Josie’s “Porchetta”

I’ve been having dreams about my hometown of Phillipsburg, NJ. “P-burg,” as we called it, is a town located on the Delaware River in the northwest corner of the state. Easton, Pennsylvania, was right across either of two bridges: the “free bridge” and the “new bridge.” When I was growing up, it was an industrial town already in decline. Two foundries employed a lot of people but were already laying off workers, and a once-vibrant rail industry was gone. The whole town of eighteen thousand people seemed so big to me, but as with most kids, a return visit made me realize how small it actually was.

My last dream started with me in “Union Square,” a collection of old buildings I remember as always being vacant. The only reason to be there was coming across the Delaware River from Easton or eating at Jimmy’s Hot Dog Stand (an institution still there).

I started walking uphill along South Main Street and reached my family doctor’s office, Dr. Lewis Genninger. I remember the waiting room being ornately decorated with floor-to-ceiling curtains on the walls, two huge Ming Dynasty glazed horses, and big glazed vases on the tables. The room was really out of character for our sleepy little town.

Next door, or at least close by, I walked into the world headquarters of Phillipsburg National Bank with my dad. There was only one other location. It was a big concrete building with columns on the front and a drive-through window on the side. It seemed cavernous at the time, and big ornate light fixtures suspended from the ceiling gave it the feeling of old banking money. I was there with my dad for some paperwork or something. It’s a medical marijuana dispensary now.

As they say, you can’t go home again.

This led me to feel nostalgic for a dish my mom, Josie, cooked quite often: a pork loin roast she called “porchetta.” Now, porchetta in official Italian speak is pork belly (or a whole deboned pig) with the skin still on, stuffed and rubbed with plenty of chopped rosemary, garlic, salt, and pepper. It’s roasted on a spit until the skin is a crispy brown. Nothing—absolutely nothing—is better than grabbing a porchetta sandwich at a roadside food truck in Italy.

My mom used to make it surrounded by roasted red potatoes. I remember a large Pyrex dish coming out of the oven, the smell of rosemary filling the room. Cold slices of the pork the next day, right out of the fridge for a sandwich, would always leave you hungry for more.

I now like to cook the potatoes separately because I feel they are better at a higher temperature, You can cook them while the pork rests. Pork loin is an inexpensive cut of meat that’s very easy to cook to death. It’s a safer bet to cook it low and slow once you’ve browned it. You have to hit the temperature just right, or you’ll end up with cardboard.

The memories of this dish are seared into my brain just like the our home town. The smells are the same but the town is something else. The bank is something else. The waiting room is surely gone. The town itself exists now as much in memory as it does on a map.

But that porchetta—that version of it—still holds. Not authentic, not textbook, not something you’d find on a roadside in Italy, but ours. My mom’s. A pork loin instead of a whole pig, no crackling skin, just rosemary, garlic, salt, pepper, and those red potatoes soaking up everything in the pan. It didn’t need to be anything more than that.

You can’t go home again, they say. Maybe that’s true. But every once in a while, without even trying, you catch a glimpse of it anyway, in a dream, or in a bite of something familiar, and for a moment it feels just as big as it ever did.

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