Air raid sirens usually gave us advance warning of the bombers’ approach, but one attack from the air, designed primarily to demolish our morale, always came unannounced. It came at night, a single plane with two bombs. We named it Pippo. Shortly after its arrival overhead, Pippo dropped one of its bombs. It circled buzzard-like above, sometimes appearing to be very close, then pulling away. Shaken out of our sleep, we waited, waited for Pippo to drop the second bomb, after which, if we were still alive and unharmed and had not lost our minds, we would try to piece together a little more sleep out of the broken night.
Surviving the raids and getting enough to eat were what we thought about, virtually to the exclusion of everything else. There was nothing else. The country was desperately short of food. Nearly all the men able to work the fields were in uniform, and a large part of the food that was produced was requisitioned to feed the German army and its fascist allies. We were among the lucky ones, because even though the Germans kept an eye on what we produced and confiscated most of it, Papi was able to conceal enough corn to make polenta and wheat to grind into flour for our bread. We also roasted some of the wheat kernels to make coffee, which had vanished along with sugar. We called our coffee granato, from grano, the word for wheat, and sweetened it with honey.
Our most precious possession was salt, which had become a nearly unobtainable commodity. My mother’s sister, Margherita—Margò, we called her—was married to Tonino’s brother, an electrical engineer in charge of production for the company that supplied electricity to the northeastern regions of Italy. In the kitchen of the house in Venice where they lived, Zia Margò kept an electric burner going constantly to boil down seawater from the lagoon—unpolluted then—until only salt was left. From time to time, she sent us a little bag of it, more valuable to us than diamonds. Some of the salt we used for ourselves, some we bartered. The local pharmacist had beehives, and for a little salt he let us have honey for our coffee. For a few spoonfuls of salt, we were able to get fresh milk from a neighbor who kept a cow. This exchange led to one of my first culinary tasks. My mother poured the milk into a broad pan that she kept overnight in a cold place, with which that house was well supplied. In the morning, she skimmed off the cream that had floated to the top and ladled it into a fiasco, an empty Chianti flask. My job was to shake the flask until the cream clotted into butter, another priceless ingredient for our kitchen. Not that there was much of it. It takes more cream than one might think to make a spoonful of butter.
We fenced in a small part of a yard for the few chickens that we were able to raise. They were astonishingly agile in evading capture, and if we wanted one for the kitchen, it often took three of us to corner it. One morning my mother, Papi, and I had maneuvered our quarry toward a corner when we heard an ear-splitting whine, a powerful whoosh, and an explosion close to us. The chicken we were after lay on the ground, blood pouring from its truncated neck. Shrapnel from an errant bomb had decapitated it. For a moment, we were unable to move or breathe, but when we realized that none of us was harmed, that it wasn’t one of our heads lying on the ground, we ran into each other’s arms, laughing hysterically. My mother lifted up the headless fowl, and we marched giddily into the house, raucously singing a patriotic song while triumphantly holding up our war trophy and dinner. We kept the piece of shrapnel, which had the shape of a shallow bowl, and used it for many years as an ashtray, reminding us of the miracle that killed a chicken and spared us.
In exchange for a little packet of salt, we acquired a piglet. To raise it, we were instructed to feed it a pulpy mixture of mulberry leaves boiled with polenta. “You will have to see to feeding the pig,” my mother said to me. “I have enough to do feeding the family.” It was the first dish I had ever been asked to prepare, and it was not until after my marriage that I prepared any others. The ancient Roman custom of training grapevines from one mulberry tree to another was still being followed at that time, and it was in our vineyard that I found fresh mulberry leaves for my little customer’s dinner. The dust raised by the bombings lay thickly on the leaves, so I had to wash them thoroughly at home. I quickly learned how to chop them very fine, a skill that came back to me many years later when I had to chop onion for the dinners I cooked for my husband. I boiled the chopped leaves in a pot with water and polenta flour until I had a dense mush.
When it was time to serve my pig its dinner, my mother came along to help. When we opened the gate of its enclosure, we had to be very careful that it did not escape. Once, however, it did get away, slipping right through our legs. Its speed was dazzling, but to lose it was inadmissible, so we chased it through the fields, shouting after it as loudly as we could. Our shouts brought people from the adjacent farm who eventually helped us recapture our freedom-bound pig.
My mulberry mash must have been very nourishing, because the piglet grew to be a nice stout hog. By winter, it was time to slaughter it. In Italy we describe the traditional cold-weather slaughtering of a pig as fare il maiale, “doing the pig.” The actual killing is only a preliminary to the elaborate craft of dressing the carcass into cuts and products to eat fresh or cure, wasting not a single ounce of flesh or fat or blood.
