The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club

by Marlena de Blasi

  Having chipped at icons early on in our sessions together, we began to allow nostalgia a grander role in what we cooked, honouring traditions but divining them down to more familial ways. One of the women might say, ‘I know that agnello stufato, braised lamb, is made without tomatoes but my grandmother used tomatoes. Let’s use tomatoes.’ And so we used tomatoes with the lamb or beat up a frying batter with white wine rather than beer or left a suckling lamb to braise overnight in nothing but butter and sea salt in a terracotta pot – its lid sealed shut with a paste of flour and water – in the waning heat of the wood oven. We began to expand the Thursday Night repertoire of dishes and stories by retreating even farther back into the women’s individual and collective pasts. I’ve always thought it was Miranda’s brandy-drenched boar that emboldened them.

  As for their resistance to l’Americana, it abides. As I knew it would. That long-ago day at the mill, my standing on a stool to stir three kilos of wine-plumped pasta in that witch’s cauldron, shifted me into their folkloric history if not their unguarded confidence about things culinary. Trust in that camp having never been the animus of my desire to be among them, I am not troubled by the continuing absence of it. It is only Ninuccia’s sometimes acidic expressions of resistance – as much to me as to how I think and work with food – that burn. Pazienza. Patience.

  I have learned to quench all reference to the gastronomy of France, my own first and eternal love. All Gallic regions and their glories are begrudged; carrots, onions and celery sautéed in butter – butter, by now, a pardoned sacrilege – I call soffrito, never breathing, mirepoix. If I crust beef in the fat from crisped pancetta with shallots and wild thyme, braise it in red wine, add the dried zest of an orange and Niçoise olives – the olives contraband along with wines and cheeses, Armagnac and Alsatian framboise carried home from visits over the border into the territory of the profane – I say da medioevo, from the medieval, and they are appeased as they would never be should I have called it what it is: a little stew from Provence.

  Far more than the small French dalliances that I have enacted upon them have they enriched me. From study and research and observation during my journalist life, I’d learned of Umbria’s culinary traditions, mine a scholarly knowledge, only somewhat fortified, tested in my early Orvieto years by listening to Miranda, chopping and stirring for her. Never once in these two years having written a recipe or even a method, the women talk to me, show me as did their mothers and grandmothers to them. Or, in Miranda’s case, as did the ancient and revered cook to the noble family for whom she began to work when she was sixteen. When they battle among themselves about which reading of a dish is the authentic one, I step aside. I follow the consensus.

  The composition of Thursday suppers they have, for all this time, left to me. I write the menus and all of us cook. They have grown to like and expect the filo conduttore approach to all the parts of a supper, the conducting thread technique in which Miranda believed but often failed to execute. I can do it well, string the dishes together – antipasto through dolce – with the barely discernable, subtle, or bold use of a single herb, a spice, a fruit, the dishes building in intensity as wines should, were we ever to drink any but our own local red. This I do while respecting their rules and that pleases them. It has sometimes become their game at table to identify the supper’s filo conduttore.

  And when I cook a dish alone and perpetrate some exotic fillip, they accept it as a specimen from the old tomes. Or pretend to. By now Filiberto has begun to say, at first taste, da medioevo, thus avoiding further comment from the tribe. Still, when I work at the dishes that belong to them, they watch me, if with a guise of nonchalance. No matter how long I stay, I will always be just passing through.

  We grow and forage and barter just as Miranda had always done. We save bits and pieces of one supper and build upon them for the next. Our needs having outgrown the garden outside the rustico – a plot too sheltered by a stand of old oaks – a half hectare of fine black earth we’ve rented from a farmer outside Porano, the village that sits, as the crow flies, two kilometres across a valley from Orvieto. We have planted an orto on this land, which we and our men tend and harvest. And it’s there, right at the edge of the orto, where, sometimes in late spring and summer and into early autumn, we set up for Thursday suppers. Everyone who has an auto carts up to the site one or two tables from the rustico, a bench or some excuse for a chair. And our bread and wine. We shell just-picked peas or marbled red beans or skinned favas directly into a pot of water boiling upon a tripod fire and roast sausages and bulbs of fennel or tiny eggplant or just-dug baby onions or fat bull’s-eye tomatoes over the white-hot ash of another fire, which Filiberto has set in a pit he’d dug and lined with river stones.

