subscriber saturday: forget your age. hone yourself to live your future life.
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Now onto our topic for this week.
BBC food presenter
has been posting on her Instagram stories about what she’s doing in Portugal - working hands-on with farmers who raise and butcher livestock, make cheese and grow everything. Her purpose in doing this, she tells us, is to help prepare her future self, a concept she discusses in this interview with Jo Franco.This got me thinking.
I love life a lot, as evidenced by a multitude of passions: gardening, restoration, pottery, cooking, wine, writing and painting and fermenting to name a few.
And yet, here I am, staring down my 66th birthday in a few months. I feel great, but I know these feel-good years are already a bonus. So how do we prepare our future selves for doing more wonderful life affirming things when the possibility of decline becomes more and more a reality to face?
My Role Model - Beloved Uncle Bernard
This is my late great uncle, Bernard Belli. Bernard immigrated to the USA from a tiny village in the Emilianese hinterland called Bardi (where, coincidently, Michelin star chef Angela Hartnett’s Italian family hales and where her cooking passion came from!) in Emilia Romagna in 1916.
He was more like a grandfather, actually, as my father’s father had passed away when I was just five. My Uncle Bernard was my dad’s uncle, and he lived with his wife Anna deep in the country side in Pennsylvania. He was a highly refined man, very attractive and dapper; my recollections of him often involve a velvet smoking jacket (which he gave me and I wore until it was threads) and an ascot.
Bernard arrived in America in 1916 only to turn around and be conscripted in 1917 to fight for the United States in World War 1. I’m not even sure he was a US citizen at this point. After returning to New York, he waited tables until he saved up enough money to open a restaurant of his own, the Mascotte in Manhattan (New York Italians who opened fine dining establishments in those days only opened French restaurants because Italian food was considered far too common) .
That was the good news.
The bad news is that he opened the Mascotte about two months before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and had to close it within a year. I have two forks from that short-lived restaurant. I keep one here in Germany and one in Italy, so I always think of Bernard when I cook, no matter where I am.
Between fighting in World War l and losing everything he had in the restaurant during World War ll, Bernard and Anna also lost the only baby they would ever be able to have at childbirth. In between there was the Great Depression. They were no strangers to deep pain and anxiety and very difficult times. Despite all they went through, I mostly remember them smiling together. They were deeply in love and a very solid team.
After moving from Queens to Pennsylvania in the 1960s, Bernard and Anna planted or hunted close to everything they ate. They were the role models for my parents, who did the same thing after moving us from New York City to the same part of Pennsylvania a few years later. These incredible generational influences are what fuel my passion for eating only healthy, good food today.
Bernard knew food. Going to their home for dinner meant eating something like freshly shot peacock or venison and vegetables from the garden, but there was always something like Crêpes Suzette or Cherries Jubilee for dessert to remind you that he knew his haute cuisine.
Anyway, my future-self story about Uncle Bernard has to do with my helping him plant an apricot tree. I would imagine at this time he was around 83 or so. The tree was literally a stick. I asked him when it would start producing fruit. He scratched his head, and in his beautiful northern Italian accent, said, “oh, I’m not sure, my darling. Maybe five years, maybe more.”
He must have seen the astonished look on my face that said he’d probably be pushing up daisies by then, because he laughed and with that gorgeous twinkle in his eye, said, “Darling, when the first apricots come in, you and I will eat them together.”
He lived to see fruit from that tree, and enjoyed a long life, which included deer hunting - into his nineties.
Uncle Bernard is my forever icon, my love and my role model when I think of what I’d like my future self to be.
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