Simple cuisine does not mean spare, however. An Italian meal is like a play with many acts, except if you don’t watch it you’ll be stuffed to the gills before intermission. It took us a while to learn to pace ourselves. First comes the antipasto—in September this was thinly sliced prosciutto and fresh melon, or a crostini of toasted bread with ripe tomatoes and olive oil. That, for me, could be lunch. But it’s not. Next comes the pasta, usually handmade, in-house, the same day, served with a sauce of truffles or a grate of pecorino cheese and chopped pomodoro. And that, for me, could be supper. But it’s not, we’re still at the lunch table. Next comes the secondo (actually the third), a meat or fish course. In the mountains, in autumn, it was often rabbit stewed “hunter’s style” or wild boar sausage served with porcini mushrooms; near the coast it was eels, crayfish, anchovies, or some other fresh catch sautéed with lemon juice and fresh olive oil.
With all this under the belt, the diner comes into the home stretch with the salad or contorno—a dish of roasted red peppers, eggplants, or sliced tomatoes with basil. Finally—in case you’ve just escaped from a kidnapping ordeal and find you are still hungry—comes the option of dessert, the only course that can be turned down with impunity. I tried politely declining other courses, but this could generate consternations over why we disliked the food, whether the damage could somehow be repaired, until I was left wondering what part of “No, grazie” was an insult to the cook. Once when I really insisted on skipping the pasta, our server consented only on the condition that he bring us, instead, the house antipasto, which turned out to be a platter of prosciutto, mixed cheeses, pickled vegetables, stuffed mushrooms, fried zucchini flowers stuffed with ham, and several kinds of meat pastries. (The secondo was still coming.) Also nearly obligatory are the postprandial coffee and liqueur: grappa, limoncello, meloncello (made from cantaloupes), or some other potent regional specialty.
I was not a complete stranger to meals served in this way. But prior to our trip I’d expected to encounter such cuisine only in fancy, expensive restaurants. Silly me. Whether it’s in the country or the town, frequented by tourists or office workers or garage workers or wedding guests, a sitdown restaurant in Italy aims for you to sit down and stay there. Steven and I immediately began to wonder if we would fit into the airplane seats we had booked for our return in two weeks. How is it possible that every citizen of Italy doesn’t weigh three hundred pounds? They don’t, I can tell you that.
By observing our neighbors we learned to get through the marathon of lunch (followed by the saga of dinner) by accepting each course as a morsel. City dining is often more formal, but the rural places we preferred generally served family style, allowing us to take just a little from the offered tray. If a particular course was a favorite it was fine to take more, but in most cases a few bites seemed to be the norm. Then slow chewing, and joy. Watching Italians eat (especially men, I have to say) is a form of tourism the books don’t tell you about. They close their eyes, raise their eyebrows into accent marks, and make sounds of acute appreciation. It’s fairly sexy. Of course I don’t know how these men behave at home, if they help with the cooking or are vain and boorish and mistreat their wives. I realize Mediterranean cultures have their issues. Fine, don’t burst my bubble. I didn’t want to marry these guys, I just wanted to watch.
The point of eating one course at a time, rather than mixing them all on a single loaded plate, seems to be the opportunity to concentrate one’s attention on each flavor, each perfect ingredient, one uncluttered recipe at a time. A consumer trained to such mindful ingestion would not darken the door of a sports bar serving deep-fried indigestibles. And consumption controls the market, or so the economists tell us. That’s why it’s hard to find a bad meal in Italy. When McDonald’s opened in Rome, chefs and consumers together staged a gastronomic protest on the Spanish Steps that led to the founding of Slow Food International.
We did have some close gastronomic shaves in our travels, or so we thought anyway, until the meal came. Early in the trip when we were still jet-lagged and forgetting to eat at proper mealtimes, we found ourselves one afternoon on a remote rural road, suddenly ravenous. Somehow we’d missed breakfast and then lunchtime, by a wide margin. The map showed no towns within an hour’s reach. As my blood sugar dipped past grouchy into the zone of stupefaction, Steven made the promise we have all, at some point, made and regretted: he’d stop the car at the very next place that looked open.
