When all our work is finished, the fire laid, bread set to rising in the cheese hut, the stove lit, table set, we go to walk in the meadow, smoke the short, thin, clove-perfumed cigars I’ve taken to of late. We speak of who knows how many things, always high-stepping the edges of her story, both of us regretting her candour, Gilda for her revelation, I for its weight. We light two more cigars and I am about to launch yet one more inane attempt at distraction when she says, ‘So, I was eight when Magdalena died. Or ran away. And to the old aunt’s wintering life, I was a burden. She had no taste for the vigil it would want to keep me from echoing the disgraces of my mother. The disgraces of Magdalena. It was to the orphanage of Sant’ Eufemia where I would go, the aunt decided. The nuns would shape me. They would protect me.’
Gilda giggles then, a girlish laugh rare to her and an overture, I think, to a pleasant turn in the story. We wander back toward the rustico, stop to sit on the stones of the sheepfold wall and Gilda takes my hand, turns it palm up as though to read its lines but rather she presses her own against it. To the millimetre, our hands are the same size. ‘You’re the first full-grown woman I’ve known with hands small as mine.’ From Miranda, I think Gilda already knows something of my own shaping by the nuns.
‘I would learn much later that half the aunt’s pension opened the doors if not the hearts of the Sisters of Mercy to me. And – not to be outdone – the priests who came to say mass each morning in the convent opened the black bone buttons of their serge trousers to me as well. I punizioni. Punishments. As standard on the curriculum as vespers, the punishments were the inviolate and holy fathers’ historical if not just desserts, sacred spoils of their office. Though the ordeals were meted out upon only the youngest and prettiest of the little girls, all of the boys of Sant’ Eufemia were subject to the holy fathers’ summons. The boys were fewer in number and so were punished with a gruesome constancy. But there were so many of us girls under ten – ten seeming to be the maximum age of the girls who piqued the priests’ lust – that our turns in the sacristy before or after mass came about rarely enough.
‘But the punishments were only one of the ways to suffer at Sant’ Eufemia: the everyday hunger and weariness, being cold, being hot, being alone … There were worse torments than being made to stand and watch while one priest or another set about his feats by himself or with the aid of one of the boys. They rarely touched us, we girls. I would look where I was commanded to look but I developed a sort of open-eyed blindness. I could look without seeing. I still do that.’
‘You do. You still do that. It’s true.’
Gilda laughs. ‘You’ve noticed … I don’t mean to, you know. It’s only …’
‘I understand. Now I understand.’
She smiles, shakes her head, shrugs a shoulder. ‘A small relic of the punishments, I suppose … the faraway gaze,’ she says, looking straight into my eyes. She proceeds: ‘Abuse comes in many colours. Certain of its tints are all the rage now, aren’t they? Popular polemics. A week in the hot light of the press and then the tortured are left to the business of their broken lives and the torturers are enfolded into some far-off flock, sent away if not to the stake or the gallows or down to the river with stones sewn to the hems of their trousers as they sometimes were in earlier epochs. Yes, now they are simply hidden. And wherever they are hidden, a fresh batch of babies is likely nearby. Civilisation. Ours. I’ve often wondered what the old aunt would have thought about the nuns’ protection of me had she known of the punishments.’
‘Did you ever try to tell her?’
‘Of course. Not in distinct words. Eight-year-olds don’t normally have the distinct words. I might have had them but even if I did, there was, even then, the suffocating sense that I wouldn’t be believed. That my aunt wouldn’t believe me. And not being believed was more frightening to me than were the punishments themselves. Telling and not being championed, not being rescued, that’s what terrified me. Not being believed was akin to not being loved. They were the same thing to me: being believed and being loved. I think they still are. Anyway, back then I thought: Better not to test it.’
Gilda looks at me then, her gaze enraged. ‘But I did try to tell the old aunt. Every time I saw her. But not in distinct words. Miranda was the first person I told. And not so long ago. It’s easier to tell you now that she knows. That someone else knows. But I think the nuns knew. I’m certain they did. Perhaps they, too, were punished. More likely they were too deep in their own salaciousness to care. They did their duty, kept us from being not too filthy and not too hungry. They taught us our lessons, some of our lessons. The rest we learned by ourselves.’
