Mediterranean Summer (4 page)

A short while later, Nathalie pointed to Bonnieux, a town that capped a lone hill ahead, our final destination. The winding two-lane road to town took us past fruit and nut orchards, grass fields, restored farmhouses, and old stone barns. The car’s diesel engine labored to make the final steep grade. Near the summit a clear vista of the valley of the Vaucluse opened up. I looked across to Lacoste, another hilltop town close by, and saw the jagged ruins of the Marquis de Sade’s castle, which dominated the vista from high above the village. Recalling the twisted madness chronicled in Peter Weiss’s modern play
Marat/Sade
that I read in college, I wondered how this exquisite environment could have produced such a tortured soul.

It didn’t take long to adjust to the daily rhythm of living in Provence. Early each morning I’d walk down the street to the patisserie to get warm breakfast pastries or brioche to have with café au lait, which we drank out of bowls, a local custom. We would leave by eight o’clock to go to the markets, buy what we needed for lunch and dinner, and then return to the apartment with an occasional detour through one of the villages that dotted the hilltops of the valley.

At the end of my first month, all seemed on track until one day Nathalie asked me, “Is there anything you want to make while here?”

I replied, “No, I like your choices. I like what you’re doing.”

“But didn’t you come here to learn the food of Provence?”

“Of course,” I answered. “That’s why I try to follow your lead in the kitchen.”

Nathalie dismissed my response with a somewhat chilly “okay” and went back to her work. That seemed to resolve the issue, but just what might have motivated her question continued to nag at me.

I didn’t understand what her problem was. I was eager to go to the market each morning, help with the prep, even help with the clean-up, all the while trying to adhere to my mother’s warning not to be a pushy American.

“Remember,” my mother had advised me, “you will be living in this woman’s home, working in her kitchen. Don’t come on like a know-it-all, telling her that this isn’t how they do it in San Francisco or New York. You are there to learn.”

“What are you thinking about?” Nathalie asked me the next day as I chopped some mirepoix vegetables and tried my hand at making the “house” salad dressing.

Maybe because her question took me by surprise, or because I didn’t know what answer she was looking for, I replied, “Nothing. I was just thinking about how different eating at home is.”

“David, I didn’t invite you here to chop vegetables and season lamb. Cooking, you know, is not about recipes. It comes from my heart. You have never asked me why—why I do things, why I want it done this way and not that way. What’s in your heart, David? Did you leave it at home?”

I didn’t know quite what to say. I must have searched too long for an answer, for Nathalie went on.

“Maybe you might want to think about other things to do in Provence. But that is for you to decide.”

With that, she left the kitchen.

I quickly finished up the vegetables, wiped my hands, left the apartment, and briskly walked up the narrow cobblestoned road to the village peak. I perched myself on the top of a wall overlooking the entire valley and began to assess what just happened. I had been invited to find something else, my services no longer required. Yes, despite the polite words she had used, I had been fired, and not from a glitzy restaurant with a demanding clientele, but from a job without pay. I had no idea why, other than that in some way I failed to measure up. I didn’t know what to do. I thought for a minute about trying to repair the situation with Nathalie, but she had left me no such opening, her demeanor communicating that she had made her decision and it was final. I had been let go, told to find some other place, not just to work but to sleep as well.

I had to make a decision. Going home after having been stamped a total loser by a world-recognized food authority likely meant leaving cooking forever. And I wasn’t able to explain Nathalie’s judgment of me, even to myself. The problem was I still didn’t quite know what I had done wrong.

As much out of
embarrassment as courage, I wanted another chance in Europe. But in order to stay, I needed a connection—someone who could open a door for me to another position. As if guided by a kindly saint who had taken pity on me, I remembered that my mother had mentioned during a call home that one of her colleagues had a sister, Faith Heller Willinger, who was a food writer living in Tuscany. Just in case I considered going to Italy, my mother had passed on her address. The next day I sent off a letter.

Faith was close to the Italian restaurant business and had become a respected expert in food and wine. Although I didn’t know it at the time, my letter arrived while she was busy reading galleys of her soon-to-be-published guide to Italian regional cuisine,
Eating in Italy.
Yet she took the time to speak to me by phone. I told her about my embarrassing experiences with Alice and Nathalie. She took the time to buck me up, to restore a little of my lost confidence. But the help she offered me was not limited to confidence building.

