Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

by Bill Buford

  “I don’t think Mario understands how much we gave him. You can only learn these things here—from people who have been making these foods their whole lives. Do you understand? That’s what we gave Mario. Something he can get nowhere else.”

  Betta was contemplative. “Maybe tomorrow I will teach you how to make tortellini.”

  PORRETTA WASN’T the obvious place for lessons in making the region’s most complicated pasta. The town has never been known for its food, and there are only a few historical references to it. There is an obscure mention in Casanova’s autobiography, dating from the 1790s, when, accompanied by a Florentine beauty and in flight from her mother, he stopped nearby, rousing an innkeeper after midnight with demands for food and drink, and then found himself so sated by macaroni he was unable to perform an act of love. The side effect was not addressed in a collection of food narratives written around the same time by Doctor Luca Zeneroli. His 1771 Selection of Medical Stories pertaining to the Porretta Baths—the food stories are the appendix—appears to be the only surviving culinary text in the millennium-long history of the town. Goethe may have passed through, crossing the Appennines via the Porrettana, but seems to have made the journey on an empty stomach. George Eliot, traveling in the other direction to Bologna (Porretta has always been on the way to somewhere else), also didn’t stop to eat.

  The difficulty is the extreme winter. Some livestock survives it, if there’s an adequate shelter. I was taken to an example of one, a hut of hand-hewn stones with a thatched roof and a solid wood door, where I was then introduced to a remarkably ugly pig of gigantic proportions. (People could only guess at its weight—two thousand pounds? three?) The pig was a boar—although he didn’t seem like one boar, but several, linked together like cars of a freight train—and, for several years, had been personally, even if indirectly, responsible for most of the region’s prosciutto. Even so, I had no idea the species could be so ugly or so large. Apart from the pigs, there wasn’t much else. The land was dense forest, too cold for grapes or olives, with only one local crop, hay, which you saw growing in the few cleared areas.

  But there were butchers, a proud clan. One night I found myself at a table, under a balmy starry sky, with a half dozen of them. The occasion was Gianni’s postponed festa. The good weather had finally arrived, and five hundred people had shown up—the first warm night of what would turn out to be the hottest summer in five centuries. (With the uninterrupted warm evenings, Gianni’s pizzeria would finally turn a profit, although the unexpected treasure raised questions about a business that relied so absolutely on the mountain’s fickle climate.) The butchers had grilled the meat; Gianni and Betta prepared pizzas; Mark and I cooked the pasta; and now it was midnight, and we were exhausted—the happy exhaustion of feeding lots of people—and were having an impromptu family meal of steak and red wine, gathered round a table by a still-burning barbecue fire.

  I was curious about the invisible culinary history of the region. I wondered what distinguished the food here from what you might eat anywhere else in Italy, and the people around me agreed that it was in theirs having to be foraged: it came from the woods.

  People hate to buy vegetables, a butcher confessed, because vegetables are expensive and not from here.

  And it was true. A white truffle, which elsewhere might sell for hundreds of dollars, seemed easier to come by than something fresh and green. What could be got from the woods was free and amounted to a diurnal dining diary that everyone kept in their heads. May was wild asparagus, arugula, and artichokes. June was wild lettuce and stinging nettles. July was cherries and wild strawberries. August was forest berries. September was porcini.

  “But too many porcini,” a woman declared. “Every day—porcini, porcini, porcini.” In September, her son goes out in the afternoon and returns with fifty pounds of porcini. “What am I to do with so many porcini?” She cooks them, she dries them, she freezes them, until “Basta!” she throws them out.

  October was wild boar. “There are thousands of them in these woods.”

  “Not thousands?” I protested.

  “Yes,” people answered in unison. “Thousands. And pigeons and deer and even wolves,” and at the mention of wolves I looked out into the night and studied the zigzaggy mountain crests above us, unpatterned like the broken teeth of an old comb, and the forests, black against the dark blue summer’s starry light, and felt a primitive Grimm awe for what was out there and an equally primitive comfort in being here, by a fire, surrounded by people.