We rejoiced when a hotel-restaurant materialized at a motorway crossroads, but to be honest, we were also a little disappointed. How quickly the saved can get picky! It looked generic: a budget chain hotel of the type that would, in the United States, serve steam-table food from SYSCO. We resigned ourselves to a ho-hum lunch.
In the parking lot, every member of a rambunctious bridal party was busy taking snapshots of all the others with raised champagne glasses. We tiptoed past them, to be met at the restaurant entrance by a worried-looking hostess. “Mi dispiace!” she cried, truly distressed. The whole dining room was booked all afternoon for a late wedding luncheon. While trying not to sink to my knees, I tried to convey our desperation. The words affamatto and affogato blurred in my mind. (One means “hungry” and the other is, I think, a poached egg.) The hostess let us in, determined in her soul to find a spot for these weary pilgrims from Esperanto. She seated us near the kitchen, literally behind a potted palm. It was perfect. From this secret vantage point we could be wedding crashers, spies, even poached eggs if that was our personal preference, and we could eat lunch.
The hostess scurried to bring us antipasto, then some of the best pasta I’ve ever tasted. We didn’t poach on the wedding banquet, just the three ordinary courses they’d whipped up to feed the staff. While we ate and recovered our senses we watched the banquet pass by, one ornate entry after another. Forget all previous remarks about simplicity being the soul of Italian cuisine, this was an edible Rose Bowl parade. The climax was the Coronated Swordfish: an entire sea creature, at least four feet long from snout to tail, stuffed and baked and presented in a semi-lounging “S” shape on its own rolling cart. It seemed to be smiling as it reclined in languid, fishy glory on a bed of colorful autumn vegetables, all cupped delicately in a nest of cabbage leaves. Upon its head, set at a rakish angle, the fish wore a crown carved from a huge red bell pepper. Its sharp nose poked out over the edge of the cart, just at eye level to all the bambini running around, so in the interest of public safety the tip of His Majesty’s sword was discreetly capped with a lemon cut into the shape of a tulip.
I imagined the kitchen employees who carved this pepper crown and lemon tulip, arranging this fish on his throne. No hash slingers here, but food poets, even in an ordinary budget roadside hotel. We’d come in expecting steam-table food, and instead we found cabbages and kings.
The roads of Abruzzi, Umbria, and Tuscany led us through one spectacular agrarian landscape after another. On the outskirts of large cities, most of the green space between apartment buildings was cordoned into numerous tidy vegetable gardens and family-sized vineyards. Growing your own, even bottling wine on a personal scale, were not eccentric notions here. I’ve seen these cozy, packed-in personal gardens in blocks surrounding European cities everywhere: Frankfurt, London, every province of France. After the abrupt dissolution of the Soviet Union’s food infrastructure, community gardeners rallied to produce a majority of the fruits and vegetables for city populations that otherwise might have starved.
Traversing the Italian countryside, all of which looked ridiculously perfect, we corroborated still another cliché: all roads actually do lead to Rome. Every crossroads gave us a choice of blue arrows pointing in both directions, for ROMA. Beyond the cities, the wide valleys between medieval hilltop towns were occupied by small farms, each with its own modest olive grove, vineyard, a few fig or apple trees (both were ripe in September), and a dozen or so tomato plants loaded with fruit. Each household also had its own pumpkin patch and several rows of broccoli, lettuce
s, and beans. Passing by one little stuccoed farmhouse we noticed a pile of enormous, yellowed, overmature zucchini. I made Steven take a picture, as proof of some universal fact of life: they couldn’t give all theirs away either. At home we would have considered these “heavers” (that’s what we do with them, over the back fence into the woods). But these were carefully stacked against the back wall of the house like a miniature cord of firewood, presumably as winter fuel for a pig or chickens. The garden’s secondos would be next year’s prosciutto.
