Eating Italy: A Chef's Culinary Adventure (11 page)

OUR TOES MET UNDER THE TABLE. MATTEO AND CLAUDIA’S FRIENDS WERE DRINKING AND LAUGHING AT THE OTHER END OF THE TABLE. THEY SEEMED MILES AWAY.

We were at the Tucans, an Irish bar just down the street from Piazza Vecchia, the main square of Bergamo’s medieval-looking old city on the hill. Claudia and I could barely communicate because I didn’t know much Italian and she didn’t know English, but I couldn’t take my eyes off of her olive brown skin. We sipped Scotch across from each other and slipped off our shoes. She seemed to like me.

A few days later, Claudia left for a two-week vacation to Ireland with her friend Livia. We texted each other the whole time she was away. One night, she texted me: “
Sogni d’oro.
” The translation was “Dreams of gold,” but it didn’t seem quite right. The next day at work, I asked everyone in the Frosio kitchen what it meant. They made fun of me, but we figured out that it means “sweet dreams.”

Claudia got home at the beginning of May, and I couldn’t wait to see her. We made plans to get drinks at O’Dea’s, another Irish bar in Bergamo. She picked me up around ten p.m. in her red Mini Cooper. Even with the language barrier, we got our points across, talking about our families, friends, America, and Italy. We left the bar around three a.m. and I drove her Mini back to Frosio Ristorante, where I lived upstairs. The engine quieted down, we opened the doors and stepped outside. I walked around to her side to say good night and noticed the moon in the sky. I leaned toward her, and we kissed.

After that night, we spent a lot of time together. She lived about a half hour from the restaurant on a hilltop called Monte Bò in the village of Cene. When I first rode there on a borrowed motorcycle, it took forever to get to the top. She lived at her mother’s place, a beautiful yellow house with terra-cotta roof tiles, perched on the hillside overlooking a lush, green mountain range. Claudia gave me a brief tour. The spring gardens were just starting to bloom. Outside the kitchen door, a huge rosemary bush grew near some lavender, sage, and oregano plants. The back steps led down under the pergola, and kiwifruit hung from the top of the pergola. Claudia told me that persimmons and pomegranates grew there in the fall. Their property stretched down the mountainside and was dotted with fruit trees, including figs, plums, and two kinds of cherries—amarena and bing. Wild asparagus were coming up near the edge of the forest. They had walnut trees and kept chickens.

As a chef, I was blown away. All this great food, right in their backyard! A grove of chestnut trees sloped down the hill, and when I met Claudia’s brother, Alex, he told me that wild boar crawled up the hillside to eat the chestnuts in the fall. He would hang out of the window with his hunting dog, Dick, and then shoot them. Alex would butcher the boar and their mother, Pina, would braise it with rosemary, tomatoes, onions, red wine, olive oil, and butter and serve the ragù over polenta.

I learned that Pina is quite the cook. Her father, Vittorio, was a butcher with a
salumeria
in Bergamo. Her father-in-law, Giorgio, was a cattle farmer and cheese maker. So she always had fresh meat, cheese, and produce at her fingertips. When Claudia was a kid, they had a donkey named Casimiro. After the donkey died, Pina braised it with juniper, cinnamon, cloves, and black pepper, and Claudia ate it.

When I heard that, I really started to fall for her. This
was a family of food lovers. Cooks! Claudia and I spent the next several weeks sharing all of our favorite things. I showed her my favorite gelato place, Paradiso, in Alme; and she turned me on to the incredible licorice gelato at Gelateria Peccati de Gola in nearby Albino.

It didn’t take long for the rest of her family to get curious about “the American boy.” The first time I met them was at the end of May at Claudia’s grandmother’s house in Fiobbio, just a few kilometers down the hill from Cene. Everyone was gathering to celebrate the baptism of Francesca, her uncle Vittorino’s new baby. When I walked in with Claudia, I heard “
L’americano è qui. Ciao. E benarrivato!
” which means, “The American is here. Hello. And welcome!” Except for her Aunt Betty, no one spoke English. They spoke Bergamascan, a dialect that barely sounds like Italian. We sat around for the next couple of hours, stumbling through various conversations about my work, family, America, and the younger President Bush (no one liked him). Without Aunt Betty translating, I would have been completely lost. I found out that the Fiobbio house was her grandmother Anna’s. Anna had two daughters, Pina and Irene, and four sons, Bruno, Vittorino, Nunzio, and Piero. Most of them had children, the newest one being Vittorino’s daughter, Francesca.

Her family prepared a giant meal, and we started eating around noon. Piero owned a
gastronomia
(gourmet shop) and brought shrimp in
salsa rossa
, octopus and potato salad, prosciutto cotto mousse, liver pâté in gelatin, little savory puff pastry tarts, and a mountain of salumi. Her aunt Irene made lasagne with salmon. Nonna Anna made a veal roast with vegetables from the garden. She also made this incredibly rich-tasting, mahogany-colored rabbit served on the bone over polenta. They raised the rabbits out back. To make the polenta, Nonna lifted off three metal rings from the flat-top burner of the wood stove, using a little tool that hung on the edge. That brought the polenta pot closer to the flames,
which made the polenta burn a little on the sides, giving it a smoky aroma. Nonna liked that I was interested in how to make the food.

Toward the end of the meal, six different cheeses appeared on the table, including formagella, Gorgonzola, and casolet. By five o’clock, when I had to get back to work at the restaurant, they had just started dessert. There was sponge cake with fruit and whipped cream, cookies,
piccola pasticceria
(tiny pastries), and coffee made in the Italian
moka
pot. There was a ton of food. I was in heaven!

I learned that back in the day, Claudia’s family was one of the first in Fiobbio to own a car. Almost everyone in the family ran a business, and they were very proud of Claudia, a young woman running her own successful video rental store in town. They were nervous that an American was going to come and break her heart, or maybe even take her away from Italy and ruin her life. But I was less interested in going back to the States than I was in staying here as long as I could. When I thought about it, I’d only saved enough money to get me through the next couple of months. But I could feel my life changing. I needed to stay here. I was starting to feel more at home than I had felt for years.