My husband gasped when I first told him, at the seaside in Italy, that I craved a burger or a BLT. He’s Italian, after all, and couldn’t imagine why I wouldn’t want a plate of spaghetti alle vongole or some fried calamari at the beach. The only fish I grew up having beachside was either a fried crab cake with ketchup or a cup of clam chowder.
Some summer temptations never cease to leave my cultural palette. We may now spend most summers on the Mediterranean Sea but, when I taste salt water, I still long for the Atlantic Ocean.
My husband claims that hamburger meat or bacon is heavy – a culinary choice that warms you up after skiing, for instance. Fresh fish, on the other hand, is light, he says, and, therefore, the natural fit for a summer meal after a seaside dip.
Fish, salads, fruits and vegetables garnish many beach stands in Italy, and certainly contribute to the lithe legs parading the dunes. Had I substituted a few plates of them for the countless hamburgers and BLTs I devoured as a child, I might not long for a tutu over my bikini.
But it’s not that I wouldn’t second his menu choice at the beach – it’s that having a hamburger or a BLT catapults me back to New England summers, where goose bumps pop up on your skin after a swim and multi-colored sea glass appears on pebble beaches.
A hamburger, for instance, often followed a morning of tennis lessons with the local pro who wore Zinc on his lips. While we practiced our backhands, he had a hard time paying attention. “Eye on the ball, kids,” he would say. “Racket back, no spaghetti wrists, now step – well, good morning Mrs. Van Alan! – and follow through.” Inevitably, there were more balls hit outside the court than on it. But we weren’t there to qualify for Wimbeldon; a few sets with pals led to friendships for life.
A supply of BLTs, on the other hand, might have been prepared by my grandmother for picnics to deserted islands. Her weathered hands were as quick to wrap the soggy sandwiches in wax paper as to tie a bolon knot on the dingy. But the best BLTs were made by my father because they oozed Hellman’s mayonnaise and had at least two slabs of bacon per piece of bread.
A glass of pulpy lemonade or mint iced tea usually mulled next to the tennis courts in a plastic pitcher. My brother and I spent a few summers selling “homemade” lemonade to help satisfy his comic book and my bubblegum addiction. We used our weekly allowance to buy the frozen Minute Maid cans, and added water. It didn’t matter that we hadn’t squeezed the lemons. Homemade to us meant prepared by mom (who kindly shrugged off labor costs). The day we sold a cup to Donny Osmond we concluded we’d made it big and closed shop.
Thermoses taken on summer picnics were filled with my mother’s secret recipe of her coveted iced tea. She promised me the recipe when I married since it had been a wedding present to her along with a silver pitcher. Stirring the caldron of soaking teabags in the kitchen with her often led to stories of courtships and love affairs, insights into who she was before having me.
An ice-cream sandwich might come on the way home after riding the waves at the beach or a sail in the harbor. It would arrive at a quiet moment at the end of the day when the leather seats of our family station wagon stuck to the back of my legs. My brother and I would lay our arms down next to each other and compare hues of our suntans. Our rope bracelets, a sign of another summer braided to our wrists, grew greyer and smellier with every August swim.
Beach life at the Mediterranean does not disappoint in the Glamour Department. Italians often bring two bathing suits to the beach – a change of costume never leaves you with a wet bum. Batiked sarongs replace soggy towels wrapped around bronzed legs. Swimmers float for hours in bathtub-warm water. Sun creams smell like Parisian eau de toilettes. This summer, some Italian beaches are even hosting water-gun games where the ammunition is not Evian but Moet Chandon.
My taste buds have rapidly adjusted to spaghetti alle vongole over a glass of a pinot grigio, and the requisite gelato that Italian beaches offer. And my husband has converted me to iced tea with a spoonful of lemon granita as a substitute combination of lemonade and iced tea.
But it’s the heartiness of the American summers of my childhood that I miss where awareness of eating healthy was kept to a minimum, where we road bikes instead of mopeds, read books instead of text messages on cell phones, played cards instead of Gameboy, had a month’s holiday instead of a long weekend, and never waited an hour after a meal to swim but dove in, head first, minutes after our last bite.
