Amore and Amaretti

by Victoria Cosford

  Annamaria and Silvia are surely too slender and too beautiful to be pastry chefs – they look like models, young women in their twenties whose aprons and tailored trousers seem too smart for the business of food preparation. Their long bony fingers with pearly manicured nails move with deft confidence, however, through each procedure, and their final creations invariably provoke sighs of admiration.

  Each week the making of several different desserts and pastries is taught, demonstrated, then tasted; the class is encouraged to participate after the demonstrations. And so we whisk egg whites endlessly in copper bowls, simmer diced apple in butter and spices before filling apple charlottes, gently heat sugar syrups, and roll out pastry. Whenever pastry is concerned, it is Silvia who takes over. ‘Ha le mani fredde’ – she has cold hands – explains Annamaria, essential for the delicate matter of pastry-making and the difference between light and leaden.

  Zabaglione

  8 large egg yolks

  100 g caster sugar

  250 ml dry Marsala

  In a large, heatproof bowl, beat the egg yolks and sugar with a whisk until they are thick and pale, then beat in the Marsala. Set the bowl over a saucepan of barely simmering water and keep beating until the mixture becomes a thick foam – electric beaters make this less labour-intensive! Serve accompanied by savoiardi biscuits for dunking.

  There are twelve students, mostly Italian and mostly women, but there are a few Asians, a South American, a German and me. Over six weeks, we bond little more than the exchange of shy smiles during some procedure. At the end of the evening, when we are urged to stay, chat and sample the cooking, I am too impatient to be away, striding briskly towards the looming back of the Duomo through the darkening streets to reach my bus in time for the return home. I am also aware, halfway into the expensive course, that I am not learning as much as I had hoped – that, in fact, I know more than I thought I did.

  Un buon vino, un buon uomo e una bella donna durano poco

  A good wine, a good man and a pretty woman last a short time

  At La Cantinetta I have slipped so effortlessly into the role of dessert-and-cake-maker – it is my greatest joy. I continue to bake my famous cheesecakes in a wealth of variations. I bake almost-flourless chocolate truffle cakes lacquered with dark icing, and enormous carrot cakes studded with walnuts and smothered in cream cheese icing. I simmer oranges until they are soft enough to whizz to a paste, then fold through ground almonds and sugar and eggs and transform it into Claudia Roden’s Middle Eastern orange cake.

  Chocolate truffle cake

  100 g dark chocolate, chopped coarsely

  100 g unsalted butter, cut into 8 pieces

  3 large eggs

  150 g caster sugar

  50 g plain flour

  Preheat oven to 200°C (400°F, Gas mark 6). Melt chocolate and butter in double boiler and set aside to cool a little. Beat eggs with sugar till pale and thick, then stir through chocolate mixture – or use a whisk (it’s easier). Add sifted flour and beat well for 3 minutes with electric mixer. Pour into buttered cake pan and cook for about 20 minutes. Cool for 5 minutes in pan before turning out. When cold, ice with the glaze.

  Glaze

  80 g dark chocolate

  10 g unsalted butter

  100 ml thickened cream

  Cocoa powder

  Melt dark chocolate and unsalted butter. Bring thickened cream to the boil in a separate saucepan and whisk into the chocolate until smooth and shiny. Pour over the cake and sift cocoa powder over the top. Chill before serving.

  I make pies and tarts, falling back almost guiltily on my own recipe for perfect pastry, one I have been using since I was about twelve years old, which never lets me down regardless of the temperature of my hands. I mostly make apple pies with lattice lids, which I gild with egg yolk for a gorgeous golden finish.

  Often it is a crostata, a pastry shell, which I fill with custard and top with fruit. The mixed berry ones always look spectacular with their glazed tumble of blueberries, raspberries, blackberries and other tiny berries whose names I do not even know. Sometimes the egg yolks are so brilliantly yellow that the resulting crema pasticciera (custard) emerges lustrous and luscious, and it is such a pleasure to smooth it thickly into the cooled, cooked base of the flan.

  Like last time, Gianfranco in a cheerful frame of mind will tease, applaud and indulge me in my sweet-making, but when tense and short-tempered, which is mostly, he will bead his eyes malevolently in my direction and so I gallop to a hasty conclusion, my heart pounding foolishly like a reprimanded child.

