‘Cazzo fai?’ he is now demanding of me, hovering over my cake-making preparations, and I am babbling like a child as I explain that it is a new and delicious cake, when we both know I should be starting with the pasta sauces, the cinghiale (wild boar) or the anatra (duck) or the pappa ai porcini. Like so many of the ingredients with which we cook and that are not picked up from the markets by Gianfranco, the porcini are delivered to us. This year the funghaio (mushroom man) is a comic-faced Florentine called Mario with an enormous moustache and devoid, gratifyingly, of the sleaziness which characterised dear Angelo from two years ago.
Crate upon crate of huge fleshy mushrooms are unloaded from his truck and stacked in the coolroom. The pappa ai porcini is a variation on the Tuscan classic pappa al pomodoro, that gorgeous sweet tomato soup rendered thick by coarse bread, which simmers until it collapses into a pulp. In the place of tomatoes, the porcini are sliced thickly and left to bubble and perfume the bready broth.
Our next-door neighbour Elio supplies our house wine, the vino da tavola. Elio often stands in the kitchen talking to us as we weave around him. Now he is telling us how badly one eats in Genova, where he has just made a short trip – the only good thing was, at least, the pesto. I have been reading in La Nazione that, due to a relatively cool summer and the recent spates of rain and thunderstorms, there has been talk of adding sugar during the wine-making process to augment the level of alcohol. I am told this is something Italy has resisted doing until now and I discuss this with Elio, who assures me that in spite of everything he is expecting his wine to be good this year.
Another morning, Ignazio’s gentle father arrives clutching a cane basket lined with bright-green vine leaves that contains three types of grape. Apart from the fat green and small black, there is a small white grape called uva fragola, so called because of its strawberry flavour. It is intense, perfumed and spicy. I find the flavours of everything to be so sharp, as if the food I eat in Australia is muted, a little bland. The tomatoes, of course, are sweet beyond belief and I eat vast quantities of them, slicked with green oil, accompanying springy, milky mozzarella and bread. Everything as it should be. And, in spite of the morning lectures, of course I am eating too much again.
I finally meet the famous Donatella, fascinated to see what sort of tempestuous, irresistible woman my sweet angel has moved on to in his romantic life. Suddenly there she is, one damp grey morning, tall and dark with a wiry wildness about her, an easy, loping self-assurance as she ranges restlessly, familiarly, around our kitchen. I see how quickly possessive I become, and instinctively armed to dislike her.
She barely glances my way anyway, even when introduced, and breaks into peals of unexpected, unexplained laughter as Alvaro and I exchange looks. For all his gossipy confidences about her over the weeks, I see that he, too, is prey to some crazed sort of charm she possesses; he is agreeing to go on a snail-gathering expedition with her. They organise buckets and raincoats and the kitchen is suddenly neat and calm without them.
Donatella: the on-again, off-again relationship, perplexes me. I find myself hunting for clues in Ignazio’s bedroom about the sort of man he has become. Underneath the bed, drawers reveal little of interest: comic books and magazines, empty cigarette packets and wine labels. There are no tied-up bundles of letters from me and no other evidence that I ever existed for him. Why should there be, after twelve years? And yet I am conscious of obscure disappointment. For all their obvious fondness for me, I have learned how strangely unsentimental both Gianfranco and Ignazio are – their relationship towards me is brotherly, a little dry. It is as if once our affairs of the heart ceased there was no residue of the former passion, nor any great sense that we had made an impact on each other’s lives. I wonder if I merely imagine this or if it is I, the strange one, who goes on loving ex-lovers beyond the affair, and can never properly be around them without mentally flickering, periodically, back to images of how great we once were together. I have no desire for either – although there persists something about Ignazio, the shards of remaining sexual tensions, perhaps, which makes me care about other women in his life, and be bothered by them.
Alvaro is cooking the snails that Donatella and he have gathered. First, he laboriously washes them, and then tips them into a pot of cold water. This he places on a low heat to bring to the boil. The snails, at first, are climbing out of the water and up the sides of the pot, but by the time I have rushed upstairs for my camera they have begun to flail and flounder feebly in water too hot for survival, water which is slowly and mercilessly killing them. Of course, as Alvaro points out, it is no crueller than killing lobsters, but my heart has gone out to all those brave little fleshy palpitating bodies struggling from their carapaces up the sides of the pot, only to flop back down again.
