‘I don’t know about it being good but without it, without understanding that life is finite, we’d succumb to the torpors. So many do, as Paolina has just said.’
‘So … regrets, fear, hope … all of them good.’ Again, Gilda.
‘Good. Yes, and right, somehow right. I do well understand I’ve not exactly been a woman of the world for these last seventy-six years, having been born and lived all that time within eight kilometres of where we sit right now. I don’t know how much more I could have learned about the point of life had I wandered farther. I think that wherever I might have gone I would have found you. Souls like you. We are magnificently the same. Not only us, all of us. Without pain, without fear, who would any one of us have become, what would we have to show for having lived? Any five women, wherever, whomever, put them together at supper around a fire and, ecco, ci saremo, there we’ll be. The point of life is to do what we’re doing right now, what we did yesterday, what we’ll do with what’s left of our time. Surely we are not barren of fantasy or dreams and yet none of us seem to be swanking about, reaching for great things or, worse, perceiving ourselves to be doing great things. There are no great things. After the myth of security, the second greatest myth ever inflicted on humans is the myth that we were meant to triumph. How wonderful it is to be content with holding hands around this mangled old table, with some nice bread, some wine, a candle and a fire, a blessed sleep waiting.’
‘A highly concentrated recipe. Within the holding-hands part and the blessed-sleep-waiting part there are other components. I mean, about the point of it all.’ Ninuccia says this.
‘Yes. But those other components are implicit, instinctive in the holding-hands part, the blessed-sleep part. We wouldn’t be doing what we do if those other components were not in place. They hardly need naming, do they Ninuccia? Like saying, taste for salt. We already knew that.’
Già. Indeed.
Paolina says, ‘I wonder if that woman of Lampedusa’s, the one in the brown travelling suit, I wonder if she rides up there right behind the man on the black horse, keeping one another company on their endless route. If so, maybe that’s why we’re sometimes taken to the brink and then taken back, maybe they disagree. A man and a woman on the same horse, they’re bound to disagree. Especially with old Atropos waving her scissors at them.’
‘It won’t matter. There’ll only be that half moment of meeting, maybe less. They arrive as we leave. Atropos must have grown fast enough with her snipping by now. Ships in the night, isn’t that how it is?’ Gilda wants assurance.
‘So they say. When you are, they aren’t. When they are, you’re not,’ Ninuccia says.
‘I forgot about Atropos.’ I say this but it’s not true.
‘She is forgettable. Especially in springtime. I can tell you now I’d never go in springtime. Having once again snatched her baby girl back from Hades, Demeter in all her glory then raising up the grasses and weeds from their sleep in the dark, wild asparagus in the meadows, puntarelle on the hills. Never in springtime.’ This is Paolina.
‘Less would I go in autumn. New wine, new oil, all those chestnuts, fat porcini smelling of loam and the ages, figs dripping honey, the leaves on the vines gone yellow as saffron, rounds of pane della vendemmia cooling on the shutter over the windowsill, pheasants hung from a wire in the cheese hut. Never in autumn. It would have to be summer.’ This is Ninuccia.
‘Parched gold, the hills. Light limpid as apricot tea, the beauty of it stinging my eyes, bruising my soul, I could never go in summer. I shall outwit them all in summer,’ Gilda says.
Blue-black eyes wet, fierce, Miranda says, ‘I shan’t even consider winter.’
‘And you?’ Gilda asks me but I don’t answer.
Out of words, we listen to the candles beginning to splutter, to the plash of wood char upon the embers in the hearth.
‘Open the window. Fill the pitcher,’ Miranda resumes command.
Moonlight drinks in the darkness of the little room and the window panes shudder. The lantern swinging from the metal arm above the old green door strikes it in tempo. Lento, lento. Sea beating upon sand.
Miranda says, ‘A strange sensation, just now. A memory, I think. Maybe not a memory. A little girl, not me, holding tight to a woman’s skirt. Her mother’s skirt. I could see and feel the stuff of it, black, soft, but it wasn’t me touching it. I think it was my mother as a child. Yes, it was she, trotting along beside her mother, holding tight to her skirt. Now where did that come from? How strange to be old and to recall your mother as a child.’ Miranda looks at Gilda who looks away.
