The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club

by Marlena de Blasi

  ‘Pierangelo soon slipped back into the life he’d led before his sojourn to Umbria. Before us. Setting out with his former mates to fish for tuna, he’d stay away for three or four days, return for one or two, before going off again. I knew it wasn’t always to the sea where Pierangelo went. Normal as raising sheep or fishing the seas, working a job now and then for the clans. “We all do it. Nothing dangerous. I told you, nothing dangerous at all.”

  ‘Meanwhile I learned more about my mother-in-law. Unsought, unacknowledged by her, Cosima had long ago been assigned to the province of myth by the women of Acquapendente di Sopra, she having ministered to two generations of them since she was in her early adolescence. In her men’s black shoes and her shapeless black dress, loping over the fields or between the lanes, she’d be bent on birthing babies, washing the dead, keeping vigil over the sick. Pulling an anise cake from her basket, the perfumed thing still warm from her hearth, she could light up gloom by walking through the door. But her more constant sympathies Cosima reserved for the seven women who lived within her nearest reach in the three houses attached to hers.

  ‘Save when they slept or on the occasions when their husbands or sons were at home, the seven and Cosima were together. In summer they cooked in the spare kitchen of the deconsecrated church’s cellar where it was cool. In winter when the cellar was cheered only by a small hearth by which hermit monks once warmed themselves, they cooked together there as well, neither knowing how to nor desiring to live separately from one another. Bringing shaped and risen loaves covered with cloths to the communal oven, which sat in a clearing of oak scrub just outside the village, they’d settle themselves on stones or among the weeds with their knitting while their bread baked. On Mondays, they mounted their washing in baskets on their heads and walked to one or another of the nearby streams, whichever one was rushing good and fast. At noon they ate bread and cheese from their pockets and, at sunset, laid supper on a table in the front lane when it was fair or piled together in one of their houses or back in the church cellar when it was cold. The table cleared away, their kitchen chairs in a half circle in the lane, they’d once again pick up their needles and yarn and talk and work and sing. Santo cielo, sainted heaven, how they could sing. Not an alto among them, they raised their seven soprano voices in a blaze of plainsong or chanted and keened as women before them had chanted and keened in those mountains for thousands of years, their sounds visceral, their pitch mesmeric, orgasmic, sweetening, finally, almost to a whisper.

  ‘And so I went about my days as they did theirs, blithe as well-loved children. Their almost breezy sanguinuity sprang, it seemed, from their abiding concern for one another, each one trusting the others to be thinking of her while she was thinking of them. Though those who were widows – Cosima and two others – were pensioned by the State and the others supported, more or less, by their husbands, their economic lives were mostly operated collectively. Whoever had, shared. Cosima was their purser. They worked an orto, kept hens and raised rabbits, and bartered lamb and cheese from the shepherds. They decided upon things by “committee”: who was to get her boots repaired, her knives sharpened, her teeth fixed, how much wood was to be cut, which mattresses were to be restuffed. What they didn’t grow in their orto or forage in the meadows and the woods, they bought from the fruttivendolo ambulante, the travelling fruit and vegetable wagon, on Saturday. And to supplement mean times – their own or, more often, those of their neighbours – they sold their handiwork: prized by the fancy women of Reggio and Catanzaro were the table covers and bedspreads of vast dimension and heirloom design, which were crocheted by the women of Acquapendente di Sopra from white cotton string, tea-dyed to a pallid amber brown. And what they didn’t knit or sew, they would fetch in the markets, riding down the mountain to Reggio in the Thursday or the Saturday bus several times a year. You will recall that it was 1969 when I arrived in Acquapendente di Sopra. That these women lived then in that cloistered self-sufficiency seems an imponderable truth. Having so little, they were free to have everything.’

  •

  Never asking me if I’d wanted another caffé, Ninuccia has been up and down, slapping the wet grains from the Bialetti into the sink, rinsing all its parts, spooning out more ground espresso, packing it into place, filling the pot with water. Never breaking the stride of her story, she lights the burner, sits down. We avoid one another’s gaze. I don’t want to hear more of this story. I don’t want this Cosima to be relegated to fable. I want to know her. I am wishing that I was her. At the least, I want to be there with her, with all of them. I belong there. I’m certain of this. How can it be that I am feeling the loss of a woman I never knew, would never know? I think of their soprano voices in the evening, under the mountains.

