The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club (35 page)

Già
. Indeed.

Paolina says, ‘I wonder if that woman of Lampedusa's, the one in the brown travelling suit, I wonder if she rides up there right behind the man on the black horse, keeping one another company on their endless route. If so, maybe that's why we're sometimes taken to the brink and then taken back, maybe they disagree. A man and a woman on the same horse, they're bound to disagree. Especially with old Atropos waving her scissors at them.'

‘It won't matter. There'll only be that half moment of meeting, maybe less. They arrive as we leave. Atropos must have grown fast enough with her snipping by now. Ships in the night, isn't that how it is?' Gilda wants assurance.

‘So they say.
When you are, they aren't. When they are, you're not
,' Ninuccia says.

‘I forgot about Atropos.' I say this but it's not true.

‘She is forgettable. Especially in springtime. I can tell you now I'd never go in springtime. Having once again snatched her baby girl back from Hades, Demeter in all her glory then raising up the grasses and weeds from their sleep in the dark, wild asparagus in the meadows,
puntarelle
on the hills. Never in springtime.' This is Paolina.

‘Less would I go in autumn. New wine, new oil, all those chestnuts, fat porcini smelling of loam and the ages, figs dripping honey, the leaves on the vines gone yellow as saffron, rounds of
pane della vendemmia
cooling on the shutter over the windowsill, pheasants hung from a wire in the cheese hut. Never in autumn. It would have to be summer.' This is Ninuccia.

‘Parched gold, the hills. Light limpid as apricot tea, the beauty of it stinging my eyes, bruising my soul, I could never go in summer. I shall outwit them all in summer,' Gilda says.

Blue-black eyes wet, fierce, Miranda says, ‘I shan't even consider winter.'

‘And you?' Gilda asks me but I don't answer.

Out of words, we listen to the candles beginning to splutter, to the plash of wood char upon the embers in the hearth.

‘Open the window. Fill the pitcher,' Miranda resumes command.

Moonlight drinks in the darkness of the little room and the window panes shudder. The lantern swinging from the metal arm above the old green door strikes it in tempo.
Lento, lento
. Sea beating upon sand.

Miranda says, ‘A strange sensation, just now. A memory, I think. Maybe not a memory. A little girl, not me, holding tight to a woman's skirt. Her mother's skirt. I could see and feel the stuff of it, black, soft, but it wasn't me touching it. I think it was my mother as a child. Yes, it was she, trotting along beside her mother, holding tight to her skirt. Now where did that come from? How strange to be old and to recall your mother as a child.' Miranda looks at Gilda who looks away.

Rising, taking off her apron, Miranda says, ‘Let's go to walk now.'

‘It's past …'

‘Midnight. Past midnight in Umbria, get your things, go on.'

Ninuccia grumbling, we others happy for Miranda's impulse. A small tribe of aging czarinas, earrings swaying, lips still mostly red, we find our shawls, trade hats so no one wears her own, step out into the night. Into warm greenish air, gusty as before a storm, we start up the Montefiascone road under the umbrella pines. Miranda and Gilda lead, Ninuccia, Paolina and I are close behind. Miranda stops, turns to face us.

‘I wonder if any one of you will remember that pinch of cloves in the ragù of goose for the
trebbiatura
. I doubt you will, if only for orneriness. I know you won't cook the old dishes as I do. The bread won't rise because you'll forget to close the back door and no one will remember to roll a demijohn into the kitchen on Wednesday so the wine won't be too cold for Thursday.
Pian, piano
, you'll slip away from how things are tonight. You'll begin meeting in restaurants on Thursdays. Not meeting on Thursdays at all. What was it she used to say, Chou, that little girl you wrote about …'

‘I-love-you-don't-forget-me.'

‘As though it was a single word. I-love-you-don't-forget-me,' Miranda says in English, her accent somehow Hungarian. ‘Hold tight to one another, now, all in a single row. Good, that's it. Tighter.'

Miranda stops abruptly then, looks at Gilda and Paolina to her right, to Ninuccia and I on her left. She looks straight ahead.

‘They'd never dare come for me on a Thursday.'

WITHIN THE NARRATIVE MANY OF THE
SUPPER CLUB
DISHES
are described in detail sufficient to guide a home cook to a fine result. Even so, I've chosen to further elaborate some of these, to put them down in more traditional recipe form. Also you'll find dishes not recounted in the narrative, dishes which, over these long years of my Umbrian life, have become well-loved emblems of our table, dishes guests expect to find there.

There are two caveats: first, I'm wordy but not complicated (as a cook, as a woman). In the pages that follow, I talk to the reader as though he or she were in the kitchen with me. I want you to know more than the means to the end and so I take liberties, assuming that you, too, want what I want for you: the stories and the chatter which can be passed on.

