by Jen Lin-Liu
“It’s a good supermarket,” Marina said. “You have sanitary controls. You are safe when you go there. It’s less expensive than the local shops.”
“Is there any resistance to it because it’s French?” I asked.
She paused. “Well. As I told you, Neapolitans are tolerant of all cultures.”
After the oil was hot, she added the meat and a couple knobs of butter, an ingredient I’d see more of in the north. She used the Danish brand Lurpak. “That’s one thing Italy doesn’t do very well,” she admitted.
As Marina turned the meat with a spatula, the scent of sizzling veal, pork, and olive oil wafted through the kitchen. She added a cup of red wine, two chopped onions, and more olive oil. She spun two large cans of whole tomatoes through a food mill set over the pot. “It doesn’t amalgamate well when you don’t strain the tomatoes first,” she said, using one of her favorite English words.
She plucked several fresh plum tomatoes from the vine and held one to my nose so that I could catch its sharp scent. She diced and added them into the pot as well. “Those are from Mount Vesuvius,” she said. Because of the volcanic ash, the soil below the mountain was among the most fertile in Italy. “That’s why the Greeks and Romans settled here—to take advantage of the good land,” she said. “The sulfur purifies.” Though the volcano that had devastated Pompeii two millennia before could one day erupt again without warning, the land’s curse was also its blessing.
Marina placed another tomato on a slice of thick bread, then cut it into slivers. She flicked salt over the tomatoes and bread, drizzled them with olive oil, and handed it to me. I took a bite and seized up momentarily; I was unprepared for the tomato’s juiciness, the bread’s chewiness, and the lively oil. It was as incredible as the pizza I’d eaten the night before. But this wasn’t a proper dish—it couldn’t even be called bruschetta without the toasted bread and the garlic. I also knew that when I tried to re-create it elsewhere, it wouldn’t be the same. The pizza and that simple snack revealed the key to Italian food: it was about the ingredients, grown in the right terrain, with proper care.
All that was left was to allow the sauce to concentrate in the simmering pot for a few hours—ragù was one of the pasta sauces that needed time. “The sauce should gather into a thick cream,” said Marina. “The density should be intense. It should make little explosions like Vesuvius.”
She decided that we’d go out while the sauce simmered. “Gianluca!” she hollered. “Come and stir the sauce occasionally.” He nodded obediently. “Keep well,” she said tenderly to the ragù as we left.
We climbed into the hatchback and drove through two imposing high-security gates. Liberated from the kitchen, Marina seemed happier. Like many other women I’d met on my journey, she didn’t have a particular passion for food, she told me. Cooking was just a duty she’d had since she was an adolescent. As the eldest child in her family, she cooked for her younger sister and brother, a role that prepared her for the obligations of marriage.
We pulled up at a bakery, one of the few businesses that was open on Sundays. It was bustling, too, with locals buying bread and pastries. Marina told me she was careful about which bakeries she patronized because the Camorra controlled certain ones. “Occasionally, they’ll hire street kids to bake bread in ovens heated by toxic material, like old car tires,” she said. She yelled her order to the baker behind the counter and he handed her a dessert box.
As we drove around Naples, Marina pointed out the Phlegraean Fields, a wide, partly submerged caldera that was the mythical home of the Roman god Vulcan. Before the fields loomed Mount Vesuvius. “Pliny, one of the earliest journalists in the world, documented the volcanic eruptions that covered Pompeii. He wrote about the columns of gas and smoke,” she said, slipping into tour guide mode.
As natural a tour guide as she was, Marina told me she’d started her business only recently. She’d been a stay-at-home mother for most of her adult life—not that she hadn’t had career ambitions, particularly when she was young. Her father had been a jeweler, and as a child, she helped out in his store, greeting customers and explaining the attributes of various gems. “I was always taking care of his public relations,” she said proudly. She graduated from the best high school in Naples, received degrees in foreign literature and gemology, and apprenticed at her father’s shop. She also worked briefly for the United Nations, and thought about becoming an interpreter or a flight attendant. Then she met Maurizio.
