Under the Tuscan Sun (15 page)

THE
SIGNORA
WHO LIVED HERE A HUNDRED YEARS AGO COULD
walk in now and start to cook. She'd like the porcelain sink,
big enough to bathe a baby in, its drain board and the curved
chrome faucet. I imagine her with a pointed chin and shiny black
eyes, her hair swept up and twisted in a comb. She's in sturdy
shoes that tie and a black dress with the sleeves pushed up,
ready to roll out the ravioli. She'd be ecstatic, no doubt, to
see appliances—the dishwasher, stove, and frost-free
fridge (still a novelty in Tuscany), but otherwise, she'd feel
quite at home. In my next life, when I am an architect, I always
will design houses with kitchens that open to the outdoors.
I love stepping out to head and tail my beans while sitting on
the stone wall. I set dirty pots out to soak, dry my dishcloths
on the wall, empty excess clean water on the arugula, thyme, and
rosemary right outside the door. Since the double door is open
day and night in summer, the kitchen fills with light and air.
A wasp—is it the same one?—flies in every day and
drinks from the faucet, then flies right out.

The one absolutely American feature is the lighting.
Terrifically high utility costs explain the prevalence of
forty-watt bulbs hanging in so many houses. I cannot bear a dim
kitchen. We chose two bright fixtures and a rheostat, causing
Lino, the electrician, extreme consternation. He'd never installed
a rheostat, which intrigued him. But the lights! “One is enough.
You are not performing surgery in here,” he insisted. He
needed to warn us that our electrical bill—he had no words,
only the gesture of loosely shaking both hands in front of him
and shaking his head at the same time. Clearly, we are headed
for ruin.

On the brick ledge behind the sink, I've begun to accumulate
local hand-painted majolica platters and bowls. I've thought of
luring Shera back to paint a stencil of grapes, leaves, and vines
around the top of the walls. But for the moment, the kitchen is
finita.

WE POURED SO MUCH ENERGY INTO THE KITCHEN BECAUSE A
dominant gene
in my family is the cooking gene. No matter what occasion, what
crisis, the women I grew up among could flat out hold forth in the
kitchen, from delicate timbales and pressed chicken to steaming
cauldrons of Brunswick stew. In summer, my mother and our cook,
Willie Bell, went into marathons of putting up tomatoes, pickling
cucumbers, stirring vats of scuppernongs for jelly. By early
December they had made brandied cakes and shelled mountains of
pecans for roasting. Never was our kitchen without tins of brownies
and icebox cookies. Or without a plate of cold biscuits left over
from dinner. I still miss toasted biscuits for breakfast. At one
meal we already were talking about the next.

My daughter showed every sign of breaking the legacy of my
mother and Willie, whose talents destined my sisters and me to
shelves of cookbooks, constant plans for the next party,
and—ultimate test—even the fate to cook when eating
alone. Throughout her childhood, except for an occasional batch of
obsidian-like fudge, Ashley disdained the kitchen. Shortly after
she graduated from college, she began to cook and immediately
started calling home for recipes for chicken with forty cloves
of garlic, profiteroles, risotto, chocolate soufflé,
potatoes Anna. Without meaning to, she seemed to have absorbed
certain knowledge. Now, when we're together, we, too, go into
paroxysms of planning and cooking. She has taught me a great
marinated pork tenderloin recipe and a buttermilk lemon cake. These
familial connections give me a helpless feeling: Cooking is
destiny.

This inexorable inheritance notwithstanding, in recent years,
I've worked more and more. In our normal life in San Francisco,
everyday cooking becomes, at times, a chore. I confess to an
occasional supper of ice cream from the carton, eaten with a fork
while leaning against the kitchen counter. Sometimes we both get
home late and find in the fridge celery, grapes, withered apples,
and milk. No problem, since San Francisco has great restaurants.
On weekends we try to roast two chickens or make minestrone or
a big pasta sauce to get us to Tuesday. On Wednesday: a stop
at Gordo's for super carnitas burritos with sour cream, guacamole,
extra hot sauce, and a thousand grams of fat. In rushes of super
organization, I freeze plastic tubs of soup and chili and stew
and stock.

The leisure of a summer place, the ease of prime ingredients,
and the perfectly casual way of entertaining convince me that this is
the kitchen as it's meant to be. I think of my mother's summer tables
often. She
launched
meals, seemingly with ease. Finally
it dawns on me—maybe I'm not simply inadequate. It was
easier then. She had people around her, as we do here. I sat on
the ice cream churn while my sister turned the handle. My other
sister shelled peas. Willie was totally capable. My mother
directed kitchen traffic, arranged the table. I use her recipes
often, and have a measure of her ease with guests but,
please, no fried chicken. Here, I have that prime ingredient,
time. Guests really do want to pit the cherries or run into town
for another wedge of
parmigiano.
Also, cooking seems to
take less time because the quality of food is so fine that only
the simplest preparations are called for. Zucchini has a real taste.
Chard, sautéed with a little garlic, is amazing. Fruit
does not come with stickers; vegetables are not waxed or
irradiated, and the taste is truly different.

