In Maremma

by David Leavitt

  With Pina and her husband, Giampaolo, there was none of this. We all took to each other from the beginning. If on busy nights they had trouble finding a babysitter to take care of Martino, their ten-year-old son, and Margherita, their three-year-old daughter, the children would have dinner at our table. If we had been working hard in the garden in the cold months, Pina would make polenta with ragú and little rolls of veal filled with asparagus and mozzarella specially for us.

  Pina was lean and sexy: usually she wore miniskirts and silk stockings, a crisp white coat, and, to finish off the ensemble, a towering and equally crisp chef’s toque. Except in August, and maybe also the end of July and the beginning of September, the restaurant was open only from lunch on Friday through dinner on Sunday. Like many Italians, Giampaolo owned a quantity of real estate (including two apartments with a view of the dome of St. Peter’s), which was how they could afford to keep Il Mulino open only on weekends.

  Giampaolo and Pina, Il Mulino (Photo by MM)

  On Wednesdays, Pina and Giampaolo drove all over the Maremma to find the best and freshest provisions—marzoli, a local truffle so called because it has its season in March, or vegetables from a secret market near the coast that operated like a speakeasy: if you knew who to say had sent you, you would be admitted to a room full of produce of incomparable savor—including such rarities, in Italy, as tomatillos, Chinese watermelons, yellow tomatoes, and sweet white corn to be eaten on the cob. Not far from this place was a farm that sold nectarines with carne bianca (white flesh), white eggplants that looked like mozzarella cheeses, sheep’s milk yogurt flavored with lemon or apricot or wild berries, tiny and pungent fresh goat’s milk cheeses decorated with peppercorns or juniper berries, and aged pecorino. Another farm, this one organic and run by Germans, sold a passata di pomodoro so flavorful you could eat it out of the jar as tomato soup. In June, these expeditions often concluded with lunch—invariably, spaghetti with chopped razor clams and wild fennel, then an espresso—at a beachside restaurant on the poorer side of the Monte Argentario. Pina was shrewd enough to keep a few secrets to herself, however. We never learned where she got her carrots, her lemons, her guinea fowls, or her lamb.

  There was no written menu at Il Mulino. Instead Pina came to the table and described what she had on offer, and never troubled to write anything down. Sometimes she actually brought out a tray of raw meat to show you how beautifully marbled it was, how perfectly aged. And what choice! Among the first courses (tailored to the season), herb-laced pappardelle with a white rabbit ragú (the ragú was white, not the rabbit), or bucatini in a tomato sauce slow-cooked with lamb, the meat crumbling off the bone, or gnocchi made with a combination of potato and beetroot and dressed with a pumpkin sauce, or plain potato gnocchi served with guttus, a local version of gorgonzola made with sheep’s milk. Or what about spaghetti with those March truffles, or tortelli filled with fresh ricotta and borage? And then there were the minestre (soups): scottiglia (a broth of guinea fowl and pork poured over a subtle slice of olive oil—drenched toast), an ever-consoling pasta e ceci, or a virtuosic aqua cotta. And then, after that, there were the secondi to consider . . .

  There were many regulars: a couple from a few doors down who jarred the most delicious honey; a lesbian math professor from Rome who brought both her companion and her dog; a man who, having worked in a Rome bank for thirty-three years and lost his wife—she developed a psychosis after giving birth to a stillborn child, was institutionalized and, after twenty-one years, committed suicide—found India, grew his hair long, and chanted mantras while he ate.

  One day when we were having lunch there, a thrilling number of powerful black cars pulled up. One of them held a Milan judge prominent in the anticorrup-tion investigations called Mani Pulite (Clean Hands), the others his bodyguards. Before the judge entered, the bodyguards searched the dining room, the kitchen, and the storage rooms, located every means of ingress and egress, then posted soldiers bearing machine guns at each of them. The judge enjoyed his lunch without incident.