“I resisted marriage for many years,” Marina said. “I wanted my independence.” She noted it wasn’t her suitor as much as her mother who pressured her into marriage. “She wanted me to have the white dress and the Catholic wedding.” After nine years, Marina caved in and tied the knot. She got pregnant right away, on her honeymoon in North Africa. As good Catholics, she and Maurizio had waited until they married to consummate their relationship, and they hadn’t used birth control.
The pregnancy caused Marina much anxiety. She worried that the antimalaria pills she’d taken on her honeymoon would affect the fetus. She had an amniocentesis, which she believed almost caused her to miscarry. She was put on bed rest later in her pregnancy. During her labor and delivery, the umbilical cord had gotten tangled around the baby’s neck, and she had to undergo an emergency Caesarian. The pregnancy left her with some lasting side effects, including a dulled sense of taste.
As scarring as the pregnancy was, Marina fell into the role of full-time mother and soon gave birth to a second son. Her sons became the center of her life. “They grow so fast and you only have a certain number of years to spend with them,” she said. In any case, her previous aspirations now gave her anxiety. Not only did she no longer want to become a flight attendant; she no longer wanted to fly anywhere. And her husband, a traditional man, expected her to stay at home anyway.
“You didn’t think about working after your sons were born?” I asked.
Marina thought for a moment. She’d been too absorbed in being a full-time mother. She hadn’t had a moment to think about what she wanted for herself. “So my advice to you: if there is anything you want to do, you should fight for it now. You should declare your independence early. Otherwise, it will be too late.”
I’d done that, all right. But had I taken it too far? What was the right balance? I realized that for many women, even those with very different stories, it was a struggle.
Marina parked the car by the shore, and we walked around the waterfront. “I love the movement of the water,” she said. “It helps me, soothes me. When I go anywhere else, I feel the lack of water. In Rome, I have to go to the fountains.”
Stray cats lazed on the seawall. In the distance was Capri—it looked like a magical rock, poking out of the calm sea. But while the water was tranquil, the morning sun had given way to clouds.
Marina had found meaning in raising her sons, but “now everything is done,” she said. “My sons are grown. I want to find new meaning in life. Women my age, they are concerned with their sexuality. They are interested in money. They want to look better. They don’t want to accept their old age.” They wanted face-lifts; they wanted Botox. They were chasing youth. “But all of that is empty.”
• • •
When we arrived back at Marina’s, the scent of ragù hit our noses as soon as we opened the front door. As promised, the concentrated sauce had begun to emit little lava-like plops. She had me adjust the salt, since she had a dulled sense of taste. I added a pinch, not wanting to overseason her hard work. Marina boiled a brand of dried pasta called Libera Terra—“Free Land”—that had been produced on land the government had recently reclaimed from the Camorra. The oversize ridged tubes were called paccheri, derived from paccarià—Neapolitan for “slaps.” The pasta was so large, it supposedly slapped you in the face when you ate it. After they were boiled, the tubes became floppy, ideal for soaking up the ragù; half a dozen were enough to make a meal. Marina spoone
d ragù and a healthy dollop of ricotta over the paccheri. She left the meat in the pot; it had given its all to the sauce. But she set out veal meatballs she’d made, to be eaten on the side, along with grilled zucchini doused with olive oil. Everyone poured themselves glasses of wine and water. Marina groaned when her family kept their eyes glued to the soccer game as they ate, in violation of the etiquette I’d learned. “I only have peace in the summer, when football season is over,” she said.
Marina scrutinized her food. “How do you like it?” she asked, frowning.
“It’s good,” I said, though in truth the meal didn’t compare to the pizza the night before, or even the tomatoes on bread she’d served me earlier. The simple stuff had been better.
“It’s not very good,” she said, looking at me skeptically. She hadn’t been expecting false praise; Italians were brutally honest with each other, but my American sensibilities had held me back. And anyway, I had a nagging feeling that it was my fault: I’d undersalted the dish.
We finished the pasta and moved on to dessert, fruit tarts from the bakery. Afterward, Marina said, “Come with me. Let me show you something.”
