A Thousand Days in Venice (29 page)

Yield:
8 servings

Of all the dishes we cooked during our sojourn at the hotel next door to our apartment during the renovation, this one has earned the status of family treasure. We cook it anytime and everywhere we can barter, hunt, buy, or beg a basketful of porcini. After successful autumn hunts, we make a dose big enough to feed the neighbors, and we stage our own Sagra di Porcini.

5 tablespoons unsalted butter

1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil

1 pound of fresh wild mushrooms (porcini, cèpes, chanterelles, portobelli), wiped free of surface grit with a soft, damp cloth and thinly sliced

½ pound shallots, peeled and minced

fine sea salt and just-cracked pepper

1 cup Moscato or other late-harvest white wine

1 cup heavy cream

4–5 fresh sage leaves

Over medium flame, warm 3 tablespoons of butter with the olive oil in a large sauté pan and, when the butter foams, add the mushrooms and the shallots, tossing them about to coat them in the hot fat. Lower the flame and sauté until the mushrooms begin to give up their juices. Sprinkle
salt and pepper generously over all. Add the wine and continue to braise gently for 20 minutes, until almost all the wine and the exuded juices have been absorbed by the mushrooms. Meanwhile, in a small saucepan over low flame, warm the heavy cream with the leaves of sage. When the mixture is close to simmering, remove from the stove and cover (the cream will take on the perfume of the sage while the mushrooms braise). Strain the cream and discard the sage. Now add the perfumed cream to the mushrooms and continue the very slow braise, permitting the cream to reduce for 2 or 3 minutes. Serve the dish very warm with thin toast and glasses of the same chilled Moscato used in the braise.

Yield:
4 servings

I learned quickly to love this icy, creamy, addictive ending to nearly every lunch or dinner served in every
osteria
and
ristorante
across the Veneto. Alas, no one even knows what
sgroppino
is here in the Umbrian hills, where we now live. Though I never made the drink at home in Venice, after we moved I began to improvise it from sheer nostalgia. It is so light and goes down so easily, one feels almost noble about drinking it—as though one has forsaken dessert and settled for a cool drink. Here is our house version.

½ pint lemon ice cream or sherbert

4–6 ice cubes

4 ounces vodka

1 cup sparkling wine (in the Veneto, it's the ever present Prosecco)

shredded zest of 1 lemon

Place the ice cream or sherbert, the ice, vodka, and wine in a blender and whirl until it's thick, creamy, and barely pourable. Transfer it to iced wineglasses, sprinkle on the lemon zest, and serve with small spoons.

It was Sue Pollock who took me by the hand, saying, “First we have to find you the most wonderful agent.”

And Sue brought me straight to Rosalie Siegel who, like all magical people are wont to do, changed the course of my life. Rosalie is Jeanne d'Arc in a Chanel suit. She is a sage. Tenaciously, devotedly, and with that rare finesse of hers, she shepherded me and my story. Now I can't imagine any story of mine without her.

From across six thousand miles of land and sea, Amy Gash reined me in. No less than a brilliant editor, she saved me from an excess of “floating, hovering, lunging, festooning, raising up, and dancing.” She helped me to lay down some old trappings, to stand up taller as a writer. Anyone who still thinks that editing is all about punctuation and grammar should know the depth of her work. Amy loved this story and cared, unstintingly, how I told it. And everywhere in this text that three adjectives remain still lined up in a row is a result of my stubbornness, a sign of the skirmish or two among our battles that Amy let me win.

This book was made by every Venetian who showed me the way
or told me a secret, every one of you who sipped Prosecco with me, taught me a word, fed me, hugged me, rescued me. And cried with me. You are a race apart, a tribe more blessed than cursed and that I lived among you for those thousand days is a divine keepsake, one that burnishes even the thinnest blaze of the sun and keeps me warm.

Finally, it's not that I don't remember you, you about whom I did not write among these pages. It's not even that I don't remember you kindly or not so kindly, as the case may be. But this is such a small book and my life is such a long story that this is all I can say for now.

Published by
A
LGONQUIN
B
OOKS OF
C
HAPEL
H
ILL
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

a division of
Workman Publishing
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014

© 2002 by Marlena de Blasi. All rights reserved.
ISBN 978-1-56512-589-6