“That’s terrible!” (As it turned out, that is the title Macmillan put on it when they published the book in England.)
“I can’t think of anything else, Judith. This is just more classic Italian cooking.”
“That’s it! That’s what we’ll call it.”
Victor and I returned to Bologna in April to make some last-minute decisions on the kitchen. A ceramics manufacturer in Modena offered us their tiles. For the walls, we chose one with a geometric border in brown and white with, in the center, a childlike drawing of a rooster in brown and ochre. On the floors, we had plain white tiles. It was the last time I put ceramic on a kitchen floor; it was torment for our feet. We had table linens done in a traditional grape-cluster pattern that was hand-printed with wooden blocks by Pascucci, a nineteenth-century workshop near my town. The color was that of real rust, shed by old pieces of iron submerged in vinegar. When we handed our departing students their diplomas, we also gave them an apron hand-printed with the same pattern.
Victor had the low plaster ceilings removed to expose the old, brick-faced, barrel-vaulted ceilings, raising the height of the room to
The new kitchen the city of Bologna built for us in 1978
fourteen feet. Where there had been plywood, he put in a wall of glass bricks that flooded the kitchen with light during daytime classes. In the evening, we turned on the modern Italian fixtures that Victor had chosen. For prepping and for hand-rolled-pasta workshops, we bought several industrial stainless-steel tables whose tops we capped with butcher block. All our china came from Richard Ginori. We still have a full set that we now use every day at home in Florida. Victor created a wine cellar by mounting two parallel layers of strong chicken wire spaced ten inches apart over the full height of one narrow wall. The wire, painted black, had four-inch-square openings into which he laid the bottles. It was a dazzling kitchen. We had ample space for twenty or more participating students and a staff of four. In 1978, it had cost the Communist-run city of Bologna $100,000 to build. Glowing with paternal pride, Testa brought Renato Zangheri, the mayor of Bologna, and the whole city council to see it.
My school finally had a home of its own. When I think of those years in Bologna, and of all the classes that succeeded one another, and all the people to whom I said hello and good-bye, whose names I learned and forgot, I imagine myself camped every spring and every fall by the bank of a great river, waiting for the periodic flow of a current that eddies before me to discharge its living freight and comes through again when it’s time to retrieve it and deliver a fresh contingent. It felt as though the world itself was streaming through. When Victor and I once counted the countries our students were coming from, we counted twenty-eight. They came from Britain, Scandinavia, and every country in Western Europe; they came from the Middle East, from Africa, from Japan, India, Australia, Singa-pore,
Students in Bologna gathered around me at the large stove of the new kitchen
Hong Kong, South and Central America, Canada, and nearly all the states. One was from Montana, but I don’t remember any from the Dakotas, or Nevada, or Wyoming.
Some of my students were there for professional reasons, many were serious amateurs, and others came, no doubt, only because going to Marcella’s school in Bologna was the thing to do that year. Some among them were prominent in their fields, even world famous, but they blended smoothly with classmates who led unadvertised lives. I taught them how to make pasta dough using only eggs and flour, and how to roll it out by hand, ignoring the skepticism of those who didn’t understand that it was worth the effort. Those who did understand bought the long, narrow, Bolognese hardwood pasta pin in the market and mailed back from home photographic proof of the skill they had mastered. I taught them how to make everything, from pickles to gelato. To demonstrate where the correct cut of meat for scaloppine came from, I had a butcher take apart a whole leg of veal in front of them. Giorgio Guazzaloca, my talented butcher, was a good-looking young man, and not all the attention directed at him focused on the technical details of his demonstration. Giorgio was as bright as he was attractive, and twenty years later he became Bologna’s first non-Communist mayor. Once the students had grasped the fundamentals of muscle structure, I taught them how to cut a slice across the grain and pound it thin. It was another instance of having to overcome skepticism. I relied on taste to persuade my students that both the knowledge and the effort that were required could make a difference. They discovered that our scaloppine cooked flat, without curling, that they could be tender yet satisfyingly firm, and that their juices ran sweet.
