The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club

by Marlena de Blasi

  Only Paolina and I will be cooking for tonight, others still involved in some stage of the vendemmia, the harvesting of the grapes. Fernando and I have been cutting grapes these last six mornings with Ninuccia and Pierangelo and their small army of workers, while Miranda and neighbouring farm wives went about the task of feeding all of us. Miranda will be there with them again today. Perhaps Gilda will decide to join Paolina and I. One never knows about Gilda.

  I don’t expect Paolina until eleven or so. I look about for something to do, take up cloths and set about cleaning the already clean tables and benches and chairs. A futile task, I sweep the floor, still a mosaic of broken, half-sunken terracotta tiles, scraps of linoleum, lengths of wood fitted in here and there like puzzle pieces. That famous truckload of antique tiles with which Miranda’s nephews were, two years ago, to have laid a new floor in the rustico, they sold at a grandiose price to an outlander whose villa they were restructuring. Thanks to the nephews, though, the beams slouch less and in places where the stones of the walls had shifted, they’ve stuccoed, and washed the patches with a sponge in a tint more rose than apricot.

  Miranda conceded to a length of ruined water-green brocade, which Paolina, Gilda and I found on the Neopolitan’s used-clothing table in the market one Saturday. Gilda clutched the stuff, burnt to crumbling rags along its hem, against her chest: ‘An enraged man must have heaved a lit candelabra across the room, smashing the window, setting afire the curtains while a woman screamed and wept. We have to have this.’

  When Paolina asked its price, the Neopolitan gently took it from Gilda, folded it carefully as he would the shroud of Turin. ‘I think you must be right. About the man and the candelabra and the woman. I’m sure of it,’ he told her, handing it to her with his compliments.

  An Umbrian merchant would never have fallen so utterly for Gilda’s figment. Neopolitans, as intrinsically susceptible to romance as they are to villainy, might well have lifted her purse with one hand while offering the brocade with the other. The piece falls now from the iron hook where we once hung herbs to dry, and is draped over the top and down one side of the single window, as though it’s always been there.

  I feel at odds with this uncommon, undesigned time. I walk about, look again at the work table, adjust things that don’t need adjusting. I go outside, open the bread oven, give it a good sweeping, take logs from Iacovo’s wood pile, place them in a square, add kindling on top, another layer of wood, more kindling, a third layer of wood, more kindling in the centre. I light a faggot of twigs and throw them, flaming, into the centre of the square. A single match does it. No bellows, no fanning. I pull the iron door almost closed, and go back inside to get the woodstove started. A surprise for Paolina, I will make a small batch of tortucce for our lunch. No room on the work table, I take up the oilcloth on the supper table, scoop out flour straight onto the scrubbed wood, build up the sides to make a well, pour in yeast softened in warmed white wine, sea salt, a piece of butter from my private stash in the cheese hut, a few drops of oil, crushed fennel seeds. The mass feels good under my hands and I knead it with a rhythmic thud. Waves slapping on sand. Miranda says kneading bread is like a Gregorian chant, both taking on the cadence of the kneader’s or chanter’s heartbeat. I desire to believe this, so I do. Into a bowl, covered with a kitchen towel, I set the dough on a chair pulled close to the warming stove. I pour oil into a pot but won’t begin to warm it until Paolina is here.

  I go out to the sheepfold wall where I’ve left my sack, pull out a hard folder papered in a scene from Benozzo Gozzoli, take it back inside and, onto the place I scrubbed after mixing the dough, I dump out sundry sizes and types of paper held together in a corner by the two-tears-and-a-fold method. I will work. The book about Tuscany already published, the finished narrative recounting our early days in Orvieto well into the production process, it’s a Sicilian story that I shall work on now, the events of three weeks spent in the mountains there during the first summer of our marriage while we were still living in Venice. Scarce useful material in the fat pile, words and half sentences scribbled mostly on bar napkins and ripped-off edges of the thick brown paper of caffè-table covers and fancy pastry-box wrappings. Never having ceased to relive them, I hardly need notes to restore me to those days. To those people. For these past twelve years since that summer, I’ve never stopped writing the story, jealously guarding it in its own separate cache in my mind, all the while working on other books. I pick up the pieces, stuff them back into the folder, knowing that all I really need now is time to let the story write itself. How strange to think that what has been part of me for so long – faces and voices and words, neroli riding every breeze, the crisp just-fried shell of a cannolo under my teeth, the cut of one woman’s eyes, the scent of lavender in still-wet hair, the stomp of horses’ hooves below my window at sunrise – all of it to become pages in a book. We all die a little when something finishes. It’s how we use up our time. How we use up the thread that Lachesis bequeathes us. Beautiful or painful, we die a little from every ending.