Rising, taking off her apron, Miranda says, ‘Let’s go to walk now.’
‘It’s past …’
‘Midnight. Past midnight in Umbria, get your things, go on.’
Ninuccia grumbling, we others happy for Miranda’s impulse. A small tribe of aging czarinas, earrings swaying, lips still mostly red, we find our shawls, trade hats so no one wears her own, step out into the night. Into warm greenish air, gusty as before a storm, we start up the Montefiascone road under the umbrella pines. Miranda and Gilda lead, Ninuccia, Paolina and I are close behind. Miranda stops, turns to face us.
‘I wonder if any one of you will remember that pinch of cloves in the ragù of goose for the trebbiatura. I doubt you will, if only for orneriness. I know you won’t cook the old dishes as I do. The bread won’t rise because you’ll forget to close the back door and no one will remember to roll a demijohn into the kitchen on Wednesday so the wine won’t be too cold for Thursday. Pian, piano, you’ll slip away from how things are tonight. You’ll begin meeting in restaurants on Thursdays. Not meeting on Thursdays at all. What was it she used to say, Chou, that little girl you wrote about …’
‘I-love-you-don’t-forget-me.’
‘As though it was a single word. I-love-you-don’t-forget-me,’ Miranda says in English, her accent somehow Hungarian. ‘Hold tight to one another, now, all in a single row. Good, that’s it. Tighter.’
Miranda stops abruptly then, looks at Gilda and Paolina to her right, to Ninuccia and I on her left. She looks straight ahead.
‘They’d never dare come for me on a Thursday.’
THE RECIPES
ABOUT THE RECIPES
WITHIN THE NARRATIVE MANY OF THE SUPPER CLUB DISHES are described in detail sufficient to guide a home cook to a fine result. Even so, I’ve chosen to further elaborate some of these, to put them down in more traditional recipe form. Also you’ll find dishes not recounted in the narrative, dishes which, over these long years of my Umbrian life, have become well-loved emblems of our table, dishes guests expect to find there.
There are two caveats: first, I’m wordy but not complicated (as a cook, as a woman). In the pages that follow, I talk to the reader as though he or she were in the kitchen with me. I want you to know more than the means to the end and so I take liberties, assuming that you, too, want what I want for you: the stories and the chatter which can be passed on.
I’ve made no attempt to offer a balance of starters, main dishes, sweets. As I tell you in the narrative, we often ended Thursday Suppers with an espresso cup of fresh ricotta drizzled with dark honey (or a piece of honeycomb) or mixed with a few crushed espresso beans and, perhaps, some dark sugar. Miranda almost always set out a tin of biscotti for dipping into the heel of our wine or into a tiny glass of ambered vin santo. That said, you won’t find ‘desserts’ here but rather several dolce salata – sweet and salty – dishes which are more often served at the end of a supper than a traditional sweet.
And caveat number two. Over and over again, I will offer you dishes based on wine, extra-virgin olive oil, pecorino and bread, the elements which form – and have for centuries formed – the cuisine of Umbria. We have sheep and pigs, we have grapes, we have olives, we have wheat. And so this is what we cook, how we eat, what we drink. Though all the dishes, in the narrative and in this section, are inspired by the gastronomic patrimony of Umbria, they are almost never lifted from t
he canonical repertoire of the region. Rather I’ve interpreted recipes to suit the marketplaces, the sensibilities and lifestyles of readers who do not live and cook in rural Umbria or those who do not have the Umbrian hand – la mano – as it’s said here.
After what I can now quite honestly term a lifetime’s passion for food and cooking, I admit to practising a very personalised cuisine, an amalgam of tradition and instinct. Hence these recipes represent the slowly distilled juices of my cooking not only here in Umbria, but in all the places to which I’ve travelled on my stomach, where I’ve lived and worked and cooked and fed people.
