Breanne
Carluccio
Culinary Portfolio
2026
2026
At 1205
At 1205, I hosted dinner almost every weekend for two years. The tradition began shortly before a close friend moved away, and though we hadn’t planned it that way, gathering for dinner became how we coped with his absence.
The table became the center of the home. It was very heavy, made of solid white oak, and the leaf was always extended so it could seat six comfortably. It stood beside a large south-facing window between two doors that opened to the side yard, one from the kitchen and one from the living room. Guests drifted through constantly, sometimes unsure of which door to use as an entrance or exit, and the peculiar layout could make the whole room feel like it was revolving.
The house, too, had its own kind of rotation. It was tied to a fifteen-year long lease that had passed through generations of roommates. Each time someone moved in, they signed onto it, and when they left, signed off again—but the table stayed where it was. I like to think of it in that way, existing long before us and likely long after. It belonged to all of us and to no one, and it will always hold the image of our dinners. For me it also holds these words, because most mornings after, the table became my writing desk. It was where I sat when I first started writing this piece.
I’ve since moved out of 1205. Family-style dinners are still being hosted, and although they’re not quite the same as they were, we follow more or less the same format. Each week we rotate who cooks, and the chef invites whoever they please. It all comes together very organically. Sometimes we skip weeks, sometimes we collaborate. Sometimes it’s big and loud, full of laughter, and other times it’s quiet, moody, and intimate. Every Saturday teaches me the same thing again in a new way. Appetite is a divine form of participation, and eating is deeply affective.
On one of our inaugural nights, sometime in late-January, I cooked pan seared black cod with Botija olives, rosemary, and fresh-squeezed blood orange, sheet pan roasted gnocchi with Maitake, sautéed green beans, and a warm honey-dijon vinaigrette. Months later, upon reflection, F said that it was in his “top three,” alongside M’s roasted cauliflower and romesco sauce (which was my personal favorite). Now I cannot recall the third meal on his list, and it suddenly fills me with emptiness.
Is what slips away from memory just as telling as what remains?
Anyone could sit with us at the table, and anyone could make these dishes, but maybe that’s exactly what makes them matter.
In the same way I question the inimitable qualities of our dinners, I also sometimes wonder if what we’re doing only feels new because we didn’t inherit it directly. Dinners at my mom’s house were on fold-out tables in front of the TV. At my dad’s we always had a seat for Nana, and I cherished the nights I got to sit next to her.
When I was a child, family dinner was a little more compulsory than comforting. I didn’t even like the taste of portobellos yet. My dad made me try them marinated in balsamic vinegar and garlic. He’d claim proudly that they tasted “just like steak” as I ate them over the trash can, so I could promptly spit them out.
Nana hated mushrooms too, and at the dining room table, I believed that we sat together firmly in solidarity. But there was a shocking truth that was revealed to me when I got older. Apparently, at some point, my dad got tired of always specifying her order, and whenever we got her lo mein from the Chinese restaurant, he didn’t actually ask them to hold the mushrooms. Her eyesight was poor, and it was likely she couldn’t see them on her plate, so she ate them without knowing.
I think, maybe what we’re doing now on Saturday nights is less like tradition or invention and more like recovery, a half-remembered rhythm that keeps people together when life feels unsteady or confused.
In spring, P and I foraged nettles to make malfatti with lamb bolognese. In winter, we ate lots of radicchio. In summer, there was a particularly memorable moment when we all had S’s spicy kimchi soup during a heatwave. We were slurping, sweating, and crying with the barely-there breeze from the box fan.
It’s true that when I cook with my friends I aspire towards creativity, but I often grow tired of presenting cooking as if it’s artistry. Of course, it can be, or perhaps it always will be, but to care about it in that way feels a bit misconceived, because it should never really start or end with that aspiration.
It’s almost paradoxical, because a person can easily spend years perfecting a recipe, much like an art form. You can spend days cooking a broth or stock, many hours simmering, kneading, resting, fermenting. But as for licking the spoon? What happens in that fleeting moment? Don’t you just want to bring it to the mouth of someone you love and have them taste it too?
Cooking is strange this way. It takes patience to coax the sweetness from onions, but the entire achievement disappears in minutes. There is nothing more ordinary than baked bread, and yet it’s a little transcendental when you tear open a fresh loaf of sourdough and the smell of yeast fills your nose.
