by Angela Petch
TUESDAY
Today it was really hot and sunny like it often is after a storm. Mamma said it had cleared the air.
It was fun down on the river bed. Mamma came to help collect firewood too and she made us a picnic which we carried down in a basket and not in the cool bag we usually use, because there wouldn’t have been any of those in the 1920s. We had left-over pizza from the other night (yummy), and dried fruit and cake. (Actually, ginger).
We gathered quite a load of firewood. Either Babbo or I will chop it up later. Dragging it back to the wood store was such hot sticky work that, even though the water was quite cold, we all decided to go back to the big waterfall for a swim. Mamma said it would do as our wash. She wouldn’t let us use soap in case of polluting the river, but she told us in the olden days women used wood ash from their fires to wash clothes down by the river, like a kind of soap. How weird is that?
She was so much fun in the river pool – I’ve never seen her do head stands under the water before and she showed us how to do somersaults without getting water up our noses. She even let me dive off the rocks, which she doesn’t usually do. But she said there was more water than usual from the storm and so it was deep enough and quite safe.
As well as the wood we found a few other bits and pieces washed down the river: an old boot (Ma has bagged that and says it’ll look good with a geranium planted in it…what????) I joked and said in the olden days a one-legged peasant would have loved to have found the boot because shoes were expensive and most people wore wooden clogs.
The twins picked up bits of strange-shaped driftwood because they said they looked like ghost fingers and they spent ages being boring and pretending to scare each other. When you scream down by the waterfall it echoes all round the place and I hope nobody thought we were being murdered.
In fact nobody came to find out, so it was just as well we weren’t being murdered.
WEDNESDAY
Cycled round to my friend’s house because Mamma couldn’t take me in the car (not authentic and we don’t have a donkey) and I couldn’t text him either, seeing as we are living in the 1920’s) but Tommaso is away - bummer! - and won’t be back until next week as he has gone down to stay with his Nonna by the sea. I wanted to ask him to come swimming with us. He’s the only boy I get on with at school. But he lives quite close to Giselda, so I carried on to hers.
Giselda was in the little room she keeps just for her cats and I told her about my project.
Anyway, she told me that to make it more true to life (authentic), I should have walked all the way up here along old footpaths because the main tarmac road wasn’t built then and also hardly anybody owned a bike then, only quite well-off people. She told me some funny stuff about bikes - how people hung them up so the tyres wouldn’t wear out and how they even let the air out of them between each ride because they thought it would make their bikes last longer that way.
She made me a lush cup of hot chocolate, so thick my spoon stuck in the middle and then asked if she could come and visit tomorrow as she felt she could be of great use to me in the project. I told her it was cool. Well, I couldn’t phone Mamma to check if it was alright, because I wanted to do it properly and be authentic. (That’s my absolute favourite word at the moment).
‘I’ll drop in at about 6 a.m. tomorrow,’ she said. ‘In those days people made the most of daylight and went to bed at sun down and got up at sun rise.’
I hope Mamma won’t be cross. Maybe I’ll get up at 5.30 and bring her a cup of tea in bed, like Babbo sometimes does. (But he doesn’t usually get up at 5.30).
THURSDAY
We overslept and woke up to a weird noise. I looked out of my bedroom window and there was Giselda on a two-wheeled cart and her donkey bridled up. The donkey was making a right old din, Eeeh Aaaaw, over and over and Mamma came rushing out ready to tell us off, I think. But she just laughed when she saw Giselda.
The twins ran out with two carrots and Giselda said donkeys used to be known as the little horses of St. Francis.
True to her word, it was 6 o’clock. Giselda held up a paper bag and said, ‘I’ve brought us breakfast. Sweet pizza with a thick sugar coating. And I shall make us all some coffee from roasted barley.’
The coffee wasn’t that good and Mamma cheated and went off and made herself a cup of English tea.
