Under the Tuscan Sun

by Frances Mayes

  A friend says Italy is getting to be just like everywhere else—homogenized and Americanized, she says disparagingly. I want to drag her here and stand her in this doorway. The men have the look of their lives—perhaps we all do. Hard work, their faces and bodies affirm. All are lean, not a pound of extra fat anywhere. They look cured by the sun, so deeply tan they probably never go pale in winter. Their country clothes are serviceable, rough—they don't “dress,” they just get dressed. They wear, as well, a natural dignity. Surely some are canny, crusty, cruel, but they look totally present, unhidden, and alive. Some are missing teeth but they smile widely without embarrassment. I look in one man's eyes: The left one is white with milky blue veins like those in an exploded marble. The other is black as the center of a sunflower. A retarded boy wanders among them, neither catered to nor ignored. He's just there, living his life like the rest of us.

  At home I plan a menu ahead, though I frequently improvise as I shop. Here, I only begin to think when I see what's ripe this week. My impulse is to overload; I forget there are not ten hungry people at home. At first I was miffed when tomatoes or peas had spoiled when I got around to cooking them a few days later. Finally I caught on that what you buy today is ready—picked or dug this morning at its peak. This also explained another puzzle; I never understood why Italian refrigerators are so minute until I realized that they don't store food the way we do. The Sub-Zero giant I have at home begins to seem almost institutional compared to the toy fridge I now have here.

  Two weeks ago, small purple artichokes with long stems were in. We love those, quickly steamed, stuffed with tomatoes, garlic, yesterday's bread, and parsley, then doused with oil and vinegar. Today, not a one. The fagiolini, slender green beans, are irresistible. Should I have two salads, because the beans also would be good with a shallot vinaigrette? Why not? I buy white peaches for breakfast but for tonight's dessert, the cherries are perfect. I take a kilo, then set off to find a pitter back in the other part of the market. Since I don't know the word, I'm reduced to sign language. I do know ciliegia, cherry, which helps. I've noticed in French and Italian country desserts that the cooks don't bother to pit the cherries, but I like to use the pitter when they're served in a dish. These I'll steep in Chianti with a little sugar and lemon. I decide on some tiny yellow potatoes still half covered with dirt. Just a scrubbing, a dribble of oil and some rosemary and they'll roast in the oven.

  I could complete my shopping for this meal right here. I pass cages of guinea hens, ducks, and chickens, as well as rabbits. Since my daughter had a black angora rabbit as a pet once, I can't look with cold eyes on the two spotted bunnies nibbling carrots in the dusty Alitalia flight bag, can't imagine them trembling in the trunk of my car. I intend to stop at the butcher's for a veal roast. The butcher's is bad enough. I admit it's not logical. If you eat meat, you might as well recognize where it comes from. But the drooped heads and closed eyelids of the quail and pigeon make me stop and stare. Rooster heads, chicken feet (with yellow nails like Mrs. Ricker's, my grandmother's Rook partner), the clump of fur to show the skinned rabbit is not a cat, whole cows hanging by their feet with a square of paper towel on the floor to catch the last drops of blood—all these things make my stomach flip. Surely they're not going to eat those fluffy chicks. When I was a child, I sat on the back steps and watched our cook twist a chicken's neck then snap off the head with a jerk. The chicken ran a few circles, spurting blood, before it keeled over, twitching. I love roast chicken. Could I ever wring a neck?

  I have as much as I can carry. The other stop I'll make is at the cooperative cantina for some local wine. Near the end of the sinuous line of market stalls, a woman sells flowers from her garden. She wraps an armful of pink zinnias in newspaper and I lay them under the straps of my bag. The sun is ferocious and people are beginning to close down for siesta. A woman who has not sold many of her striped lime and yellow towels looks weary. She dumps the dog sleeping in her folding chair and settles down for a rest before she begins to pack up.

  On my way out, I see a man in a sweater, despite the heat. The trunk of his minuscule Fiat is piled with black grapes that have warmed all morning in the sun. I'm stopped by the winy, musty, violet scents. He offers me one. The hot sweetness breaks open in my mouth. I have never tasted anything so essential in my life as this grape on this morning. They even smell purple. The flavor, older than the Etruscans and deeply fresh and pleasing, just leaves me stunned. Such richness, the big globes, the heap of dusty grapes cascading out of two baskets. I ask for un grappolo, a bunch, wanting the taste to stay with me all morning.

  AS I UNLOAD MY CLOTH SACKS, THE KITCHEN FILLS WITH THE scents of sunny fruits and vegetables warmed in the car. Everyone coming home from market must feel compelled to arrange the tomatoes, eggplants (melanzane sounds like the real name and even aubergine is better than dreary-sounding eggplant), zucchini, and enormous peppers into a still life in the nearest basket. I resist arranging the fruit in a bowl, except for what we'll eat today, because it's ripe this minute and all we're not about to eat now must go in the fridge.

  I'm still amazed that the kitchen is finished. Though there still is the ghost of a circle above the outside door, where a saint or cross hung in a niche when this was the chapel for the house, there is no sign at all of the room's later inhabitants, oxen and chickens. When the mangers were ripped out, we found the remains of elaborate scroll designs on the crumbling plaster. As the nasty pen came down, we saw green faux marble designs. Now and then in the restoration we stopped and said, “Did you ever expect to be scraping decades of mold from animals' uric acid off a wall?” and “You realize we'll be cooking in a chapel?”

  Now, oddly, it looks as though the kitchen always could have been this way. Like those in the rest of the house, the floors are waxed brick, the walls white plaster, and the ceiling has (oh, Ed's neck and back!) dark beams. We avoided cabinets. It was easy to construct the plaster-covered brick supports built for thick plank shelves we envisioned when we spent our evenings drawing on tablets of grid paper. Ed and I cut and painted them white. The baskets from the market hold utensils and staples. The two-inch-thick white Carrara marble tops are smooth to my eye and always cool to the touch or to the pizza dough and pastry I roll on it. We hung the same rough shelves on another wall for glasses and pasta bowls. To secure the brackets, Ed drilled toggle bolts into solid rock, spewing stones and straining the drill to its highest whine.

  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 ha
s 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.

  In the delicious stupor that sets in after the last pear is halved, the last crust scoops up the last crumbles of Gorgonzola, and the last drop empties into the glass, you can ruminate, if you are inclined that way, on your participation in the great collective unconscious. You are doing what everyone else in Italy is doing, millions of backsides being shined by chairs at millions of tables. Over each table, a miniature swarm of gnats is gathering. There are exceptions, of course. Parking attendants, waiters, cooks—and thousands of tourists, many of whom made the mistake of eating two wedges of great sausage pizza at eleven and now have no inclination to eat anything. Instead, they wander under the unbearable sun, peeking through metal grates covering shop windows, pusing at the massive doors of locked churches, sitting on the sides of fountains while squinting into minuscule guidebooks. Give it up! I've done the same thing. Then, later, it's hard to deny yourself the luscious melone ice cream cone at seven, when the air is still hot and your sandals have rubbed your heels raw. Those weak ones (mea culpa) who succumb possibly will have another wedge, artichoke this time, on the way to the hotel; then, when Italy begins eating at nine, the foreign stomach doesn't even mumble. That happens much later, when all the good restaurants are full.