She took me to the end of the hall and opened an iron door. Beyond was an enormous sunny balcony, filled with lemon trees and jasmine flowers. Marina’s dog, an aging beagle with a floppy chin, dozed in a corner. The balcony offered a view of the Phlegraean Fields and the street below, where a busker stood in the middle of traffic, playing a classical tune on a violin against the backdrop of the Mediterranean Sea. It was the beauty of Naples, and the sense of home she had there, not cooking, that gave Marina pleasure.
14.
There was something about the mist that drifted through the Po River Valley and the breeze that blew through the undulating hills of the Apennines in Emilia-Romagna that created the right conditions for Italy’s best food products. That’s what Valerie, a sfoglina—a female pasta maker—told me as I toured the most divine factory I’d ever visited. This emporium in the small, mountainous village of Castel d’Aiano produced the mother of all Italian cheeses: Parmigiano-Reggiano. Across Italy, I’d learned a lot about the cheese, known to Americans as Parmesan. It was sprinkled onto nearly everything, “aside from our espressos,” one sfoglina joked. Marina in Naples mentioned that because the cheese could be stored for years, some Italians invested in wheels of it, like certificates of deposit. It was regarded as health food, a source of calcium, vitamins, and protein, which made it especially good for children and pregnant women. (The ten to fifteen grams usually grated over a serving of pasta had more protein than a serving of chicken.) Parmigiano-Reggiano, however, had to be produced within a certain geographical limit of Emilia-Romagna, from the milk of a special breed of cow fed a strict diet of hay and barley. It was not to be confused with grana padano, another cheese made nearby with milk from cows fed a looser regimen of corn and other grains. “Why is grana padano not as good?” I asked Valerie. I’d had a tough time differentiating the two cheeses in the past. The sfoglina clucked. “Sometimes grana padano goes like this—” she said, making the sound of a bomb exploding—“Psh!”—and throwing her hands up in the air. During its production, the lesser cheese was prone to burst.
I would never mistake any other cheese for Parmigiano-Reggiano after visiting the factory. A man everyone called Il Maestro explained the early steps of the process: He and his workers heated fresh milk with rennet until it curdled. They drained the curds, shaped them into large wheels, and placed them in vats of brine. Then he opened a large door to the warehouse where the cheese was aged, and a distinct, unforgettable fragrance hit my nose. The scent was a heavenly mix of grassy (from the pastures where the cows had grazed), nutty (from the aging process), and subtly sweet (from the milk itself). The drafty, cavernous room reminded me of a vault where rare books or precious works of art might be stored. The warehouse didn’t need heating or cooling—the temperature was naturally between 55 and 68 degrees Fahrenheit throughout the year, the right range for the cheese to ripen naturally, which took eighteen to thirty-six months. Round, yellow wheels resembling oversize snare drums, each resting on its own platform, stretched from floor to ceiling in neat rows. The Maestro pulled out a small hammer and thumped the sides of several wheels, where the name of the cheese was etched. Banging a well-aged cheese yielded not an echo but a resounding thud, an indication that the proteins had reached the proper density.
One of the by-products of Parmigiano-Reggiano, whey, was fed to pigs for another Emilia-Romagna specialty: prosciutto di Parma, the salt-cured, tissue-thin pork that Italians, from north to south, often served as antipasto with cheese and bread. But in this region, I was introduced to a whole range of charcuterie that Italians had managed to conceal from most of the world. The buttery pink mortadella at one bed-and-breakfast was nothing like its Spam-like American offspring, baloney. It seemed blasphemous to even link the two. At a pig fattoria, or farm—the Italian word inspiring pleasant images of animals happily fattening away—I reached for slice after slice of lardo, razor-thin, nearly transparent wisps of pork fat that melted on my tongue. At a dinner party in the town of Parma, the host, the sister of an Italian-American friend, went into her kitchen and turned on an industrial-looking deli slicer, a fixture of many Emilia-Romagna households. She loaded a football-sized hunk of meat and shaved off a plate’s worth. Literally the “little butt” of pork, the sheets of velvety culatello were cured in a method similar to prosciutto, but the precious cut yielded a richer, sweeter flavor and sold for twice the price.