In canvassing the territory, Papi had found three women and two older men who had the necessary experience. The crew arrived early one cool December morning, bringing their equipment: a coil of strong rope, trussing string, scissors, a meat grinder, stockpots, formidable-looking knives. The men deftly immobilized the hog; firmly bound the hind legs, then the front ones; and hung it by its hindquarters from a beam, the head facing down over a large basin. One of the men slashed the hog’s throat, letting its valuable blood collect in the basin. When it was dead, the two men scraped the skin, or rind, clean of its bristles, being careful not to rub away any part of the precious rind itself. Called coteca in Italian, the rind is gelatinous and sweet-tasting when cooked, and it has many uses: in soups or stews, or ground up and combined with the stuffing for large boiling sausages, such as cotechino and zampone. The men softened the skin with warm, but not scalding, water, and then scraped the bristles away with the edge of a large, shallow, copper ladle. They then lifted the carcass and carried it inside, laying it on top of the massive dining table, which had been covered with a double layer of heavy oilcloth. They slit the belly open and began removing the organs. The women cleaned out the intestines, washing them out many times so that they could be used as casings for the sausages and salami. The men dressed the meat into different cuts, boning some of it so that the women could run it through the grinder. It would subsequently be seasoned in different ways, depending on whether it would be used for sausages, salami, or cotechino. I had intended to watch their work through to the end because I had not seen it done before, but the flashing of knives cutting up a dead body; the fetid smell of the cleaning of the intestines, reminiscent of the incontinence that was associated with the panic in the air raid shelters; and the pooling blood on raw flesh provoked in me both nausea and terror. I took a long walk in the fields, letting the wintry air clear my head and cool down my thumping heart.
It was almost dark when I saw the workers leave, and I came home to find a cornucopia of salami, sausages, a prosciutto, several neatly dressed cuts of meat, and one of my favorites, a cotechino, a large sausage that becomes lusciously creamy when boiled. It is made with a large percentage of the rind—coteca—from the pig’s snout, hence the name cotechino. In Venice and its region, they call it musetto, an Italian diminutive for “snout.” In Venice’s wine bars, a warm, tender, slice of musetto on a round of grilled bread is one of the city’s most effective remedies for the rawness of a winter day on the lagoon. My mother pointed to a small tub filled with solid white fat saying, “There is a job waiting for you,” without any other explanation just then. That night we didn’t eat any pork; we had only cooked vegetables and a salad of raw greens.
The first thing my mother decided to cook the following day was the pig’s blood. I had never had it, but although I felt
queasy, I was curious to see how my mother would go about it. She sliced a huge mound of onions, which she put into a large skillet with some of the pork fat. She let it cook slowly for a long time, until the onion had been greatly reduced in bulk and became a dark nut brown. The blood had turned a reddish brown and jelled enough that she could cut it into pieces, which she put in the skillet, together with a parsimonious pinch of our precious salt and chopped, dried chili pepper. We used chili because peppercorns were agonizingly hard to find and the few we had, we had used for curing the salami and sausages. It was during the war that I developed a fondness for chili pepper, which readers of my recipes will no doubt have noticed. The smell of onions caramelizing had boosted an appetite that didn’t really need much spurring; the dish looked like fried liver and onions, and when Mother put it on the table I fell to it without hesitation. In fact, it tasted somewhat like liver, only sweeter and more tender.
We also had the pig’s liver in what I believe to be, without exception, the tastiest of all liver preparations. The pig’s butchers had carefully set aside the animal’s caul, a fatty abdominal membrane that looks a little like a fishnet. When it was Papi’s turn to cook, he cut the liver into chunks, then stuck a fresh bay leaf to each chunk and wrapped it in a length of caul. He grilled the liver over red-hot embers taken from the kitchen stove, just long enough for most of the caul to melt and the rest to turn brown.
It became time for me to render the pork fat in the tub. Following my mother’s instructions, I cut up the solid fat into pieces no larger than a walnut and put them into a large saucepan, over a section of the stove where the heat was low. “Stir every ten or fifteen minutes,” my mother said. I had homework to do, so I opened my texts and my workbooks on the kitchen table with a large clock in front of me. Each time I stirred the pot I noticed that the fat had melted a little more. “Don’t ever let it boil,” my mother had warned me. After a few hours, I saw that the pot was full of liquid, but there was also a pulpy, pale gray substance in it. I called over my mother who said, “Take the pot off the stove; the fat is fully liquefied. Get some of our crocks”—of which we had previously collected a goodly number—“and ladle only the liquid into them.” Once done, I was instructed to set the pasta colander into a bowl, empty the pulpy matter from the saucepan into the colander, and then take a smaller bowl and press it hard into the colander, squeezing through it all the remaining liquefied fat. I poured the last drops of fat into the crocks, now brimming with yet another invaluable ingredient for our larder, strutto, rendered pork fat. Whenever I cook with fat now, I long for that strutto, so much lighter and tastier than oil or butter; it made anything you fried in it so crisp and fragrant.
My mother stopped me just as I was about to empty the mashed pulpy stuff from the colander into the trash. “Wait,” she said, “with that we are going to make ciccioli—cracklings.” She spread the pulp into an iron pan, sprinkled two or three grains of salt over it, and put it into the hot oven, where it eventually formed crisp, brown, headily scented nuggets, more delicious and satisfying than any kind of chip.