  I place two chairs face to face in front of the spent hearth, sit, stretch my legs out straight as the space will allow. This won’t do. There’s just enough wood in the hearth basket to make a fire. My third fire of the morning, I feel a primeval rush watching the flames take hold and crackle with the first match. I look at my strong, small hands, which are older than I am, my nails hard and short and filed square. How many hundreds of years ago was it? The era of my silk-wrapped California nails. I make a pillow of my jacket, lie on the least rugged space of the floor and I sleep.

  An auto careening off the Montefiescone road onto the gravel outside wakes me. Paolina.

  ‘Mi dispiace tanto, I’m so sorry you’ve been waiting … I was with the Dutch in Bolsena …’

  Having flung open the door before she’d come to a full stop, Paolina shouts her apology, exits from her old black Mini, legs first; a long stretch of skinny jeans before her black mud-caked boots crunch down on the stones. Unfolding the rest of her to reveal her signature black T-shirt, a pashmina – also black – hanging from one shoulder, a canvas sack hung from the other. We embrace and I smell sun and olive oil and woodsmoke on her skin. As is mine today, Paolina’s hair is unbound and we laugh at the similarities of our long, curly manes. Leaning back a bit, she spreads her fingers and runs them through my tangles, tells me, ‘Yours is worse than mine. I left my clip in Bolsena. What’s your excuse?’

  ‘Don’t have one. I’ll get some elastics from my purse.’

  Piling up our hair, washing our hands, our alliance is easy. Over these past two years, Paolina and I and Miranda have been the Thursday constants, with Gilda and Ninuccia joining us often enough. We walk about the work table and I watch Paolina tenderly touching things, standing back to look at the whole, then moving closer again. She has grown up and spent all her life among this bounty, and still the beauty of it amazes her. To be able to be amazed by the familiar is the one incontestable gift that we five women share. So has pronounced Miranda over and over again.

  ‘I’d rather paint this than cook it,’ she says.

  ‘We can save pieces of everything and lay the supper table just like this one.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what we’ll do. I’m starving, always starving after I finish a lesson.’

  She begins to unpack her sack. She looks up at me, starts to say something but stops, turns the words into a smile. Paolina seems otherwise engrossed today, gentle, sweet but far away. Secretive. Happily so. I will not ask what causes this other spirit. She will tell me if she chooses.

  ‘What did you manage to teach your two Dutchmen this morning?’ I ask her, lighting the flame under the oil. She looks at me as I do this and yet doesn’t seem to see me or the pot or the flame beneath it.

  She says, ‘We’re still at the beginning – fresh pasta and potato gnocchi. They always want to make the same things and so that’s what we do. Sono pignoli. They are perfectionists. We used thirty-six eggs this morning since
they’re expecting twenty-two for dinner. I warned them I wouldn’t be back to serve or wash up. Siete per conto vostro, you’re on your own, I told them.’

  Paolina is a cooking teacher whose students are mostly German and Dutch tourists who rent the same countryside villas near the lake of Bolsena year after year. She is legendary among them and I sense it’s the wistful beauty of her as much as her talent that intrigues them. Paolina is docile by nature, shy, hesitant, yet what she says is often pungente, piercing. Though one wouldn’t flinch to hear that she was ten years younger, Paolina is sixty.

  ‘I made dough to fry. For our lunch,’ I tell her. ‘A few tortucce, a sliver of prosciutto, some wine.’