In between courses, I received many visitors in Bologna: colleagues, journalists, restaurateurs, friends. Tom Margittai of the Four Seasons paid me the most influential visit, one that led to profound changes in my teaching career and in our private life in Italy. When the spring session was over, Tom had us join him at the Cipriani hotel in Venice, where he introduced us to its new director, Natale Rusconi. Things moved very quickly after we met Natale. He came with his family to Bologna to see our operation. The following year I was giving two classes at the Cipriani, and at the end of the year, we had put a down payment on a large apartment atop the roof of an early sixteenth-century palazzo in Venice.
My last class had been graduated and had left Bologna, and I was looking forward to the luxurious laziness of the pause before the next one checked in. Mimi Sheraton, who was then the restaurant critic for The New York Times, was on the phone from Florence.
“What brings you to Italy, Mimi?” I asked.
“I am writing a piece for the Times on the restaurants here, and I would like to come up and let you take me to the one you think is cooking the best food in Bologna.”
“When would you like to come?” I was hoping she would choose a day when I was busy teaching.
“I checked with your office in New York, and they said you have no class next week. Are you available on Wednesday?” Unfortunately, I was.
I don’t dislike Mimi. In fact, I admire her. No one writing about food has a broader store of knowledge, or a more perceptive palate, or a more deeply graven taste memory. I am also grateful to her for kind reviews of my cookbooks. But in my experience, when Mimi is at the table, things have an uncanny way of going wrong. Twice I had her for dinner at home in New York. Once I cooked a lamb shoulder to an unchewable state; another time a fish soup—one of the things that I do best—was more dreary in flavor than I would have thought was possible.
To play it safe, I chose the restaurant where I had most recently been taking my students. It was run by one of Bologna’s steadiest restaurateurs, Pierantonio Zarotti. The food had been so consistently satisfying that it had become the favorite place for Victor and me to go to alone when we were not teaching. The chef, Nino, was a friend. “When you make the reservation,” Mimi said, “don’t let them know who I am or why I am there.” I considered her request and then ignored it. How could I spring such a surprise on Zarotti, a man with whom I had worked so closely and who had never disappointed me? “Don’t worry,” said Pierantonio. “Le farò fare una bellissima figura” (“I am going to make you proud”).
“May I recommend some of the specials we have this evening?” Zarotti said when he had shown us to our table. “No,” said Mimi. “Please bring the menu.” After he had left the menus with us, she said to me, “I don’t like to order specials; they are usually leftovers the restaurant is eager to move.” We were four, Mimi and her husband, and Victor and I. She had each of us order something different, from the appetizers, to the pastas, to the second course, to dessert. We ate glumly because there was not a single agreeable dish among them.
When we asked for the check, Zarotti brought one that had just a single figure on it. It was the kind of bill reserved for favored customers, and it represented a discount over what the meal would have cost if every dish had been itemized. Mimi would have none of it; she sent it back asking for an item-by-item accounting. While she was studying the bill, I ran over to Zarotti.
“Where is Nino? What happened to him tonight? The dinner was a disaster.”
“Nino is no longer here, he quit.”
“He’s not in the kitchen? Who is cooking?”
“My son.”
His son? I wondered. Zarotti couldn’t have been forty yet.
“How old is your son?”
“Seventeen.”
BY 1985, I HAD a full schedule of classes in Bologna, in Venice I was teaching at the Cipriani and in our new apartment, and back in New York, I was reviewing the edits of Marcella’s Italian Kitchen, a new cookbook I had written for Knopf. I decided to give two last courses in Bologna in 1986. In 1987, I would turn over the Bologna operation to my son, Giuliano, and to my assistants, the Simili sisters, Margherita and Valeria. Two events took place in 1986 that persuaded most Americans who had planned to visit Europe to stay home: one was the radioactive fallout from the explosion at the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl, Russia; the other, the bombing raid on Colonel Gadhafi in Libya that President Reagan had ordered. There were hardly any Americans in Italy that year, except for students in my two courses, both of which were full.