  For large functions he often sets me the task of creating enormous crostate on a special wooden board. This involves quadrupling the amount of pastry I usually make, rolling it out in sections carefully and neatly onto the board, pinching up a border all the way around and filling it with a creamy custard. Gianfranco always insists on helping me with the topping and it is one of those precious moments when we are quietly working together, our heads lowered in focused concentration as we arrange kiwi fruit, strawberries, blueberries and figs in exquisite patterns, joking and teasing, joined in our shared passion for the artistry of food.

  Guido, the bearded banker, brings into the kitchen a plate of ovoli he found growing by the road. His delicate fingers lift the mushrooms to show me their resemblance to hard-boiled eggs. These are the most valuable of mushrooms, he explains, costing up to 80,000 lire (€40) a kilo, pointing out how the white ‘shell’ has been partly peeled away to expose a rich golden ‘yolk’. Gianfranco has joined us; Guido always cheers him up, loosens the tension around his mouth and eyes and has him laughing, which he is doing now, expertly inserting the point of his tiny knife under the white part of the mushrooms and lifting it off so we can admire the perfect gold fungus beneath. I remember eating these once in Siena with Piero, cooked simply in butter and tossed with shreds of tagliolini, very thin fresh pasta.

  Tonight we all dine together when the kitchen closes early. Ignazio and Cinzia set one of the inside tables, while Gianfranco is preparing carpaccio of lean, pale-crimson eye fillet, adorning it with slender slices of Guido’s ovoli, which he has tossed in new green olive oil. I contribute the pungent pecorino stagionato I bought earlier in Greve, still encased in its waxy paper, and one of my apple pies. Buried in rice in the fridge I am saving up the precious black truffle presented to me by Mario, our fungaio.

  Having started this season at La Cantinetta plump, I grimly resolved not to become plumper. I am sliding there in spite of all the promises that I made to myself on the flight coming over, all my earnest diary entries and letters to friends and family. ‘È più forte di me’ – I can’t help it – is a saying I hear regularly and one which I find I use increasingly as an excuse for second helpings, too much bread, the chunk of tangy Parmesan that I nibble on slow evenings with a glass of Chianti. I glance at Guido’s much younger wife, a beautiful woman with skin a peachy flawlessness and the body of a ballerina. She once confided to me that she never diets, but simply avoids consuming both bread and wine. Bread and wine! A sacrifice too great for a woman whose excesses are commonly justified on the grounds of loneliness, failure to be appreciated or cared about, infrequent communication from Australia, and the gibes and criticisms of Gianfranco and Ignazio.

  Crostata di mele

  (Apple pie)

  Make up a batch of my perfect pastry (see Fruit Tart recipe, p. 110). Line a greased pie dish with the rolled-out, larger half of it and trim. Fill with apples you have stewed with a little sugar and strip of lemon rind. Roll out the other half of pastry and fit neatly over the apple. Prick all over with fork and brush with beaten egg yolk. Bake until golden in a moderately high (180°C, 350°F, Gas mark 4) oven.

  There is an absence of mirrors – La Cantinetta is almost devoid of any, except the small high one in the bathroom, which requires tremulous balancing on the edge of
the tub for unsatisfactory viewing. I find this lack of reflection unsettling; as if my own image were the only core of reassuring familiarity I have in this temporary strange world. Guido’s wife is the sort of graceful poised Italian woman beside whom I feel large and clumsy, to whom I blurt out my insecure inner life over too much late-night Chianti, conscious of being too eager and too friendly and too, finally, misunderstood. A messy splashing around beside her self-contained creaminess and her slender dignity, only vindicated, at least a little, when Gianfranco carves himself off a thick-crusted wedge of my apple pie and sinks his teeth into it with a look of rapture. At least there are my desserts and cakes to redeem me, to rescue me, to restore my value.

  It is autumn and the menu has changed again. I am plunging my hands – almost up to elbows – in Gianfranco’s salsa di pecora, the mutton sauce he has been slowly simmering all morning and which we will serve with rigatoni. To the standard base of onion, celery and garlic is added the dismembered sheep he carved up earlier, several bones, some ordinary minced topside, then later the red wine and the peeled tomatoes. I am peeling the flesh from the bones. It is a fatty sauce with a fatty earthy aroma reminding me of the heavenly oxtail sauce, the salsa di coda, we were making two years ago.

