The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club (15 page)

I go out to the sheepfold wall where I've left my sack, pull out a hard folder papered in a scene from
Benozzo Gozzoli
, take it back inside and, onto the place I scrubbed after mixing the dough, I dump out sundry sizes and types of paper held together in a corner by the two-tears-and-a-fold method. I will work. The book about Tuscany already published, the finished narrative recounting our early days in Orvieto well into the production process, it's a Sicilian story that I shall work on now, the events of three weeks spent in the mountains there during the first summer of our marriage while we were still living in Venice. Scarce useful material in the fat pile, words and half sentences scribbled mostly on bar napkins and ripped-off edges of the thick brown paper of caffè-table covers and fancy pastry-box wrappings. Never having ceased to relive them, I hardly need notes to restore me to those days. To those people. For these past twelve years since that summer, I've never stopped writing the story, jealously guarding it in its own separate cache in my mind, all the while working on other books. I pick up the pieces, stuff them back into the folder, knowing that all I really need now is time to let the story write itself. How strange to think that what has been part of me for so long – faces and voices and words, neroli riding every breeze, the crisp just-fried shell of a
cannolo
under my teeth, the cut of one woman's eyes, the scent of lavender in still-wet hair, the stomp of horses' hooves below my window at sunrise – all of it to become pages in a book. We all die a little when something finishes. It's how we use up our time. How we use up the thread that Lachesis bequeathes us. Beautiful or painful, we die a little from every ending.

I place two chairs face to face in front of the spent hearth, sit, stretch my legs out straight as the space will allow. This won't do. There's just enough wood in the hearth basket to make a fire. My third fire of the morning, I feel a primeval rush watching the flames take hold and crackle with the first match. I look at my strong, small hands, which are older than I am, my nails hard and short and filed square. How many hundreds of years ago was it? The era of my silk-wrapped California nails. I make a pillow of my jacket, lie on the least rugged space of the floor and I sleep.

An auto careening off the Montefiescone road onto the gravel outside wakes me. Paolina.

‘
Mi dispiace tanto
, I'm so sorry you've been waiting … I was with the Dutch in Bolsena …'

Having flung open the door before she'd come to a full stop, Paolina shouts her apology, exits from her old black Mini, legs first; a long stretch of skinny jeans before her black mud-caked boots crunch down on the stones. Unfolding the rest of her to reveal her signature black T-shirt, a pashmina – also black – hanging from one shoulder, a canvas sack hung from the other. We embrace and I smell sun and olive oil and woodsmoke on her skin. As is mine today, Paolina's hair is unbound and we laugh at the similarities of our long, curly manes. Leaning back a bit, she spreads her fingers and runs them through my tangles, tells me, ‘Yours is worse than mine. I left my clip in Bolsena. What's your excuse?'

‘Don't have one. I'll get some elastics from my purse.'

Piling up our hair, washing our hands, our alliance is easy. Over these past two years, Paolina and I and Miranda have been the Thursday constants, with Gilda and Ninuccia joining us often enough. We walk about the work table and I watch Paolina tenderly touching things, standing back to look at the whole, then moving closer again. She has grown up and spent all her life among this bounty, and still the beauty of it amazes her. To be able to be
amazed
by the familiar is the one incontestable gift that we five women share. So has pronounced Miranda over and over again.

‘I'd rather paint this than cook it,' she says.

‘We can save pieces of everything and lay the supper table just like this one.'

‘Yes, that's what we'll do. I'm starving, always starving after I finish a lesson.'

She begins to unpack her sack. She looks up at me, starts to say something but stops, turns the words into a smile. Paolina seems otherwise engrossed today, gentle, sweet but far away. Secretive. Happily so. I will not ask what causes this other spirit. She will tell me if she chooses.

‘What did you manage to teach your two Dutchmen this morning?' I ask her, lighting the flame under the oil. She looks at me as I do this and yet doesn't seem to see me or the pot or the flame beneath it.

She says, ‘We're still at the beginning – fresh pasta and potato gnocchi. They always want to make the same things and so that's what we do.
Sono pignoli
. They are perfectionists. We used thirty-six eggs this morning since they're expecting twenty-two for dinner. I warned them I wouldn't be back to serve or wash up.
Siete per conto vostro
, you're on your own, I told them.'

