La Belle Cuisine

Lasagne Linguist
He knew words, and he knew pasta
Saveur No. 52 Jul/Aug 2001

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“It was an outlandish summer event for Martha’s Vineyard in the late 1940s –
a lasagne dinner. In those days, lasagne was a cosmopolitan, adventurous food,
and the Vineyard was hardly the sophisticated venue that it is now. Yet each
July, Mario Pei, Italian-born scholar, Columbia University professor of romance philology, author of books like ‘The Story of the English Language’ and ‘The Families of Words’, and eater par excellence, would arrive for a week’s vacation
at my parents’ cottage in East Chop. He would be followed by a shipment from Manganaro’s on New York’s Ninth Avenue. In the carton that we would open
in awed silence lay mozzarella, ricotta, fat green and black olives, anchovies,
tuna, sweet Italian sausage, and sheets of lasagne with ripply edges.
Professor Pei would spend one full day preparing the dinner with flair in our
old-fashioned New England kitchen. A tall man of impressive girth, he would
fill the little room, giving imperious orders for pots and pans, then browning
the sausage over too high a heat so that it splattered the walls. He would plop
the tomato paste into the sizzling meat, onion and garlic, add water, and stir
with grand abandon. This often produced red splotches that decorated the
ceiling for a day or so until the mess could be discreetly removed while the
professor was at the beach.
Dinner would start with a sizable antipasto. Then the lasagne would appear,
still bubbling from the oven, to applause and Professor Pei’s appreciative nods.
Finally, he would rise and serve his creation. It was boldly galicky, meaty, and pillowed with cheese, a strange and wonderful food. Afterward, we’d have a
salad of greens and tomatoes from our backyard victory garden, a leftover from
the war. Before dessert (usually one of my grandmother’s pies), Professor Pei
would urge his guests to get a spot of exercise, and they’d dutifully rise and
follow him to the lighthouse, then march back to the table.
Recently I found Pei’s handwritten recipe in my grandmother’s scrapbook –
and again in Ada Boni’s ‘The Talisman Italian Cook Book (Crown, 1950), for which he wrote the introduction. In it he mentions an eighth-century work by
Hesychius, a Greek lexicographer, in which a dish of dough in sauce is called ‘makaria’, food of the blessed. Those were surely blessed lasagne parties that
we enjoyed decades ago.”
~ Phyllis Méras

 
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