•
We sit a while longer on the stones in the twilight, basking in a kind of complicity, shared if mostly unspoken. Her auto lights spent, it’s Ninuccia who swerves onto the gravel.
‘Why isn’t the fire lit?’ This her only greeting.
Gilda begins to assure her but I walk over to the auto, say, ‘Ciao, Ninuccia.’ I try to hug her but she is already bending into the back seat to fetch pots and sacks, some of which she hands to me before she leans in to offer her cheek to kiss.
Within the hour, the rustico is full to its sagging rafters on this November evening in 2007. Miranda, Ninuccia, Paolina, Gilda, Iacovo, Fernando, Filiberto, Pierangelo, Niccolò and I had just sat down at table when Miranda’s most beloved trucker knocked at the door, told her he was just passing by to say hello. ‘Non voglio disturbatvi, scusatami. I didn’t want to disturb you, pardon me,’ he says, eyeing the room and the table and us. Miranda sends him to the kitchen to wash while Niccolò finds him a bench and the evening begins with the passing of and the tearing at the potato flatbreads, the slathering of the pieces with the borlotti, which Gilda and I had pounded down to silk. It’s potential richness having been the object of a somewhat harsh discussion between Ninuccia and I when we all planned tonight’s menu, it’s she who is first to finish her piece of focaccia, reach to tear off another and spoon more of the mousse onto her plate. Signifying ‘delicious’, she swivels her index finger into her cheek, nods her compliments to me and I wonder, How long it will want before she begins to trust me?
Tonight the tribe is deep in the annual strife over olives. Did the rain come too late, was the summer hot enough, the hail that fell three days ago, how cruel was its damage? Niccolò’s groves are ancient, terraced on hillsides, and so receive sun and water obliquely, with more mercy than Pierangelo’s and Iacovo’s groves, which sit on flat land and so are more ruthlessly prey to the caprice of water and sun. It was Filiberto who planted Miranda’s hundred-tree oliveto near the rustico eight or nine years ago and its most bountiful yield barely suffices for her sister’s extended family and Thursday Nights. It is now less than a week before the November full moon and the beginning of this year’s harvest and I, typically entranced by the subject, hear only a word now and then of their talk of quantity, quality, acid per cent, intensity of flavour and colour, the most current of the scandals over farmers who blend inferior Pugliese oil with the local and pass it off to exporters as pure Umbrian. It’s Ninuccia who distracts me: How long will it want before she begins to trust me?
Four years have passed since that evening when Miranda announced her sham retirement and the tribe went to grief, the dialogue contemptuous about La Festa di Babette and murdered turtles and quail lying in state in pastry coffins, the air chastening around my two meekly spoken words: I’ll cook. Surely that early chafe is gone but still Ninuccia drags a toe across the dirt. My side, their side. Maybe it’s not Ninuccia who plagues me this evening. More, it is Barlozzo, who said: ‘For you, my darling girl, being separate is being safe. You can hardly lament the status you’ve bestowed upon yourself. Separate you will always be. You’re like Sicily. An island. Only you’re an island born not of nature but of your own craving to be one.’
Miranda’s gaze brings me back and, noticing that the bowl of mousse is nearly empty, I rise to take it to the kitchen, thinking to refill
it but Miranda says, ‘Leave the rest, thin it with a little broth and wine. Our soup for next week.’ Waving her hands, palms inward, she says, ‘Niccolò, you’re on.’
A rare, maybe unique, departure from Thursday rules, a man has been sanctioned in the kitchen.
When we’d all sat at Bar Duomo after last Saturday’s market to talk of this week’s menu, Niccolò was there. Sitting at another table plying three farmers with grappa and old stories, when he heard me say that I would make umbricelli con le briciole, he declared, loudly enough for the entire bar to hear, ‘Devi fare quelli in modo mio. You must make them my way.’
Alone now in a rampage behind the bedsheet curtain, we hear Niccolò slapping the flat of a knife on the work table, stirring, cussing – ‘Questa maladetta cucina, this damned kitchen’ – the splash of pasta hitting the colander, then the soft plop of it into the wide shallow serving bowl, two metal spoons hitting one another as he tosses and tosses and then Niccolò begins to sing. ‘Funiculi, funicula,’ and we all sing with him as Miranda herself holds aside the bedsheet curtain for his entrance.