  They continued through their calendar, reaching chestnuts (November), whereupon everyone sighed. Chestnuts were such a problem. No one could eat them.

  “This is a poor community,” a butcher explained, “and we grew up eating many dishes with chestnuts. For us, they mean poverty. We now can’t eat chestnuts. There are recipes that will disappear unless they are passed on soon, but for now, no one can touch them.”

  By the end of the calendar (the cruelest month was March, when there was nothing), I understood something new about Betta’s pasta—its importance. Its value was different from pasta in the life of Miriam, say, or of Valeria. For them, pasta was a culinary tradition that they’d grown up in, a feature of their culture, their identity. For Betta, it was a tradition she wanted to belong to. She lived in the mountains, where you were always reminded of how little you controlled. This year, even the reliably over-abundant porcini, which I had finally concluded was the taste of Porretta, never appeared. The ground was too dry. Dadi, the man who ran a food shop—catering to day-trip Italians expecting to return home with bags of wild mushrooms—was importing them from Sweden. For Betta, pasta was crucial to how she thought about herself. “Mario,” she said, “is now a great success, and I am not. Mario is now rich, and I am not. But he was never very good at making pasta. He was never as good as me. I am very, very good.”

  THE NEXT DAY Betta was in the kitchen when Mark and I arrived. She was resolved: today she would tell us how to make tortellini, although, before she began, she renewed her conditions.

  I understood them. I will not tell Mario.

  “Do you promise?”

  Mark and I looked at each other. (We said nothing, but what was communicated between us was unmistakable: this, we agreed, is very weird.)

  I promised.

  “Okay,” Betta said. She was solemn. “This is what goes inside. There are four meats: pork, chicken, prosciutto, and mortadella.” The measurements were in etti. “You start with two etti of pork, ground up.”

  “Any cut?” I asked.

  “The shoulder or butt,” she said, indicating her own shoulder and butt, that cook’s thing of pointing to the cut in question as though it had been butchered from your own body. “A lean piece.”

  I repeated the quantity and wrote it in a notebook. Two etti is about eight ounces.

  “About half as much chicken. The breast. Also ground up. You cook both meats together in a pan with butter.”

  I wrote a formula: Maiale + pollo = padella con burro. Pork + chicken = pan + butter.

  “Next. The cured meats. Half an etto, or fifty grams, of the prosciutto and mortadella. You grind these up, too.” Fifty grams is about two ounces. Prosciutto is found all over Italy but is at its most refined in the Po River Valley, the heart of Emilia-Romagna. Mortadella—a fatty pork mousse in a casing—is another specialty associated with Bologna (thus “baloney,” the bastardized name of a bastardized version). These were the tastes of the zona; you won’t find them in a Tuscan preparation, even though Tuscany was so close I could see it from the kitchen window.

  “You add your ground-up prosciutto and mortadella to your pan. Cook them slowly. You want the flavors to mingle.” In all, there was about a pound of meat. “Let it cool, and add two eggs, some parmigiano…“

  “How much?”

  “Enough to thicken it. And some grated nutmeg…”

  “How much?”

  “A little.” She bunched her fingers together. “You mix it
with your hands. That’s the filling.”

  The result—like grainy sand before the eggs, cheese, and nutmeg are added; like a gray mushy toothpaste afterwards—wasn’t much to look at, but, since it was about to be tucked inside a piece of dough, what it looked like was irrelevant. The smell, however, was powerful. What was it? The Bolognese meats? The combination of the raw and the cured? I stuck my head in a bowl and my mind said: pizza toppings and eggnog and a barbecue on the Fourth of July. It was all my holidays in one. My mind also said: This is not a smell you know. It wasn’t of the mountains, which I’d now come to think of as damp and mushroomy brown. It was different. Appetizing, certainly, and wintry, and, somehow, highly specific. This was a taste I knew I would encounter nowhere else in the world. An urban medieval perfume, I concluded. This, I wanted to believe, was the fragrance of a Bologna kitchen, learned by someone in Betta’s family, preserved and passed on until it had reached the aunts in Vergato.

