know. And yet, in person, she is unassuming, not show-offy or diva-ish.
I caught up with her one evening recently; she was in Montreal for a one-woman culinary road show, an event called Saputo Presents Lidia’s Italy Live, and we spent half an hour together before the show.
She was warm and gracious as we talked about connecting through food and about legacy — she said she wants to be remembered “as someone who communicated the way in which food nurtures body, soul and mind” — and about how when it’s just her, she might prepare something as simple as pasta with olive oil and garlic for dinner.
I asked what kind of pasta she uses. “My brand,” she replied. I said I didn’t know it.
“I’ll send you some,” she said, smiling and waving my business card, which I’d put down on the side table near us as I prepared to take my leave. In my mind, I put the chances she’d send the pasta at slim or none.
But the white cardboard box that landed on my desk a couple of weeks later proved me wrong.
The box held three one-pound packages of Lidia’s pasta: fusilli, linguine and spaghetti.
My spirit soared: How nice that she had remembered — that she had done what she said she’d do.
In life, I tend to expect little from most people; in return, I am rarely disappointed. Still, I don’t believe one ever becomes inured to the small defeats that punctuate our days.
Years ago, I gave someone who was then a friend a gift of a silk scarf. I liked it enough to have bought another for myself. She unwrapped it, looked at it and, as she handed it back to me, said: “I’ll never, never wear it.”
We do our best not to internalize those disappointments. But they mark us and they make us ever more wary. Recently, for instance, New York Times technology reporter Nick Bilton opened a column about the digital era and etiquette this way: “Some people are so rude. Really, who sends an email or text message that just says ‘Thank you?’ Who leaves a voice-mail message when you don’t answer, rather than texting you? Who asks for a fact easily found on Google?” he wrote. “Don’t these people realize that they’re wasting your time?”
To Bilton, there’s no place in our wired society for what, as far as he is concerned, amounts to time-wasting communication. So now, saying thank you is wasting time? Heavy sigh.
In Bastianich’s latest cookbook, Lidia’s Favorite Recipes (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), there’s a recipe for a pasta dish featuring cubes of baked eggplant, canned plum tomatoes, grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, ricotta cheese and fresh basil. It calls for ziti — short narrow tubes of pasta. I’d prepared the dish already with penne, or with orecchiette. This time, I used some of the fusilli Bastianich had sent.
The pasta had some bite, the way pasta should, and held the sauce well. To me, the dish tasted better than ever — enhanced, as it was, by a dash of kindness, a splash of grace.