Mozzarella Most Murderous

by Nancy Fairbanks

  “If you have a chance to go to Naples, you must be sure to see the painting of Medea at the Archaeological Museum. A very powerful depiction, the mother so grim as she decides to slay her children because Jason is to marry another woman; the children, watched over by their old teacher, playing innocently, unaware of what she plans. I have never understood why she killed the children. She should have killed Jason.”

  As my husband is named Jason, I felt somewhat discomfited by her opinion, but not as shocked as I was with what Constanza said next.

  “And the fate she chose for the bride-to-be—you remember? The fiery bridal dress she sent to Jason’s princess?” Constanza laughed. “That was a satisfying episode in the myth.”

  Again I shivered. Constanza, whom I had so liked in her role as a mother, approved of the agonizing death Medea meted out to Jason’s new love. To get my mind off an unpleasant subject, I asked her if she knew what sharp cabbage was, explaining that I’d read Pompeii had been famous for onions and “sharp cabbage.” However, my hostess said that, without hearing the name of this cabbage in Italian, she couldn’t tell me and thought of cabbage as peasant food anyway.

  “I read somewhere that in the Campania garlic and onions are never used in the same dish,” I remarked.

  “Of course not,” she replied. “Why use both? In fact, a little of either is quite enough, and both together entirely too much. One does not want the breath to be offensive, after all. Breath smelling of onion and garlic is so lower class.”

  I had to chuckle. “That’s a very medieval attitude, Constanza. Quite in keeping with your Norman heritage. Leeks, garlic, and onions were considered the food of the lower classes, who could be identified by their breath. There’s a story of the Duke of Ferrara, Ercole d’Este, who was asked by a peasant for knighthood. The duke agreed and ordered the knighting ceremony prepared, but when the peasant’s coat of arms was presented, it was a bulb of garlic on a blue background, and everyone laughed at him.”

  “I’m sure you think that story unkind on the duke’s part,” said Constanza, “but it does show that garlic, historically, was held in low esteem, as was the peasantry. They ate coarse food which would have given the nobility indigestion.”

  “So I read. There’s one story about the introduction of the potato to Italy. It was called a white truffle and no one would eat it until a time of famine in the eighteenth century, and then the peasants took potatoes up. It was suggested that bread could be made from potatoes, which might cause indigestion, but would make peasants happy because indigestion made them feel full. That’s sort of sad, don’t you think?”

  Constanza gave me a stern look. “In a time of famine, which perhaps you do not have in America, a peasant is glad enough to eat and to feel that his stomach is full when his fields have been destroyed by the volcano or by marauding armies.”

  I suppose she was right, but it was the attitude that grated on me. Did she really believe, as some nineteenth century writer had said, that indigestion was good for the poor? Maybe she did. This was the woman who approved of Medea’s solution to Jason’s marriage plans. It made you appreciate divorce laws that imposed civility on the separating couple. And yet Constanza could be so pleasant, and she was obviously a loving mother.

  22

  A Green-Eyed Evening

  Carolyn

  I didn’t even take my shoes off before falling onto my bed after the Pompeii trip. Jason wasn’t there; I had seen him downstairs talking to Sibyl as they headed for the bar. Hank joined them, but I was too tired for anything but a nap. Then, just as I was drifting off, I had a thought that sat me back up on the bed. Gracia Sindacco had told Bianca that Paolina slept with someone other than her boss the night before she left for Sorrento. What if it was Valentino? That would give Constanza two reasons to kill Paolina—because she had slept with both Constanza’s husband and with the man Constanza had chosen for her daughter. I immediately called Bianca’s room and asked her to see if Gracia knew who that man was, Paolina’s last lover. Then I did take off my shoes and went to sleep.

  Jason got back to the room so late that I didn’t have time to do more than wash my face and change my clothes before dinner. He chatted about some interesting toxic idea he and Sibyl had come up with at the bar while I was worrying about my unwashed state after an afternoon of wind, dust, and sun. My husband didn’t say anything to indicate that I needed a bath, but then, he wouldn’t. There was no predinner gathering for drinks and appetizers, maybe because Constanza was watching her glucose levels. Alcohol isn’t good for diabetics, is it? We were to go straight in to dinner, but Bianca pulled me aside to relay her conversation with Gracia.