The surface of the water is now milky foamy scum, the shells suspended like seashells left by a receding tide, shiny and devoid of their life force. When they have been boiled, they are rinsed and boiled again – the water must be perfectly clear before being added to a separate pot of odori: Alvaro’s finely chopped celery, carrots, garlic, onion, chilli and wild fennel, which he has softened in olive oil, then with its liquid brought to a simmer before toppling in the snails. He splashes in white wine and, when it has evaporated, adds peeled tomatoes, then leaves the lot to simmer for about half an hour. Over at my chopping board the gentle rattling of shells against the sides of the pot makes me want to cry.
Business is established and steady. Periodically there are functions, which may mean working up to twelve hours with barely a break. Two weddings on one day mean a formal lunch followed by a merenda – afternoon tea – for forty people, and when the chaos from that is cleared away we must then set up for the standard evening’s à la carte. At least the functions, being immaculately organised, are easy: group food is infinitely less trouble than individual service, with everything arranged and then sent out on platters, the edges wiped briskly clean. Alvaro and I work well together and I find his immeasurable patience, good humour and even temper refreshingly different from the unpredictability and tyranny of Gianfranco.
Occasionally, however, we have the great man back in the kitchen with us. He has been to the markets and brought back a box of artichokes, which Vito is now cleaning, peeling away the outer leaves, cutting sharply across the tops and trimming the bases: artichoke risotto, Gianfranco calls out to Cinzia, is to be one of the daily specials. When he is in the kitchen, I feel as if Alvaro and I unconsciously shrink into the smallness of the space so that no damage can be done and no blame laid. There is Gianfranco at his most magnificent, sloshing olive oil into a wide pan, chopping quickly through the artichokes so they emerge like wafer-thin petals, all his movements firm and economical. In a good mood he instructs us, invites us to dip our fingers into the simmering substance, leaves it on a low heat at a safe stage and disappears, his workstation spotless.
There is an old wood-fired oven out the back, behind the lower function area. I am still a little awed every time I escape the kitchen and step into the beautiful outside world with its two levels of dining, the statuary, the vision of the vineyards beyond the stone walls. Today we are roasting a whole piglet in the oven. Yesterday evening it was stuffed with frattaglie (the liver and intestines) tossed with garlic and rosemary, and then stitched neatly up. Bunches of sticks from the vines and cypress branches were fed into the oven to get it going and the fire has now been burning for hours. Vito explains to me how you know when a wood-fired oven is sufficiently hot: the entrance turns white, a condition called a pane. The little pig is turning a glorious golden brown and looks as if it is sleeping.
Later in the kitchen, we hear a news report on the radio about someone who has died from eating tiramisu – a particular brand of mascarpone was apparently the culprit. ‘I won’t be eating it again,’ says Vito, who is biting into his snack of a prosciutto-filled panino, warm from the oven, with a glass of Chianti.
Risotto ai
carciofi
(Artichoke risotto)
Prepare two saucepans, one containing about 1 litre of simmering chicken stock and the other containing a little olive oil.
Prepare 8 medium-sized artichokes by removing the tough outer leaves and trimming their bases to about 2 cm. Cut across top leaves, halve, then quarter. Leave in a bowl of water with a lemon wedge until ready to use.
Finely chop together 1 medium onion and 2 fat garlic cloves and soften them in heated olive oil. Drain artichoke quarters and add to pan, seasoning to taste, and sauté for several minutes. Toss in 1 1/2 cups Arborio rice and, stirring continuously, allow to be coated with oil and vegetables for about 5 minutes. Ladle in several cups (or to cover) of stock, lower heat and, stirring frequently, simmer rice. When it has absorbed most of the stock, add another cup and continue this until the rice is nearly cooked – al dente (chewy) – which may take 25 to 30 minutes. Remove from heat, add a knob of butter, a handful of freshly grated Parmesan and finely chopped parsley. Cover the pan and leave for 5 minutes, check seasoning and then serve immediately.
