Theresa Picone has to catch herself sometimes when she talks about the most important thing that happens at Picone Fine Food, the store her family has run for 106 years.
Talk. Food. Of course, it’s the food - oh, the food (my fingers are making a butterfly motion at my pursed lips as I write that word; mmm, the foods to be had at Picone’s) - but, oh, the talk. It’s almost as delicious.
They’re almost the same thing - the food, the talk, the wonderful twin businesses of our mouths, savouring tastes that are not even in them, savouring just by saying the words - “Mezzetta basil pesto” or “vegetable chick pea curry with rice” or “locally grown fresh strawberries” - saying those words and feeling the words stimulate the salivary glands in glorious evocations and memories of flavour. The power of words, the power of food.