  ‘Perfect. But first a pair of bruschette. An Umbrian woman must have her bruschette …’

  From the half loaf she’s carried in her sack, she cuts four thin slices, shakes the ash from the grate and sets the bread over the fire.

  ‘Bread before bread?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘And there will be two more breads at supper tonight.’

  ‘Lovely.’

  Atkins rolling about in his tomb flashes in my mind. As do our guests, mostly those from America, whose organisms rebel at wheat, all glutenous foods. The culprits are pesticides. Good clean wheat nourished most of the world for millenia. Here the greatest compliment one person can pay another is to say, lei e buono come pane, she’s good as bread. Even the word companion, when divined down from the Latin, signifies the one with whom I take my bread. So, yes, bread before bread. As long as it’s made from honest, unmanipulated wheat.

  I watch Paolina slitting the skins of two figs from the pile on the work table then spreading the red flesh of them onto the hot bread. She drizzles on some oil, a few turns of the pepper mill. Beckoning me to the fire, she is arranging the four beautiful bruschette on the tin that Miranda uses to catch drippings from meat as it cooks over the embers.

  ‘You know, Miranda never cleans this old tin. Just swipes it with a piece of soft bread and …’

  ‘I know. And, if you’re anywhere near, she tears the bread in half and …’

  ‘Ah, so you do know. It must be suffused with twenty years’ worth of flavours from herbs and flesh and wood and I always use it when I come here, even if it’s only – like today – as a tray. Here, rub the bruschetta across the bottom of the tin before you take it.’

  I go to see about the oil, pinch off a tiny piece of dough, drop it into the pot and watch as it turns deep gold in a few seconds. Ready. I stretch to thinness two small nuggets of dough and slip them into the hot oil. Immediately they blister, begin dancing about. ‘Paolina, will you slice the prosciutto?’

  More proficient even than Miranda at the job, Paolina works a knife, saw fashion, across the haunch, lays the ruffles of almost transparent ham over the luscious hot little breads, letting it melt into them. We don’t bother with plates or even to sit but eat out of hand, taking time only to open the spigot on the wine barrel, to fill two tumblers. Now we are ready to begin.

  We need workspace and so defile Miranda’s still-life, moving it in diminutive form to the supper table. Paolina holds a chair while I slip the crotch of a sheaf of grapes over a beam. We like the look of this and so hang three others in the same way so that the grape leaves nearly touch the table, as though we’d set up among the vines.

  Stripping the pointy little rosemary leaves from their branches, chopping them with a rocking motion of her knife directly on the wooden work table, Paolina mixes the dough for fig schiacciate: flatbreads of yeast softened in warm red wine, flour, a little sugar, sea salt, oil. Working part of the rosemary into the dough, she sets it to rise beside the woodstove, then places the remaining rosemary in the hearth basket, scent for the fire during supper. Meanwhile I put together the dough for the wine bread, which wants a slow four-hour rise and so I carry it out to the coolness of the cheese hut. We talk about timing, calculate when the wine bread will go into and be ready to come out of the oven, agree that we won’t bake the schiacciate until after the pears are done. I stripe-peel and core some of both the brown and red-skinned ones, cut a thin slice from their bottoms, leave their stems intact and sit them to rest in a bath of red wine warmed with butter. Once the wine breads are baked, I’ll wrap a spiral of pancetta around the pears, slide them into the oven, roast them to softness but not to collapse and the pancetta to an almost-charred crispness. The red wine and buttery juice from the pears will have formed a fine sauce with which I’ll glaze them while they’re still hot.