“Dig! Dig! Dig! And Your Muscles Will Grow Big”
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On July 9, 2006, in Edinburgh, Scotland, the world lost one of its most successful local-foods advocates of all time: John Raeburn. At the beginning of World War II when Germany vowed to starve the U.K. by blocking food imports with U-boats, Raeburn, an agricultural economist, organized the “Dig for Victory” campaign. British citizens rallied, planting crops in backyards, parks, golf courses, vacant lots, schoolyards, and even the moat of the Tower of London. These urban gardens quickly produced twice the tonnage of food previously imported, about 40 percent of the nation’s food supply, and inspired the “Victory Garden” campaign in the United States. When duty called, these city farmers produced.
A similar sense of necessity is driving a current worldwide growth of urban-centered food production. In developing countries where numbers of urban poor are growing, spontaneous gardening on available land is providing substantial food: In Shanghai over 600,000 garden acres are tucked into the margins of the city. In Moscow, two-thirds of families grow food. In Havana, Cuba, over 80 percent of produce consumed in the city comes from urban gardens.
In addition to providing fresh local produce, gardens like these serve as air filters, help recycle wastes, absorb rainfall, present pleasing green spaces, alleviate loss of land to development, provide food security, reduce fossil fuel consumption, provide jobs, educate kids, and revitalize communities. Urban areas cover 2 percent of the earth’s surface but consume 75 percent of its resources. Urban gardens can help reduce these flat-footed ecological footprints. Now we just need promotional jingles as good as the ones for John Raeburn’s campaign: “Dig! Dig! Dig! And your muscles will grow big.”
For more information visit www.cityfarmer.org or www.urbangardeninghelp.com.
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STEVEN L. HOPP
On a rural road near Lake Trasimeno we stopped at a roadside stand selling produce. We explained that we weren’t real shoppers, just tourists with a fondness for vegetables. The proprietor, Amadeo, seemed thrilled to talk with us anyway (slowly, for the sake of our comprehension) about his life’s work and passion. He was adamantly organic, a proud founding member of Italy’s society of organic agriculture.
His autumn display was anchored by melons, colorful gourds, and enough varieties of pumpkin to fill a seed catalog for specialists. I was particularly enchanted with one he had stacked into pyramids all around his stand. It was unglamorous by conventional standards: dark blue-green, smaller than the average jack-o’-lantern, a bit squat, and covered over 100 percent of its body with bluish warts. He identified it as Zucche de Chioggia. We took photos of it, chatted a bit more, and then moved on, accepting the Italian tourist’s obligation to visit more of the world’s masterpieces than the warty pumpkin-pyramids of Amadeo.
At day’s end we were headed back, after having taken full advantage of an olive oil museum, a farmers’ market, two castles, a Museum of Fishing, and a peace demonstration sponsored by the Italian government. We passed by the same vegetable stand on our return trip and couldn’t resist stopping back in to say hello. Amadeo recognized us as the tourists with no vegetable purchasing power, but was as hospitable as ever. He’d had a fine day, he said, though his pyramids had not exactly been ransacked. I admired that pumpkin, asking its name again (writing it down this time), and whether it was edible. Amadeo sighed patiently. Edible, signora? He gave me to know this wart-covered cucurbit I held in my hand was the most delicious vegetable known to humankind. If I was any kind of cook, any kind of gardener, I needed to grow and eat them myself.
I asked if he had any seeds, glancing around for one of those racks. He leaned toward me indulgently, summoning the disposition that all good people of the world maintain toward the earnest dimwitted: the seeds, he explained, are inside the pumpkin.
Oh. Yes, right. But…I struggled (in the style to which I’d become accustomed) to explain our predicament, gesturing toward our rental car. We were just passing through, in possession of no knives, no kitchen, no means of getting the seeds out of the pumpkin. Amadeo suffered our helplessness patiently. We would be going to a hotel? he asked. A hotel with…a kitchen? They could cook this pumpkin for us any number of ways, baked, sautéed, turned into soup, after setting aside the seeds for us.