  My throat tightens, tears threaten. I think how absurd is this response of mine to the women of Acquapendente di Sopra. I will drink this fresh caffé and then explain to Ninuccia that I really must go. First I will steer our talk to the present. To the less remote past.

  ‘I never knew it was you who began the Thursday Night Suppers. I mean, with Miranda.’

  ‘Those Marvellous Thursday Nights, that’s what Cosima called them. Yes, yes, it was me who carried the idea home to Miranda years ago when I returned from Calabria. Missing life with Cosima and the women as I did, I’d hoped to feed my nostalgia for those nights in the mountains by raising up some kinship here in Umbria. Of course, it was not at all the same. I should never have expected it to be. What they had and who they were in Calabria and what we have and who we are here … was unequal. Discordant. How could I expect to satisfy them with what had delighted Cosima’s tribe?’

  ‘I would cook a pot of beans, not so different from that one over there, and call it Thursday Night Supper. There were more of us back then, sometimes as many as twenty squeezed into the rustico. I’d ladle out beans or some thick soup of barley and spelt scented with whatever herbs were near. Bread, wine. Of course, there was always cheese. Once I made la polenta in catene – cornmeal in chains – thin cornmeal mixed with stewed white beans spooned into deep bowls over bread. Filiberto called it war food. He remembered his father hanging a sardine from a string tied to the light above the kitchen table; the oil dripping from the little fish was the only condiment for his family’s nightly polenta during the meanest years. His father never changed the sardine for another until only bones swung from the string.

  ‘“We’d cut a piece of the flat, yellow pudding, swipe it across the sardine, trying to wet it with the little fish’s salty oil,” Filiberto told us. “There was watered wine until that ran out. Nothing of bread.”

  ‘Filiberto’s stories led to Miranda’s,’ Ninuccia says.

  ‘Not only at your table,’ she said, trying for Miranda’s voice. My family fared better than most of our ilk, I having begun working as maid and kitchen apprentice for the Giacomini when I was sixteen. I’m not telling you that their stores allowed the usual five-course lunch and the thick soups and cheeses and dry sausages and six or seven conserva di frutta, which composed their light supper of an evening. Deep pockets, the black market, they ‘arranged’ things. Everyday Cook sent me home with almost enough to feed my family. Six of us and my mother – my father already gone by that time. Cook and also Signora Giacomini, I think, knew I supplemented their gifts with my own mild thieving – mostly soap and flour. A kilo of flour consoled my mother. Soap, too. At least her children would be clean, would have bread. My brothers were apprentices of a sort, too, running and fetching for the Partigiani even though the youngest was ten when things went bad. Sometimes one of them would come home with a sack of eggs, as many as five or six, and I think it was those eggs that saved us as much as anything. I’ve always thought it was the eggs. I took to bringing Giorgia, then nine or ten, with me to the Giacomini each morning, knowing that Cook would sit her down, fill a bowl with some sort of pap – sometimes a piece of bread with sugar. Can you imagine sugar during the war? The grace of the Giacomini gave way, though, when I
trooped in with two cousins, the daughters of my mother’s sister, who was faring less well than we. They were kind about drawing the line but draw it they did. Years afterward I remember my aunt telling how they survived for weeks and months on a prized two-kilo tin of salted Spanish anchovies. I remember that tin – wedged between the more usual goods – in the kitchen armoire. It had been there for years, maybe as many as ten, as though my aunt knew to save it. Red and blue and foreign-looking. Sometimes I would pull it forward on the shelf, finger all the writing on it that I couldn’t read. A gift from someone who’d travelled to Spain. I don’t remember who. When there was nothing left but sacks of polenta, my aunt opened the tin, her two tiny girls standing on chairs to watch her. The story goes that, without bothering to rinse away their preserving salt, she mashed a few of the fish to a paste, mixed in whatever broth she’d brewed that morning from wild herbs and then spread the mess thinly over their nightly polenta.

