48 pages • 1 hour read
Tembi LockeFrom Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Significance of Food in From Scratch
From its preparation to its consumption, the presence of food plays a significant role in Tembi’s memoir, from the book’s title to its closing pages, which comprise family recipes. Making meals from scratch, or composing foods from basic ingredients rather than from store-bought components, is central to the Lupo family, both in Croce’s kitchen and at Saro’s restaurant and home. The phrase ‘from scratch’ also refers to Tembi’s long, arduous process of starting her life anew after losing Saro, metaphorically indicating that she must rebuild her sense of self from entirely new components.
Throughout the contemplative narrative of From Scratch, food serves as both physical and emotional sustenance, even from the earliest beginnings of Saro and Tembi’s romance. For example, Saro first wins Tembi over with his kindness, attentiveness, persistence, and above all, his cooking. By the end of her first meal at Acqua al 2, Tembi falls deeply in love with Saro, as evidenced by her statement that “he had already filled me with his food, his creativity. Now having to take him in the flesh—his eyes, nose, mouth, and gentle brow—made me rock back slightly on my heels” (33). Saro shares his knowledge and love of cooking with Tembi early in their relationship, and their roles reverse after Sara’s cancer diagnosis. Tembi not only brings home-cooked meals to the hospital to spare Saro from having to eat mass-produced food, but also sooths his lips with ice-pops when he does not have the energy to eat. Food remains critical to Tembi even after Saro’s death, as her memories of him are always inextricably linked to the food he loved to prepare and enjoy. Moreover, she cooks his recipes using ingredients from his garden in order to feel close to him and ease her pain.
The presence of food in From Scratch serves multiple symbolic purposes, at various times representing culture, tradition, family connection, or all three at once. For example, Tembi links Southern soul food to her forebears, from the time of slavery to the present, stating, “From them I had learned about food as the physical and emotional sustenance that carried people across the terrain of hard-lived lives” (137). In Aliminusa, moreover, Croce supports Tembi and Zoela primarily with food, which Tembi calls “mystical sustenance” (146). Croce’s food sooths Tembi, for she says, “I was like a child calmed by the comfort that lay in consistency and tradition—the comfort and tradition I craved. I had come to count on the woman stirring a pot” (146). Like Saro, Croce expresses her love by teaching Tembi about local Sicilian foods, such as how to distinguish between sweet and bitter almonds, and this practical knowledge soon takes on a deeper symbolic role in the narrative, for Tembi states, “One look at Nonna, and I knew she knew that life could be bitter—as could joy and love. She had lost her husband and her only son. She had had the taste of bitter almonds linger on her palate. She wanted to spare me the same” (182). Croce’s food is not just Tembi’s heritage from Saro, but also Zoela’s, a fact made clear through their participation in the age-old task of preparing food together: “I hung back as everyone worked in silent ritual. Zoela’s nine-year-old hands were doing something her grandmother had done, her father had likely done” (291). Cooking and sharing meals, then, are expressions of tradition, family, culture, love, and emotional support.
Love, Loss, and Different Ways of Grieving
The entwined themes of love, loss, and grief permeate Tembi’s memoir. The book focuses on Tembi’s three marriages to Saro: the marriage they had before he got sick, their marriage during his illness, and their marriage after his death. Tembi fell in love with Saro while dining at Acqua al 2 for the first time, a night that left her “tingling with a kind of excitement [she] hadn’t ever felt” (31). Saro was instantly committing to the relationship, but Tembi was skeptical of lasting love, largely because of her parents’ divorce, “trying to decipher what made people come together and stay together forever” (36) and struggling with “the idea that Saro had suggested, that a pairing could yield something great and lasting, was beautiful but untested” (36). Ultimately, Tembi decides to take a chance with Saro and commits to a long-distance relationship, marrying him in New York and moving with him to LA to pursue acting opportunities.
Losing Saro upends Tembi’s life emotionally, professionally, and financially. Tembi feels untethered after Saro’s death, as though she is “floating in the outer rings of Mars while [her] body was tied to Earth” (46). The official lament at Croce’s house underscores the depth of her grief as she recounts “the wailing, the tears [that] all formed a shrill and guttural song of loss that seemed to reach back to the ancient world” (108).