  The thing about Pina was this: one warmed to her either at once or not at all. Over the years we learned to tell which of the newcomers would return and which would not. The ones who would not were those who found themselves at a loss for just what to do in a place where they were not specially fussed over simply because they had deigned to bring their custom. And so they’d get up and down from their tables. They’d take restaurant guides from the top of the enormous wooden chest and read them through until the food arrived. They’d pace in front of the restaurant, where sometimes Martino played with Margherita or rode his bicycle. We knew that tomorrow night these people would eat at one of the more famous restaurants in Saturnia or Montemerano, where they would be given a complimentary flute of champagne and be addressed as “lei.”

  Pina and Giampaolo were orphaned when they were teenagers, which might have been why they knew how to make one feel that one belonged somewhere. Even their dog, Becky, was profoundly maternal, if in Giampaolo’s words “un po’ mignotta” (“a girl of easy virtue”). Once, when she had had an abortion, Becky was discovered in the piazza giving milk to a litter of orphaned kittens. Everyone gathered round. Tourists took pictures. Such a sight had never before been seen in Semproniano.

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  THE CHALLENGE OF writing about acqua cotta, the Maremma’s signature dish, is the same as the challenge of cooking it: how to make something out of next to nothing. In those years we witnessed the gentrification of some of the poorest Tuscan foods, with the result that soups such as panzanella and pappa al pomodoro and ribollita, once eaten only by farmers, fetched thirty dollars a bowl in New York restaurants. And acqua cotta—“cooked water”—is the poorest of them all.

  According to Mauro, at the heart of every acqua cotta was the phrase “se c’era... ” If there was a carrot, you’d put it in. If there was a little ricotta, you’d put it in. The basic ingredients were humble: onion, celery leaves, olive oil, and old unsalted Tuscan bread. (These are just about the only ingredients upon which recipes for acqua cotta agree.) To this soup, however, most cooks add a little tomato; perhaps sprinkle some grated pecorino cheese on the bread. Grander ingredients—bietola (Swiss chard), a few porcini mushrooms, or slices of sweet red peppers; basil, sage, parsley, garlic, peperoncino—are facoltativo (optional), as is using broth instead of water. Finally—but this is very rare; indeed, one might almost call it putting on airs—some cooks throw in a few pieces of sausage.

  Mauro, the Ironmonger in Semproniano (from Samprugnano 1900—1963: Storie e Figure)

  Despite occasional efforts at codification, acqua cotta remained, in our part of Tuscany, the subject of endless, if good-hearted, argument—much as in Amatrice people argued about whether a true Amatriciana was made with or without white wine, with bucatini or spaghetti. Thus while waiting in line at the butcher shop one morning, our request of the five women present for the “authentic” recipe for acqua cotta led to our being given five different “authentic” recipes. Sauro’s sister, the cook at the old-folks’ home in Semproniano, prepared a bizarre version of this soup that, baked in a Teflon dish, resembled more than anything a Thanksgiving dressing. (In fact, you had to eat her acqua cotta with a fork, which was plain wrong.) The extremely refined version that Pina made at her restaurant showed fidelity to the spirit rather than the letter of the soup, for she omitted the most essential ingredients, onion and celery, in favor of a nest of spinach laid in the broth and topped with a poached quail egg. According to Pina, acqua cotta was eaten all over Central Italy. In her authoritative collection of regional Italian recipes, on the other hand, Anna Gosetti della Salda firmly identifies Grosseto as the birthplace of acqua cotta. Her recipe is essentially one for mushroom soup. Ada Boni’s version of acqua cotta—which she gives as one word, acquacotta—is essentially one for bell pepper soup.

  In the end, like its Emilian cousin, the famed ragú that in Bologna is served over tagliatelle, acqua cotta exists more as an ideal than a rigid
recipe, as essential a piece of Maremman folklore as the butteri. And yet ... se c’era ... How far we’d come from Mauro’s poor childhood, from those days when there wasn’t enough flour, and pasta had to be made from ground chestnuts!