  Betta wouldn’t show me the next step—preparing the complex pasta engineering that encased her filling—until I met a new condition. I would have to return later in the summer, my third trip. It was, I concluded, a test of my promise that I wouldn’t reveal the recipe to Mario: if enough time had elapsed and she got no reports of her tortellini on the Babbo menu, she could assume the coast was clear.

  IF YOU’RE A BOY, your principal difficulty in making tortellini, I discovered (because of course I returned), is your fingers, which, alas, really need to be a girl’s, and not just any girl’s, but an elfin girl’s.

  Your fingers need to be small because all the action occurs on the top of the smallest one, the pinky—in Betta’s case, the tiny top of her very petite pinky—where you place the puniest square of pasta. You then pack the puny square with largest amount of filling possible and fold it, corner to corner, to form a miniature but bulging triangle. You next tip the top part of the triangle forward, as though it were bowing in an expression of gratitude, and then (the crucial step) pull the other two corners forward, as though securing the bowing head in a headlock. You then press it all together to form a ring. When you turn the pasta over, you’ll be astonished by what you created: a belly button. (What can I say? It’s wildly erotic.)

  Each infinitesimal tortellino takes a long time to make, and during the whole delicate process I found myself always on edge, hoping against hope that I wouldn’t crush the fuckers. (I crushed many fuckers.) And, given how little time it takes to eat the peanut-sized little bastards, you come away with an understanding of what they are: munchkin food made by people with a lot of time on their tiny hands. And yet, for all that, it is an angelically yummy munchkin food. You simmer it in a clear broth, turn off the flame, and let it sit for a while in the pot, doing that back-and-forth thing that a good pasta does, taking in the broth’s flavors, releasing its own starchiness, until it is tender and floppy and bloated with taste and can then be served, smelling fragrantly of Christmas.

  The truth is, Betta was right. You learn pasta by standing next to people who have been making it their whole lives and watching them. It seems simple, and that’s because it is simple, but, characteristic of all Italian cooking, it’s a simplicity you have to learn. My advice: Go there. Make Betta a star. Isn’t it about time? You’ll have to put up with Porretta—very authentic because very ignored, and characterized by the temperamental irritability of a place that feels it has been abandoned (don’t even think about getting change for a parking meter) and stay at an overpriced hotel with no bathroom, occasional water (sometimes hot), plastic walls (although wood-colored), no windows (you think there’s a view?), and a dysfunctional telephone that works from noon on Sunday to early on Monday morning. And then, once you’ve settled in (hah!), wander down to the bottom of the valley, listening for the River Reno, and, near the old aqueduct (now housing a sewer—you’ll smell it), watch out for a sign, painted by hand, virtually illegible and probably fallen down. It says “Capannina.” There will be an arrow. Follow it, and after half a mile, where the river bends around itself, a peninsula of Emilia-Romagna surrounded by Tuscany, you’ll find the pizzeria. Betta gets in at about four. Good luck.

