I hadn't been dating Antonia for more than a couple of weeks when she invited me to her parents’ home for lunch. For the first time. We were moving pretty quickly, if you must know, because we had already dated, exactly once, five years earlier, then took a half-decade break to figure things out.

Still, I didn’t know her parents at all. “My mom’s making eggplant,” Antonia announced. “It’s the best.” I waited a beat before answering. At the time, I was a cocky young journalist and restaurant critic being paid to say way too much about the hard kitchen work and creativity of others.