  The menu for tonight is simple, a good part of it already prepared. We’ll start with the roasted pears and a round of Filiberto’s new pecorino, still creamy after only a few weeks of aging. Then the schiacciate, Paolina’s rosemary-scented dough stretched flat, laid with halved figs still in their skins, more rosemary on top, a good dose of oil in the hollows formed by a final knuckling of the dough. The juices from the figs will caramelise in the oven’s fierce heat and, as we we did with the tortucce, we’ll lay the hot flatbreads with prosciutto. As the tribe is vanquishing those, harvest sausages will be already crisping over the hearth fire. Made of coarsely ground pork (three parts lean, one part fat) dried grapes from last year’s harvest saved precisely for this purpose, as well as new grapes, seeded and peeled, new red wine, wild fennel flowers, sea salt and coarse-ground pepper, I mixed it at home on Tuesday morning, left it for a day to age in the fridge. It was Mocetti, our faithful butcher, who stuffed the winey, grape-studded mass into casings, tying the fat rope with thick string at short intervals. Yesterday Fernando and I hung the sausages from hooks in the cheese hut. Another day for the flavours to mingle. Once roasted, we’ll sit the plump, juice-dripping things on a puree of potatoes cooked in red wine rather than water and pounded to smoothness with oil. We’ll pass the vendemmia bread hand to hand. In final praise to the harvest, our dolce will be a cake made with wine grapes, if in yet another form. It was Ninuccia who, earlier in the week, cooked four or five kilos of new grapes in a copper, tin-lined pot over embers for a day and a night, the fruit slowly, very slowly, giving up its juices then reabsorbing them to form a dense compost. Once filtered, the compost becomes il mosto, a precious condiment used in both sweet and savoury harvest dishes. Ninuccia handed me a litre jar of mosto a few days ago, instructing from across her shoulder as she was doing something else: ‘More sugar than flour, wine, no more than two eggs, salt and olive oil, 300 grams of mosto. It you make it tonight, it will be just right for Thursday.’ My first torta di mosto waits in Miranda’s armoire, safe under a yellow bowl. Yes, every single dish made with wine.

  The rustico heady as a wine cellar, dough under our nails, flour everywhere on our clothes, our hair mostly unbound again, we are giddy girls playing house. Paolina says, ‘We’re dangerous together, you and I. We could let the bread burn while we dream. When we talk I feel soothed. And when we’re quiet, as we are today, I feel soothed. Does that make sense? Maybe that’s the wrong word. Perhaps it’s that I feel understood … revealed without my having to work at explaining.’

  Remembering Ninuccia’s mosto, I think Paolina’s words are pure and dense as wine cooked to syrup. Silent as she is, an uncommon allegria flits about her this afternoon.

  ‘To understand and to be understood …’ I say.

  ‘Yes, yes. It’s exactly that. With Niccolò I have always had that’

  Niccolò. Nearly every time that Paolina and I have cooked together, she has been accompanied by a man – bello come il sole, beautiful as the sun, Miranda says of him – the same man who accompanies her sometimes to Thursday Nights. An arresting figure in English tweeds and paisley foulards, he might be an aging actor come to live out his dotage in the countryside and yet he is a gentleman farmer. And, as it’s said here of people who love the table, he is una forchetta d’oro, a golden fork. He walks with a cane but also with a swagger, this Niccolò.

  ‘I was going to ask you why he didn’t come with you today …’

  ‘He’s up at
Castello della Sala observing the harvest or surely he would be here, if only to tell us what we’re doing wrong. My darling Niccolò.’

  Paolina touches her suddenly flushed face, and says something about the woodstove and the fire. ‘Shall we go for a walk?’

  We wander out into the afternoon. Under the ripe five o’clock sun, the air is as gold as Orvieto wine and we walk a while in the meadow. We sit then among the weeds on the edge of Miranda’s oliveto to face a long stand of slender young trees, their branches drooping nearly to the ground with still-green fruit, the leaves hissing, quivering like the silvered net skirts of a hundred ballerinas. From the pocket of her jeans, Paolina pulls out a small metal box fitted with tobacco, rolling papers and matches. Using her thigh as a workspace, she expertly rolls a thin cigarette, hands it to me, rolls another, lights mine with a tiny wooden match, which the Italians call svedesi. She lights her cigarette from mine and we lean back, each with an arm under her head, watching the trees and the light. We smoke the cigarettes halfway then snuff them on a stone. Paolina puts the dead ends into her metal box.

  Looking up at the sky, she says, ‘I’m sixty, Chou, and last evening I had my first proposal of marriage.’

  I look over at her but she keeps her gaze upward. I sit up, ask, ‘One of the Dutch?’