I frankly could not imagine sallying into the kitchen of our hotel and asking anyone to carve up a pumpkin, but we were in so deep by now I figured I’d just buy the darn thing and leave it in a ditch somewhere. Or maybe, somehow, figure out how to extract its seeds. But I had to ask one more question. A pumpkin grown in a field with other kinds of winter squash would be cross-pollinated by bees. The seeds would sprout into all sorts of interesting combinations, none of which you’d ever really want. I asked about this in my halting Franco-Spitalian.
The light dawned over his face. He understood perfectly, and began talking a mile a minute. He gestured toward a basket of assorted bright, oddly shaped gourds, and told me those were allowed to cross with each other freely, with the obvious sordid results. He wanted to make sure I understood. “Signora, it would be as if you had not married an Italian. Your children could be anything at all!”
Not married an Italian—Mama mia! I shuddered, to make my sentiments clear. Amadeo then seemed satisfied that he could continue the genetics lesson. On his farm, Zucche de Chioggia was prized above all other pumpkins, and thus was raised in a “seminario” where the seeds would breed true to type.
A seminary? I pondered the word, struggling for cognates, only able to picture a classroom of pious young pumpkins devoting themselves to Bible study. Then I chuckled, realizing there must be a common root somewhere—the defining condition having to do with these chaste fellows all keeping their genes to themselves. How could we not buy such a well-qualified vegetable? Off we drove with our precious cargo, warts and all.
Back in our hotel room, I paced around staring at it, trying to summon the courage to take it down to the dining room. “You take it,” I prodded Steven.
“No way,” was his helpful reply.
We’re too American. We lost our nerve. We dined well, but no seminary-trained pumpkin met its maker that night.
A type of tourist establishment exists in Italy that does not easily translate: categorically called agriturismo, it’s a guest accommodation on a working family farm. The rooms tend to be few in number, charmingly furnished, in a picturesque setting, similar to a bed and breakfast with the addition of lunch and dinner, plus the opportunity to help hoe the turnips and harvest the grapes if a guest is so inclined. The main point of the visit for the guest, however, is dinner, usually served family-style at a long wooden table adjacent to the kitchen. Virtually everything set down upon that table, from the wine, olive oil, and cheeses to the after-dinner liqueur, will have been grown and proudly fabricated on the premises. The growers and fabricators will be on hand to accept the diners’ queries and appreciation. The host family will likely join the guests at the table, discussing the meal’s preparation while enjoying it. By law, this type of accommodation must be run by farmers whose principal income derives from farming rather than tourism. The guest rooms must be converted from farm buildings; all food served must be the farm’s own. Fakes are not tolerated.
This hospitality tradition is big business in Italy, with 9,000 establishments hosting more than 10 million bed-nights in a typical recent year, turning over nearly 500 million euros. The notion of agri-vacationing originated in the days (not
so long ago) when urban Italians routinely made trips to the countryside to visit relatives and friends who were still on the farm. Any farmstead with a little extra in the storehouse could hang a leafy bough out on the public highway, announcing that travelers were welcome to stop in, sample, and purchase some of the local bounty to take home. It was customary for city-dwelling Italians to spend a few nights out in the country, whenever they could get away, tasting regional specialties at their freshest and best.
It still is customary. The farmhouse holiday business attracts some outsiders, but during our foray through Italian agritourism we met few other foreigners, mostly from elsewhere in Europe. The great majority of our companions at the farm table had traveled less than 100 kilometers. Whether old or young, from Rome or Perugia, their common purpose was to remind themselves of the best flavors their region had to offer. We chatted with elderly couples who were nostalgic for the tastes of their rural childhoods. One young couple, busy working parents, had looked forward to this as their first romantic getaway since the birth of their twins two years earlier. Most guests were urban professionals whose hectic lives were calmed by farm weekends when they could exchange the cell phone’s electronic jingle for a rooster’s wake-up call and the gentle mooing of Chianina cattle. And more to the point, eating the aforementioned beasts.
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