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  DURING OUR FIRST months in Semproniano, we were often asked if we were German. This was an understandable mistake: most of the foreigners who settled in this part of Italy were German. In reply, we would explain that we were Americans, at which point, inevitably, we would be asked if we came from ... where? It sounded like airshay. The town in question was Hershey, Pennsylvania, to which vast numbers of Sempronianini (among other Maremmani) had emigrated. Alfred Pel-ligrini: “After visiting Pitigliano, the hometown of their grandparents, friends from Hershey ... commented, ‘the only difference between visiting the Italian section of the Hershey cemetery and visiting the cemetery in Pitigliano was that we couldn’t smell the aroma of chocolate in Pitigliano.’ The names on the headstones were the same in both towns.”

  That neither of us had ever been to Hershey surprised some of the older residents of Semproniano, for whom Hershey was “America.” At first the Sempronianini had gone to work in the city’s quarries; later, these immigrants built the chocolate factory that would employ more immigrants. Soon Hershey became known in Tuscany as the Perugia of America. And the Hershey connection persisted. Rosaria recalled that her grand-mother, who worked at the chocolate factory, used to return every few years bearing an umbrella filled with Hershey’s Kisses. It was the shape of the sweet that impressed Rosaria when she was a girl, not the taste; at Signora Idia’s gelateria, after all, you could get chocolate ice cream made with unpasteurized sheep’s milk. “So rich! Of course you can’t make it now. The law.” As a doctor, she had to approve of such regulations—and yet: “You should have tasted it. So cremoso. Really, you haven’t tasted ice cream at all until you’ve tasted ice cream made from unpasteurized sheep’s milk.”

  Sempronianino in Hershey, Pennsylvania

  (from Samprugnano 1900—1963: Storie e Figure)

  One year Alfred Pellegrini, the son of Maremman immigrants and the owner of Alfred’s Victorian Restaurant in Middletown, Pennsylvania, led a tour of Hersheyites to Semproniano. They took cooking lessons at the Locanda la Pieve and ate every night at a different restaurant. The tour concluded with a dinner at Pina’s, which we witnessed from our usual table by the fireplace. As each course was brought to the table, Pina would describe it to Mr. Pellegrini, who would then translate, for although most of their parents and grandparents came from Tuscany, few of them spoke Italian.

  When the acqua cotta arrived, Mr. Pellegrini entered into a reverie about his grandmother, who had become angry at him when he had written in his cookbook that as a child he had always hated acqua cotta. The memory of his grandmother evidently touched Mr. Pellegrini deeply, for as he spoke of her his eyes grew moist. Pina, meanwhile, not realizing that his speech had long since moved beyond matters of gastronomy, kept interrupting to remind him that the spinach was organic.

  Another incident stays with us. Although Giampaolo’s father was the concertmaster of one of the orchestras of RAI (Radio Audizioni Italiane), his and Pina’s own musical tastes ran to jazz and sometimes reggae. After a couple of hours of Bud Powell, the people from Hershey indicated that they wanted Italian music for their last night. “Dean Martin!” an older member of the group shouted hopefully, which led Giampaolo to pull out the olive crate in which he kept his cassettes. With assistance from a few of the women, he sifted through them.

  “Any Caruso?”

  “‘O Sole Mio’?”

  “How about ‘That’s Amore’?”

  “Who’s Bob Marley?” one of the women asked, picking up a cassette.

  “A rap singer,” answered her friend, who was wearing a brown cloche.

  Giampaolo continued to sift. Maurizio Pollini playing the Chopin études, Victor de Sabata, Buddy Holly . . . It turned out that he did not own a single tape of Italian songs.

  That same weekend—it was the beginning of porcini mushroom season—we went back to Il Mulino for Sunday lunch. At a nearby table sat four American men who, as it turned out, were also from Hershey, although not affiliated with the group from two nights before. After we helped translate Pina’s recitation of her menu, we got to talking with them: they were on a tour of Italy in search of relatives. Only after lunch was over did we exchange names. “Scott Reese;” one of them said, holding out his hand.

  “Reese as in the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup?” we queried.

  His grandfather had invented it.