I've made no attempt to offer a balance of starters, main dishes, sweets. As I tell you in the narrative, we often ended Thursday Suppers with an espresso cup of fresh ricotta drizzled with dark honey (or a piece of honeycomb) or mixed with a few crushed espresso beans and, perhaps, some dark sugar. Miranda almost always set out a tin of biscotti for dipping into the heel of our wine or into a tiny glass of ambered
vin santo
. That said, you won't find ‘desserts' here but rather several
dolce salata
– sweet and salty – dishes which are more often served at the end of a supper than a traditional sweet.

And caveat number two. Over and over again, I will offer you dishes based on wine, extra-virgin olive oil, pecorino and bread, the elements which form – and have for centuries formed – the cuisine of Umbria. We have sheep and pigs, we have grapes, we have olives, we have wheat. And so this is what we cook, how we eat, what we drink. Though all the dishes, in the narrative and in this section, are inspired by the gastronomic patrimony of Umbria, they are almost never lifted from the canonical repertoire of the region. Rather I've interpreted recipes to suit the marketplaces, the sensibilities and lifestyles of readers who do not live and cook in rural Umbria or those who do not have the Umbrian hand –
la mano
– as it's said here.

After what I can now quite honestly term a lifetime's passion for food and cooking, I admit to practising a very personalised cuisine, an amalgam of tradition and instinct. Hence these recipes represent the slowly distilled juices of my cooking not only here in Umbria, but in all the places to which I've travelled on my stomach, where I've lived and worked and cooked and fed people.

One of the finest dishes of my life (and one which I recreate as often as its components are to be found) is nothing more than bruschette served with little soup plates of tomatoes. Only tomatoes. Glorious tomatoes. Ripe, sun-struck, skin-split beauties – broken and crushed more than sliced – set to warm for a few hours under a hot sun. Spooned into the bowls, a dish of salt flakes or fine sea salt nearby, the bruschette almost too hot to handle, a dry, almost chalky white wine chilled down to a degree somewhat below that which the winemaker would advise. And there you have it. Don't be tempted to tear basil over these tomatoes. Save that luscious idea for another moment.

 

THE METHOD

To begin, it seems fitting that one should learn to say
bruschetta:
bru-skett'-ah. A bruschetta is nothing more than freshly toasted, oiled bread spiked with sea salt. Hardly an Umbrian or Tuscan supper begins without one or two trenchers of honest country bread, lightly toasted on both sides under a grill or over the hearth embers then drizzled with fine oil. The goal of ‘toasting' is not to harden the crumb or crust of the bread, but to enhance its good flavour and texture as only a gentle charring can do.

Once the bread is toasted – and without missing a beat – pour the best oil in thin threads (in a circular movement) over one side of the bread, take pinches of fine sea salt or salt flakes and rub them between your fingertips over the oiled bread. Again, with no delay, get the things to the table around which everyone is already seated, the wine poured.

These and only these, unornamented, are true bruschette (plural). All manner of vegetables – cooked or raw – cured meats, savoury pastes, and even sometimes the flesh of a fine juicy fig, can be laid upon the hot oiled bread. But these filips transform the bruschetta into a
crostino
. Often in a trattoria or ristorante, a clove of garlic stuck on the end of a toothpick will be served with the bruschette, to be rubbed over the hot bread. Unless the garlic is white and hard and has an unmusty perfume and nothing of a green heart, don't bother. In fact, even the most fresh and delicate garlic speaks louder than good oil and tends to distract from the intended simplicity. Two or three bruschette per person is the dose which begins to arouse hunger without peril of blunting it for what will come next.

When
la mezzadria
– the medieval system of sharecropping – still existed in Umbria, a tenant farmer was wont to enrich his portion of the spoils with stuffs not easily tracked by his landowner. The
fattore
– administrator – kept a tally on the courtyard animals, dutifully marking births and slaughters, while grain yields were calculated before a harvest and counted out later, right down to the bushel. Hunters returning from the woods with bloodied sacks over their shoulders were met by the
fattore
or one of his squad who relieved the farmers of their spoils; and poaching was an offence punishable by beating or banishment from the farm.

Still, privateering flourished. Fruit could be bullied down from a tree, a pat or two of new cheese formed from a morning's abundant milking could be tucked inside a linen kitchen towel and set to ripen in some secret drawer. And who could know just how many baskets of mushrooms were to be dug from beneath a stand of oaks after a rain or how a piece of honeycomb was broken off in a certain way. It was this sort of cunning that enlivened the mean substance of a poor man's table. Now that nearly all the old survival methods are just memories, carving up a good pear and eating it with slivers of fresh or aged pecorino and thin threads of chestnut honey can raise up a long-ago reckoning in an Umbrian farmer. He'll offer you a slice of pear from the tip of his knife, nod his head toward the round of cheese, the loaf of bread and the honey jar on the table. And while you're helping yourself, he'll look at you and say, ‘
Sono buoni eh? Ma, credimi, erano più buoni quando erano rubati
. They're good, yes? But, believe me, they tasted even better when they were stolen.'