The official lament exemplifies the communal approach to grief in Aliminusa. Croce’s friends and family support her not just during the lament, funeral, and interment, but also with regular check-ins. As Tembi observes, “Grief in Sicily is not an individual experience but a communal one where people are called upon to witness and support one another” (277). Accordingly, women on Croce’s street often drop by unannounced to gossip, share news, and make sure the family has everything they need. As Tembi observes, “each of the women on this street will be called upon and expected to participate in the illness or death of the others. They held one another up, it was a custom as ancient and alive as the ruins of Sicily's Hera temple” (233). Tembi compares this communalism to African practices, linking the grieving rituals of her ancestor’s and Saro’s:
The way certain African cultures use drumming as an active means of dealing with their grief—the rhythm is played continuously for days, day and night, over and over, as a constant reminder to the community of its loss—in Sicily the story of the deceased is told over and over (278).
While Croce deals with grief through community, tradition, and faith, mothering Zoela is Tembi’s primary focus and source of comfort after Saro’s death, for “she was the person who gave [Tempi] a reason to keep putting one foot in front of the other” (119). Tembi and Zoela find comfort in each other after Saro’s death, and Tembi states that the two of them “were testing each other’s permanence” (165) in the aftermath of losing one they love so deeply. Maintaining her intangible connection to Saro through memory also helps Tembi through her grief, and her annual trips to Sicily draw her closer to Croce, and by extension, Saro. Tembi is through the worst of her grief by the end of her third summer in Sicily and feels “more stable in the world, more comfortable navigating the changes that come with loss” (265), yet her life remains “misshapen in many of the unfamiliar places” (265). Receiving Croce’s blessing to be happy, however, allows Tembi to look forward to a brighter future.
Discrimination and Prejudice in Italian Culture
During a phone conversation with Tembi two days before moving to New York, Saro asserts that his parents “don’t approve of mixed-cultural relationships” (76). Saro uses his parents’ prejudices to explain why he hasn’t told them of his plans to move, despite his imminent departure. Saro minimizes the racial undertones of his parents’ stance by bringing up his Sardinian ex-girlfriend. According to Saro, his parents disapproved of this five-year relationship because his ex was not Italian, a distinction that baffled Tembi, who states, “Sardinia is part of Italy,” to which Saro replies, “A part from Italy. An island away from Italy. Being Sardinian is different from being Italian and definitely different from being Sicilian. My parents didn’t approve and didn’t get along with her” (76).
By using the term “mixed-cultural,” Saro sidesteps issues of racism in his family and culture. Giuseppe and Croce’s extreme reaction to Saro and Tembi’s marriage, however, suggests that Tembi’s African American heritage fuels their opposition to the relationship. Giuseppe and Croce not only refuse to attend Saro and Tembi’s Florentine wedding, but also disowns him for disobeying their wishes. The wedding marks the start of a long period of estrangement that only eases after Saro’s cancer goes into remission and he travels to Sicily at Tembi’s insistence. Saro attributes his parents’ biases to their community and culture, saying, “My father thinks he will be gossiped about, even mocked. He thinks all Americans divorce. And in his mind, I am marrying down” (84).
Although Tembi does not describe racist incidents in Aliminusa, she does discuss systemic racism in Italy’s airports. Before traveling with Saro’s ashes, Tembi ensures that she correctly fills out the forms and permissions required to transport human remains into Italy. Her vigilance stems from previous travel experiences in Italy, in which she “had often been profiled [and] had been pointed out by the carabinieri and immigration police on more than one occasion” (112). These previous experiences cause Tembi to remain close to Saro when she navigates Italian airports and to keep her American passport in view to avoid delays.
The challenges of being accepted within a different culture are evident in many different scenes that prove the people of Aliminusa to be tight-knit and insular. The locals only accept those who commit to becoming a part of their culture in every aspect. For example, they ultimately accept Tembi because she returns to the town repeatedly and engages with the community and her husband’s family. Similarly, locals accept the interim priest, a Black man from Burundi, only because he is deeply committed to serving the community. By contrast, the same locals are hostile to an Englishman involved in a car accident while passing through the town, because as an outsider, he is owed no loyalty or special consideration. Biases toward outsiders, alongside loyalty to community members, thus drive the Englishman away without an insurance claim, despite the fact that he is not at fault in the accident. As Tembi aptly observes, “the Sicilian instinct isn’t always to make it easier for an outsider” (288).