  “She thinks Paolina slept with a man who came to visit Ruggiero that day. He stopped to talk to her on his way out of the office.”

  “Who was he?” I asked, glancing at my husband, who was now chatting with Sibyl on the way in to dinner.

  “Well, this is the weird part, and I have to say, I think maybe Gracia is a provincial type who hates foreigners.”

  “What did she say?” I asked impatiently.

  “She said it was a foreigner, maybe an American, maybe someone from this meeting. That I should ask my friend Signora Blue if she knew where her professore was that night. I wouldn’t pay any attention, Carolyn,” Bianca added.

  I noticed that she was watching me rather curiously as she reassured me, and Gracia’s remarks did send a shiver up my spine, which had been doing entirely too much shivering today. Still, it was nonsense. Jason had been in Paris with Sibyl, for all the consolation that gave me. I shrugged. “It couldn’t have been an American from the conference. Jason was in Paris, and Hank was in Rome. I wonder if she has something against me. But why would she? I don’t even know the woman.”

  “Ignore it,” Bianca advised again, and we went into the dining room together, where I saw that some people were seated, but not Hank and Ruggiero, who were in intense conversation. Hank? Why was he talking to Ruggiero? I managed to sit beside Hank and asked him.

  “I’m trying to drum up business,” he replied as he took the bottle from the waiter and poured wine for both of us. “Why do they give us only half a glass?” he muttered. “It’s not like they won’t be back every five minutes with refills.”

  “Business with Ricci Chemicals and Pharmaceuticals?”

  “Sure. They have toxic waste. We’re trying to expand into the European market. It’s not like we’re just in New Jersey. We do business all over the U.S. Might as well expand. I’d love to get into Eastern Europe and Russia. They have toxic waste coming out their ears. And China—that would be a gold mine if it weren’t such a pain to do business there.”

  He turned to talk to his wife, and I considered what he’d said. It made sense. More sense than Gracia accusing Jason. We ate our way through another wonderful dinner. How was Constanza getting this fantastic food out of a hotel that served such awful dinners to the other guests? Maybe the breakfast chef was doing her dinners? No, wait. She’d hired a local chef. I knew that. Obviously my nap had been too short.

  Among other things, we had lovely pork cutlets with Marsala and juniper—I do love the sweet, rich taste of Marsala with meat—and an excellent polenta. A form of polenta goes back to Roman times. People in Pompeii had probably eaten it. But an interesting thing I’d read about polenta concerned the eighteenth century. This was after maize from America had become popular in the area and was a staple food of the poor. Because the method for treating the maize killed the vitamins, there were terrible epidemics of pellagra among the people in the countryside and the poverty-stricken urban dwellers in Naples and other cities. I didn’t even know what pellagra was, but I presumed I was in no danger because I’d eaten polenta on one evening.

  At dinner the chemists were quite animated—mostly about chemistry—but those of us from the Pompeii tour were half asleep. Wouldn’t you know? Ruggiero announced dancing after dinner and led us into a small ballroom with a musical foursome on a little stage.
I wanted to groan. As soon as I got up from the table, I discovered that all my leg and back muscles were aflame. Of course I understood the progression: first climbing around rocks, then oxygen euphoria, then horrible pain. There were chairs in the ballroom, and I longed to commandeer one, but I had questions to ask.

  First, I cornered Ruggiero and said I understood Constanza had been in Sorrento the night before the conference to help Paolina with the organization, adding that we had had such a lovely time together today that I now wished I could have had dinner with her that night. Her husband said he didn’t think she’d been in Sorrento; she’d never offered to help Paolina before, but he and his wife hadn’t come to Sorrento together the next day. Maybe she’d been off shopping. His wife was an ardent shopper.

  No alibi for Constanza. Then I limped over to her and said that the conference was so well organized that her husband must have come ahead to see to things himself. She stared at me with raised eyebrows. “The president of the company does not come ahead to organize the conference, my dear Carolyn,” she replied at last. “However, being a professor’s wife, you might not know that. I suppose if your husband were organizing a conference, he might well have to come ahead to see to the details. He probably doesn’t have people to do it for him.”

