Maisto - The Gastronomy of Marriage

The Gastronomy of Marriage is spirited, intimate, and great fun. Maisto writes with a vital contemporary frankness that belies a truly romantic spirit. The result is a wonderful marriage.

A LEKSANDRA C RAPANZANO ,
James Beard Awardwinning writer

Michelle Maistos tender book traces the journey toward a momentous occasionher weddingwith honesty, love, and vulnerability, all played out before, during, and after one mouthwatering meal after another.

M ATT M C A LLESTER , author of Bittersweet:
Lessons from My Mothers Kitchen

Lyrical, fresh, honest, and true, Maisto examines the year leading up to her marriage with sincerity and intelligence, shedding new light on the everyday dilemmas modern women face as they seek to nourish themselves and the ones they adore. The recipes, taken from Maistos Italian American family and her husband-to-bes Chinese American heritage, are unique, practical, and inviting, and the love storyas American as they comeutterly captivates. A must-read for anyone who has navigated the complicated waters of coupling, from beginning to end.

K AMY W ICOFF , author of I Do But I Dont:
Why the Way We Marry Matters

I WAS TOLD TO MARRY A MAN FOR HIS HEART (OR MORE exactly, his soul), but in the end it was a stomach I fell for. On our first date, Rich ordered a chocolate souffl at the beginning of the meal, noting an asterisk on the menu warning diners of the wait involved. At the time, I imagined he did it partly to impress me, which it did, though today I know well that hes simply the type of man who knows better than to turn down a hot-from-the-oven souffl when one is offered to him.

That the latter was a necessary quality in any person I might consider marrying was something I likely knew somewhere inside me but couldnt have put into words that day. I was twenty-two and having an early dinner in a breezy Los Angeles restaurant on Sunset and Vine, with a co-worker Id kissed two nights before, tipsy on tequila after a postwork Memorial Day party. Even so, I felt the importance of this new informationthat he was a good eater, and an eater I could respectand, despite having spent the previous five months working together and hanging out very platonically, hiking trails in Malibu and the Valley, it struck me as the most significant definer of his character that Id so far been privy to, and I felt more connected to him for it.

Today I have a clearer sense of what attracts me, and sitting with a poor eater, the articulated words impotent and emasculated come to me, cruel as they are. Even as a young girl, I sometimes felt a jolt of meanness toward fussy eaters. Being a good eater was a point of pride in my family, and there were summer nights when I sat alongside my father eating more steamer clams than I cared forusing the ugly black siphons that poked from their shells to dip them first in hot water, to rinse them, and then in a ramekin of melted buttersimply to bask longer in his approval. My sisters, both decent eaters, drew the line at the steamers texture and scrunched their faces in disgust; but I was my fathers daughter, and we ate on.

We have always been a warm, boisterous, physical familyhugging and kissing and linking arms and sitting closebut we can also be a quietly judgmental lot, who frown at weakness and prize strength above all else. And there are no more egregious revealers of a weak nature than being fussy at the table, straying from ones faith, and staying with a man you know isnt right for you. By which I mean dating; in marriage, it was understood, one was sealed to ones mistakes.

Ive heard it said that love chooses you, but I was raised to believe its a choice each of us makesthe most important choice each of us makesand that the consequence of not doing so properly can be a life more akin to a long, unhappy death. George Washington, of all people, once put it nicely when he wrote to a friend: I have always considered marriage as the most interesting event of ones life, the foundation of happiness or misery. As a girl I watched my aunts and neighbors with their husbands, and my older cousins marry, and I saw how the person you chose, like a dye dropped into water, came to affect everything.

My eye was trained to this by my mother, who by her own admission had chosen poorly. She and my father dated for a year, and after enough people asked when they were going to get married, in the car after a date one night my father said, So I guess we should get married. And my mother agreed. She mostly blamed her decision on not having anyone to talk it over with. She still tells me, incredulous, It wasnt until we were at the church and Grandma was pulling the veil down over my face that she said to me, Are you sure about this? By the time they reached their honeymoon, my mother was certain of her mistake.

Determined to protect her three daughters from similar fates, she filled the talk in our household of women (which certainly it was even before my father left, during our teenage years) with tales and dissections of relationships and marriage. It was an agenda further fueled by my older sister, Bridget, who was particularly pretty and so attracted the attention of men quite early (far earlier than my younger sister, Maria, or I would, which I think actually suited us both). At the center of all the talk was usually a woman who just didnt understand what she was getting into; or who was so in love she simply couldnt see a situation for what it was. I understood early that men possessed the ability to separate a woman from her senses, and that in order to choose correctly I would have to keep my mind and eyes clear so as not to become a victim of the very thing I sought to commit to.

I stepped carefully through a modest dating career, and then one January afternoon Rich walked into the office of my first magazine job, to interview for the position just above mine. I was the editorial assistant, with a big desk up front for secretarial chores, and I handed him the paperwork, validated his parking ticket, and told him to sit and wait. Back then, the type of man who turned my head was thick and athletic, a bulk of a man in whose enormous hands I felt feminine and light. This person who chose the chair closest to my desk, however, extending and crossing his legs at the ankles, so that twice I had to step over them, was just a head taller than me, broad-shouldered but thin, confident but eager; I imagined myself out of his league. And still, with a severity I couldnt explain even to myself, catching the strangeness of my actions, I made a point of ignoring him: disliking how casually hed dressed; aware he wasnt fidgeting like the others; disregarding the neat curve of his black hair around his small, perfect ears.