This is a dish that causes Ninuccia’s happiness. First of all, umbricelli are the quintessential pasta of Umbria. Thick, imperfect, hand-rolled ropes of flour and water dough, these reflect the Umbrian character: rough, austere, wonderful. In the region of Tuscany, the very same pasta is called pici, these, too, reflecting the Tuscan character: rough, austere, wonderful. Yet should one be fool enough to suggest the similarity of their pasta, less the Umbrian and Tuscan characters, one could well incite hours of fist-pounding, shrieked threats, the biting of forefingers, endless and impatiently delivered litanies about how the water is different, the earth in which the wheat has grown up is of a another colour and texture and composition, the very manner in which the trebbiatura, the threshing, is conducted is not the same. And let’s not even speak of the different ‘hand’ in mixing and rolling. Far more than a geographical border separates Tuscany and Umbria. Italy is not a united country but a group of individual ‘city states’, much as it was in the medieval.
Having chosen to soften what I knew would be her displeasure at the suavity of the borlotti mousse, it’s the sauce for the umbricelli that pleases Ninuccia: stale bread – roasted and pounded to rough crumbs – the best oil, half a large head of perfectly crisp, perfectly creamy white garlic smashed to a paste, a pair of well-rinsed anchovies preserved under sea salt, also pitilessly smashed, a little of the pasta-cooking water. Mixed together with the hot, hot pasta, the result is sumptuous and yet it’s a supper made of sticks. Certainly this way of dressing pasta is a take on aglio, olio, peperoncino, a sauce so simple that, when concocted out of it’s territory, it’s likely to be desolated by flawed elements used in erring proportions: acrid, green-hearted garlic, chillies older than most marriages, who knows what oil. Only a masterful hand can make supper out of sticks. Anybody can make good food from extravagant elements: Ninuccia’s mantra.
Of Niccolò’s pasta, the tribe eats as one, smelling, absorbing, tasting, chewing, their eyes gone glassy with the very comfort of it. I think to a long-ago night, a Venetian night when, as Fernando slept, I cooked pasta for myself, lit a candle, opened the window to moonlight, sat and slurped, inhaled, twisted the strings about my fork – just as he’d instructed me never to do. That was the last time that pasta tasted this good to me.
‘And now for the secondo, the main plate,’ Niccolò says, with a whiff of challenge in his voice.
‘Contrast,’ I’d pleaded as we sat last week over the menu for tonight. ‘After the simplicity of the pasta, let’s make a … more complex dish.’
It was Ninuccia herself who said, fagiano in salmi. She went on to say that Pierangelo had four fat pheasants hanging in the cantina, nearly ‘ripe’ enough to be cooked. ‘And salmi is a family recipe invented by my father’s sister. Or his aunt, I can’t remember. If someone could barter a black Norcia truffle, we’d be set.’
Though words collided in my throat, shackling the breath in my chest, I knew better than to free them. I would not tell Ninuccia Santacaterina née Marchesini that her family’s fagiano in salmi is an adaptation of the Franco-Piemontese repertoire of the early 1900s, that it came to fame when French gastronomy held sway over the borghese – the upper class – in northern Italy. I won’t say that salmi is a reworked French ‘civet’ – a ragout of game cooked in butter and wine. Even the word salmi is derived from the French salmigondis, which signifies melange, amalgam, concoction. I will not say that, over the years, the dish was claimed and rusticised by the Tuscans and the Umbrians – among others – so that now it lies among the celebration dishes in the most modest kitchens. I will not say that salamagundi is an Anglicised word for hodgepodge, muddle. I allow myself to say, ‘Wonderful. I’ll find the truffle.’
This evening Ninuccia brought a potful of dismembered pheasants, which she’d earlier wrapped – while still whole – in pancetta and roasted at a high temperature only ontil the flesh was rosily undercooked. Cutting them into pieces then, she’d set them to cool in a bath of red wine. In the rustico kitchen, she put together the sauce. With not the smallest justification for the impiety of it, she melted what looked like half a kilo of butter in Miranda’s braising pot, scraped in a fine mince of the pancetta in which the birds had been wrapped, carrot, celery, porcini, rosemary and sage, and began the slow dosing of the fats and aromatics with red wine. Each time the wine reduced, she added more. After two litres of wine and nearly an hour’s worth of distillation, she spent the flame, stirred in three or four anchovies, rinsed and mashed, covered the sauce. ‘Ecco, fatto. There, it’s done,’ she’d said, not even asking me about the truffle which, though I’d tried every reputable supplier in town, I had not been able to find. ‘Too early, only scorzone now,’ they’d said.
