From our brief Christmas visit last year, we know that the focus of the season is twofold: food and the presepio, the crèche. We're ready to launch into one and are intrigued by the other. The bars display fancy candies and that lighter Italian parallel to our ubiquitous Christmas fruitcake, the panettone, in colorful boxes. A few shops have distinctly homemade wreaths. That's it for decoration, except for the crèches in all the churches and in many windows. “Auguri, auguri,” everyone says, best wishes. No one is rushing about. There seems to be no gift wrap, no hype, no frantic search.
The window of the frutta e verdura is steamed. Outside, where we're used to seeing the fruits of summer, we find baskets of walnuts, chestnuts, and fragrant clementines, those tiny tangerines without seeds. Maria Rita, inside in a big black sweater, is cracking almonds. “Ah, benissimo!” she greets us. “Ben tornati!” Where there were luscious tomatoes, she has piled stacks of cardi, which I've never tasted. “You boil it but first you must take off all the strings.” She cracks a stalk and peels back the celerylike filaments. “Throw it in some lemon water quickly or it will turn black. Then boil. Now it's ready for the parmigiano, the butter.”
“How much?”
“Enough, enough, signora. Then the oven.” Soon she's telling us to make bruschetta on the grill in the fireplace and pile on it chopped black cabbage cooked with garlic and oil in a frying pan. We buy blood oranges and tiny green lentils from a jar, chestnuts, winter pears, winy little apples, and broccoli, which I've never seen in Italy before. “Lentils for the New Year,” she tells us. “I always add mint.” She piles in our bags all the ingredients for ribollita, the wintery soup.
At the butcher's, new sausages are in, looped along the front of the meat case. A man with a sausage-shaped nose himself elbows Ed and acts out saying the rosary, then points to the long links of fat sausages. It takes us a moment to make the connection, which he thinks is very funny. Quail and several birds that look as though they should be singing in a tree lie still in their feathers in the case. Color photos on the wall show the butcher's name written on the backsides of several enormous white cows, source of the Val di Chiana steak that Tuscany celebrates. There's Bruno with his hand possessively around the neck of a great beast. He motions for us to follow him. He opens the freezer room and we follow him in. A cow the size of an elephant hangs from ceiling hooks. Bruno slaps a flank affectionately. “The finest bistecca in the world. A hot grill, rosemary, and a little lemon at the table.” He turns up both hands, a gesture that adds “What else is there in life?” Suddenly, the door slams shut and we are locked inside with this massive body encased in white fat.
“Oh, no!” I flash on the three of us caught as in the child's game of Freeze. I swing around toward the door but Bruno is laughing. He easily opens the door and we rush out. I don't want any steak.
WE INTENDED TO COOK BUT WE HAVE LINGERED. WE DEPOSIT all the food in the car and walk back to Dardano, a favorite trattoria, for dinner. The son who has waited tables since we came here suddenly looks like a teenager. The whole family sits around a table in the kitchen. Only two other customers are here, local men bent over their bowls of penne, each eating as though he were alone. We order pasta with black truffles, a carafe of wine. Afterward we walk around in the quiet, quiet streets. A few boys play soccer in the empty piazza. Their shouts ring in the cold air. The outdoor tables are stored, the bar doors closed tight with everyone inside breathing smoke. No cars. A lone dog on a walk. Totally emptied of foreigners, except us, the town reveals its silences, the long nights when men play cards way past the nine o'clock bells, the deserted streets that look returned to their medieval origins. At the duomo wall, we look out over the lights of the valley. A few other people lean on the wall, too. When we're really freezing we walk back up the street and open the bar door to a burst of noise. The cocoa, steamed on the espresso machine, is thick as pudding. One day back and I'm falling in love with winter.