  ‘“Ninuccia’s polenta is hardly war food,” Miranda told Filiberto that evening, mortifying him as much with her gaze as with her words. It was the first time I’d ever heard her speak with pure contempt. Not the last, though. I think it was when she told us that story of the anchovies that I knew I loved Miranda. I think it was that night. In any case, Filiberto sought immediate reparation by rising from his place, coming to me, taking both my hands, kissing the palms. Once back in his chair, he looked at Miranda. After a moment or two he said:

  Winter was the worst: being hungry and being cold, too. We had snow one year, an unusual amount. Surely it was the first snow of my own young life. Exciting as it was, it faded soon enough to tedium. We’d just kneel in front of the window watching it fall. One morning, a hungry morning, my father wrapped us in some sort of shawl or blanket, brought us to the door, opening it to a moaning wind. He said, ‘Look out there, do you see it? Do you see all that bread under the snow? Can’t you see it? Close your eyes, imagine all that germination going on deep under the insulating snow. When it melts, even though the earth will still be brown and bare, there’ll be bright shoots sticking their heads straight up to the sun. Acres of young wheat. Loaves and loaves of good crusty bread.’ Of course it was a lie. Sometimes all we have are lies.

  ‘We others were not old enough to remember the war, some of us not yet born. We listened to the polenta stories and the bread-growing-under-the-snow as to fables but when the solemn moment passed the tribe sat, forks pointing north, waiting for what would next be brought to table. The first of my suppers were not a successs.

  ‘But Miranda had understood what I’d had in mind to make of Thursday nights and so she began to help me, to choose and cook dishes that, though they resonated less abundant times, had some chance at pleasing.

  ‘One time we begged lambs’ innards from the butcher who bought stock from Filiberto, and brought them back to the rustico almost still pulsing. We set pancetta and salt pork to melt over a quiet flame with rosemary, onion, garlic and peperoncino and gilded it all until the smell it sent up set our mouths to watering. Meanwhile we chopped the innards almost to a pulp and added them to the pot, marrying them to the hot, perfumed fat. A little sea salt, a litre of red, tomato conserve, all of it distilling down to a delectable mash to spread on thick slabs of roasted bread. Miranda called it soffritto di agnello, said it was a piquant second cousin to the traditional Roman dish coratella (lamb innards stewed in white wine with fennel and sage) and even closer kin to the lampredotto of the Tuscans (veal stomach stewed with tomato, onion, celery and spooned onto trenchers of crusty bread). Il soffritto won a restrained sort of applause but, as before, the group sniffed about for what would come next and then next after that.

  ‘Once Miranda and I bartered with the Catanzarese in the market: eight dozen baby artichokes for two rounds of Filiberto’s pecorino. The colour of violets and tiny as a baby’s fist, 20 centimetres of leafy stem. All we did was light the wood oven, peel the stems, cut them in two and let them sit in lemon water for half an hour. Into three oiled terracotta dishes, we laid them down in a single layer, poured in white wine – only about half an inch – then dusted them with sea salt and bread crumbs, gave them a good dose of oil and let them roast slowly until their chokeless hearts were soft. Then we heaved on fistsful of grated pecorino, poured on another thread of oil and slid the dishes back into the oven until the cheese went bronze. The group poked at the tiny little crisped things, spooned one or two out to taste, all the while mumbling that no decent artichoke was roasted but braised in white wine with lemon and mint, this latter another dish that the Umbrians borrow from the Roman canons. Eight people devoured ninety-six artichokes, slid bread in the juices of the terracotta dish closest to them, moved brazenly to polish juices in the further territory of the other dishes. “Buoni, buoni da vero, ma adesso? Good, very good, but now?”