She suggested that I meet her in Florence and maybe she could help arrange an itinerary of internships in some of the best Italian restaurants, providing that my priority was to learn, not to make money. I assured her this was so, that I had come to Europe to broaden my skills and see Mediterranean cooking at the source.

During our first meeting in Florence, she began to educate me. “You must realize when we talk about
la cucina italiana
”—Italian cuisine—“it’s about cookery from twenty different regions rather than a single, national cuisine.”

She went on to explain that Italy has been united as a republic only since the mid-nineteenth century, almost a century after the United States became a nation, and every region still held on to its own specialties and traditions.

“During the twentieth century,” she added, “in the largest cities, this interesting palette of distinct regions has been a little blurred by modern transportation and a new generation of young chefs who strive for innovation.”

I had originally left the states to experience Provence and the south of France. Being in Italy was completely unexpected. I was excited by the prospect of a new challenge, but at the same time my failure to meet the last challenge had left me vulnerable. Faith must have read this on my face.

“Okay,” she said, shifting gears. “Have you ever cooked with white truffles? Know how traditional balsamic vinegar is truly made? Made pesto in a mortar and pestle? Have you ever heard of the regions of Friuli or Liguria, the dairy belt of the Po valley, or know that Chianti is a place and not just a wine?”

While she spoke, I realized how little I knew about Italian cuisine and that I had accepted as fact many of the worst clichés about the Italian menu.

“Tomatoes came from the New World, not Naples.
Peperoni
are bell peppers, not the sliced salami disks on a pizza. Bologna is a city, and the deli meat you know is really a derivative of mortadella,” she continued. “And a true Florentine steak is a very thick porterhouse that doesn’t need to be served with spinach.”

When she realized just how little I knew, she figured out how to help me.

“I believe it would suit you best,” she said, “to move around for a while, in rural parts, and experience the variety this country offers from its core.” Over the next few days, she tirelessly worked the phone, creating an itinerary of internships that would expose me to what she considered the heart and soul of true Italian food. This would take me to areas of the country where the best examples of regional cooking could be found, and where restaurant owners and chefs were dedicated to preserving the cookery of their respective localities.

Only room and board was offered, except in the rare case where a generous owner might provide a small stipend for pocket money. I would start in Piedmont, and then move on to Friuli, Tuscany, Lombardy, Campania, and Lazio, not in big-city restaurants but in restaurants and wineries in small towns and back-road rural areas where the menus featured time-honored local fare.

The first stop would be in Piedmont. It was truffle season. I was going to a restaurant among the vineyards of Barbaresco, in the valley of the Langhe—fertile soil for the pricey
Tuber magnatum,
the white truffle of Alba. I had no idea what to expect, what working in a foreign kitchen with strangers beside me was going to be like. Especially since I didn’t speak a word of Italian.

Once off the train I showed the address to the uniformed stationmaster. He led me outside to get a clear view and pointed to a winding road that seemed to end at an old town on top of a nearby hill. As I gathered my bags, trying to distribute the weight evenly shoulder to shoulder, he raised his eyebrows, and then shrugged a smile at me. I thanked him and set out.

I finally dragged my three bags up the last incline to the small piazza where the restaurant was located. I found the back door and went into the kitchen, soaked in sweat even on that cold and foggy November day. The staff was in the final hectic stages of getting ready for a lunch banquet, and the chef had no interest in my heroic feat of getting me and my luggage up that road. The first words belted out of her mouth in French were “
Bienvenue, es-tu ici pour regarder ou pour travailler?
”—Welcome! Are you here to watch or work? She handed me an apron. Like most folks so close to the border, she was bilingual. We could communicate, at least enough to be understood in French.

She wasted no time. “Go help in the pasta station!”

Virtually no one spoke English. Italians speak Italian, and among themselves they communicate in their own rapid-fire local dialects. I heard a language full of emotion, but my lack of vocabulary deprived me of the nuance each emotion was driving home. I heard the stream of words as little more than white noise. It was easy to tune out what I was having so much trouble understanding.