AT FIRST LIGHT, WE ARE OUT ON THE TERRACES, EVEN THOUGH heavy dew is on the olives. We intend to finish today, not leaving them time to mildew. Below us the valley surges with fog as thick as mascarpone. We are above it in clear, frosty air, utterly fresh and sharp to inhale, as if we're looking down from a plane: a disembodied feeling—this hillside is floating. Even the red roof of our neighbor Placido's house has disappeared. The lake gives this landscape some of its mystery. Large mists rise off the water and spread over the valley. Fog billows and rises. As we pick olives, wisps of clouds pass us. Soon the sun asserts itself and begins to burn off the fog, showing us first the white horse in Placido's pen, then his roof and the olive terraces below him. The lake stays hidden in a pearly swirl of clouds. We come to trees with nothing on them, then a laden tree. I take the lower branches. Ed leans the ladder into the center and reaches up. To our joy, Francesco Falco, our caretaker of the olives, joins us. He's the quintessential olive picker in his rough wool pants and tweed cap, basket strapped to his waist. He sets to work like the pro he is, picking more than we're able to. He's not as careful, just lets twigs and leaves fall in, whereas we've fastidiously removed any stray leaf after reading they add tannin to the taste of oil. Now and then he pulls out his machete from the back of his pants (how does he not get poked in the bottom?) and hacks off a sucker sprouting up. We must get the olives in, he tells us, a big freeze may be coming. We pause for a coffee but he keeps picking. All fall he has cut back the dead wood so that new growth is encouraged. By spring he will have hacked off everything except the most promising limbs and cleared around each tree. We ask about bush olives, more experimental techniques of pruning we've read about but he will hear nothing of those. The way to take care of olives is second nature, unquestionable. At seventy-five, he has the stamina of someone half his age. The same stamina, I suppose, that gave him the strength to walk home to Italy from Russia at the end of World War II. We identify him so totally with the land around Cortona that it's hard to imagine him as the young soldier stranded thousands of miles from home when the ugly war ended. He jokes constantly but today he has left his teeth at home and we have a hard time understanding him. Soon he heads for the lower terraces, an area still overgrown, because he has seen from the road that some of the olives there are bearing fruit.
With the olives from below, we do have a quintale. After siesta, which we've worked through, we hear Francesco and Beppe coming up the road on a tractor pulling a cart of olives. They've taken the sacks of their friend Gino and are on their way to the mill. They load Gino's olives into Beppe's Ape and help us load ours on, too. We follow them. It's almost dark and the temperature is dropping. Many California winters have dimmed my memory of real cold. It's a presence of its own. My toes are numb and the Twingo heater is sending out a forlorn stream of tepid air. “It's only about twenty-five degrees,” Ed says. He seems to radiate warmth. His Minnesota background reawakens anytime I complain that I'm cold.
“Feels like Bruno's freezer to me.”
OUR SACKS ARE WEIGHED, THEN THE OLIVES ARE POURED INTO a bin, washed, then crushed by three stone wheels. Once mashed, they're routed to a machine that spreads them on a round hemp mat, stacks on another mat, spreads more until there is a five-foot stack of hemp circles with the crushed olives sandwiched between each. A weight presses out the oil, which oozes down the sides of the hemp into a tank. The oil then goes through a centrifuge to get all the water out. Our oil, poured into a demijohn, is green and cloudy. The yield, the mill owner tells us, was quite high. Our trees have given us 18.6 kilograms of oil from our quintale—about a liter for each fully bearing tree. No wonder oil is expensive. “What about the acid?” I ask. I've read that oil must have less than one percent of oleic acid to qualify as extra virgin.
“One percent!” He grinds his cigarette under his heel. “Signori! Più basso, basso,” he growls, lower, lower, insulted that his mill would tolerate inferior oil. “These hills are the best in Italy.”
At home we pour a little into a bowl and dip in pieces of bread, as peopl
e all over Tuscany must be doing. Our oil! I've never tasted better. There's a hint of a watercress taste, faintly peppery but fresh as the stream watercress is pulled from. With this oil, I'll make every bruschetta known and some as yet unknown. Perhaps I'll even learn to eat my oranges with oil and salt as I've seen the priest do.
The sediment will settle in the big container over time but we like the murky, fruity oil, too. We fill several pretty bottles I've saved for this moment, then store the rest in the semidarkness of the cantina. Along the marble counter, we line up five bottles with those caps bartenders use to pour drinks. I've found those perfect for pouring slowly or dribbling oil. The little lid flaps down after you pour so the oil stays clean. We'll cook everything this holiday season in our oil. Our friends will have to visit and take bottles home with them; we have more than we can use and no one to give it to, since everyone here has their own, or at least a cousin who supplies them. When our trees yield more, we may sell the extra oil to the local consortium. I've bought the terrific comune oil in a gallon jug for about twenty dollars. I once lugged one home and it was worth the long flight with the cold jug balanced between my feet.