  On the radio, Neneh Cherry sings ‘It’s a Man’s World’ and in his little corner Vito thumps the hood of the dishwasher shut. Alvaro is mixing the batter for the popular deep-fried chicken and vegetables, which we serve tumbling out of stiff paper cones: he whisks together eggs and white wine, then one cup of flour and in its still lumpy stage folds through chopped chicken thighs.

  Farro, the ancient grain spelt, has become the fashionable item this season, and so we are turning it into soups and salads. There is a pot of steadily simmering, thickening soup of spelt and porcini mushrooms alongside an asparagus sauce to be served with tagliatelle.

  Earlier I watched Gianfranco and Alvaro prepare fresh pigs’ cheeks to make guanciale, the large cheeks placed into a container and covered completely with rock salt. In several days they will be ready for the addition of garlic, herbs and lots of pepper, before being hung for several weeks. Already hanging from the rafters in the rarely used upstairs television room are prosciutti of various sizes. They are treated the same way, though being so much larger they are left under salt for a month. They must hang for a year, the salt ‘cooking’ them and providing flavour. Vito tells me that prosciutti used to be draped over fireplaces, but nowadays they are hung in rooms ventilated by enormous fans to dry them out; in the final phase they are left in damp cool cellars. The drying must happen quickly, or they will start to rot.

  Pollo fritto

  (Fried chicken)

  1 kg chicken thighs, halved

  2 eggs

  1/2 cup white wine

  230 g (1 cup) plain flour

  Sage and rosemary, roughly chopped

  Salt

  Vegetable oil

  Whisk together all ingredients (except chicken), until smooth. Add chicken and set aside for about an hour. Deep-fry in very hot vegetable oil till crisp and golden. Drain on paper towels, and serve in paper cones sprinkled with sea salt and lemon wedges.

  Gianfranco’s moodiness and volatility keep us steady and alert. I begin to see in my endless meditations, letters home, or when I plunge off on my morning walks, how he is the essential centrifugal force holding the rest of our weaker souls together, and without him we would fall apart. No one else possesses his authority, although I observe how much in his shadow Ignazio has grown up and developed, how earnestly he seeks to imitate and emulate. Sweet little Ignazio, who drinks steadily throughout the day, must fill in the spaces of Gianfranco’s gradually increasing absences, but ‘the essence’ is always there to hold us together.

  Although capable of admirable efficiency, Alvaro also drinks day and evening, and slides easily into sloppiness. I persist with my private stern lectures and diary entries, reminding myself this ‘season’ is a mere matter of months after which I will return to my sane and comfortable Sydney life, my Paddington flat and my trivial, tedious routines. I am here to absorb, learn and be inspired rather than be sucked back into the wells of loneliness and self-contempt.

  It is taking me all this time to understand that what I see as his failure to appreciate me and to constantly acknowledge my work is perhaps Gianfranco’s professionalism, the detachment necessary to steer his team and ensure its flow; that in reality it may be a measure of my stubbornly low self-esteem – and that what the experience could be teaching me, among realms of other great lessons, is self-reliance; that the reason I should work hard, create magnificent food and always do my best is not a needy search for approval and praise, but because it is a worthy way to live.

  Amor nuovo va e viene, amore vecchio si mantiene

  New love comes and goes but old love remains

  Unfailingly, I am moved by the rare displays of Gianfranco’s solicitude. One evening we receive a visit from Emilio, our detergent sales representative, a gingery pink and fleshy man habitually dressed in khaki. He and a boisterous group of friends have been dining and Emilio, drunk, has run into the kitchen and scooped up the bread-and-butter pudding – which I had painstakingly been making as a gift for Ignazio’s mother – and disappeared. The car tyres squeal away, laughter floating from the windows as Alvaro and I gape at each other. Gianfranco, of course, is informed immediately: his face whitens with fury and he swears he will have no more dealings with this man, should he dare show his face.

