48 pages • 1 hour read
Tembi LockeFrom Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
PrologueChapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
From Scratch opens in Aliminusa, a small village in Sicily’s interior. Tembi breaks into an olive grove to scatter the ashes of her late husband, Saro Lupo, fulfilling his dying wish. Tembi recalls meeting Saro, a Sicilian chef, at a Florentine gelateria before reminiscing about their love, the days leading up to his death from a rare cancer, and her grief after his passing. Keen not to upset the Sicilian locals, who disapprove of cremation, Tembi hides her plan to scatter Saro’s ashes. She recalls the resistance she and Saro initially faced from his family, who objected to his relationship with a Black American woman. Careful to avoid the prying eyes of passersby, Tembi rolls under a barbed-wire fence, hoping that fulfilling her husband’s wishes will help her and their daughter, Zoela, to reimagine their lives without him.
Prologue Analysis
The Prologue introduces love, food, cultural difference, and grief as key themes in Tembi’s memoir. Tembi, a self-described “African American woman [with] the culinary soul of an Italian” (2), shared a passion for food with Saro, an Italian by birth and a chef by profession, despite coming from a very different culture. Saro taught Tembi how to appreciate Sicilian produce, showing her how to pick fruit from a Mulberry tree, twist ripe tomatoes off a vine, and peel back the outer layers of a wild fennel bulb to smell its earthy scent. By sprinkling her narrative with lush descriptions of “the sounds of late-summer crickets and cicadas and the scurrying of lizards,” along with “the intoxicating scents of eucalyptus, burning wood, and ripening tomatoes” (2), Tembi uses evocative prose to draw readers into her and Saro’s romantic world while vividly conveying the rich depth of Sicily’s natural beauty. At the start of their relationship, Tembi and Saro pursued their romance against his family’s wishes, an act of quiet courage that demonstrates the true strength of their love. Deliberately employing a cooking metaphor to intensify the descriptions of their history together, Tembi asserts that Saro’s death “put pan to flame” (4), before comparing the loss to “being flung onto jagged rocks at low tide, belly up at high noon on the longest, hottest day of the longest year of [her] life” (4). Tembi’s grief seems boundless, but she clings to the hope that fulling Saro’s wishes can help her and Zoela move forward in Saro’s absence.