‘I’ve brought along some things to make this project of yours more lifelike,’ Giselda said, fetching a long bag from the back of the cart. ‘This is called a saccone,’ she explained, ‘and each household would have had one to store their flour and beans.’
She held up a longish creamy-coloured bag and Ma was really interested in it, especially when Giselda explained how every housewife in those days would know how to weave the material to make them and darn and patch them and keep them extra clean. Mamma looked closely at the material and said she wouldn’t know how to start and how much easier it was nowadays just to be able to use a fridge and freezer and plastic bags.
Giselda pulled out old, fusty clothes from the bag and handed them round: patched trousers and a check shirt - also patched - (there were almost more patches than material) and a piece of string to tie round my middle instead of a belt.
The girls and Mamma were each given a long thick skirt, blouse, shawl and a scarf to tie round their heads. She had some smelly pieces of fox fur which would have been tied round children’s ears to keep them warm in winter, but thank goodness it’s summer now and we didn’t have to wear the pongy things.
‘How are we going to run around in these horrible skirts?’ Rosanna whined and Giselda replied that in those days there wouldn’t be a lot of time for playing and that she was going to keep us all busy for the last two days of the project. Emilia tried to do a somersault and got tangled up in her skirt and went off in a strop. Giselda ignored her but Rosanna managed to persuade her to come back and join in. ‘If I’ve got to wear this hideous thing, then so have you,’ she bossed. ‘It’s only for today.’
The girls were given the task of finishing off making cheese. Giselda explained that this normally would start at four o’clock in the morning when we are usually fast asleep. ‘The first task was to milk all the flock. Well, I picked milk up from the farm at Torriolo up the hill from you – Alessandro had already done that job on your behalf – and this has been filtered, ready to heat up in these pots.’
Because it would have taken far too long to make a fire from scratch, Giselda said the girls would be allowed to use the gas cooker in our kitchen.
‘I have a thermometer here to check when we should add the rennet. Between 30 and 40 degrees, but never more than 40.’ Giselda said.
‘What’s rennet?’ asked Emilia.
‘It’s taken from a sheep’s stomach, to help make cheese,’ said Rosanna.
‘Well done, Rosi. Now we’ll add just the correct amount and then watch for the point of coagulation, when curds are formed in the cheese and it starts to go lumpy.’
The fun part came after the girls had broken up the curds with a kind of whisk.
‘I got this down from the wall this morning,’ Giselda said, holding the wooden tool up. Ma was interested in that too and got out her metal one to compare.
‘Ooh, yuck this is all gooey,’ Rosanna said, her hands immersed in the pasty mess of curds.
‘It’s fun! All squidgy!’ Emilia said, wiping a hair from her cheek. She ended up with a splodge of the goo on her face. Ha ha!
‘I can’t believe this will turn into cheese,’ Rosanna said. ‘I think I’ve gone off the idea of eating cheese anymore. And it’s stinky-poo!’
When they’d picked out most of the paste (although lots of it landed on the floor and the kitchen units), Giselda produced another old fashioned bit of equipment from her old kitchen.
‘These are called cascine. They haven’t been used for years and years, these forms, but once upon a time, they were used every day to make our own cheeses.’
We all joined in, Mamma too, pressing
the paste down into the wooden forms, patting and smoothing it.
‘If you had a cellar, it would be the ideal place to store these but modern houses don’t have those anymore,’ Giselda said. ‘Let’s try under the stairs, it’s quite a cool place. The longer it stays there, the better – to make it strong and seasoned.’
After we’d cleaned up and had an authentic mid-morning snack of Pan cristiano (like eggy bread: bread dipped in egg and fried. Quite yummy!) and a drink each of watered-down wine (can’t see what all the fuss is about myself), Giselda set me the task of being a day labourer. My job was to ‘dicioccare’ – to beat lumps of earth so that it turned into fine soil, removing stones and roots to prepare for planting. In a very short time I had blisters on my palms from the hoe and Ma had to bind up my hands. Giselda apologised but she said she wanted to show us how hard life was for ordinary people in the past.
