Giancarlo Buonomo: Home is where the hunger is

I’m nearing the end of a month-long layover. On December 16, I flew from Detroit to Boston. And on the evening of January 21, I’ll board a plane in Boston headed for Rome, to study and eat and file this very column. When my editors approved my proposal to write pieces from Italy, they mentioned I would have a column due before I made my transatlantic journey.

“Write something about Boston!” they suggested.

A good idea, but harder than one might think. Not that there’s a dearth of word-worthy edibles in Beantown — in fact, it’s the opposite. I could tell you about the perfect fried oysters I ate at B & G last weekend, how the crisp crust contained a nugget of briny, almost molten meat, how they were served in their original shells. I could give you my practiced rant about how the pizza in Boston is actually better than the pizza in New York. I could wax poetic about the sausage sandwiches with peppers and onions that carts sell outside of Fenway Park.

But after a few paragraphs of that, I’m sure you’d get tired. When I ran out of adjectives and alliteration, there’d be that dreaded “So what?” Simply describing the food scene of my home city could only hold your attention for so long. Good food writing — good writing of any kind — always starts with a question. Here’s mine: Why did the cold spaghetti I ate out of a tupperware at 2 a.m the other night taste so bad?

Sorry, I’ll back up a bit. I’m not really from Boston, you see. I actually hail from a suburb called Concord, whose revolutionary and literary lore you probably learned about in high-school history. I associate my house — cappuccino-colored exterior, just down the road from a farm — with food. I have many happy memories of childhood dishes: tomato sauce, roasted chicken, stuff I ate every week as a kid, and still do now. I liked the leftovers even better; there was always something sinfully illicit about heating them up late at night.

Much of modern gastronomy is, paradoxically, sentimental. Great chefs — even ones who use liquid nitrogen and make foams — often create dishes that reheat long-frozen memories. Thomas Keller, whose French Laundry was once named the best restaurant in the country, used to make miniature grilled cheese sandwiches with tomato-water soup. David Chang’s Momofuku Ko (two Michelin stars) serves fried apple pies with miso butterscotch for dessert, a refined version of the McDonald’s classic. Countless other chefs dish out these Proustian moments, and there is no shortage of customers eager to experience them.

I assumed, then, that chowing down on my cold spaghetti would be full of delicious nostalgia. When the sweet sauce, thickly caked on the spaghetti, hit my palate, it would fire some well-seasoned neurons and flood me with halcyon feelings. I would be 14 again, having a snack before a long Friday-night sleep.

But therein lies the problem. It’s probably fun for a 40 year old to be reminded of their favorite food when they were 14. At 20, in that anxious layover between adolescence and adulthood, it wasn’t fun to feel like a teenager again. Why? Because that spaghetti tasted so simple, so comfortable, so easy. In a forkful of pasta I had regressed, and saw how easy it could be to do that over and over and over.

Maybe I was alone in this feeling. I associate my house — my whole childhood — so strongly with food, but then again, my parents spent a large amount of time and money cooking and shopping and eating with my siblings and me. Did others have such good memories of eating at home? I made a simple survey, and sent it out to scores of friends, asking if the food at home or at school was better. I checked a day later, and 83 percent of them had chosen “home.”

Students like myself are in a bit of a half-sour pickle. Most of us hope when we leave for college we’ll transition from the kid version of everything to the adult version. Sleepovers with a pilfered 12-pack will be replaced by keggers. A rigid curriculum will be replaced by classes you’re actually interested in. Singles are finally stretched into home runs. It’s rare that I meet a college student who misses high school.

And yet, most of us miss the food of our childhoods, and aren’t that excited about “eating like adults.” At an age when many of us so desperately want to, and often need to, forget the practices of our youth, food is the one thing that we often don’t want to change. But because food is so infused with the essence of childhood, the simple act of eating can bring many of us to a state that we struggle to move out of.

The other night, I was roasting a chicken with some garlic and herbs. I remember being small and getting on my tippy-toes to place my nose near the oven, to breathe in the wonderful, exciting aroma of ingredients transforming into a meal. This night, I hunched over and inhaled the fumes, like the oracles of Ancient Greece, hoping they would tell me something.

My chicken needed to cook longer.