  As the light pales to lilac, we begin pouring out one another’s wine, take up our chairs and turn them to the improbable beauty of the town, which has sat upon its great volcanic plateau since Iron Age Villanovan tribes settled there a thousand years before Christ. Barely breathing, no one speaks. Perched on the edge of her chair, inclining herself toward the sun, her hands flat upon her aproned thighs, Miranda closes her eyes. All the better to feel the light. She waits. A low-slung breeze thrums the sheets of metal that protect the woodpile behind us, makes a wind harp of them, and she waits half a beat longer, taunting Apollo, her eyes wide open now, goading him on his way through reddish clouds thin as tulle. And then she whispers, ‘Ecco la torta, behold the cake.’

  Ornamented, bejewelled, its scars and sins blurred, Orvieto at sunset is a glittering wedding cake awaiting a bride, the long train of her silver-mesh dress scraping across the old stones. Gold-rose gleams splash upon the gothic face of the Duomo di Santa Maria Assunta, dazzling the red-roofed palazzi that enfold her, lighting up the meadows flung out over the green silk valley below the town, spangling wild iris tangled in the high grasses and yellow corn strutting across the fields. And the vines, everywhere the vines.

  The torches we’ve pummelled into the earth we light now, take our places at the strange many-clothed, many-levelled table, take one another’s hand, the breeze trembling the flames of the torches, making the wind harp moan. We say, ‘Vivi per sempre. Live forever.’

  Unlike Thursdays in the rustico where the dishes are brought out one by one, here we take our supper as we will, all the pans and bowls within reach upon the table. Helping one another to each thing, one tears at the bread, passes the piece to the one nearest, then passes on the loaf so that the next one can do the same. Tear, pass, pass.

  Tourists who drive by on the road to and from Porano often stop, sometimes to a screeching halt. Tumbling out of their autos, cameras at the ready, they fix the scene as they would a monument, a vista. Standing in a row gaping at what must seem a spectral pageant, they say nothing. Nor, often, do we. When Italians, local or not, stop to look, they shout from their windows, ‘Siete pronti per un macchiaiolo or siete proprio Felliniani. You are ready to be painted. You are Fellini characters.’ If one of Miranda’s truckers passes by, he whistles, takes both hands off the steering wheel, blows kisses to her, yells ‘Amore mio’ into the darkening.

  Stars and moon and the light of the torches rouse discourse at the table by the orto unlike the one under the slouching beams of the rustico. Out here our talk tends to mystery.

  ‘Voi credete nel malocchio? Do you believe in the evil eye?’ This is Ninuccia, her enquiry meant for all of us.

  ‘Not at all,’ Filiberto answers her.

  ‘Nor do I,’ says Iacovo, standing up to take a turn pouring our wine. ‘But it’s power is absolute.’

  ‘It does not exist but it’s power is absolute. Both are true. What is not made of at least two truths?’ Adjusting her braids, Miranda looks around the table. One hunger sated, now she has appetite for provocation.

  ‘Have you been victim of the evil eye?’ This is Paolina asking Miranda.

  But Ninuccia, Pierangelo and Iacovo speak at once and so Miranda does not answer Paolina, waits while the thr
ee tell of instances, undisputed they say, of tragedies caused by the power of the evil eye. Injuries, reverses of fortune, malaise, unexplained deaths, a well gone dry in a biblical rainstorm. Ninuccia is naming upon her fingers the races in which some form of the evil eye is believed, practised, respected: Greeks, Arabs, Spaniards, Jews, Russians, Turks among them. Save Miranda, Paolina, Fernando and I, the others have joined in to agree or dispute. Paolina tries repeatedly to be heard but it’s only when Miranda calls forcefully for santa calma, holy calm, that the others turn to her and wait for her to speak.

  ‘How many of you wear or carry the little horn?’ Paolina asks, pulling a chain out from under her black T-shirt as she speaks. A tiny gold horn hangs from it. Amulets in the shape of a horn are believed to stave off the evil eye.

  Pierangelo takes a five centimetre-long red ceramic horn from his pocket and lays it on the table. Reaching under her sweater into the space between her breasts, Ninuccia pulls out her own red horn and holds it in her open palm. Miranda works her hand to the same place on her own body and holds up a tiny golden ring encircled with six horns. One by one, everyone owns up. Only Fernando and I are wandering through life without protection from the evil eye.

