Focaccia

I was in Genoa, Italy, staying with an Italian friend for a month before starting graduate school in the fall. She and her family had cabanas at a beach, and every day after lunch we would drive to the beach for an afternoon of sun and sea. On the way, she often would stop at a local bakery for focaccia, which back in 1988 was pretty much non-existent in America, even in cosmopolitan NYC with its large Italian population.

I remember being underwhelmed at the idea of some flat bread being a snack at the beach. I grew up eating plump, tender and sweet fried clams and freshly made while-you-watched salt water taffy at the beaches in Maine. This was just… bread. She held the bag out to me. It was stained with olive oil, which surprised me for some reason. Inside were several rectangles of focaccia, glistening with olive oil and sprinkled with coarse sea salt. I took one and bit into it. The outside was crisp and the inside chewy, full of air pockets where the oil had settled. The flakes of sea salt danced on my tongue. I was in heaven. We sat, looking at the sea, eating our focaccia, until the rectangles were gone.

Over the next few weeks I tried different types of focaccia, always from the same bakery, which, it turned out, was considered the best one for focaccia in Genoa, and therefore all of Italy. There was one with slivers of sweet onion, another with rosemary, but I think the perfect simplicity of the one with just oil and salt will always be my favorite.

Several years later, focaccia came to America, even showing up in the supermarket. I tried several, always hopeful, always disappointed. Most were too thick and bready to even come close. Many were too dry. Some would get it almost right, but still were just not the same. Now, I know I cannot eat wheat, so I no longer search for it, though I did find a gluten-free version that if fried a bit in olive oil in a pan can be rather tasty. But it’s an entirely different experience, and I’m at peace with that. Instead, I have tucked focaccia away into my bank of memories, to be savored whenever I get a hankering for its perfect simplicity.

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