‘At your age you might have been a chimney sweep or a frog catcher or a spaccapietre, sitting on a pile of stones and banging them from morning to night until they were small enough to use to rake onto road surfaces. Or a woodcutter, or a boy digging ditches down on the coast where you’d probably have caught malaria while you were at it.’
It was helpful of Giselda to show us all these things but I was beginning to wish the end of the week would hurry up and come and we could go back to normal. It was really, really hard work.
For the rest of the morning, Giselda took us foraging. We walked up to the mountain pass where, underneath beech trees, we found porcini mushrooms. I’d already been out mushroom hunting with Babbo several times, so this wasn’t new to me, but she showed us some other types I had never collected – tiny mushrooms that looked like rows of teeth and grew beneath fallen leaves so they were difficult to find. Mamma said she would never have the courage to eat mushrooms she found on her own in case she made a mistake and poisoned us all. (Later, when Giselda had gone, we looked them up in our Pocket Book on mushrooms and they are called Wood Hedgehogs!)
Mamma was more interested in the leaves we looked for in the meadows: young leaves of wild chicory, hairy leaves of pimpinella, (she said they were called Burnet-saxifrage in English), poppy and dandelion leaves, wild carrot – which didn’t look like carrots at all but white frothy flowers - and loads of other stuff I don’t remember. Giselda said the leaves would be too bitter to eat raw now as springtime was the best time to collect them. We were getting a bit bored by this stage until Giselda showed us a patch of wild strawberries and we ate loads of those. The girls squashed them in their fingers and smeared the red juice all over their faces and then kept pretending to drop dead and stuff. They are so sad sometimes.
When we got back to the house, Giselda made us clean and chop up some of the plants she said wouldn’t be too past it and Mamma boiled them up. In the meantime, Giselda rolled out home-made pasta and we had fun cutting out huge ravioli with an upturned glass and used the plants as a filling. She produced a jar of home-made tomato sauce from her basket and said every peasant household would have had a plentiful supply of this, made at the end of the summer months and stored away for eating during winter when snow was on the ground and nothing could grow. There were no shops round here either. Just the occasional man who came round selling reels of cotton and tins of herrings, or candles - but not when snow was on the ground. She showed us a picture of one – he had this weird thing on his back with pockets where he kept all the stuff he sold. Giselda said everybody had to make do with what they could store up from summer. Stuff like dried pears and apples, chestnuts and maize for polenta (which Mamma hates - she says she would have died in those days because she can’t eat it, it turns her stomach but Giselda laughed and said she would definitely have eaten it rather than exist on an empty belly.)
Lunch was yummy but Mamma said it had taken a whole morning to prepare and kept going on about how hard it must have been for women in those days.
‘Everybody helped each other more,’ Giselda said. ‘In fact, with the men away in Maremma for so long, women and older people relied on each other a lot. And in the evenings, when the chores were finished, they would meet in somebody’s house for veglia.’
Then she jumped up and clapped her hands and came up with another idea.
‘I know – how about we have a veglia up at my house tomorrow evening? Maybe you could invite Davide’s friends to come around. Get them to dress up like you are – their parents can come along too, if they want. The more, the merrier!’
‘It’s a bit short notice,’ I said. I was trying to put her off really. I didn’t think anybody would want to come and I’d probably get teased but Mamma had already told Giselda it was an excellent idea.
When I told Giselda I’d have to use my phone to invite them and it wouldn’t be authentic, she laughed. ‘In the past you would have shouted from the top of the mountain but I don’t think that would work now. Or you could do what the villagers did then - lean against the walls of a house or a tall rock and shout through cupped hands. That was usually done to tell somebody their lost sheep had been found. But no wires would be involved.’
After she’d gone Mamma said we were allowed to switch on the telly and we watched Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. She said we deserved it as it had been quite a hard day and then she put some ointment from the chemist on my blistered hands.