Our herbs still thrive, despite the cold. I cut a handful of sage and rosemary sprigs, quarter onions and potatoes, and arrange them around a pork roast and pop it in the oven, after a liberal sprinkling of our first season's oil baptizes the pan.
The next afternoon, we find an olive oil tasting in progress, the town's first festa for olio extravergine del colle Cortonese, the extra virgin oil of the Cortona hills. I remember my tablespoon at the mulino, but this time there's bread from the local bakery. Nine growers' oils are lined up along a table in the piazza, with pots of olive trees around for ambiance. “I couldn't have imagined this, could you?” Ed asks me as we try the fourth or fifth oil. I couldn't. The oils, like ours, are profoundly fresh with a vigorous element to the taste that makes me want to smack my lips. The shades of difference among the oils are subtle. I think I taste that hot wind of summer in one, the first rain of autumn in another, then the history of a Roman road, sunlight on leaves. They taste green and full of life.
Floating World:
A Winter Season
THERE IS SOMETHING AS INEVITABLE AS LABOR that takes over around Christmas. I feel impelled to the kitchen. I feel deep hungers for star-shaped cookies and tangerine ices and caramel cakes, things I never think of during the rest of the year. Even when I have vowed to keep it simple, I have found myself making the deadly Martha Washington Jetties my mother made every year on the cold back porch. You have to make them in the cold because the sinful cream, sugar, and pecan fondant balls are dipped by toothpick into chocolate and held up to set before being placed on the chilled wax-papered tray. The chocolate dip, of course, constantly turns hard and must be taken into the kitchen and heated. My mother made Jetties endlessly because her friends expected them. We professed to find them too rich but ate them until our teeth ached. I still have the cut-glass candy jar they spent their brief tenures in.
The other absolute was roasted pecans. Nuts roasted in butter and salt; the arteries tense even to read this—we ate them by the pound. I cannot get through a Christmas without them, although now I usually give most to friends and save only a small tin for the house. For guests, of course.
This year, no Jetties. But our almond crop must be used so roasted almonds seem inevitable. This weather demands the red soup pot. In preparation for Ashley and Jess's arrival, I'm making the big pot of ribollita, a soup for ending a day of fieldwork, or, as I think of it, for arriving from New York. Reboiled is the unappetizing translation and, naturally, it is, like so many peasant dishes, a soup of necessity: beans, vegetables, and hunks of bread.
Winter food makes me understand Tuscan cooking at a deeper level. French cooking, my first love, seems light years away: the evolution of a bourgeois tradition as opposed to the evolution of a peasant tradition. A local cookbook talks about la cucina povera, the poor kitchen, as the source of the now-abundant Tuscan cuisine. Tortelloni in brodo, a Christmas tradition here, seems like a sophisticated concept. Three half moons of stuffed pasta steaming in a bowl of clear broth—but, really, what is more frugal than to combine a few leftover tortelloni with extra broth? More than pasta, bread is the basic ingredient of the repertoire. Bread soups, bread salads, which seem rich and imaginative in California restaurants, were simply someone's good use of leftovers, possibly when there was little in the house except a little stock or oil to work with. The clearest example of the poor kitchen must be acquacotta, cooked water—probably a cousin of stone soup. This varies all over Tuscany but always involves invention around a base of water and bread. Fortunately, wild edibles always abound along the roadsides. A handful of mint, mushrooms, a little sweet burnet, or various greens might flavor cooked water. If an egg was handy, it was broken into the soup at the last moment. That Tuscan cooking has remained so simple is a long tribute to the abilities of those peasant women who cooked so well that no one, even now, wants to veer into new directions.
ASHLEY AND JESS ARRIVE WITHIN AN HOUR OF EACH OTHER, A miracle of scheduling since she is coming to Chiusi from the Rome train and he is coming into Camucia from Pisa and Florence after landing from London. We pick her up, then speed the forty minutes back and arrive just as he steps off the train.