  Well, we were back to the old snobbish Constanza, and I still didn’t know where her husband had been the night of Paolina’s murder, or in fact, where either Ricci had been. And that, I felt, was all the detecting I could handle in my present condition, so I sat down. Eliza plopped herself right down beside me. She was wearing a crepe dress that matched her hair—taupe. “I was so curious about that dish you ordered at noon. Isn’t the name rather—er—salacious?”

  Goodness she looked interested, as if she expected me to tell her a dirty pasta story. “Well, puttanesca does refer to women in the sex trade.”

  “Hmm.” She nodded knowingly. “How very obscene. A perfect lunch choice after a visit to Pompeii. The guide did say it was the site of the famous Roman orgies.”

  I’d always wondered exactly what sound a titter made; Eliza was tittering, and I couldn’t resist teasing her a bit. “Oh, Romans were quite straight-laced compared to earlier inhabitants of the Campania—the Oscans and the Samnites. Romans considered their drama so disgusting that the word obscene grew from the name of the tribe—Oscan.”

  “Really? Whatever could their plays have been about? Sex, I suppose, which explains why pasta puttanesca is so spicy.”

  “Actually, it’s the red pepper flakes,” I replied.

  “Pepper was used for a long time to disguise the flavor of spoiled food.” Eliza nodded knowledgeably. “My mother always said that.”

  “Oh, I’m not sure of that. It became popular around the first century AD and was used in everything—even wine. And desserts. I suppose the wine wasn’t all that good in Roman times, but I doubt that the desserts were spoiled. And people in the Middle Ages believed that spices helped to dissolve food in the stomach. They sprinkled spices on everything as a digestive.”

  “Really?” Eliza stared at me, puzzled, and then suggested that I might like to try reading books on botany, which were so very interesting.

  After mentioning a few fascinating botanical facts to prove her point, she popped off her chair and left to spread her love of plant life elsewhere. I relaxed and watched the action. Ruggiero was dancing and flirting with Sibyl, of all people. She was taller than he. I studied Constanza surreptitiously to see if she cared, but she didn’t seem to notice. Maybe she was as tired as I was. Then I watched Jason to see if he was jealous. He wasn’t even looking at Sibyl; he was talking to Adrien Guillot, a conversation that had the look of chemistry. I could usually tell.

  Constanza, when I looked again, was glaring at Valentino and Violetta, who were laughing together. Was she jealous on her daughter’s behalf? Did her daughter know that Constanza had Valentino picked out as a prospective son-in-law? Then, as Ruggiero danced by, I heard him bragging to Sibyl about how fit he was. That meant, if true, that he would have had the strength to throw his unfaithful mistress over the waterfall, he or his wife, who had picked up Bianca.

  About then Hank sat down beside me. Too bad. I wanted to watch, not talk.

  “Ricci’s a good dancer,” Hank observed.

  “So is Sibyl,” I responded politely, although actually she was more enthusiastic than graceful, in my opinion, but maybe I was just jealous since my husband seemed to like her so much. At least he wasn’t dancing with her. Had they danced in Paris?

  “She’s a jewel,” he agreed. “I can see why Ricci’s putting the moves on her, but he doesn’t have a chance. Neither does your husband, in case you’re worried about that.”

  Well, that was tactless, I thought, embarrassed that Hank had noticed my uneasiness about Jason and Sibyl. “That’s very reassuring,” I said dryly, and started looking for someone else to talk to.

  “The fact is that Sibyl knows she’s not likely to find a lover better than me.” He grinned at me and added without the least appearance of modesty, “Not to blow my own horn, but I do know my way around a woman’s body.”

  The man was drunk, I realized, though it didn’t excuse the poor taste of his remarks.

  “So how about Capri tomorrow, Carolyn? Are you up for it? Us accompanying persons have to stick together.”

  Fortunately Jason arrived and suggested that we call it a night. I was only too happy to agree, even if he did grumble all the way to the room about the deficiencies of the meeting and all the undercurrents between the participants. I was surprised that he’d noticed, but he mentioned Constanza’s reaction to the flirtation between Lorenzo’s mother-in-law and Valentino Santoro. “What’s that about?” he muttered. “Violetta must be twice his age. And he’s supposed to be mourning his lost but unrequited love, what’s-her-name.”