Nights turn cool at fifteen hundred feet. That suits us because
we can prepare some of the hearty foods that are not at all suitable
in the sun. While
prosciutto
with figs, chilled tomato
soup, Roman artichokes, and pasta with lemon peel and asparagus
are perfect at one, the fresh evenings fuel the appetite. We
serve spaghetti with
ragù
(I finally learned that
the secret ingredient of a
ragù
is chicken liver),
minestrone with globes of pesto,
osso buco,
grilled
polenta, baked red peppers stuffed with ricotta and herb custard,
warm cherries in Chianti with hazelnut pound cake.

When tomatoes are ripe, nothing is better than cold tomato
soup with a handful of basil and a garnish of polenta croutons.
Panzanella,
little swamp, is another tomato favorite, a
salad of oil, vinegar, tomatoes, basil, cucumber, minced onion,
and stale bread soaked in water and squeezed dry—a true
invention from necessity. Since bread must be bought every day,
Tuscan cooking makes good use of leftovers. The rough loaves work
perfectly for bread puddings and for the best French toast I've
ever had. We go for days without meat and don't even miss it, then
a roasted
faraona
(guinea hen) with rosemary, or
sage-stuffed pork loin, remind us of how fabulous the plainest
meats can be. I cut a small basketful of thyme, rosemary, and
sage, wishing I could beam one of each plant to San Francisco,
where I keep a window box of faltering herbs going. Here, the
sun doubles their size every few weeks. The oregano near the well
quickly spreads to a circle about three feet wide. Even the wild
mint and lemon balm I dug up on the hill and moved
have taken
off. Mint thrives. Vergil says deer wounded by hunters seek it for
wounds. In Tuscany, where hunters long since have driven out
most wildlife, the mint is more plentiful than deer.
Maria Rita, at the
frutta e verdura,
tells me to use
lemon balm in salads and vegetables, as well as in my bathwater.
I think I would like cutting herbs even if I weren't cooking.
The pungency of just-snipped herbs adds as much to the cook's
enjoyment as to taste. After weeding the thyme, I don't wash my
hands until the fragrance fades from my hands. I planted a hedge
of sage, more than I ever could use, and let most flower for the
butterflies. Sage flowers, along with lavender, look pretty in
wildflower bouquets. The rest I dry or use fresh, usually for
white beans with chopped sage and olive oil, a favorite of Tuscans,
who are known as “bean eaters.”

Anytime we grill, Ed tosses long wands of rosemary on the
coals and on the meat. The crispy leaves not only add flavor, they're
good to nibble, too. When he grills shrimp, he threads them on
rosemary sticks.

I have pots of basil by the kitchen door because it is supposed
to keep out flies. During the wall-building and well-drilling weeks,
I saw a worker crush leaves in his hand and smear his wasp sting.
He said it took away all the pain. A larger patch grows a few feet
away. The more I cut off, the more seems to grow. I use whole
leaves in salad, bunches for pesto, copious amounts in
sautéed summer squashes and tomato dishes. Of all herbs,
basil holds the essence of Tuscan summer.

THE LONG STRETCH OF SUMMER LUNCHES CALLS FOR A LONG
tavola.
Now that the kitchen is finished, we need a table outdoors, the
longer the better, because inevitably the abundance at the weekly
market incites me to buy too much and because inevitably guests
gather—friends from home, a relative's friends from
somewhere who thought they'd say hello since they were in the
area, and new friends, sometimes with friends of
theirs.
Add another handful of pasta to the boiling pot, add a plate, a
tumbler, find another chair. The table and the kitchen can
oblige.

I have considered my table, its ideals as well as its
dimensions. If I were a child, I would want to lift up the
tablecloth and crawl under the unending table, into the flaxen
light where I could crouch and listen to the loud laughs, clinks,
and grown-up talk, hear over and over
“Salute”
and
“Cin-cin”
travelling around the chairs, stare at
kneecaps and walking shoes and flowered skirts hiked up to catch
a breeze, the table steady under its weight of food. Such a table
should accommodate the wanderings of a large dog. At the end,
you need room for an enormous vase of all the flowers in bloom
at the moment. The width should allow platters to meander from
hand to hand down the center, stopping where they will, and
numerous water and wine bottles to accumulate over the hours.
You need room for a bowl of cool water to dip the grapes and pears
into, a little covered dish to keep the bugs off the Gorgonzola
(
dolce
as opposed to the
piccante
type, which
is for cooking) and
caciotta,
a local soft cheese. No
one cares if olive pits are flung into the distance. The best
wardrobe for such a table runs to pale linens, blue checks, pink
and green plaid, not dead white, which takes in too much glare.
If the table is long enough, everything can be brought out at once,
and no one has to run back and forth to the kitchen. Then the
table is set for primary pleasure: lingering meals, under the
trees at noon. The open air confers an ease, a relaxation and
freedom. You're your own guest, which is the way summer
ought to be.