Calabria: The Toe of the Boot

On Michael, the chili, and the Italian-American kitchen that got credited to the wrong region for a hundred years

by Joe Harris

This was before the Godfather.

I want to establish that clearly, because it matters. The year was around 1967. Before Coppola gave America a mythology to attach to Italian men with friends in interesting places, before anyone had a script for what to call what they were seeing, I had Michael. The real version.

I was about fourteen, in junior high school, when my mother started going out with an Italian-American gentleman named Michael Di Miere. He was nice enough. Always had a lot of cash in his pocket. Tipped well — quietly, to everyone who passed by the table. He was, if I am honest about it, a fellow right out of Goodfellas, except that Goodfellas didn't exist yet and I had no frame of reference for what I was looking at. I just thought he was Italian. I didn't ask.

He never seemed to have a particularly clear line of employment. He had owned a business of some kind downtown in Los Angeles that had closed. What he did after that was not entirely clear. What was clear was that he knew people. He used to get me jobs that were unusual for a teenager — one summer I worked at a fabric company down in the Garment District. I didn't ask how he knew the people who hired me. I just went to work. I didn't ask.

Over time, the houses got a little better. Our economic circumstances seemed to improve in a general, unannounced way. I didn't ask. By the time I was in college, Michael and my mother were living in a house on 26th Street north of Montana Boulevard in Santa Monica. If you are from Los Angeles, you know what that means. That is a neighborhood for doctors and lawyers and people who have done very well at something. I didn't ask what that something was.

Michael also introduced me to a French restaurant in the neighborhood — a small place called La Petite Moulin that really should have had a Michelin star. It was expensive. Michael always paid. They served me wine even though I wasn't twenty-one. Nobody asked, because the French people who owned it considered wine part of the meal and not an alcoholic beverage, which is the correct position, and they served me aperitifs too because they didn't care about that either and neither did I. It was at that table, over many evenings, that I first understood what French cooking was. And it was through the chef at that restaurant — who I eventually came to know, and from whom I learned most of what I know about French technique — that I understood what it meant to have the gift. He was the best chef I ever knew. That is saying a great deal. I didn't ask how Michael found the place or why they treated us the way they did. I just ate the food and paid attention.

One afternoon I went to the house above Montana to mow my mother's lawn. I went inside to visit and in one of the closets I found a stack of vinyl record albums that went from the floor to the ceiling. Four hundred records, maybe more. I looked at them for a moment.

I asked.

Not where they came from. Not what they were doing there. Whether I could have some. Michael said yes. I went through the stack carefully and took the first Black Sabbath album, which seemed appropriate. The Allman Brothers. Deep Purple. A handful of others from artists I didn't recognize that turned out to be really good records. I didn't ask about the provenance of the collection. The records were there. I could have some. That was enough.

When I was getting ready to transfer from Santa Monica College to UC Davis, Michael gave me a business card. It belonged to an LAPD precinct captain. He said: tape it behind your driver’s license. If you get pulled over, hand the officer your license. He will see the card and ask how you know the captain. Say he is a friend of the family. He will let you go.

I didn't entirely believe him. But I kept the card. One time I got pulled over and I handed over the license and it played out exactly the way Michael said it would. The officer asked. I said friend of the family. The officer's demeanor changed. I drove away without a ticket.

I didn't ask.

By this time Michael was working, I believe, as a clerk at a uniform supply company downtown — the place where all the police officers and law enforcement got their belts and uniforms and gear. I am guessing that this company was owned by people who had a vested interest in cultivating a beneficial relationship with law enforcement. I am guessing that the gear may not have cost the officers what it would have cost anyone else. I am guessing that this was a way for people who needed goodwill from law enforcement to acquire it, because it never made complete sense that Michael had the economic resources he had from clerking at a uniform supply company. The records were something of a tell.

He wasn't walking around hurting people. I don't know if he was in the life exactly. There are people adjacent to that world who help and are helped and are not quite in it. I suspect he was more like that. He was from New York. He was Italian. I always assumed he was Sicilian, the way most people assume about Italian-Americans from New York.

But when I put it together, years later, in a kitchen far from Los Angeles, I think his people were from Calabria.

The tell was the chili. Michael put Calabrian chili on everything until there was sweat on his brow, and I thought that was simply how Italians ate. It was my first prolonged experience of Italian food, Italian table culture, an Italian man at ease in a restaurant. I had no reason to think otherwise. Of course all Italians ate this way. Of course the heat was just part of it.

It is not. Most of Italy eats nothing like that. The heat — the particular conviction that everything can be improved by adding fire, that the chili is not an accent but a philosophy — that is specific to the south. To Calabria especially. The toe of the boot. The region that sent more people to America than almost any other, and whose food became the foundation of what Americans think of as Italian cooking, and which got credited to Sicily for a hundred years because nobody stopped to ask where in Italy these people were actually from.

What Americans think of as Italian-American food — the red sauce, the heat, the preserved meats, the garlic used without apology, the whole architecture of the kitchen that built itself in New York and Chicago and San Francisco between 1880 and 1920 — is largely Calabrian. The emigrants from the toe of the boot dug the subway tunnels and ran the fish markets and opened the restaurants and brought their food with them. The food became mythology. The mythology got attributed to the wrong region. Calabria has never been particularly interested in correcting this, because Calabria has never been particularly interested in anyone’s attention. It knows what it is.

The ’nduja is the proof. Spreadable salami in a jar — fermented pork fat and Calabrian chili preserved together until they become something neither is alone, something that liquefies when heat touches it and distributes its flavor through everything it meets. Made right it is one of the most surprising things in the Italian pantry. Made wrong it is grease with ambition. The moment you apply heat to good ’nduja it tells you immediately which one you have. That honesty is also Calabrian.

The bergamot orange grows in a narrow coastal strip around Reggio Calabria where the climate is so specific that attempts to grow it elsewhere produce something recognizable but not the same. Combined with quince — also bitter, also complex, also one of those fruits that requires heat and time to reveal itself — you arrive at something that has no equivalent in the fruit world. Two of the most sophisticated flavors fruit produces anywhere on earth, grown within miles of each other on the same coast. The region has been sitting on this combination for centuries. The rest of the world is just catching up.

Tuesday night we cook from Michael’s kitchen. Not the kitchen he had — though the house above Montana was well appointed — but the kitchen his people came from. The chili in the guanciale sauce. The braised pork shoulder with black olives. The ’nduja melting into the bean and chicory soup the way it melted into everything Michael ate, until the sweat appeared on his brow and he was satisfied.

Michael is gone now. My mother is gone. Los Angeles was a long time ago. The card worked. The records were good. La Petite Moulin taught me more than I knew I was learning. And I spent years thinking all Italians ate with that heat before I understood that the heat was a geography, a history, a people who crossed an ocean and built a kitchen that fed a nation and never asked for credit.

I didn’t ask either. But I’ve been paying attention ever since.

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