Bruschette with Sun–struck Tomatoes
One of the finest dishes of my life (and one which I recreate as often as its components are to be found) is nothing more than bruschette served with little soup plates of tomatoes. Only tomatoes. Glorious tomatoes. Ripe, sun-struck, skin-split beauties – broken and crushed more than sliced – set to warm for a few hours under a hot sun. Spooned into the bowls, a dish of salt flakes or fine sea salt nearby, the bruschette almost too hot to handle, a dry, almost chalky white wine chilled down to a degree somewhat below that which the winemaker would advise. And there you have it. Don’t be tempted to tear basil over these tomatoes. Save that luscious idea for another moment.
TO SERVE 6
INGREDIENTS
As authentic a crusty country loaf as you can buy or bake, sliced into 3cm thick trenchers and laid on a baking tray in a single layer or upon a grate if they are to be toasted over embers
Extra-virgin olive oil
Fine sea salt
One kilogram of very ripe, nearly over-ripe, garden tomatoes which have never been acquainted with a refrigerator and which you’ve either grown yourself, or selected from a farmers’ market or a trustworthy fruit and vegetable seller.
THE METHOD
To begin, it seems fitting that one should learn to say bruschetta: bru-skett’-ah. A bruschetta is nothing more than freshly toasted, oiled bread spiked with sea salt. Hardly an Umbrian or Tuscan supper begins without one or two trenchers of honest country bread, lightly toasted on both sides under a grill or over the hearth embers then drizzled with fine oil. The goal of ‘toasting’ is not to harden the crumb or crust of the bread, but to enhance its good flavour and texture as only a gentle charring can do.
Once the bread is toasted – and without missing a beat – pour the best oil in thin threads (in a circular movement) over one side of the bread, take pinches of fine sea salt or salt flakes and rub them between your fingertips over the oiled bread. Again, with no delay, get the things to the table around which everyone is already seated, the wine poured.
These and only these, unornamented, are true bruschette (plural). All manner of vegetables – cooked or raw – cured meats, savoury pastes, and even sometimes the flesh of a fine juicy fig, can be laid upon the hot oiled bread. But these filips transform the bruschetta into a crostino. Often in a trattoria or ristorante, a clove of garlic stuck on the end of a toothpick will be served with the bruschette, to be rubbed over the hot bread. Unless the garlic is white and hard and has an unmusty perfume and nothing of a green heart, don’t bother. In fact, even the most fresh and delicate garlic speaks louder than good oil and tends to distract from the intended simplicity. Two or three bruschette per person is the dose which begins to arouse hunger without peril of blunting it for what will come next.
Red Wine-roasted, Pancetta-wrapped Pears served with Panna Cotta di Pecorino
When la mezzadria – the medieval system of sharecropping – still existed in Umbria, a tenant farmer was wont to enrich his portion of the spoils with stuffs not easily tracked by his landowner. The fattore – administrator – kept a tally on the courtyard animals, dutifully marking births and slaughters, while grain yields were calculated before a harvest and counted out later, right down to the bushel. Hunters returning from the woods with bloodied sacks over their shoulders were met by the fattore or one of his squad who relieved the farmers of their spoils; and poaching was an offence punishable by beating or banishment from the farm.
Still, privateering flourished. Fruit could be bullied down from a tree, a pat or two of new cheese formed from a morning’s abundant milking could be tucked inside a linen kitchen towel and set to ripen in some secret drawer. And who could know just how many baskets of mushrooms were to be dug from beneath a stand of oaks after a rain or how a piece of honeycomb was broken off in a certain way. It was this sort of cunning that enlivened the mean substance of a poor man’s table. Now that nearly all the old survival methods are just memories, carving up a good pear and eating it with slivers of fresh or aged pecorino and thin threads of chestnut honey can raise up a long-ago reckoning in an Umbrian farmer. He’ll offer you a slice of pear from the tip of his knife, nod his head toward the round of cheese, the loaf of bread and the honey jar on the table. And while you’re helping yourself, he’ll look at you and say, ‘Sono buoni eh? Ma, credimi, erano più buoni quando erano rubati. They’re good, yes? But, believe me, they tasted even better when they were stolen.’
