My lifelong love affair with good food has a precise beginning. My family background is Pennsylvania Dutch (i.e., German) on both sides. I grew up in Harrisburg PA during the 1940's and early 50's. Our diet was the typical Germanic meat and potatoes one with occasional forays into fancy items like canned asparagus (ugh). Harrisburg was an unbelievably provincial place then; everybody we knew was just like us, and we knew no Catholics, Jews, coloreds, or any other ethnicities. My parents, however, were pretty open-minded; they just didn't get any opportunities to try meeting new people, my mother having plenty to do with a slew of children. My father, since he worked for the railroad, did meet a lot of different people.
One evening, I guess around 1945, he came home and announced that we were having company for dinner; that they were Italian, and that they were going to bring food and cook it for us. Dolores and Sam, God bless them, arrived with the makings of a traditional antipasto, which was promptly laid out in intricate detail on a large platter, and knocked our socks off, since we had never imagined that food could be a delight to the eye as well as to the palate. But the tour de force was spaghetti and meatballs. When I tasted it, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. There had never been anything so delicious. And different -- we had never before eaten anything made from cooked tomatoes, we only ate tomatoes raw. Spaghetti and meatballs is now considered hopelessly old-fashioned and fake Italian, but I don't care -- 50 years later it's still my #1 favorite meal. From then, I've been trying out every cuisine and ethnic food imaginable and have had a wonderful time doing it, even if I have to sacrifice to get the lard off every so often. At the same time, I still have a fondness for Pa.Dutch foods as well, although they are getting harder all the time to get and making them yourself is a pain.
I also recall vividly the evening in 1956, after we had moved to Bucks County PA, my father taking us all for a ride to the Italian section of Trenton NJ to try out a new food which we had never heard of but which was then all the rage, called a "tomato pie". We couldn't imagine a pie made with tomatoes, but when we tried it, we liked it very much. It later became known as a "pizza."