It wasn’t only Americans who had enrolled. Among the students from other countries, there was John Arthur Dove, from South Africa. He was exceedingly quiet, keeping to himself the whole week. He followed the lessons scrupulously and learned the techniques very quickly. All that I knew about him then was that he was a private chef. We got the full story several years later when, in Johannesburg, as I shall relate in another chapter, we were treated to a remarkable encounter in the house where John worked.
Burt Lancaster was also a student in that class. When he arrived at the hotel, he looked grizzled and old, with a brown soft cloth cap pulled down over his eyes. I didn’t even recognize him. Everyone else standing there did, however. He didn’t stay long in the hotel. Gallieri had done the best he could to glamorize one of the small suites similar to ours. He replaced the furniture with antiques, hung colored engravings of flowers on the walls, and laid an Oriental rug on the floor. But it wasn’t spacious enough for Burt, and on the following day, he moved a few blocks away to the Carlton, then the only luxury hotel in Bologna.
My office in New York had advised me that Burt hoped to make his visit private and to please not inform the press of his arrival. It was exactly what I had hoped for. I did not want distractions in the class, I did not allow comings and goings during the lesson, and I did not accept anyone coming late. (It was a policy that on a much earlier occasion had led to a serious confrontation with a student, as I’ll relate further on.) Burt had been in Bologna just one day when my telephone became overheated with calls from several Italian papers. Lancaster had starred as the Sicilian prince Don Fabrizio Salina in Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard and had become the most popular American film actor in the country. I also had to take calls from journalists in other European countries. They all wanted to interview him; they all wanted to take photographs of him working in the kitchen. “Absolutely not,” I said to every one of them. “Burt Lancaster doesn’t want it and I won’t allow it.” I told the telephone operator not to let any other calls through, unless it was my mother. The last journalist I spoke to was calling from Rome, and I asked him how he had learned that the actor was taking my course. He had read it in Variety, he said. Burt had been playing chess with the editor of the paper and told him he was coming to Bologna to cook with me. Variety printed the story. “Well, Burt,” I thought, “is that how you keep your movements secret from the press?”
In class, Burt was self-effacing and followed each lesson with great intensity. I understood, from watching him, how carefully he must have studied all the different characters he’d played, to slip into their skins so convincingly. On the evening we went to the country, I was startled to see motorcycle police following the bus. They waited while we dined and danced—it was my night to dance with Burt Lancaster—and when we got back into the bus, they escorted us to the hotel. It was my first and last police escort. I was told that anti-American feeling was running high after the Libya bombing, and they didn’t want to risk an incident involving a high-profile personality.
Burt Lancaster was exceptionally kind to Victor and me, but I was puzzled to find him so much less vigorous in person than on the screen. I learned subsequently that just a few years earlier he had had a major heart attack and several bypasses. He unwound during our diploma dinner. On the last night of every class, I brought my students to my hometown, to a restaurant perched on a pier facing the sunset over the Adriatic. For that final get-together, I regularly engaged a small, local male chorus. Unnoticed by the students, the men of the chorus sat having dinner several tables away. At my signal, during a pause in the service, they broke into their first song. Their voices were magnificent, and they sang powerfully, with great feeling. That evening Burt allowed himself to have fun. During another pause, he sang for his fiancée, Susan Martin, who had come to Bologna with him. The song was “If You Knew Suzie (Like I Know Suzie).” Several of us joined him. A few years later, Susan became his third wife.
What we called a diploma was actually a certificate of attendance. Students weren’t tested, and the course was too brief for me to judge and reward their proficiency. What mattered, for my self-respect and that of everyone in the class, was that each student participate fully
With Burt Lancaster and Susan Martin at the diploma dinner in Cesenatico
and punctually in our activities. I made that clear to everyone when we met at the beginning of the course. In the twelve years that we had the school, only one student chose to ignore that requirement. His name was Salvatore, and he was a restaurateur from the Midwest.
