A Moveable Feast

by Lonely Planet

  ‘It would be a pleasure,’ says Giovanna, with a smile that says she means it, and would even be sad if I were still in the country and didn’t attend on Saturday.

  ‘Un gran piacere,’ I say, not only because they are such a charming couple, but because (being a little napoletana) I know a wedding meal in Sardinia – perhaps my most favourite destination among hundreds of favourite food destinations in Italy – will be the ultimate culinary pleasure.

  The day of the wedding, I shop, because the only nice dress I brought is purple, and Beppe’s mother informs me that purple brings bad luck to a wedding. She explains that today we’ll have a light lunch, and a nap.

  In the late afternoon, everyone drives from the beach up to the town of Sennori, high above the sea and overlooking the north-west part of the island, where the gathering cars begin to wind up the streets, honking. The procession stops first at the bride’s house, where relatives serve finger sandwiches, and the small crowd waits for the bride to appear in her huge frothy dress to snap photos and accompany her to the church. Then Beppe asks me to come along to the groom’s house to collect him. At the door, someone hands me a plate and Beppe tells me to smash it hard, or it’ll bring bad fortune. I break it into smithereens, everyone claps, the parents offer us drinks and more snacks, and eventually we take the groom to the church, careening up narrow cobbled roads to the top of the hill.

  The wedding is a traditional Mass, where all the men stand outside the church on the piazza smoking, taking turns scouting the ceremony so they can all rush in at the moment to hear the vows. The couple departs in a hail of confetti, and the guests make their way back, honking, down to a restaurant near the sea, to drink aperitifs while watching a Campari-coloured sunset. Waiters pass around olives and stuzzichini – Sardinian antipasti (‘to pick’) – with seafood, mozzarella and tomatoes, bruschetta, everything irresistible that almost everyone seems to be resisting.

  Antipasti

  - Prosciutto crudo

  - Antipasti di terra alla Sarda (salsiccia, olives, formaggio dolce)

  - Antipasti di mare (insalata di mare, polpetti in agrodolce, cozze gratinate, capesante gratinate)

  We sit down to long rows of tables, maybe 300 guests, with the sea breeze wafting in from the terraces. There’s a sense of giddy anticipation at the table, and I’m excited to be at my first Italian wedding feast.

  The firstness of this meal reminds me of my first proper meal ever in Italy, twenty-five years before, when I was travelling the Mediterranean at age twenty-two, and landed in Florence to visit my cousin Tim. I would have been happy with any meal; I had just arrived from the Sinai desert, where I’d picked bugs out of pita bread to eat with tinned sardines. Previous to that, I’d spent four years eating college food, and had emerged from the suburbs of Colorado, where no-one was a good cook, and food was suspect anyway because it might make you fat. My mother doled out strips of flank steak with green bean casserole made with cream of mushroom soup and warned us against the bread. I took over the cooking in high school, turning out such delicacies as a Weight Watchers’ recipe called ‘Fish Delish’, which involved catfish, canned red cabbage and mandarins in artificially sweetened syrup. Italian food where I come from meant Spaghetti-Os or big plates of soft pasta with bland tomato sauce and dusty parmesan cheese shaken from a green can.

  My cousin Tim, on an academic semester in Italy, was staying with a modest family outside of Florence. I spoke no Italian, but the parents and two teenaged kids smiled when I said things in high school Spanish, and replied in musical chatter, which Tim tried to translate. We sat down at a simple wooden table with short drinking glasses of wine.

  The mother brought out an appetiser dish: fried baby artichokes. I didn’t touch them because not only is fried food fattening, but I’d tried vinegary artichokes from a can: no thank you. My cousin shot me a warning glance. I put an artichoke on my plate and tried a tiny bite. The crispy coating was as delicate and transparent as dragonfly wings. The artichokes tasted like green, like spring, completely tender. I took another bite, and another, finishing everything on my plate. The mama beamed when I said ‘delicioso’, which sounded Italian but was actually Spanish. Then she did something that neither Tim’s parents, WASPy sticklers for table manners, nor my parents, WASPy guilty eaters, would ever have done: she took more artichokes off her plate with her fingers and insisted I eat them too. I did, to her relish, and mine.