  ‘“Le fritatte di bruscandoli, wild asparagus omelettes,” I told them, proud as if the dishes I carried from behind the bedsheet curtain were set with truffle-stuffed songbirds. I was so excited to tell them about the gifts from the gods Miranda and I had found on the far hillside behind the sheepfold, a great patch of the skinny brown twig-like things, which make only a fleeting spring appearance but almost never in any but sparse quantity. A savour to which no cultivated asparagus could ever aspire, they taste like roasted hazelnuts. Delicate …’

  •

  ‘You mean, luppoli, hops. Bruscandoli are wild hops and not asparagus at all but there is great controversy among the cognoscenti over this distinction. I would wait for them every May to arrive by boat from the island of Sant’Erasmo to the Rialto. For risotto. However many the foragers would bring to the markets, the chefs from Harry’s Bar always got most of the bounty. But I managed. I’d begin my haunting of the marketeers for them around Easter time. I …’

  Ninuccia will not tolerate interruption. This one of mine was made of words she hadn’t heard. Before I finish speaking, she proceeds: ‘As you know, Miranda had – long before this beginning of the Thursday Nights – begun to offer supper three or four evenings a week to the truckers and the nearby farm families. And it was that uniquely Miranda sort of supper that they all expected on Thursday nights. The group wholly embraced the idea of sitting down to supper together in the rustico every Thursday but how and what I longed to feed them, they did not embrace at all.’

  Having been looking down at her hands or perusing the room while she spoke, Ninuccia takes a breath, looks at me.

  ‘A grand part of why I bewailed the thought of you in the rustico kitchen was raised up from the unhealed part of my old resentment at having failed to please the others. If I couldn’t, how could you? Of all people, why should it be a stranger who would cook for us? I remain distrustful, I want you to know that. Wary. I’m wary still but less so for two reasons: I know that Miranda will be hovering and that one of us will always be there to keep you in line, save you from committing foolishness. As I said, I wanted you to know all that.’

  ‘Good.’ I smile at her. Having expected something of defence from me, she waits, lifts her gaze to mine before looking down again at her hands, perusing the room.

  ‘In any case, I stopped bringing my pots of soup or beans and Miranda pushed her sack of polenta to the back of the armoire. Every Tuesday we all brought what we had to her and every Thursday Miranda cooked for us.’

  ‘Every Thursday until …’

  ‘Until now. But how far I’ve wandered. From Cosima. From the mountains.’

  ‘You must be tired and …’

  ‘No, no. Not at all, not tired,’ she says, raising a hand to cover her smile, an uncommonly girlish gesture for Ninuccia. ‘The truth is that I never wander very far from her. From Cosima. From the mountains. Never very far. I still compare them, you know. The Thursday Nights there, ours here. A foolish exercise. Quei Meravigliosi Giovedì Sere. Those Marvellous Thursday Nights with Cosima. Though the theme was the same as every other night – cosa c’e, c’e– what there is, there is – little fistsful of ho
arded things would appear on the Thursday work tables. Cosima and the others would take stock and get to work. A favourite dish was one of long, slender sweet green capsicums stuffed with old bread softened in white wine, dried olives, raisins, pine nuts, capers, pecorino, bits of lamb if they had it, an egg, maybe two, and handfuls of wild greens if it was spring. Laid on a grate high over the slow fire they took turns roasting them, painting them with oil, gently turning them until they blistered, plumped, a tin underneath to catch their juices. There’d be a sauce ready to pour over the hot things, a smash of garlic, oil, lots of onion shaved thin, red wine vinegar added to the hot juices in the tin. How good they were. And we drank wine on Thursdays, shunning the water pitcher.

  ‘Cosima always baked her anisella. With a quarter-litre jar and a screw top in her pocket, she’d walk the two kilometres or so through the woods to the bottiglieria, the tiny wine dispensary, to fetch a dose of anisette. Eggs, oil, sugar, flour and anise seeds toasted in a hot pan, she’d pour the batter into a round tin, large and shallow, cover it with a pot lid, reversed and filled with hot embers, and settle the whole into the white hot ash of her hearth.

  ‘On Thursday Nights the women dressed as they might for mass had there been a priest to celebrate it. And if there had been a priest, I’d have wondered at the women’s will to share their pagan affinities for an hour with he and Mother Church. The old goddesses were their confidantes, their undisputed authorities and, being so familiar with them, they’d call upon Hera and Hestia, Aphrodite, Artemis and Demeter, as they would neighbours from a village down the mountain. They knew too much, the women of Acquapendente di Sopra. They knew that the clans and the Church and the State were as united a family as the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. But there I go again, wandering.