  Later, we shared the story with various friends in Semproniano—Aldo and Gianni, Pina and Giampaolo—and were surprised at how little it impressed them. For example, although Aldo stocked Kit Kat bars and M&M’s, he had never heard of the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. In any case, as we soon learned—and notwithstanding their acute devotion to Nutella, that chocolate and hazelnut paste that European children spread on their breakfast toast—most Italians disdain peanut butter on the grounds that it is bad for the liver. (Just as Americans are obsessed with their hearts, Italians worry endlessly about their livers.) Even more inconceivable, to our friends, was the idea of peanut butter as a sweet, to be combined with chocolate!

  A few weeks later, when we returned from a trip to America, we brought a box of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups with us. “Il signore who ate here, the one called Reese? This is what his nonno invented,” we told Pina, who eagerly sampled one. “Well?” we asked.

  “Discreta . . . ma non mi stupisce” (“Not bad . . . but nothing to write home about”).

  This meant we got to keep the rest for ourselves.

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  ASTUBBORN LONGING for familiar things—even things at which, back home, one turned up one’s nose—became, with the passage of years, a distinguishing feature of expatriate life.

  During DL’s twelfth summer, he and his mother discovered from a cooking show called The Romagno-lis’ Table that pasta could be served with a sauce that wasn’t red. The recipe in question was for spaghetti alla carbonara, and the next evening, with a sense of adventure, they prepared some. Of course they had to approximate: instead of pancetta or guanciale, it was salt pork, Creamette spaghetti, and “Parmesan cheese” from a green cardboard shaker. The olive oil was a pallid yellow and came from Spain—or was it Greece? Even so, as they ate that first carbonara, it seemed to them for an instant that they could hear the Tiber flowing outside their kitchen window.

  When we first arrived in Italy, naturally, we disdained anything that tasted too much of America, exulting instead in the Italian-ness of the things we found at the grocery store: peppery olive oil, Parma ham, wheels of pecorino cheese that the salumiere cut with a wire. Though rarities in America at that time, in Italy such foods were ordinary; you could take them for granted.

  In those early days every trip to the grocery store, especially a stroll down the pasta aisle, sent us into a rapture. We studied the classics of Italian cooking—Ada Boni and Pellegrino Artusi—in the hope of learning how to make every dish we prepared rigorously authentic. Italian cooking, a poet friend had told us, requires above all obedience to the rules; we offered out obedience and as a result became proficient cooks. Soon we could make ragú alla bolognese the way the Bolognese do, and arista di maiale the way the Tuscans do, and spaghetti alla carbonara the way the Romans do (as opposed to the way DL’s mother had had to do). Soon wonderful food became something we felt we could count on (a very Italian attitude). And then, one morning, about three years later, we woke up wanting . . . peanut butter. So we went out and bought some (a Dutch brand) and for a few days ate little else besides peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for lunch.

  In this way it began. We questioned other Americans and discovered that they, too, often fell prey to culinary nostalgia. On visits home we lorded our superior knowledge of Italian cooking over our friends and families, even corrected their errors. (“No, you never put Parmesan cheese on
mushrooms!”) In Italy, we stole shamefacedly into the McDonald’s on Piazza di Spagna to savor a Big Mac in an invisible corner, and as often as not ran in to the director of the American Academy on the way out.

  Memory, of course, was the real culprit. As Proust knew, flavor awakens the past, which is why the longing for certain foods so often encodes a more complex longing: for remote places, for childhood, even for the childhood longing for remote places. Longing for longing may seem like a snake eating its tail—and yet it was exactly the vague yearning for a Europe we had never seen that the flavor of Stouffer’s frozen Turkey Tetrazzini had called up in us when we were children, and that we now found ourselves wanting to recapture: that World Book daydream of some ur-Italian city in which gondolas sailed down a river lined with Tuscan castles, the Tower of Pisa bowed before the bay of Naples, and the Colosseum winked in the sunny distance.

  When you live abroad, the ordinary and the mysterious trade places. What from a distance seem exotic, the very things in the pursuit of which you left in the first place lose their charm, while the alchemy of time and distance reveals in commonplace things—the things you took for granted—a surprising loveliness. This may be the secret joy and sorrow of expatriate life: by virtue of living in a foreign land, you throw not merely your history but your identity into relief. The past renders an unsuspected poetry. To prepare the foods of childhood becomes, in a very real sense, a brief trip home.

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