Then from the town of Modena, I found balsamic vinegar that was a stark contrast to the abominations that American supermarkets stocked. A husband and wife showed me around their warehouse filled with giant barrels of the authentic product. Their balsamic was made from grapes alone. “All you need is a vineyard and a lot of time,” said the wife. A true balsamic bore either an IGP or DOP appellation, which verified its provenance and meant that it was aged for at least five or twelve years, respectively. Some vinegars were stored even longer, for up to twenty-five years, and with age, the product became richer, darker, and more viscous. The wife asked me to hold out my hand, palm down, and poured a drop of the twenty-five-year-old vinegar into the crevice just below my thumb. It was so thick it didn’t run. I asked what they thought the best use was for the aged product. They huddled for a minute, then sent their adult son out to the nearest gelateria for a generous tub of vanilla gelato. They scooped the ice cream into little paper cups and drizzled vinegar over it. The vinegar cut the creamy sweetness of the gelato with a subtle acidity that tasted a little like lemon but had a depth that lingered on my tongue. It was divine.
• • •
I’d come to Emilia-Romagna to learn pasta, though; the cheese, meat, and vinegar were mere bonuses. (It was like that scene in Jerry Maguire when Renée Zellweger says to Tom Cruise, “You had me at hello.” Emilia-Romagna had me at pasta.) But Paolo, the ponytailed, thirty-something director of the local tourism board, went out of his way to ensure that I tasted everything the region had to offer. Emilia-Romagna suffered from an inferiority complex, despite being blessed with delicious food, beautiful mountains, and historic cities like Ravenna and Bologna. The region was like the pretty but ignored middle sibling in a brood of attractive sisters. As with Naples, tourists often bypassed the region, opting for Tuscany. So why was Emilia-Romagna better than Tuscany? I asked Paolo one afternoon.
“Well . . . It’s not better than Tuscany. Tuscany is beautiful,” he said, going into the typical swoon. I waited in vain for a little hustle. Come on, Paolo, I thought. Wasn’t he taking the Italian tendency toward candor too far?
One thing was certain: there was no better place to learn fresh pasta—even if, nowadays, most Italians used dried pasta. The latter was more convenient, certainly, and some chefs argued that the dried version retained its shape better after boiling and was better suited for heavier sauces. But still, nothing was more amazing tha
n the freshly made lasagna, ravioli, and tortellini of Emilia-Romagna. In big cities like Rome, I’d been surprised to discover that even restaurants known for their fresh pasta often didn’t make them in-house. Most young Italians had little, if any, experience making pasta from scratch. In Emilia-Romagna, though, I found a handful of entrepreneurial sfogline who kept the craft alive at their agriturismos—farmhouse bed-and-breakfasts—in the Apennines.
I started by learning how to make the region’s signature ragù, known to the outside world as Bolognese. The stern sfoglina named Nadia emphasized that spaghetti was never served with the ragù: “Spaghetti Bolognese NO exist-oh!” she said in horror, the mere idea an offense to her ears. She explained that the thick, meat-based sauce simply slipped off thin spaghetti—the sauce required a flatter, wider noodle like tagliatelle or even better, lasagna, which we were making that day.
The Bolognese sauce—I couldn’t help calling it that—was similar in principle to the ragù I’d learned from Marina: you took meat and tomatoes and simmered the essence out of them until they amalgamated into a thick pool of goodness. “The simpler the beef ragù, the better,” Nadia said. She began with a soffritto, the holy trinity of sautéed finely diced carrots, onions, and celery that perfumed kitchens across Italy and was the base of many sauces. Her soffritto was cooked in sunflower oil rather than olive oil, a sign we’d departed from the Mediterranean. She added three pounds of minced beef, using a fatty cut for more flavor. (The cuisine of Emilia-Romagna was often referred to as la grassa—the fat one—with good reason.) She added a considerable amount of tomato paste, a smaller quantity of tomato sauce, and a generous quantity of rock salt that confirmed my suspicion that I’d undersalted Marina’s ragù. While the sauce simmered, she turned her attention to the lasagna noodles.