During the internship, I sensed snide comments were being made behind my back, and sometimes to my face. I kept hearing
“il Americano
,” and since I was the only American on the staff, it didn’t take long to connect the dots. I stayed silent, trying to be polite by responding with what I thought were appropriately timed
sì
’s. I probably said yes to being an arrogant, selfish, rich, greedy, spoiled American cowboy more times than I would ever care to know about. “Cowboy” seemed to be a favorite label for Americans, curious because the Italians had a love-hate relationship with America’s legendary wide-open West, knocking the brawny cowboy mind-set but making their own Westerns, called spaghetti Westerns, based on the creations of Hollywood.

I watched the other cooks and tried to rely on common sense to get through the day. Although one time when a chef asked for eggs, I came back with grapes, wondering why he needed them for a dish that didn’t seem to call for fruit. He, along with everyone else in the kitchen, doubled over in sidesplitting laughter. To my untrained ear,
uove
—eggs—and
uve
—grapes—sounded similar, especially when spoken quickly with an unfamiliar accent. I went along with it good-naturedly, concealing my embarrassment.

I got through that first internship with a better familiarity with the Italian words for eggs and grapes, certain cheeses, sage, and keeping things clean. But each new internship exposed me to yet another variation of regional Italian food. And the very different personalities of Italian kitchens. Some kitchens were accustomed to
stagiaires
—the French word that Italians used for “interns.” Others were not. In some kitchens I felt the chef had some minimal interest in me, while in others I was just ignored. But in each kitchen you also had the line cooks to win over. Some welcomed me. Others simply did not want to be working alongside a
straniero
—foreigner. My first week at each new place reminded me of a first-day-of-school shakedown—sorting out the show-offs from the helpful, the wise guys from potential friends. The former talked
at
me, whereas the latter spoke
with
me.

Some kitchens thrived on chaos, others were organized and efficient. At one place the chef ordered a code of silence. Arguments that turned physical were infrequent, but could happen at any time, the explosive outbursts sometimes startling me. I once saw a chef throw ladles of boiling pasta water at her tuxedo-clad maître d’ husband. At another, the owner broke a toe kicking a pot, then broke his hand punching a wall—in the middle of service! In Friuli, there was a sous-chef who cried miserably all the time. No one could figure out why. One night an owner in a drunken passion actually put a loaded pistol to the center of my forehead to make sure I fully appreciated the brilliance of his wife’s cooking.

Living conditions, something I didn’t consider when I began, were another matter. There were rooms with minimal heat, poor mattresses, or “hot” showers that at best achieved a temperature you could call no more than tepid. At one place, the water from the bathroom sink smelled as if it had been pumped up from a swamp, while at another the staff cottage flooded when it rained. There were no televisions, music systems, telephones, or newspapers in English. But there were snoring roommates and cooks’ quarters that reeked of cigarette smoke. At one hotel restaurant I regularly had to sleep in the linen closet down the hall from the cooks’ quarters.

But I was learning.

I did a short stint in Florence at a hidden gem of a restaurant called Da Noi—meaning “from us”—that had thirty seats and one star from Michelin. The owners kept their kitchen lean, employing only one other person to help cook. They used no fancy equipment and cooked with normal household cookware, including a pressure cooker for one of the entrées. It wasn’t about the gear in that kitchen. It was about the food and a deft hand at the stove.

“
Un piatto, un gusto
”—one dish, one flavor—is what Franco Colombani used to say to me as we had dinner together in one of the family rooms at the highly regarded Albergo del Sole in Lombardy. The hotel and restaurant had been in continuous service since 1464. It was the blending of only a limited number of ingredients, chosen carefully to blend harmoniously, that preserved the dishes’ distinctive taste. One example was an antipasto on the menu,
insalata di cappone.
Poached, then sliced, white meat from a capon is gently tossed with softened golden raisins, thinly sliced candied lemon or orange peel, some Tuscan extra virgin olive oil, a splash of high-quality balsamic vinegar, sea salt, and a few turns of freshly cracked black pepper. After resting for an hour, it was finished with a splash of red wine vinegar and, when plated, an extra drizzle of olive oil. All of the components balance into a very satisfying one-flavor result. Franco was one of very few outside of Modena authorized to make traditional balsamic vinegar. His coveted barrel room was above a barn on the premises.