  At the wedding, waiters in short black jackets appear from all sides, carrying trays with overflowing plates. Here comes the traditional food from Sardinia’s interior, the cured prosciutto and sausage, salume, that tastes of herbs and chestnuts, that has nothing to do with any deli cuts I’ve ever known, even in Italy. There are platters of olives and the world’s best pecorino cheeses, delicately seasoned meatballs with a hint of sweetness, and some thin carta da musica – ‘music paper’ bread. I am content with this perfect feast before me. Then platters of antipasti arrive as if straight from the ocean: scallops in their shells a gratin, seafood salad, mussels. The table of food is like a map of Sardinia. Everything is here: the woods, the hills, the chestnut trees, the olive groves, the beaches, the stone villages, the wide Sardinian sea.

  Primi

  - Lasagne al ragù

  - Gnocchetti alla Sarda

  - Risotto alla pescatora

  The waiters clear the appetiser plates and I realise that my perfect feast was just a prelude to the meal. It occurs to me that perhaps I’ve overdone it on the antipasti, the best-tasting little morsels in the world, but I’m not worried. I’m no longer someone who is neurotic about eating, as I was when I first went to Italy, someone who thought of food only in terms of ‘good’ or ‘bad’, with good meaning low-calorie – not fresh and prepared with centuries of heart and skill – and bad meaning fattening, like pasta. I’d starve on boring good food and binge on sugary bad food, then suffer heaped servings of guilt. Now, after fifteen years of frequent trips to Italy, I’m a different person, someone who may not have Italian blood, but at least has an Italian stomach.

  This transformation began at that dinner in Florence. After the artichokes came the pasta, penne or rigatoni, who knows, with a simple tomato sauce. I was prepared for a canned Chef Boyardee taste. The pasta came into the room on wings of garlic, riding a waft of basil. The noodles weren’t mushy, but chewy, a stand-up vehicle for the sauce, which was made from those rare tomatoes of summer that you grew in your own garden, the ones that had nothing to do with the square, watery variety in the supermarket; tomatoes of summer that tasted like the sun.

  I savoured my plate of pasta and gave such dreamy looks around the table that everyone laughed. The mama tried to insist I have more, but I didn’t want to spoil the perfection of the little plate I’d eaten. I was completely satisfied. I decided, right then, that I was going to have to forget everything I knew about eating and start over. I was going to have to learn to eat and speak Italian. ‘How do you say delicious?’ I asked my cousin.

  ‘Buono,’ he said.

  ‘Buonissimo!’

  The waiters arrive at the tables, choreographed on time, with several platters of wide, homemade noodles layered in a red sauce with creamy ricotta cheese. I think this is perhaps the perfect primo in the world, until I realise that the waiters are bringing two other dishes to the table. I put down a forkful of lasagne with regret. Can I skip the seafood risotto, with its calamari tendrils, rich saffron seafood broth, and little shellfish I can’t even name? I cannot. Nor can I pass over the Sardinian gnocchetti in its red meat sauce; someone’s nonna spent all day on those, and I’m never going to be here again. Just a bite. Or two.

  Vini

  - Rosso e bianco della casa

  Everyone at the long banquet tables is starting to sigh, pausing to chat, taking a little break to light a cigarette on the terrace. The waiter refills my glass of red wine. I swirl, taking in the rich ruby colour, and sniff its blackberry aroma. It tastes like roses just past their peak, with stil
l-soft petals, and a little bitter aftertaste, like fall is coming. It’s undoubtedly a Cannonau, probably bottled within a mile of here.

  The wine takes me off on another reverie, to a couple of days after my first meal in Florence, when I decided that I would have to learn something about Italian wine along with the food. All I knew then was that there was a wine called Chianti, which came in bottles with little baskets, so I found a bus to the town called Chianti.

  When the bus dropped me off, I followed one of the lanes through the hilly vineyards to a stone winery and knocked on the tall wooden front door. An elderly man answered, and I made a gesture of tasting wine. He looked confused, then smiled and led me to a cool, dark cantina filled with thousands of bottles of dark red wine. I wondered how you knew where to start.

