How to Bake a Perfect Life (Barbara O’Neal)

From the time we are able to eat solid food, Italian girls are expected to help in the kitchen. We start with simple things: folding paper napkins and tucking them under the plates at dinnertime, ripping lettuce and tossing the salad, scattering colorful sprinkles onto Christmas cookies and placing them gingerly into the tins. Years pass and we advance to mixing, rolling and frying meatballs for Sunday sauce, flicking gnocchi off of the dough rope with our thumbs to toss into scalding water, pushing pizza dough to the far corners of the pan without making it tear all while pretending that there is no place we’d rather be than in the kitchen (forget hangin’ with friends at the mall, we’d rather be cooking!). Complaints were scolded and then dismissed by knowing words from our mothers, aunts and grandmothers, “You need to learn to cook. One day you’ll have a family of your own.”

Good Italian girls cooked. Judged by the number of hours we spent in “learning” from our matriarchs and, eventually, by the quality of the food we produced ourselves, my sister, my cousins and I entered the culinary competition early and without our conscent. To my own mother’s embarrassment and chagrin, I was never interested in learning to cook. The kitchen was prison and I longed for parole without caring about the deficit I’d face when I was a married adult. The best thing to make, as far as I was concerned, was reservations!

I’m not sure when my attitude towards all things culinary shifted. The change was subtle, like shrimp transitioning from Dove white to Flamingo pink when being sautéed for scampi. Cooking ignited my competitive spirit. Suddenly, I must barbeque the ribs that always fall off the bones (a secret I’m unwilling to reveal), roast the most succulent Thanksgiving turkey (brined, massaged, rubbed, buttered and basted strategically each year), to win the egg roll contest at work (I beat a guy born in Shanghai!), to concoct the most delectable garlic dill sauce for the grilled halibut (which is, in a word, AMAZING), to bake the most enviable Christmas cookies (and package them in the most darling treat boxes I can find each year). I am a cook. I am a baker. And I now feel an inherent need to be identified by both labels.

Those who know me best know all about my glorious metamorphosis. Most grateful is Brian, who loves to eat whatever I cook, and my mother who is thrilled about passing the holiday dinner torch to me—a daughter who was, for a time, an incredibly lost cause in the kitchen. Third on this list is Linda, the recipient of the sometimes luxurious leftovers I save for our office luncheons each week. It was Linda who recommended How to Bake a Perfect Life.

Besides baking, I have almost nothing in common with this book’s protagonist. Other than the kitchen, the setting (Colorado) is no place I’d choose to be. But this book reminds me that food provides sustenance, creates comfort, builds community, promotes joy, and symbolizes love.

Mangia!