Several days later, two policemen appear asking to check our mascarpone – fortunately, the brand we carry is not the one they are looking for, so they are shortly on their way. I continue to serenely whip up batches of the luscious cream, which I flavour with grated orange rind and layer in individual glass cups with coffee-dunked biscuits and cocoa.
Meglio un giorno da leone che cento da pecora
Better one day as a lion than a hundred as a sheep
Vito initially reminds me of Annunzio from Robespierre, the restaurant where I worked on the Isle of Elba, but then I begin to see how little alike they really are. Vito’s cosy grandfatherly quality reveals itself, I come to perceive, as a bitter provincial pettiness. He gossips nastily about the people in his life who have let him down, and lacks any genuine sympathetic interest in the lives of others. Annunzio, for all his history of failures, disappointments and wrong choices, had still offered the solidity of his patient listening, his homespun wisdom and advice, whereas there is an insistent whine threading through everything Vito says and a shiftiness in his eyes, which rarely hold your own for very long.
But for now our friendship flowers in the inevitable way that close working relationships do; more often than not it is, after all, just the three of us in the kitchen, Vito, Alvaro and la Veeky, muddling along easily enough together and often sharing meals, linked by the common bond of being staff versus principals. The cubby hole which was once Vera’s, and is now Vito’s, bedroom is even more spartan – the narrow bed neatly made up with an extra blanket folded at its foot seems all the private space he possesses, stark and impersonal as a motel room. He rarely speaks about another life, a past, a youth, a family; phone calls and visitors and groups of noisy animated diners never come for him. He darkly addresses the sink of frying pans and pots with a vigorous scrubbing in which violence seems grudgingly suppressed. Within weeks, all my chocolate-lacquered, dough-encrusted equipment has ceased to amuse him and, now betrayed by heavy sighing, merely exasperates.
È più forte di me
It is stronger than me
Early September and the weather is cooling down. My morning walks take me past grapes that bulge in thick fat bunches of burgundy through the endlessly unscrolling vineyards. It is the season of schiacciata all’ uva – the sweet flatbread studded with new grapes – and in all the Florentine bakeries large slabs of moist sticky bread dough, glittering with black-crimson grapes, are sold by the hundred grams or by the square. I make up batches from the vast quantities of grapes plundered by Alvaro from neighbouring vineyards after his vinous lunches.
I am determined to get them perfectly right – although my dough is inevitably too thick and puffy, when thin is best. They are always delicious, but always generate heated discussion around the table of tasters: too much like bread, not light enough, too sweet, not enough grapes, too many grapes. One time, bored with the uva component, I decide to add sultanas, walnuts, pine nuts, orange rind and coarsely chopped cooking chocolate to the mixture, which I then shape into a careful plait and brush with egg yolk. It looks sensational when baked, though we all agree it is a little heavy.
The olives, meanwhile, are still green. Our old friend Vincenzo Sabatini, with whom I went to stay when Gianfranco and I broke up, towers above everyone in our kitchen. He explains how this is the optimum stage for turning them into oil so that it emerges a little tart, and fruity, glorious green. Only in Tuscany and Umbria, he goes on, are the olives not left to fall to the ground (where they bruise and spoil and attract worms) but are still picked from the trees – by hand, occasionally, though now mostly by machines.
Vincenzo’s visits are always highlights: he and his wife Claudia were always like second parents to me, and it still feels that way. Mid-mornings, the kitchen will suddenly seem diminished with the arrival of Vincenzo, his huge bulk encased in denim overalls, who helps himself to a panino of prosciutto and tips an entire glass of white wine down his throat in a single gulp as he stands there telling us stories. One day he draws me aside to give me some advice. Never, he warns, give away a complete recipe; always remember to leave out just one ingredient. I wrap my arms around the familiarity of his girth, cosily complicit.
