In Which I Overextend a Metaphor Grievously

If I were Odysseus and cooking my Odyssey, Italian food would definitely be my Island of the Lotus Eaters. Odysseus fist winds up on that island very soon after leaving Troy, while all of his men were still with him and before any of them had any reason to believe fantastic events would be de rigeur for the decades before they-- or, rather, only Odysseus-- would arrive back home. And as can be expected, this early island looked just as normal and ordinary as any other remote rural village.

Just as this homey bowl of cheesy pasta seems awfully tempting to me after a long and lunchless day, so did the islander's offer of hospitality to Odysseus's war-weary men. Of course they accepted their invitation to stay a while. And before long, having suitably charmed their gregarious hosts, the sailors are offered a great gift in some of the lotuses that grow wild on that island. The islanders all seem to love them, so what the heck, the some of the sailors give them a try too. And oh. Those lotuses.

Eventually Odysseus's pickier crew members grew bored of the island and really wanted to hurry up heading home. But those who had eaten of the heady bloom didn't even hear their voices. To them, nothing in the world held meaning that rivaled that flower's taste, not even their own names, so they forgot them. So when their comrades packed up the ships and shoved off towards Ithica, they remained to continue wandering the island with its natives, in thoughtless bliss drawn only to the abstract honey of those lotuses. 

 
For me, having grown up with Italian food in my family, following a different current across that culinary ocean seems to lead to things that are all more or less familiar. I like Italian food because I'm familiar with it, so when I'm really entranced with a particular dish it always seems to take me by surprise. A dish made only out of pasta, oil, cheese, cracked pepper, and cloudy pasta water shouldn't be anything special, right? I mean, it's basically what children eat if they're being too picky for spaghetti sauce. But somehow, it's not. Somehow, it's subtle flavors and gentle aroma and big, hearty weight distance it from the simple buttered pasta and Kraft sprinkle cheese of my youth, and prepared the right way, it is pasta cacio e pepe.

And half a wilting zucchini boiled in the remainder of what was a giant can of diced tomatoes, with just a pinch of this and a pinch of that thrown in for flavor, is just the definition of cabinet cooking! It's born of a late-summer surplus of the cheapest vegetables and it is nothing special. Why, then, do I sometimes long to go grocery shopping to pick up armfuls of these veggies even (especially?!) in the middle of winter? How does garden surplus become the supreme guguzzi?

How did any flower grow so sweet as those lotuses?