With food, there is an artistry at work which dissolves and refuses ownership. Cooking is generous because food disappears. It gets eaten. The invisible artist leaves no trace except what nourishes others. Recipes are written over, erased, added to, tailored to taste. They form a collaboration of countless unknown gestures, but most importantly, they ask us to trust that what we’ve made will continue, even when unseen.
Disappearance is not the same as loss. What disappears feeds us in other ways, given and received again through the simplest meals. In the end, I think it’s important to remember that cooking as artistry only ever goes as far as the pizza joint you grew up going to, the meatloaf you ate in church, tomatoes from your mom’s garden, chicken wings and Shirley Temples at the bar, a knish from the deli for breakfast, or free potatoes you gleaned from the farm—anything and everything that just happened to be around you and sustained you in this life. I think of these foods not as just meals but instructions for how to insist that there is enough.
Last October I tried making a rendition of my Nana’s lamb shank recipe. I added in some white chanterelles because L foraged so many we had been joking about how we must eat our daily serving. Then somewhere amidst my cooking I began to mourn the fact that there were no peas. I thought they brought everything together, but the bag was badly freezer burned, and I could not incorporate them.
The experience of cooking the meal had changed something in me. I wished that I could have eaten it with my grandmother, but I ate alone at the table that night. There was an ache of grief, but I felt close to her. Mushrooms are my favorite vegetable now, and it only occurred to me after the fact, that I’d substituted a vegetable of her choosing with a vegetable she hated most. But I know that she would have at least tried it, and to her surprise, probably even liked the taste of chanterelles too.
I picked meat off the bone while I read and re-read the recipe, hand-written in her cursive. There was suddenly an undeniable feeling of continuity present. Through improvisation I uncovered that a feeling of completeness is not just created by us, but carried forward. Even in the absence of peas, something whole remained.
Only a few weeks after I cooked the lamb shanks, I made the Carluccio gravy and meatballs for the first time. I guess I was finally feeling inspired. I’d been sitting on the recipe for months, waiting for a moment that finally felt right.
My dad has recorded his entire life on yellow legal pads, so when I asked him for the recipe, he sent a handwritten, scanned, five-page PDF, complete with a title, his name, and page numbers on the top right corners. If it sounds like I’m making fun of him, I’m not. It makes me laugh because I recognize myself in him. He documents everything just like I do.
His notes, my blog.
When I finally cooked the gravy, it happened to be the last family dinner before J left town. Another friend was leaving, and I wanted to make the meal count.
I photographed the cooking meticulously at my dad’s request for updates. When I sent him a picture of the pot with a whole tomato floating inside, skin and seeds intact, he questioned me with obvious revulsion, “What the hell is that?”
No tomato with skin and seeds was meant to be there, but I saw a beautifully ripened heirloom tomato laying on the kitchen table that day, and I thought it was just begging to be thrown in. He messaged back incessantly, even about the proper temperature to serve the wine (56 degrees Fahrenheit).
The smell rising from the pot brought me straight back to my childhood, the way that scent can collapse time into a single breath. J threw macaroni at the ceiling to see if it would stick (of course, that was proof it was done cooking), and M complained about how the food co-op needs to start carrying more Italian cheeses (I didn’t disagree.)
I sat with my face over my steaming plate, surrounded by Campì Fennel, Castelvetrano olives, rapini, bucatini, a table full of friends, and too many bottles of wine to count. After dinner, the house was quiet, and the table was emptied except for the candles, still burning. Bittersweet, yes, but beneath the ache, my heart was singing.
What remains in the afterglow are traces suspended between memory and evidence. The table doesn’t need saving. It only needs to be set again next week. Absence will meet us there again, and so will abundance.
Life itself cannot be made consumable, yet there is meaning in translating it, in trying to make it more palatable. And it’s possible that what redeems us is the waste itself—the leftovers, the plum compote stained on the table, the time spent cooking when hardly anyone shows up, or when someone you love is long gone. What is sacred about life isn’t its efficiency but its excess, the way we give more than we can keep, even the way we let the words fall away. In that overflow, nothing is wasted, only offered.
Maybe the real act of defiance is to believe we still have what we need. The hand already knows what to do before the mind does. Taste, too, is a kind of language, but when I cook, I’m not saying anything new. I’m remembering something older than speech.
Taste is alive.
It’s a reminder that we are too.
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