  “Paolina,” I replied, and headed straight for the bathroom. I was going to soak in a hot tub until my muscles stopped aching, and then I might even sleep through breakfast—or not. That fennel bread was so good. And there was the possibility that they’d have the shell pastry with the orange-vanilla filling again. I wouldn’t want to miss that, even if I couldn’t pronounce it.

  Pork and other meats didn’t find an important place on the Southern Italian menu until the Roman Empire decayed and the Barbarians from the north invaded, bringing with them their penchant for hunting and for raising livestock, their taste for butter and lard, and all the problems a meat menu caused Christians, who were expected to observe “lean” days, weeks, and months. Although not an acceptable Lenten dish, this pork recipe is tasty and relatively quick to fix.

  Pork with Marsala Wine and Juniper

  • Pour hot water to cover 1 ounce dried cepes or porcini mushrooms. Let stand.

  • Brush 1 teaspoon of balsamic vinegar on 4 pork cutlets and sprinkle with salt and pepper.

  • Cook 10 cloves garlic in boiling water for 10 minutes until soft. Drain and set aside.

  • Melt 1 tablespoon butter in a large frying pan. Cook pork quickly until browned on one side. Turn and cook another minute.

  • Add 3 tablespoons Marsala wine, several rosemary sprigs, mushrooms, 4 tablespoons mushroom juices, garlic cloves, 10 juniper berries, and 1 teaspoon balsamic vinegar. Simmer gently for 3 minutes or until pork is cooked through. Season with salt and pepper.

  • Serve with polenta or noodles and a green vegetable. Broccoli, for instance, is so well loved in the Campania, that a young man leaving Naples for foreign parts is reported to have bid a poetic and tragic farewell to broccoli.

  Carolyn Blue,

  “Have Fork, Will Travel,”

  Iowa City Call-News

  Wednesday in Sorrento

  The Pasta Epidemic

  You probably think Marco Polo brought pasta to Italy from China. I thought that from childhood, but evidently it isn’t so. The Romans had a flour and water dough called lagana, which was flattened out, cut into strips, and then cooked with sauce i
n an oven. The Etruscans, too, had pasta from the fourth century BC. Some scholars of the subject think pasta came from Persia and was spread by the Arabs to China, the Middle East, and Europe. The Arabs were using pasta dried in the sun (which could be carried around in the desert without spoiling) by the ninth century, and dried pasta was being made in Sicily in the twelfth century in such quantities that it could be shipped to other cities. By the Middle Ages in Italy pasta was being made in different shapes, but instead of being baked, as it had been by the Romans, or cooked in boiling water al dente as we do now, it was cooked for several hours and flavored with cheese and spices, a recipe that held pride of place in Italy until the 1700s, when tomato sauce was introduced. However, that didn’t become popular until the early 1800s.

  For many centuries pasta was considered an expensive dish because it cost so much more than bread. When an Italian peasant family, used to eating bread, soup, and vegetables with an occasional bit of meat, ate pasta, it was considered a feast. Then in the 1600s various production innovations lowered the cost, and the problems of feeding large city populations brought it onto the table of the urban poor. Neapolitans were being called macaroni eaters by the 1700s, and pasta could be seen flapping on drying racks in the city, where it was also manufactured and exported.

  And how did pasta become so popular in America and everywhere else? It immigrated with Italian immigrants, particularly immigrants from Southern Italy, where war, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, plague, famine, and endemic poverty encouraged hundreds of thousands to leave the region for greener shores, taking their love of pasta with them.

  Bucatini alla Caruso

  And one shouldn’t discount Enrico Caruso, famous tenor, pasta lover, chef. In the early twentieth century when all America loved his beautiful tenor voice, he was in the habit of dashing into Brooklyn restaurants with his adoring followers in tow and cooking pasta—bucatini alla Caruso. He sautéed garlic in olive oil, added chopped fresh tomatoes, sprinkled on basil, parsley, and red chili flakes to taste, mixed in the bucatini, and garnished the whole with fried zucchini disks.