We decided we’re very lucky to live nowadays.
FRIDAY AND THE VEGLIA
In the end, as it was such short notice, I phoned up a few kids in my class and invited them over. Giselda told me to tell them not to bring any food – she would see to all that. Some of them moaned about having to dress up, but in the end everybody made an effort and Mamma took photos and decided to give a prize to the best costume. Celeste won…she’d borrowed her Nonna’s old flowery dress and headscarf and wore short, rubber boots and an old wrap-around apron so we didn’t recognise her at first. Mamma gave her a lush gingerbread man as a prize. She’d iced it to make it look like a peasant boy. I was pleased ‘cos Celeste took one bite and decided she didn’t like ginger and so I shared it with the twins (well, I shared it out so I got the biggest bits).
The Italian grown ups ate most of the food because they remembered eating tripe and Pagliatella (the fatty part of lamb’s intestines cooked over a wood fire) and bean stew like that when they were little. No way was I going to eat sheep insides and the twins refused too.
Giselda had asked a lady she knew was a good cook to make acqua cotta and that wasn’t too bad. Except she said the version we had eaten was a bit more complicated and richer tasting than how it used to be made. In the past it was made with stale bread, chopped up mint collected from the fields, an onion – if there was one - and water…
This is Giselda’s recipe:
Acqua cotta from the Maremma
Ingredients:
Two or three large onions; green vegetables (like cabbage or spinach); tomatoes; one egg per person, toasted bread, some grated pecorino cheese.
Put a generous amount of good olive oil from the Maremma into a big pan. Add 2 or 3 large onions sliced up and gently fry them.
Then turn down the heat and cook until the onions almost go mushy.
Add tomatoes cut into pieces and continue to cook, adding herbs such as basil, and some chopped up celery.
When this has all cooked add water (but if there is good broth available, this is better). Boil for 15 minutes.
Fry some toasted slices of bread in a frying pan and sprinkle grated Pecorino cheese on top. Add one egg per person (making sure they don’t all join together, so break them into the pan gently). After about one or two minutes, when the eggs begin to set, remove the pan from the fire.
Pour the soup into dishes and put the bread and egg on top.
**
We all LOVED the scrummy sweet Fritelle di S. Giuseppe that we finished off supper with.
Ingredients:
2 glasses of water; 2 dessert spoons of very good olive oil; 3 dessert spoons of
sugar; 250 grams of wheat flour; 2 whole eggs; 1 sachet of vanilla sugar (1 gram); a pinch of salt; ½ teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda, the grated zest of one lemon.
In a pan, heat up water, sugar, salt, grated lemon and the oil.
When it is boiling, remove from the heat and add all the flour immediately and all in one go.
Stir very well and until well mixed (this will take about 10 minutes).
Leave the mix to cool down and then add both eggs one at a time. Mix well.
ONLY AT THIS STAGE, add the bicarbonate of soda and vanilla and mix again for another 2 or 3 minutes.
Pour plenty of oil into a frying pan and heat to boiling point and throw in the mix little by little (about the size of a large walnut). Fry – if the mixture has been properly prepared, it will swell in size immediately and turn it with a fork so it cooks evenly.
Remove from the heat and toss it in sugar immediately and then put on a cloth (to absorb extra fat) and eat when still warm and never cold!
Yum yum!
We ate the food in Giselda’s garden but when it began to turn dark, she invited us inside the oldest part of her house. I hadn’t been in there before. (Her house is actually enormous and it’s amazing she’s the only person who lives there – except for her umpteen cats).
The windows are tiny and there were candles in bottles on the sill and a huge fireplace, big enough to stand up in. It was really cosy. She told the children to sit on the floor and the adults sat on wooden benches. Then she lit an old pipe and puffed on it. She looked weird with her two long grey plaits and her wrinkled face and I had never seen a lady smoke a pipe and a few of us giggled. Mamma glared at us and we tried not to look at each other in case we started giggling again.