Paolina is a cooking teacher whose students are mostly German and Dutch tourists who rent the same countryside villas near the lake of Bolsena year after year. She is legendary among them and I sense it's the wistful beauty of her as much as her talent that intrigues them. Paolina is docile by nature, shy, hesitant, yet what she says is often
pungente
, piercing. Though one wouldn't flinch to hear that she was ten years younger, Paolina is sixty.

‘I made dough to fry. For our lunch,' I tell her. ‘A few
tortucce
, a sliver of prosciutto, some wine.'

‘Perfect. But first a pair of
bruschette
. An Umbrian woman must have her
bruschette
…'

From the half loaf she's carried in her sack, she cuts four thin slices, shakes the ash from the grate and sets the bread over the fire.

‘Bread before bread?'

‘Why not?'

‘And there will be two more breads at supper tonight.'

‘Lovely.'

Atkins rolling about in his tomb flashes in my mind. As do our guests, mostly those from America, whose organisms rebel at wheat, all glutenous foods. The culprits are pesticides. Good clean wheat nourished most of the world for millenia. Here the greatest compliment one person can pay another is to say,
lei e buono come pane
, she's good as bread. Even the word companion, when divined down from the Latin, signifies
the one with whom I take my bread
. So, yes, bread before bread. As long as it's made from honest, unmanipulated wheat.

I watch Paolina slitting the skins of two figs from the pile on the work table then spreading the red flesh of them onto the hot bread. She drizzles on some oil, a few turns of the pepper mill. Beckoning me to the fire, she is arranging the four beautiful
bruschette
on the tin that Miranda uses to catch drippings from meat as it cooks over the embers.

‘You know, Miranda never cleans this old tin. Just swipes it with a piece of soft bread and …'

‘I know. And, if you're anywhere near, she tears the bread in half and …'

‘Ah, so you
do
know. It must be suffused with twenty years' worth of flavours from herbs and flesh and wood and I always use it when I come here, even if it's only – like today – as a tray. Here, rub the
bruschetta
across the bottom of the tin before you take it.'

I go to see about the oil, pinch off a tiny piece of dough, drop it into the pot and watch as it turns deep gold in a few seconds. Ready. I stretch to thinness two small nuggets of dough and slip them into the hot oil. Immediately they blister, begin dancing about. ‘Paolina, will you slice the prosciutto?'

More proficient even than Miranda at the job, Paolina works a knife, saw fashion, across the haunch, lays the ruffles of almost transparent ham over the luscious hot little breads, letting it melt into them. We don't bother with plates or even to sit but eat out of hand, taking time only to open the spigot on the wine barrel, to fill two tumblers. Now we are ready to begin.

We need workspace and so defile Miranda's still-life, moving it in diminutive form to the supper table. Paolina holds a chair while I slip the crotch of a sheaf of grapes over a beam. We like the look of this and so hang three others in the same way so that the grape leaves nearly touch the table, as though we'd set up among the vines.

Stripping the pointy little rosemary leaves from their branches, chopping them with a rocking motion of her knife directly on the wooden work table, Paolina mixes the dough for fig
schiacciate
: flatbreads of yeast softened in warm red wine, flour, a little sugar, sea salt, oil. Working part of the rosemary into the dough, she sets it to rise beside the woodstove, then places the remaining rosemary in the hearth basket, scent for the fire during supper. Meanwhile I put together the dough for the wine bread, which wants a slow four-hour rise and so I carry it out to the coolness of the cheese hut. We talk about timing, calculate when the wine bread will go into and be ready to come out of the oven, agree that we won't bake the
schiacciate
until after the pears are done. I stripe-peel and core some of both the brown and red-skinned ones, cut a thin slice from their bottoms, leave their stems intact and sit them to rest in a bath of red wine warmed with butter. Once the wine breads are baked, I'll wrap a spiral of pancetta around the pears, slide them into the oven, roast them to softness but not to collapse and the pancetta to an almost-charred crispness. The red wine and buttery juice from the pears will have formed a fine sauce with which I'll glaze them while they're still hot.