Honouring this ancient autumn rite of pairing pears with pecorino, I offer two dishes: the first is simple yet unexpectedly intriguing, a dish to be found within the text; the second is a dish I want you to have because it was Miranda’s favourite. In fact, when the season came around, she would begin to ask for it – sometimes as subtly as gesturing her chin toward the basket of pears sitting on my kitchen table, other times saying outright, ‘Non è ora di fare la crostata? Isn’t it time to make the tart?’ The delicious thing has never had any other name but that – ‘the tart’. More than once it composed the whole of a lunch between Miranda and me. Nothing but ‘the tart’ and some wine.
We’d begin delicately enough, cutting modest little wedges for one another. The devouring underway, we’d move the knife to a wider angle for the second cutting, wider yet for the third, until only a small desolate slice sat there in the tin. For the sake of compassion, we’d put our forks to it without the bother of lifting it to our plates. The main deed done, we’d press a finger to the crumbs, pour a last glass of wine.
The already tired fashion of transforming sweet dishes into savoury ones and vice versa is sometimes stretched to the absurd. But once in a while the idea seems valid. Case in point, trembling little moulds of cheese and cream which can be served as part of an antipasto (before the meal) or the finepasto (the end of the meal). Here we almost always have access to very young, still soft and creamy pecorino. Barring that availability, panna cotta made with grated, aged pecorino (or Parmigiano) is a lovely dish to add to one’s ‘easy and elegant’ repertoire.
THE PEARS
TO SERVE 6
INGREDIENTS
6 ripe (but not over-ripe) Beurre Bosc pears (almost any variety of pear can be substituted but the naturally buttery flesh of the Bosc is, I think, the best for this treatment). Cut a very thin slice from the bottom of each pear to prevent wobbling during the roasting, core them from their bottoms with an apple corer and stripe-peel them vertically with a vegetable peeler (a strip of skin removed, a strip left intact and so on around the belly of the pear). Leave the stems intact.
40 grams cold unsalted butter
2 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
6 ½ cm-thick slices of pancetta, either tesa (in a flat form like bacon) or arrotolata (the round form)
A pepper grinder
Sea salt
360–480ml of the same red wine which will be served at supper (not an extravagance but an assurance that the pear-roasting juices will complement rather than fight the wine in one’s glass)
THE METHOD
Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F.
Cut the cold butter into six equal pieces and insert a piece into the hollow of each pear. Massage each pear with the oil then wrap each one with a slice of pancetta beginning at its base and securing it at the stem end with a toothpick. In a shallow metal or ceramic flameproof roasting dish just large enough to hold the fruit comfort
ably, set the pears close together. Give a few generous turns of the pepper grinder over the fruit, pinches of sea salt rubbed between the palms over all. Now, into the bottom of the dish pour a cup of the wine and place it on the middle rack of the preheated oven. Reserve the remaining wine.
At 10-minute intervals, baste the pears with the wine in the dish and the liquid which will be accumulating as the heat coaxes juices from the pears. At each basting, add a tablespoon or two of the reserved wine. Depending upon the ripeness of the pears, roasting time will vary from 40 to 60 minutes. The pears are roasted properly when the pancetta is crisped and the point of a sharp knife sinks easily into their flesh. Do not overcook or the fruit will begin to collapse into a still delicious but less lovely result. With a slotted spoon, carefully remove the roasted pears to an oven-proof dish deep enough to hold escaping juices. Turn off the oven but place the fruit in there to keep warm.
Place the original roasting dish directly over a medium – high heat and add what may be left of the reserved wine. Allow the juices to distil and reduce until the sauce is thick but still pourable.
While the sauce is reducing, unmould a panna cotta (recipe follows) onto each of six plates, placing a pear by its side. Nap the panna cotta with the red wine sauce leaving the pear to stand as it is and serve. The goal is to get the dishes to the table while the panna cotta is still cold, the sauce still hot, and the pear at a lovely temperature somewhere in between.
PANNA COTTA DI PECORINO
TO SERVE 6
INGREDIENTS
80ml dry Marsala or dry sherry
1 envelope of powdered gelatine
600ml double cream
85 grams finely grated aged Pecorino
The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club Page 26