The people one's children bring home are problematic. One came to visit when we were renting a house in the Mugello, north of Florence. He was deeply into Thomas Wolfe and sat in the backseat engrossed in Look Homeward Angel. We madly drove all over Tuscany to show them (both artists) the Piero della Francescas but he only turned pages and sighed now and then. Once he looked up and saw the round gold bales of hay in the lovely fields and said, “Cool, those look like Richard Serra sculptures.” We never were sure anything else penetrated. A young woman Ashley brought over suffered from dire toothache except when shopping was mentioned. She miraculously recovered long enough to buy everything in sight—she had an excellent eye for design—then relapsed in her room, requiring meals on trays. Nothing was wrong with her appetite. When she returned to New York, she had to have extensive root canal work on three teeth, so her forays into the shops were remarkable mental triumphs over pain. Another never paid me for his round-trip New York-Rome ticket, which was charged to my AmEx because Ashley picked up their tickets. Naturally, we have been wondering about the person who will be spending a couple of weeks.
If I'd had a boy, I'd have wanted him to be like Jess. We both fall right away for Jess's humor, intellectual curiosity, and warmth. He arrives with a wicker hamper of smoked salmon, Stilton, oat biscuits, honeys, and jams. He spent his last two days in London buying beautifully wrapped gifts for everyone. Best of all, we don't seem like capital P parents to him but potential friends. Relieved that this will be effortless, I'm bouyed, too, by that expansion I feel when someone new is admitted into my life. My Iranian friend maintains that attractions among people are based on smell, which seems logical enough to me. Most of those most important to me I've liked instantaneously and have known I wanted a permanent friendship. (The times the connection has not lasted still sting.) Jess knows all the words to every rock song. Ashley is laughing. We're already singing in the car. What luck.
It's midday and too warm for ribollita. We stop in town and have sandwiches at a bar and Jess tells us about the wedding he was just in at Westminster Abbey. Ashley has had the longer trip and wants to fade. Ed and I take a walk, then, because the day is warm and the force of habit strong, we start to work in the garden. I pull weeds away from herbs and lift geraniums out of pots, shake off dirt from the roots and wrap them in newspaper to store over the winter. Ed mows the long grass and rakes. Everything is drenched, sweet, lush; even the weeds are beautiful. I decorate the shrine with boughs of spruce and its nuts, olive branches and a gold star over Mary's head. Ed tries to burn a pile of leaves we never were able to burn last summer because of the dryness. They're so wet now that they just smoke. When Ashley and Jes
s reappear, we drive to the nursery and buy a living tree and a big pot to plant it in. Small as it is, it dominates the living room. Since we have nothing for decoration except a string of white lights, we decide to go to Florence tomorrow and buy a few ornaments. I've brought over some candles shaped like stars and some distinctly non-Tuscan farolitos, a Santa Fe custom I've kept since spending a Christmas there once and loving the candles in paper bags outlining the adobe houses. These are glazed bags with cut-out stars. We line the front stone wall with a dozen of them and they look magical with their glowing stars. We fill the fireplace overhang with pinecones and branches of cypress Ed cut this afternoon. How easy everything seems and what a pleasure to recover the fun of Christmas. The bowls of ribollita and a fire act as knock-out drops. In the big armchairs, we're wrapped in mohair blankets, listening to Elvis singing blue, blue, blue Christmas on the CD.
AT THE OUTDOOR MARKET IN FLORENCE, WE FIND papier-mché balls and bells with decoupage angels. A wagon off to the side serves bowls of trippa, tripe, a special love of the Florentines. Business looks brisk. If I thought yesterday that I was falling in love with winter, today it's certain. Florence is redeemed and magnificent on a cold December morning. As in all the towns, the decorations are sweet—lights strung across the narrow streets at short intervals, necklaces of light with dangling pendants. Obviously the women of this city have not heard of cruelty to wildlife; I never have seen so many long, lavish fur coats. We look in vain for fake fur. The men are dressed in fine wool overcoats and elegant scarves. Gilli, one of my favorite bars, is crowded with noisy voices and clinks of cups and constant rushes of steam from the espresso machine. In the middle of the street, Ed pauses and holds up his hands. “Listen!”
Under the Tuscan Sun Page 21