  AFTER LEAVING PORRETTA, I became a tortellini student. I was curious to see if I’d find Betta’s recipe elsewhere. I didn’t. But I can’t say there’s a lot of difference between hers and, say, the twenty-five other recipes I came upon. Since the sixteenth century, the filling of this tiny folded pasta has almost always involved a bird (capon, chicken, or turkey), a cut of pork, a cured meat (or bone marrow and cured meat), cheese (almost always parmigiano), and occasionally herbs. And, since forever, it has been cooked either in broth or with cream (panna). But the quantities of these ingredients vary from recipe to recipe, even if only minutely, and these variations are what one generation passes to the next, always as guarded secrets, each family convinced that its recipe is the definitive one. The arguments about what constitutes a genuine tortellino were so passionate that, in 1971, a convention was held, La Dotta Confraternita del Tortellino, the Learned Confederation of the Tortellino, to determine once and for all the correct preparation. With considerable ceremony, the preparation was published three years later, on December 7, 1974, and then locked away in a vault in the Camera di Commercio di Bologna, the city’s chamber of commerce. Today you can find it on the websites of various agricultural and official-sounding institutions, introduced by appropriately solemn injunctions about the dangers of not following the instructions precisely, but the effort is to miss the point. The Learned Confederation cannot tell you the one recipe because it doesn’t exist, and to go looking for it or to experiment with the many variations until you persuade yourself that you’ve arrived at the definitive one is to miss the intimate ideology of the dish. There is not one recipe; there is only the one you’ve been entrusted with. “You are not to tell Mario this recipe,” Betta instructed me again. “This is my gift to you.”

  I honored the terms of the gift and didn’t pass it on to Mario, while knowing that he had no use for it anyway and that the injunction would have baffled him and made him sad. Would he have understood the resentment implicit in it? Gianni and Betta have long been accustomed to not getting their due. They’re mountain people. There is a hardship in their cooking. In their eyes, they took in a man they genuinely believed couldn’t cook (probably because they themselves understood only one way of cooking) and taught him what they knew. When he returned to America, he became rich and famous, telling the story that he’d learned everything from his “second family” in the mountains. But Mario hadn’t come here to learn a region’s cooking in order to reproduce it faithfully, as though from a textbook. I find myself thinking of the Mississippi Delta and the visits made by students keen to learn the mournful lyricism in the music that you can still hear in the juke joints there. Mario is forever making food his own way, not just griddle pizza or a porky linguine alle vongole or carbonara with raw eggs on top, but his whole approach, that nightmare display of contorni that I worked with at the grill, the secret sauces, the ingredients never revealed on the menu, the squirter bottles of syrups and acids and juices, the performance: like a musician.

  For my part, I’d come for the textbook and was glad to have it. Betta’s tortellini are now in my head and my hands. I follow her formula for the dough—an egg for every etto of flour, sneaking in an extra yolk if the mix doesn’t look wet enough. I’ve learned to roll out a sheet until I see the grain of the wood underneath. I let it dry if I’m making tagliatelle; I keep it damp if I’m making tortellini. I make a small batch, roll out a sheet, then another, the rhythm of pasta, each movement like the last one. My mind empties. I think only of the task. Is the dough too sticky? Will it tear? Does the sheet, held between my fingers, feel right? But often I wonder what Betta would think, and, like that, I’m back in that valley with its broken-combed mountain tops and the wolves at night and the ever-present feeling that the world is so much bigger than you, and my mind becomes a jumble of associations, of aunts and a
round table and laughter you can’t hear anymore, and I am overcome by a feeling of loss. It is, I concluded, a side effect of this kind of food, one that’s handed down from one generation to another, often in conditions of adversity, that you end up thinking of the dead, that the very stuff that sustains you tastes somehow of mortality.

  AND THE EGG?

  I hadn’t given up, although it now seemed obvious that the pivotal recipe that had changed the nature of pasta probably didn’t exist. After all, writing has a better chance of survival than a piece of food (can you imagine the misfortune of coming across a five-hundred-year-old tagliatelle with ragù?), and chefs are rarely writers, and if the Eureka event occurred when no scribbler was in the kitchen the discovery would have gone unrecorded.

  But I pressed on, even after my discouraging exchange with the pasta museum. After Scappi’s Opera in 1570, the next known food book was Il Trinciante, in 1581, by Vincenzo Cervio. A trinciante was a “carver,” an important person at a Renaissance banquet, and Cervio’s book—in effect, the first autobiography of a butcher—deals with meats, including useful advice about castration, addressing a range of questions such as which animals need it and which ones don’t (you’d hate to do the wrong one). But Cervio, a dedicated meat guy, is silent on the issue of eggs.