Our house is unusual amongst its neighbors: people don’t reside here long, in a community where professors buy these lovely homes and tend to stay forever. When Ficre and I chose the house at 150 Edgehill Road we felt we could see our entire lives in front of us, our grandchildren coming there, sleeping in their father’s childhood rooms left intact. We searched for a table big enough to accommodate feasts of friends and extended family in the dining room I had painted a color I called “Venetian pink,” for Ficre. We relished our role as Command Central.
We would live here but two years as a family of four, and then a year and four months and fifteen days as a family of three.
When a previous family lived here, Archbishop Desmond Tutu spent a night as a guest. With other occupants, we’re told, Thornton Wilder conducted playwriting workshops in the great room that faced the backyard. Our family celebrated two New Year’s Days with black-eyed peas and song. Ours was a house where the piano was played, a house where we sometimes read poetry at the dinner table and once served a coconut cake so delicious it made our guest weep at his grandmother’s memory. A house where the traditional Eritrean guayla was danced in a circle, and where friends danced to funk ’til the windows steamed up.
It was a house where Ficre made red lentils, and spicy beef stew, and Bolognese, and the curried vegetable stew alitcha, and I made eggplant parmigiana and chicken cotoletta Milanese in the manner he taught me, and pesto from basil in the garden, and blueberry kuchen and chocolate Pavlova and chocolate chip cookies with sea salt sprinkled on top. Casa dolce casa, the boys and I now say when we walk through the door, like he did each time we returned from our travels.
Ficre was expressive and eloquent in Italian, his third language, and New Haven had a ready supply of Italian interlocutors. Connecticut has the second highest Italian population of any state in the U.S., after Rhode Island. In New Haven, Ficre spoke some Italian most days. Carlo the carpenter would come and visit when we had just moved into our apartment on Livingston Street. I loved being a pretty, pregnant housewife, making him perfect espresso and serving it in the red enameled cups with tiny almond cookies. Carlo was an elder, full of aches and pains and complaints and off-color stories he’d tell Ficre when I left the room. He made Ficre laugh hard. We’d asked him to make a dining room table for us, of Ficre’s design. For months he’d come and talk over cups of espresso with Ficre about the table, which was always going to be ready, presto, presto. We continued to eat cross-legged on the floor, serving our guests on an elegant Scandinavian mid-century modern coffee table that Ficre had found at Goodwill for ten dollars and proudly refurbished until the clean lines were revealed and the inlaid wood gleamed. One day just before Solomon was born, Carlo called Ficre with great excitement: I have it for you! E pronto! And he came over not with the dining room table but with a handmade rocking cradle for the baby, with his signature carved into the wood on the underside.
I have a dream where time is all a jumble. First, I am in Ficre’s studio, and he has already died. I discover three paintings he has made of an Italian American folk creature, a jumping baby of sorts. In the dream, it is summer early light and the studio is already getting hot.
Then Ficre is alive, and up and out of the bed for his coffee at four thirty, when the birds began to sing. He comes bouncing in the door from the studio at the end of his day, excited to be working on the Italian paintings. Hello, sweetheart. A kiss on the lips. You are back, my darling, as if nothing ever happened. He sets to making red lentils for dinner.
We live right across the street from his studio in this dream. Everything we want is at hand: work, kitchen, gazebo, each other, summer light. How can I leave the peace of this house? I wonder. I have never lived in a house so beautiful. I have never felt so content.
When I wake I know, all of a sudden, that it is time for us to leave. Ficre isn’t here anymore. Ficre is not here. I can make his red lentils anywhere.
Author: Ficre
Prep time: 15 minutes
Cook time: 4 hours 20 minutes
Total time: 4 hours 35 minutes
SERVES: 4–6
Don’t be scared off by the long cook time—for the most part, once you’ve taken care of the chopping, all you’ll need to do is check on this dish occasionally as it simmers. To cut down on cook time, you can also use store-bought vegetable stock rather than making your own (you will need 2–3 cups). A note on tomato passata: although it isn’t incredibly common in the United States I’ve found it at Whole Foods and another grocery store in the area. It’s a tomato purée similar to tomato paste and tomato sauce—the main differences are that the tomatoes in the purée are uncooked, with no additional ingredients added, and it’s not cooked down like tomato paste. If you can’t find it, you can certainly substitute tomato sauce or crushed tomatoes for a slightly different flavor.
2 heads fennel
2 heads kale
1 yellow onion, cut into large pieces
2 large carrots, cut into large pieces
1 stalk celery, cut into large pieces
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
24 oz can tomato passata
2 carrots, chopped
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 tablespoons curry powder
½ teaspoon cayenne
½ teaspoon paprika
2 cups dry red lentils
¼ cup fresh cilantro, chopped
Salt to taste
1. In a large heavy pot, combine the first 6 ingredients and enough water to cover the vegetables by about a half inch. Allow stock to simmer for 4 hours.
2. After the stock has been simmering for about an hour, you’ll want to start making the tomato curry sauce. Combine the tomato passata, 2 chopped carrots, 3 cloves chopped garlic, and the spices in another large heavy pot and allow to simmer 3 hours.
3. Add lentils to tomato curry sauce and let simmer 20–30 minutes more, adding stock as needed to thin it out (about 2–3 cups). The mixture should be thick and creamy, not soupy or dry.
4. Stir in fresh cilantro and remove from heat. Season with salt to taste. Serve lentils alongside basmati rice.