  Everyone laughs at Paolina’s cunning, some saying that carrying the horn is tradition more than belief, others likening it to wearing a crucifix or a blessed medal. The horn and a crucifix together, a double buttress. Paolina insists that some seminary students she once knew carried horns in the pockets of their soutanes. Filiberto says that old Don Piervito still does. Even those insisting that the evil eye does not exist say, ‘Why take a chance?’

  ‘Miranda, have you been the object of malocchio?’ Once again, this is Paolina.

  ‘My darling girl, I don’t think I really know. I carry the horns because my mother did and, I suppose, everyone I’ve ever known did, does. I have never felt menaced by a person or an event. Certainly not by something that felt like stregoneria, witchcraft. Destiny has had her way with me but that’s another thing. Or is it?’

  ‘I think there is only destiny.’ I say this more to myself than to the others.

  ‘Witchcraft is primordial. Witches who harm, witches who heal,’ says Pierangelo, son of the south, son of Cosima.

  ‘Very little call for witches these days, white or black, at least as far as I know,’ Miranda tells him.

  ‘The call is still very much present. Secrecy, covertness more finely honed. How appalled you would be, Miranda …’ Pierangelo goes quiet, picks up his amulet, holds it in his hand for a moment, returns it to his pocket.

  ‘Are we talking about the devil?’ This is the first time that Fernando speaks.

  ‘Does such a force exist?’ Miranda asks, looking up and around the table.

  ‘I don’t think we’ve established that, but …’ Filiberto says before Paolina speaks over him.

  ‘Are we all part devil? I mean, isn’t there some impulse to vendetta lurking in each of us? Even the most innocent sort? If there is an innocent sort …’

  ‘I think we’ve shifted now from vendetta to pure fiendishness. The evil eye and the devil are not related,’ says Fernando.

  ‘So you are all in accord: il diavolo exists,’ Miranda says, the barest hint of question in the last three words.

  ‘Miranda, not even of you could I believe such ingenuousness? Think back to the gods and their various authorities, savage and benign …’ Pierangelo is prepared to proceed but an imperious Miranda flutters the back of her hand in dismissal.

  ‘Mythology.’

  ‘Yes, myth … myth drawn from reality. From the forces of nature but also from human actions witnessed, lived …’ Pierangelo tries again. ‘Maybe those who have more lately practised depravity will someday be relegated to myth. A god called Hitler in league with the one called Lucifer …’ Filiberto is bent on taking us back to less incendiary ground. The others mutter, feud sotto voce until there is quiet again.

  Without deciding I will, I say aloud what I’m thinking. ‘Destiny. Rife with charm and cruelty, if in unequal portions, there is only destiny. It’s another word for God, for fate. Maybe it’s another word for devil. The stones are thrown before we hit the light and what we do with the choices we’re allowed, now and then, might cause destiny to rethrow a stone or two. Apart from that …’

  ‘Chou, sei noiosa stasera, you are annoying this evening,’ Miranda tells me in the tone of a weary mother. ‘Why do you insist on piling every human mystery into destiny’s arms? Try this one. Was Jesus God, incarnate?’

  Sotto voce murmurings begin again.

  ‘I don’t know. I know He existed, that He wandered the earth, spoke of sublime ethics, which must have been the last thoughts on the minds of the Romans and even the Jews, ethics that most of us have yet to pursue. Was he the son of God? I don’t know. How could I know that when I don’t know who is God? Jesus is a figure I can conceive. God is … less substantial in my mind.’

  ‘Less substantial, yes, of course, so why not just add Him to Destiny’s already heavy load?’ Miranda shakes me between her teeth and I lose my way. I look at her but she doesn’t look at me. The wind harp whines.

  ‘Nor do I know who Jesus was,’ she says, the despot in her spent. ‘Maybe he was the son of the Hebrew God who created the universe, the God who has always been and will always be, whether or not He be substantial in our minds. Maybe Jesus was just a lovely Jewish boy, born of a mother prone to visions. Maybe the Nazarene carpenter – humble, submissive – absolved the beautiful Maria of her annunciation story and married her anyway. Loved her baby boy as his own.’ As she says this, she turns to me, gently sets me down, almost unharmed.

  ‘A universal God, his son, the prophets, the teachers, the miracle workers, witches, the devil, all of them newcomers if one thinks to the legions of dieties who managed us in antiquity. A god for every need. A goddess. Far fewer unanswerable questions back then. We knew what was what, who was who, where to go and what to do, what would happen should we stray,’ Paolina says.