We were better off than most Italians during the war because we could produce most of our food and barter for many of the things we lacked. My mother, moreover, who had never cooked in her life before coming to Desenzano, was, to our happy surprise, brilliantly resourceful in the kitchen. She baked some of the best bread I have ever had and produced each day dishes so varied and so savory that they lifted our spirits, letting us almost forget while we ate that at any moment our lives could be blown away. We would have been so well-nourished during the war, had we always been able to finish what my mother put on the table.
It was uncanny how often the bombers showed up just as we were getting ready, or even had begun, to eat. We had learned to sit sideways, turned toward the door so that, when necessary, we could make a dash for the shelter. The house had no basement, but a covered shelter had been dug out of a nearby field. If the air raid sirens went off while we were eating, we grabbed our plates and ran with them to the shelter. If the bombs started to fall before the alarm sounded, we crouched under the table, taking our plates with us. We tried never to leave food exposed during a raid because when the bombs fell, even though we never took a hit, the vibrations shook enough plaster and dust from the ceiling to cover the food and make it inedible. There were some times when we were taken by surprise, our meal was ruined, and then we had to go without.
During the final and most cruel years of the war, acquaintances, friends, and relatives would disappear. Sometimes they were not heard from again; sometimes we were told that they’d been found hanged or shot to death, either by the Germans or by the partisans, depending on whose side they had been associated. Many persons were on the move, looking for a place safer than the one they had left behind. One day, we opened our door to find standing on the step a remotely connected, and heretofore rarely heard from, aunt Albina, with her two daughters, Elena and Matilde. The girls were untying a startling number of bundles from the bicycles on which they had traveled, and one fairly large suitcase, which would subsequently cause my mother to lose her usually unassailable composure. Wherever it was that Albina and the girls had come from, it was apparently an exceedingly dangerous place, and they begged us to extend to them the presumed safety of our farmhouse. The same week, Zio Tonino had unloaded on us a distant relative of his own, a former musician who had been a bassoon player. We promptly named him Zio Fagotto, fagotto being the Italian for “bassoon.”
Within a few days, our family had grown from six to ten, for whom mother not only had to cook more food, but also find beds and linens. We had no extra sheets and blankets, so some of them had to be split in two. The blankets were already so skimpy that when they were cut we had to supplement them with our overcoats. Albina had put her suitcase away unopened, which caused my mother to ask what she was keeping in it. “The sheets and blankets for my daughters’ trousseau,” replied Albina. “Well then,” said Mother, “take them out and use them for your own beds.” “Absolutely not,” Albina said, “my daughters’ trousseau is not to be touched!” My mother was known for her inexhaustible powers of conciliation, but they abandoned her then. I watched with fascination and suspense as the two women argued with steadily increasing volume and heat. When Albina finally conceded the match I wanted to applaud, but I refrained, fearful that it might rekindle the argument.
Zio Fagotto was a different problem. He constantly complained that my mother’s cooking had lamentable shortcomings; nothing she set before him was ever done to his satisfaction, yet he ate more of it than anyone else. He demanded a flask of wine for himself and never let go of it. If there was a raid, he would take the wine into the shelter, and at night, he took it upstairs with him, stowing the flask under his bed.
During this last period of the war, I saw the different ways that danger acted upon people, sometimes paralyzing them with fear, sometimes evoking what seemed to be complete indifference. The two persons most terrified of the bombs were Albina’s daughter Elena and my own papi. Elena was obsessed with the thought that the bombs could come down while she was using the toilet and she might not get out because the bathroom door would be stuck. She therefore left the door of the bathroom, which was in plain view at the head of the stairs, wide open. As for her sister, Matilde, on the other hand, not even a war could upstage her need to be impeccably groomed. Her hair and makeup were always in perfect order; her clothes were clean, sharply pressed, and appropriately accessorized. When the air raid siren sounded, everyone scampered to the shelter, but Matilde tiptoed gingerly over the farm field, trying not to scuff her shoes.
My father was fairly calm in the daytime, but night terrorized him. He feared that if he slept upstairs, he would not have enough time, in case of a raid, to get down and reach the shelter. He therefore brought his little bed downstairs, but he was not satisfied to sleep alone because he slept so soundly—and was slightly deaf besides—that he feared he would not hear the air raid alarm unt
il it was too late. He insisted on my mother sleeping next to him so that she could wake him in case they had to make a run for it to the shelter. The bed was so small that when one of them turned over in the night, the other one too had to turn.
My mother did not let peril or discomfort interfere with what she had decided needed to be done. When an air raid came while she was preparing dinner, she would not leave the kitchen until whatever she had been cooking was done or could safely be set aside to be finished later. When we ran out of olive oil one day, that evening, as everyone was getting ready for bed, she went out, walking across the fields to Tonino’s house on the edge of town to pick up two large bottles of olive oil he had been holding for us. That was marvelous oil, incidentally, oil from the groves on the western shore of Lake Garda. Of all the excellent oils that Italy produces, it is still my favorite for its harmonious and elegant flavors.
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