  He pointed at me and asked something that sounded like the date I was born.

  I shrugged, got out a notebook, and wrote down ‘1961’.

  He shuffled into a back room, and came back with a bottle, which he wiped with a soft, clean cloth.

  ‘Millenovecento sessant’uno,’ he said, with relish.

  ‘Buono?’ I said.

  ‘Molto buono.’

  I smiled and pointed at him. He shook his head sadly.

  ‘Sono aceto,’ he said. I understood: I’m vinegar.

  I asked the price of my birthday wine, which was expensive even then. I told him I was a student and would like his cheapest bottle.

  He returned with another bottle, and wiped it with the same care. Then he brought two glasses and seemed to ask if I knew how to drink the wine properly. I shook my head no. With great style and ceremony he opened the bottle, sniffed the cork, and had me sniff it. Then he poured a small amount into the glass, lifted it by the stem to look at the colour in the light, then swirled, and dipped his long nose into the glass to smell.

  I watched, fascinated. It had never occurred to me to do anything with wine but drink it down fast, since all I’d been exposed to was Boone’s Farm strawberry wine. I followed his ritual and accidentally snorted some of the wine when I sniffed, since my nose is short.

  He laughed and poured me a glass, and I gestured that he should pour himself one, too. The wine had so many flavours going on at once, woods and fruits and earth. The man picked up the bottle with his gnarled hands and placed it on a huge stone table with a view of the vineyards, and with few words, him gesturing occasionally to the birds and the sunflowers, that old vinegar man and I drank the whole bottle.

  Secondi

  - Porchetto (maialetto) al mirto

  - Arrosto di vitello con funghi

  Contorni

  - Patate al forno

  - Verdura mista

  The pasta plates have been cleared, and the men are perking up: now the serious eating is about to begin. The meat.

  Beppe’s sister, next to me, tells me we are having a couple of traditional specialities: baby pork in mirto, the island’s herbaceous liqueur, and roast veal with wild mushrooms. The rich aromas reach the table, awakening my already much-sated appetite.

  There was a time when I wouldn’t have dreamt of eating baby animal anything, or meat at all. I was a vegetarian for many of the years I visited Italy. In my late twenties, I went to Italy with my then-boyfriend, an Italian-American named Vince, to visit a woman who’d stayed in our place in San Francisco. The first evening we arrived, Renata fixed dinner: a Florentine steak and a roast. ‘This is to make up for him having to live with a vegetarian,’ she said as Vince tucked into the meat, his eyes glistening.

  I sat there and swore I was content with just the pasta. We went out to eat another night, and I had celery with olive oil for my main course. I refused pancetta, roast rabbit, salty bresaola and carpaccio with capers. I said no to meat in Bologna. I turned down the prosciutto in Norcia. One evening in Fiesole, the chef brought out some homemade sausages as a special treat to the American guest, and I demurred, explaining I was a vegetariana. My Italian friends suddenly acted like they didn’t know me.

  I’d been a vegetarian for a lot of reasons, some having to do with health, and some philosophy, with not a small helping of moral righteousness. But at a certain point I realised that if I was to stop being neurotic about food and try to eat like an Italian – eating fresh food socially, with pleasure – then being a vegetarian just didn’t fit with the plan. Nor did it make much sense to my friends that such an otherwise hedonistic woman had this one ascetic streak. Italians like to eat with people, and it happens that people are omnivores.

  The veal almost melts in my mouth. It is so tender it reminds me of the paper-thin horse I’d tried at Beppe’s house earlier in the week. And the baby pig in mirto I’d have at my last meal. It was worth coming to Sardinia just to eat that piglet.

  The meat dishes come with contorni, side dishes of potatoes and greens. They look wonderfully cooked, but with all the splendid meat dishes, I don’t see the point of the vegetables. I take a bite of greens for old time’s sake.

  - Sorbetto al limone

  I think this is dessert and the meal has finally come to an end. That might not be so bad, because while it has been an enormous pleasure, it has also been an enormous quantity. I’m surprised they’re just having a little dish of sorbet for dessert, though.