  ‘Back to mythology, is it? I thought you’d lived long enough among the Jesuits to …’ Miranda girds for one more round but Paolina is faster.

  ‘Miranda, everything we think we know may well be myth.’

  ‘Già. Indeed.’ Miranda consents.

  ‘I Moirai, the Fates, they were at work even before the gods,’ Ninuccia says and she – along with Paolina – begins to tell the story, the two spelling one another, line after line.

  ‘Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos.’

  ‘To gods and mortals, they give each one a portion of good and evil.’

  ‘Clotho spins the thread of life.’

  ‘Lachesis decides the length of the thread.’

  ‘It’s Atropos who cuts the thread.’

  I love this myth and want a part in its telling but gather the sense to stay silent. Conjuring them as grisly ancients, hearing the story of the goddesses frightened me more than any gory fairytale when I was six or maybe seven; Clotho bending over her wheel spinning life-threads, Lachesis scrutinising a just-birthed baby, awarding it the length of it’s life-thread, and the dread Atropos brandishing scissors like a battle axe. Herself a grisly ancient, it was a Sister called Odile who instructed us in Mythology and it was only after she’d read to us of the goddesses that she passed about a print of three diaphanously-upholstered seraphs, explaining that mythology was story-telling rather than truth, that we need only be good girls, good little convent girls.

  ‘You use the present tense,’ Miranda notes, her gaze shifting from Ninuccia to Paolina. ‘Who’s to say they’re not still at their jobs?’ I ask her.

  ‘Which brings us neatly back to destiny,’ she says, smiling and saying l’Americana just above a whisper. ‘I’m not sure if it’s the smoking torches or the beauty of all this, the goodness of our sitting up here under the stars and beside our pretty beans winding up those stakes. No, I’m not sure if it’s smoke or beauty that’s stinging my eyes, causing me to weep a little and
my heart to break. I’d like to think that if Jesus happened upon us just now, we’d make room for him at the table. He’d rest a while with us, I suspect, he still loving bread and wine as he once did. In any case, shall we drink to the dullness of Atropos’s scissors?’

  •

  It is the last Thursday in this October. Fernando has left me here at the rustico while he heads to San Casciano to hunt galletti, wild mushrooms, with old friends from our life there, Stefania and Marco. It was Stefania who telephoned last evening, predicting a night of soft rain and saying, ‘Let’s hunt wild mushrooms tomorrow morning.’

  Some seasons rare others profuse, i galletti – little hens – are chanterelle in France. I tell Stefania that I won’t be able to come but Fernando promises to be there by seven.

  ‘It will be too late. Come to sleep here and we can begin at sunrise,’ she cajoles, reminds me it’s been weeks since we’ve visited, promises Marco’s luscious galetti sauce for the pici, thick ropes of pasta that he and Grazia, one of their cooks, will roll one by one. I love my friends, I love galetti, I love Marco’s cooking but nothing, no one, seduces me from Thursday Nights.

  Since we have only one auto, Fernando will leave me at the rustico on his way to San Casciano, hours in advance of my usual time to begin cooking.

  ‘They’ll have been in the woods for hours by the time you arrive,’ I tell Fernando as we drive up to the rustico. He’d asked Stefania to wake us at five and, though she did, we chose to stay longer in bed.

  ‘I know where to find them,’ he tells me.

  ‘I know, too. In the bar, sipping grappa and telling galetti stories.’

  ‘More likely they’ll have taken a flask with them. I’ll stay for lunch but I’ll be back here long before supper. With two kilos of galetti for the tribe.’

  ‘Such a greedy forager. Half a kilo would do.’

  I watch him manoeuvre the old BMW back onto the Montefiescone road and almost begin to wave him back. I’ve never been alone in the rustico for more than an hour or so but this morning the tiny woodsmoked refuge is all mine. I open the never-locked door, touch things here and there as I walk through, crouch to shovel ashes from the hearth, push aside the bedsheet curtain, carry the full pail out to the ash barrel behind the rustico. On the work table Miranda has made a still-life of the elements of supper: masses of gnarled rosemary branches; long, leafy arms of wine grapes freshly cut from the vines; a great pyramid of green and black figs layered with their leaves; a sack of red and brown-skinned pears; and paper packets and tiny cloth bags of spices. A haunch of her home-cured prosciutto hangs above the table and a demijohn of new wine sits by the door.