Ninuccia thickly sliced the great round loaf she’d bought in Ciconia, readied the trenchers for the grate and, while the rest of us were at the business of Niccolò’s umbricelli, she’d added the pheasant to the sauce, slowly reheated the mass and set about roasting the bread. I’d gone into the kitchen to help her plate the salmi but she smiled, told me to stand by should she need me. Ninuccia Santacaterina née Marchesini was in her glory, laying quarters of the birds on the hot bread, ladling the sauce, which, after its rest, had gone so deep a red as to seem black. Glossy. Redolent of the wine but as much of the woods, of pine needles and oak leaves crunched underfoot, and maybe some whiff of the apples on which the birds had fed in the orchards bordering Pierangelo’s hunting fields. How I wanted to stick my finger in the sauce, pull a sliver of flesh from one of the breasts. With the tail of an eye, she kept vigil over me. As she finished plating the first two portions, I began to pick them up, to take them to the table but she slapped my arm. ‘They must always be brought out together on a tray. You’ll take one side of the tray. Un onore. An honour,’ she told me.
Maybe she has smudged the line between us, at least for tonight. Or have I?
•
‘I’ve never known anyone to hunt porcini at dusk,’ I tell Gilda.
‘Which is why I always do. Nothing worse than some old fungarolo brandishing a pointed stick at you as though every oak in the copse was his own,’ Gilda tells me as she hikes herself up next to me onto the sheepfold wall.
It is the Thursday after the grand Niccolò–Ninuccia supper and we are just returned from a tramp in the woods. Between us on the broken stones where we sit, there is a large lidded basket filled with loam-smelling wild mushrooms. Gilda shakes one of the fat creamy-coloured things against a stone, loosening clods of wet black earth and, with the metal bristles of a small brush, she cleans it, being careful not to touch the tender underside of the cap. As she finishes with one, she hands it to me to wipe with a strip of old linen she keeps in the basket for that purpose. With a single sharp twist of my wrist, I separate the caps from the stems. Leaving the caps whole, I lay them in Miranda’s old, well-seasoned tin. The porcini ‘legs’ – as the stems are called – I sto
w in a cloth sack. Once we’re in the kitchen, I’ll mince the legs almost to a paste with some rosemary and garlic and a rasher of lardo di Colonnato, fresh pig fat perfumed with wild herbs and flowers and aged in marble vases in a village that sits at the feet of Michelangelo’s mines in western Tuscany. I’ll scrape the paste into the caps, and set the tin in the embers until the porcini give up their juices. My thumb over the bottle, I’ll splash on some white wine then, urging the mushrooms to drink and plump a while before I spoon them and their thickened sauces onto roasted bread. We’ll begin supper with these tonight.
Straight up from the cluster of rosebushes rambling along the wall, small birds swarm and rustle, fly into the west. A breeze shivers the rosehips, carnal red on the naked brown arms of the bushes, and I feel the end of autumn. Long after we’ve finished with the mushrooms, Gilda and I stay there looking at the light. The trees across the road are thin black sticks against a reddening sky and the light seems like old light, light from the past. I feel as though I can see into the past. As though Gilda and I are there.
When the bells of San Bernardino in Canonica ring five and the sky has gone nearer to dark, we head back to the rustico. Filiberto’s dogs bark, chase some fool creature across the meadow and its final hellborn shriek precedes a sudden silence. Gilda whispers ‘Poveretta, poor thing’, and makes the sign of the cross on her breast. Through the kitchen window we see Miranda already working on the fire, once again breaking her own rules about Thursday suppers. We wave but she is oblivious. We enter the kitchen just as the hot crescendo of Bamboleo wails up from Miranda’s disc player. Tonight’s supper we have mostly prepared over the past few days, leaving little to do now but light the stove, the hearth fire. Still we putter about, Miranda, Gilda and I.
The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club Page 19