The kitchen was a brief elevator ride from everyone’s rooms, but Salvatore was ten minutes late for the first lesson. The second lesson he didn’t come to at all. During the third lesson he asked questions about subjects we had discussed when he was absent, and I told him I wouldn’t answer him. When the class went on a field trip, he went on a trip of his own. He missed one more lesson, without offering explanations. He did come to the diploma dinner in Cesenatico. After dinner, I called the students one by one to come up to receive the diploma and their gift, the hand-printed apron. Only Salvatore never got out of his chair, because I had nothing for him. Back at the hotel, a few of the students insisted on seeing me inside my room because Salvatore was acting truculently. The following morning, when I went down to the lobby to see my students leave, I found pages torn out of my books strewn all over the floor. The desk clerk said that Salvatore, who had just checked out, had done that while shouting obscenities about my cooking.
The hotel’s concession to the city for the space they had turned over to build our kitchen was to expire at the end of 1987. Our life and work were now firmly rooted in Venice, as firmly as any roots can take in its waters. I had no intention of traveling to Bologna to give classes, but it was Victor’s thought that we could build on what we had created and establish the first English-speaking culinary academy in Italy for professionals. We tried out the idea in 1987, when students interested in professional training were offered a much longer and more complete curriculum. We put our son Giuliano in charge of a faculty of three. To teach bread making, desserts, and homemade pasta, he had Margherita and Valeria Simili, the twin sisters who had been my invaluable assistants. The Similis came from a baking family and had operated a celebrated bakery of their own in Bologna. The other member of the faculty was Anna Gennaro, an extraordinarily talented chef.
We attracted a very enthusiastic group of students and we felt encouraged to develop Victor’s idea. Unfortunately, the hotel was sold to an outside group, Gallieri was gone, and the new director advised the city that the hotel would not renew the concession. What was even more unfortunate was that Testa had left his post. The head of the tourist department was now a woman named Gianna Spezia. We offered to finance the outfitting of a new kitchen designed for professional training if the city would find us a space
for it. We could not afford to buy or lease a building ourselves, but Bologna, like every other city in Italy, had many unused municipal properties.
We were soon offered the premises of a kindergarten that had been closed for some time. The space was perfect and the location was enchanting, within Bologna’s largest and greenest park. Victor’s promotional wheels started to spin. He suggested we name the school L’Accademia. He found a head shot of me that he asked a graphic designer friend to transform into a logo. He would excitedly—and excitingly—describe how we could create a brand that would appear on a line of Italian foods and kitchen supplies for the American market.
Gianna called us in New York to say that the city’s commissioner of education had denied the request to release the premises of the former kindergarten to us. “But don’t worry,” Gianna said. “There are many other places available.” We were then offered a former firemen’s social hall. We went to Bologna to look at it, and although it required extensive renovation, we said we would take it. The city council approved the plan and we thought we were on our way. But Gianna called again. The powerful head of the firemen’s union had refused to turn over the building. Gianna had a third place in mind. We went to see it. It was at the edge of the city, a two-hundred-year-old building in ruinous condition. To restore it would have put us in a ruinous condition. In declining the offer, we said thank you to Gianna, and to Bologna la rossa, la dotta, la grassa, we bade good-bye, addio.
Other Worlds
1984-1992
THE MOST COMMONLY used herb in Italian cooking is parsley, prezzemolo, and it is said of someone who turns up everywhere, “É come il prezzemolo,” “He’s like parsley.” In Venice, Peter Stafford was parsley. You were on your way to the food market, and Peter would cross your path on the Rialto Bridge, both his arms pulled down by bulging shopping bags. You were at Palazzo Barbaro for one of Patricia Curtis’s receptions, and when you stepped out onto a balcony to gaze at the water traffic on the Grand Canal, Peter would already be there, doing the same. You went to a lecture at the Ateneo Veneto and there was Peter, sitting in the front row, wearing one of his perfectly fitting, ageless English suits, chatting with his neighbor on the right, the one on the left, and perhaps with the couple behind him. He was small, for an Australian, but he was lean, well-proportioned, and smart-looking. He had retired to Venice at the end of a notable career as the director of grand hotels like the Mandarin in Hong Kong and the Savoy and the Dorchester in London. It was Peter who started me globe-trotting.
Amarcord Page 17