Too much

...the latest missive from Mark Diacono's Abundance Writing Group Gathering

To everyone new here, welcome. I’m Elizabeth, the writer of The Delicious Bits Dispatch, a weekly missive for the curious, blending discovery, reflection, and musings, always wrapped up with a seasonal recipe worth lingering over.

This week I’m sharing my latest piece from the Abundance Writing Group Gathering, led by the delightful Mark Diacono. If you’re a recent subscriber, I’ve also included a couple of links below to previous issues of the Dispatch, so you can get a flavour of what I usually cook up every week.

Each month, Abundance Group Gathering attendees are given a prompt with the singular instruction to take no more than an hour to write and see what results. When we meet, we discuss where the prompt led us, what the process was like and a few brave souls share their writing with the group.

This month’s prompt: Too much

The piece below was more or less what I wrote in an hour, with some tiny edits. When you look at what I scribble down, you can understand why it’s sometimes difficult to decipher my original meaning!

Parr of my hour-long outpouring

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Too much

In my life of food, it’s always been too much or not enough.

The “not enough” part is, of course, a fallacy. As anyone with an Italian mama knows, abundance at the table, even in the most modest of homes, is always assured, the result of time, ingenuity, and the lurking fear that not everyone will get their fill.

Perhaps it is the immigrant’s story—the understanding that coming to an unfamiliar place is no guarantee that it will, in fact, be the land of plenty.

My mother took this brave new world in stride. The modern conveniences of row upon row of packaged food…the peanut butter and jelly swirled together in a single jar that I longed for her to buy…a bright orange concoction named Cheez Whiz that did make it home, meant to be spread on toast (or in my case, eaten by the spoonful), a can of “meat” mimicking ham and made with God only knows what…the hotdog of the tinned food world. All of it strange and somehow comforting in its abundance on the store shelves. Most of it bypassed for more familiar fare.

In our tiny kitchen, with its bright yellow Formica table, Italy was always on the plate. All manner of good things came forth: homemade pastas and gnocchi, cabbage rolls and baking sheets of pizza, bubbling pots of minestrone, lasagna when time and occasion merited it. We could eat to our heart’s content and know that the proverbial pot would never really be scraped clean.

My two older sisters in our pocket-sized kitchen before I arrived on the scene

In sharp contrast to the full table, one of my sisters barely ate enough. A picky eater made worse by being continually forced to finish her plate, she eschewed tomatoes wholesale, a sound and stunning rebuke of all the delicious things my mother made. I knew pizza bianca before it was trendy, gnocchi dressed with breadcrumbs toasted in brown butter, lasagna and cabbage rolls with nary a hint of tomato sauce.

All these variations, delicious because that was the only way my mother knew how to make food, were in addition to all the things. So along with the brightly hued pizza and pasta and cabbage rolls, there were the anemic versions of the same dishes, everything looking like it had been kept in a dark basement too long with the mushrooms.

There was simply too much of everything.

Perhaps it was these schizophrenic meals that mapped in my mind, making me believe that in order to get my fill, I needed to have it all.

Making sure to get all the icing on my birthday cake

And so I began to eat too much, but in the surreptitious way that a crafty overeater does: a stack of saltine crackers mortared together with salty butter, an extra piece of pizza, a row of cookies from the package, not joyfully, but with a guilty tinge.

It’s been the work of a lifetime to find the balance and strike the “I’m full” chord in my mind no matter what’s left on the plate. I’m learning to revel in plenty without having to eat every bite. Now, I’m just as likely to say “it’s too much,” to trade plates with my husband so he can finish mine too.

It’s complicated, I know.

Still, I am an avowed eater, a cook who will always make an extra dish for fear of running out, get a thrill from the farmer’s market stalls full to overflowing with far more things than I can ever buy, dither over menu choices, never be able to decide what that last meal might comprise.

And still, there’s a deep gratefulness shaped by knowing how fragile “enough” can be for many, how little separates having it from nothing at all.

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Check out these recent Dispatches for my usual style of writing and some good recipes to try, including my favourite granola recipe, and a fantastic sardine rillettes.