  A month later he does. Again, he comes in with a group of friends, who all drink too much, and again he erupts into the kitchen to greet us all. Alvaro and Ignazio are sycophantic and respond to his jokes. I have turned my back in cold contempt, fascinated to see what, if anything, Gianfranco will do.

  Gianfranco finishes his telephone conversation and turns to Emilio. He is icy. He says that he wants nothing more to do with him, and that he will be buying our cleaning agents elsewhere, and that, yet again, Emilio has that evening drunkenly created ‘un casino’ in the restaurant. But most significantly it was the crime of having taken off with the dolce, which la Veeky had spent an entire day slaving over (how I love this man), which means the relationship is over. ‘Finito, chiuso!’

  There stands Emilio, smooth-talking and florid, reduced to a puffy ridiculous figure by Gianfranco’s speech and quite shocked by it, and I am discreetly watching Gianfranco, who had clearly been upset by the whole incident too, but who possesses such integrity and loyalty that he is barely quivering. I have never seen him more magnificent; he takes my breath away. Emilio seems to melt, and then he is gone.

  There are so many things about this restaurant that I love. It seems to be the perfect Chianti experience – its cosy interior with fresh flowers and beautiful glassware on each lunch-laid table; tiny candles in containers and pot plants and intimate corners; the dusty bottles of ancient Chiantis arranged around the walls.

  I have fewer Australian visitors this year and remind myself not to do what I did last time; namely, pounce on them and demand to know if they think I look fat. Of course, I am fat again because the circumstances and issues are the same: the dire combination of low self-esteem and working, long gruelling hours, while having constant access to unlimited amounts of irresistibly lovely food and wine. I just have to open the fridge door: a haunch of Parmesan cheese reposes among black figs, huge glorious deep-green leaves of rocket, fat ridged zucchini, tiny golden finferi mushrooms, a plethora of such gorgeous food, food I will never find in Australia, food which is provocatively of the season and the place, so freshly of the moment.

  I am regrettably more conscious of the times when I am barked at by Gianfranco as if I were some lowly hired help than of the other precious moments when I watch him create amazing dishes or merely singe the hair of a duck over the open flame before hacking it up into small segments. The grace and economy that emerge whenever he cook
s I find almost arousing; it is one of the rare times I feel stirring in me something of the old passion he used to evoke.

  I am watching as he mixes cheeses: ‘Uno sperimento’ – an experiment – he says grandly and mysteriously, as he grates expensive fontina with fresh pecorino and mashes it into Gorgonzola, adding a handful of grated Parmesan. I ask him when he invented this experiment and he explains how, delayed that morning in a queue of cars, he dreamed it up. Now he smears it over cooked polenta and slides it into the oven. When he extracts it, golden and bubbling, he serves it with grilled spicy sausage and pork belly. Of course, it is sensational. I keep flashing back to images of him sitting impatiently in his big four-wheel drive stuck somewhere between Florence and Spedaluzzo, his mind moving on to recipes, food combinations, menu ideas. How can I not love this man?

  The figs have come and gone. The huge tree out the back in Gianfranco’s garden has yielded such a feast of them, too many for us to gather and use. They are scattered everywhere, skins spilt to reveal their crimson hearts, bird-pecked, rotting. Their dark leaves we use to line the platters for antipasti or for special functions; I have made endless fig crostate. On my walks, the landscape is changing, the air crisper now, veils of mist hanging over vineyards and olives finally beginning to turn black. The fields are stripped of the grapes, hand-plucked by the groups of itinerant African pickers.

  One morning I contemplate how the countryside consists of so many different perspectives; it is ever-changing, and every bend in the road throws up a whole new vision of gorgeousness, a little like those glass domes of snow you shake, and when the snow settles it is a rearranged beauty. On my walks I ponder what I will be cooking that day and the changes to the menu. I think about making potato gnocchi and the mutton sauce and a salad of spelt and porcini mushrooms with shavings of the black truffles Mario brings us. The porcini will be turned into a silky sauce for tagliatelle. There may be a need for more minestrone, perfumed by the wild thyme called pepolino. We are serving fettunta with a garlicky mix of chicory and toscanelli beans and a final slick of good oil; ribollita, minestrone thickened with stale bread, simmers to creamy thickness. The oxtail sauce I most enjoy making is on the list, as is the wild-boar sauce.