  Then come the fish courses.

  - Gamberi alla vernaccia

  - Aragosta alla catalana

  - Pesce misto in bella vista (alla griglia)

  - Monzette in teglia

  No-one cooks fish like Sardinians. Here, as in Sicily, still exist the remnants of mattanza, the great tuna kill, facilitated with a complicated structure of nets designed by the Arabs, and celebrated for weeks on end. Fish is life on these islands.

  For the past few years, as a traveller through Italy, I have steadily gravitated towards the south. That’s partly because the southern parts of Italy – Puglia, Sicily, Sardinia – still seem like Italy, with small stone villages where most people don’t care about speaking English. It’s also because the cuisine is fresher and lighter than in the north, based on olive oil, fresh vegetables – and fish. There’s something so elemental about fish as food: it comes straight out of the ocean, still plentiful in these parts, you grill it, and it’s delicious.

  The platters arrive with lobster cooked ‘alla catalana’ – recalling the Spanish who settled on the north-west part of the island – and shrimps, and quantities of plump, moist, steaming grilled fish. But I am so full that all I can do is stare at the fish, as if in an aquarium. Aren’t they beautiful. Non posso piu. I just can’t eat any more.

  Then the plates of snails arrive, peeking out of their garlic caves, monzette in teglia. My eyes tear up because there is nothing I want more in the world than to eat these little snails. Everyone in my family, everyone I grew up with, would shudder at these slimy creatures. Everyone here will be at another Sardinian wedding in their lives, and will taste more of these monzette. I sigh, to see if there is room in my stomach, in some small corner, for a little snail. There is room only for my desire.

  Frutta e desserts

  - Frutta mista

  - Gelato

  The desserts arrive, then coffee, but everyone has pushed back from the table as the music starts. Everyone wants to move by now, and they crowd the dance floor, from ages sixteen to eighty. We dance and dance around the couples, whose faces are glowing with pleasure, with the love of their huge community of friends and family, supported by the food they’ve made, the sustenance of their culture.

  I dance until three in the morning, when suddenly a switch turns off and I can no longer understand a word of Italian, nor dance another step. Despite years of speaking and eating Italian, I’ve turned into an American up long past her bedtime.

  Beppe accompanies me back to the house before returning to the party, to dance until dawn, and to down an espresso before heading to the beach.

  Foraging with Pee

  JEFFREY ALFORD

  Between a farm in Canada and a farm in Thailand,
Jeffrey Alford spends a lot of time these days with crickets, frogs, green manure and machetes. He is currently at work on a book tentatively titled Eating Leaves: A Cookbook Memoir. Together with Naomi Duguid he has co-authored two cookbooks (Flatbreads and Flavors and Hot Sour Salty Sweet: A Culinary Journey Through South-East Asia), both of which won the James Beard Cookbook of the Year Award. Alford thinks of himself as a writer, a photographer, a cook, but most of all, a traveller.

  The other night I was across the street at Oie’s playing with her one-month-old baby, Off. There were a bunch of us sitting together on a wooden platform under a roof made of simple thatch. We call it ban off, or ‘house of Off’. Oie and her partner, Mai, built it one day a few weeks back, having nothing else to do on a hot late April day here in north-eastern Thailand, in a farm village named Kravan, just a stone’s throw from Cambodia.

  Suddenly from the pitch-black evening Tey, Oie’s younger brother, aged thirteen, emerged with a flashlight attached to his head, the type that miners wear, only not so fancy. He threw a muslin bag down on the platform and then took the light from his head – turning it off in one quick, efficient movement. Still without saying a word, he opened the bag and pulled out a snake, approximately a metre and a half long, now dead. He reached further into the bag and brought out half a dozen large frogs. People around the table were impressed and told him so, but he’d saved the best for last. Out came a large plastic Coke container almost half-filled with crickets, jinglets as they are called here. He’d scored and he knew it.

  Foraging is serious stuff here in Kravan. Pee, my partner, is one of the best in the village, and well known for it. ‘Pee,’ I asked one day, ‘which do you like best, rainy or dry season?’