The menu for tonight is simple, a good part of it already prepared. We'll start with the roasted pears and a round of Filiberto's new pecorino, still creamy after only a few weeks of aging. Then the
schiacciate
, Paolina's rosemary-scented dough stretched flat, laid with halved figs still in their skins, more rosemary on top, a good dose of oil in the hollows formed by a final knuckling of the dough. The juices from the figs will caramelise in the oven's fierce heat and, as we we did with the
tortucce
, we'll lay the hot flatbreads with prosciutto. As the tribe is vanquishing those, harvest sausages will be already crisping over the hearth fire. Made of coarsely ground pork (three parts lean, one part fat) dried grapes from last year's harvest saved precisely for this purpose, as well as new grapes, seeded and peeled, new red wine, wild fennel flowers, sea salt and coarse-ground pepper, I mixed it at home on Tuesday morning, left it for a day to age in the fridge. It was Mocetti, our faithful butcher, who stuffed the winey, grape-studded mass into casings, tying the fat rope with thick string at short intervals. Yesterday Fernando and I hung the sausages from hooks in the cheese hut. Another day for the flavours to mingle. Once roasted, we'll sit the plump, juice-dripping things on a puree of potatoes cooked in red wine rather than water and pounded to smoothness with oil. We'll pass the
vendemmia
bread hand to hand. In final praise to the harvest, our
dolce
will be a cake made with wine grapes, if in yet another form. It was Ninuccia who, earlier in the week, cooked four or five kilos of new grapes in a copper, tin-lined pot over embers for a day and a night, the fruit slowly, very slowly, giving up its juices then reabsorbing them to form a dense compost. Once filtered, the compost becomes
il mosto
, a precious condiment used in both sweet and savoury harvest dishes. Ninuccia handed me a litre jar of
mosto
a few days ago, instructing from across her shoulder as she was doing something else: ‘More sugar than flour, wine, no more than two eggs, salt and olive oil, 300 grams of
mosto
. It you make it tonight, it will be just right for Thursday.' My first
torta di mosto
waits in Miranda's armoire, safe under a yellow bowl. Yes, every single dish made with wine.

The rustico heady as a wine cellar, dough under our nails, flour everywhere on our clothes, our hair mostly unbound again, we are giddy girls playing house. Paolina says, ‘We're dangerous together, you and I. We could let the bread burn while we dream. When we talk I feel soothed. And when we're quiet, as we are today, I feel
soothed
. Does that make sense? Maybe that's the wrong word. Perhaps it's that I feel
understood …
revealed without my having to work at explaining.'

Remembering Ninuccia's
mosto
, I think Paolina's words are pure and dense as wine cooked to syrup. Silent as she is, an uncommon
allegria
flits about her this afternoon.

‘To understand and to be understood …' I say.

‘Yes, yes. It's exactly that. With Niccolò I have always had that'

Niccolò. Nearly every time that Paolina and I have cooked together, she has been accompanied by a man –
bello come il sole
, beautiful as the sun, Miranda says of him – the same man who accompanies her sometimes to Thursday Nights. An arresting figure in English tweeds and paisley foulards, he might be an aging actor come to live out his dotage in the countryside and yet he is a gentleman farmer. And, as it's said here of people who love the table, he is
una forchetta d'oro
, a golden fork. He walks with a cane but also with a swagger, this Niccolò.

‘I was going to ask you why he didn't come with you today …'

‘He's up at Castello della Sala observing the harvest or surely he would be here, if only to tell us what we're doing wrong. My darling Niccolò.'

Paolina touches her suddenly flushed face, and says something about the woodstove and the fire. ‘Shall we go for a walk?'

We wander out into the afternoon. Under the ripe five o'clock sun, the air is as gold as Orvieto wine and we walk a while in the meadow. We sit then among the weeds on the edge of Miranda's
oliveto
to face a long stand of slender young trees, their branches drooping nearly to the ground with still-green fruit, the leaves hissing, quivering like the silvered net skirts of a hundred ballerinas. From the pocket of her jeans, Paolina pulls out a small metal box fitted with tobacco, rolling papers and matches. Using her thigh as a workspace, she expertly rolls a thin cigarette, hands it to me, rolls another, lights mine with a tiny wooden match, which the Italians call
svedesi
. She lights her cigarette from mine and we lean back, each with an arm under her head, watching the trees and the light. We smoke the cigarettes halfway then snuff them on a stone. Paolina puts the dead ends into her metal box.