Schiacciata all’ uva
(Sweet flatbread with grapes)
20 g fresh yeast
100 g sugar
800 g strong bread flour
125 ml water
Olive oil
1 kg small black grapes
Dissolve the yeast in lukewarm water together with 1 tablespoonful of sugar and another of flour. Allow to rise for an hour. Add all the flour, 2 more tablespoons of sugar, plus 3 of olive oil, and work well – the dough should be soft and elastic. Prove for another hour, then press into an oiled baking tin; the dough should be double the size of the tin and drape over the sides. Scatter over half the washed and dried grapes, a little sugar and some oil. Fold over the rest of the dough and scatter on the remaining grapes, sugar and oil. Bake in a preheated 180°C (350°F, Gas mark 4) oven for about an hour.
Gianfranco is making a little pizza with dough left over from the previous evening’s schiacciata all’ uva. There have been fewer customers these past evenings and they are leaving earlier. This is an excuse for Gianfranco to do the cooking he rarely does any more. He is stretching the dough out into the thinnest possible disc and scattering it with olive oil, salt and needles of fresh rosemary. He slides it into a very hot oven for five minutes, and when he removes it we fall upon it, gobbling it down hot and crunchy with transparent slices of prosciutto, our chins shiny with oil.
Another morning he attempts a sfogliata di rape, trying to remember how his mother used to make it. I had almost forgotten the snake-shaped pastries he and I used to eat cold in the early morning kitchen at his village, washed down with red wine, but now watching him the vision returns with force. The rape (turnip tops), he has cooked the previous day, large bunches of deep green leaves similar to spinach which he simmers in oil, garlic and a little brodo – broth. The result is salty beyond belief. (‘Serpentato!’ exclaims Gianfranco, furious the rare times his cooking goes wrong.)
Now he is finely chopping the vegetable and stirring through freshly grated Parmesan and a few sloshes of olive oil. The dough is wafer-thin and fragile; he rolls it out and fills it with the rape mixture, curling it up into sausages, then coiling them into a baking dish. When they are extracted, all golden and crunchy, we sample them. He admits to not being completely happy: the dough should have been even thinner, almost completely transparent so the vegetable shows through. Silverbeet, he is telling us, is what Mamma always used – and I look over at him and see that this is one of the ways I love him best, his cheeks curving into the smile of pride which mentions of his mother unfailingly inspire. His sfogliata I find delicious, probably more refined than I remember hers bein
g.
Ho una fame da lupo
I have the hunger of a wolf
We rarely eat together after service, the principals continuing to make their escape as early as they can. I have my private doubts about the little family of Gianfranco, Cinzia and Tonino, but I can see that they are trying hard, or at least Gianfranco is now trying hard, while Cinzia always has. Ignazio is still at his parents’ apartment with his broken healing limb, visiting a physiotherapist, still dogged by the black-eyed, wild, laughing Donatella in a relationship that continues to baffle me. She seems in such contrast to me. I wonder what common qualities we could possibly possess, and meanwhile reciprocate the disdain she constantly spears in my direction. I also wonder if she knows the history of Ignazio and me.
As long as it is still mild enough for outdoor dining, a motley group of us collects around a table with our assorted meals, but once the evening cold begins in earnest, Alvaro and I fall into the cosiness of meals in his room. Like a middle-aged couple, we settle in front of television on the unmade bed, plates in our laps, chatting desultorily, drinking too much. Alvaro stubs out cigarettes into malodorous, unemptied ashtrays. His socks kicked free of the clogs he wears for work give off a warmly vegetal, faintly fetid odour; we push aside clothing and newspapers to make room for the civilisation of dinner, and there is a quality of such homeliness, safety and companionship in the room that I begin to look forward to the evenings. His girlfriend waitresses in a restaurant several villages away and occasionally after work will drive over to visit. I like Rita, who is birdlike with thick-lensed glasses and a sort of bossy maternal way with Alvaro. Like so many couples, this one strikes me as odd.
I am quite enjoying my pastry-making course at the Cordon Bleu Institute. The classes take place in a building near Via Ghibellina and the apartment Ignazio and I used to share. Up a flight of steps I carry my bags of Florentine shopping each Tuesday and settle at one of the chairs arranged in a circle in the big kitchen.
Amore and Amaretti Page 12