My culinary birth occurred on a hot July night in 1969 in a restaurant on a piazza in Venice. I was a sullen adolescent on a family trip to Europe, and I had spent the previous two weeks eating Scottish oatcakes of fatal dryness and epic, incomprehensible English breakfasts. I was tired of cathedrals and museums and tired of my brother throwing up in our rental car. Normally, my brother and sister and I ate an early, indifferent dinner, then my parents went out to a mysteriously adult restaurant by themselves while we hung out at the hotel. But when we got to Venice, I exercised my prerogative as the eldest and insisted on going with them.

The restaurant was outdoors, but on the windward side there was a wall of billowing white fabric that extended upward into an intimate ceiling. It faced out to couples strolling on the piazza. Inside, there were hundreds of candles flickering and tables filled with glamorous Venetians, smoking, drinking wine, eating, flirting. I stared at the dazzling dark-haired women in black dresses who were tossing their heads back in laughter or seductively steadying the hand that held the lighter for their cigarette. I was a gawky, freckled misanthrope in this Fellini landscape, and yet I knew, with the visceral certainty of a sucker punch, that I was home. This was the adult world that I somehow, improbably, carried inside my provincial heart.

I ordered filet mignon and a salad and spaghetti. The filet was brilliant and the salad fine, but it was the spaghetti that made the most lasting impression. A man in a black tuxedo stood by a cart near the centre of the restaurant. On the cart was a copper pot over a flame, and he threw in olive oil, garlic, chopped tomatoes, fresh basil, and salt and pepper in a suave, careless Italian way. I was transfixed as he stirred it briefly, then mixed it with cooked pasta. He grated some parmigiano-reggiano and there it was. My parents allowed me a glass of red wine, a new development. I ate the spaghetti in two minutes. It wasn’t like the spaghetti at home, not like my mother’s, or like the stuff at Gondola Pizza, where we occasionally went. I was growing about an inch a week and was constantly hungry. This spaghetti satisfied me in an elemental way, taking the edge off my monstrous hunger, and it satisfied me in some other way I couldn’t quite describe.

That dinner was a dividing line. I realized there was another culinary world out there, away from Swanson’s frozen turkey, Kraft Dinner and Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, beyond the Chinese-Canadian takeout on the corner. It also made me realize that there was another life out there. And the two were linked, a thought that had a revolutionary freshness for a 15-year-old. After dinner, I had an espresso, another first, and was awake for the next five hours, replaying detailed Italian fantasies in my head (I would move to Italy, write a novel, marry an enigmatic dark-haired actress and eat at that same restaurant every night).

The adult world, as it turns out, contains fewer dark-haired women tossing their heads back in laughter than I had been led to believe. It is further complicated by children, mortgages, ball hockey schedules, and complex dishes that require shopping at multiple specialty stores, much preparation and exquisite timing. And that’s why I find myself retreating to the primal comfort of the simple tomato sauce. The appeal of the dish is its simplicity. But like most simple things, it comes with a certain effort.