The following afternoon, Testa collected Victor, Giuliano, and me and drove us to the Fiera, Bologna’s large, modern convention complex at the city’s edge. From fall to spring, the huge trade fairs that were held there made it the busiest place in Bologna. The fair calendar had come to an end, and on that day, the Fiera was deserted. Testa led us to the restaurant building, where some men had been waiting for him. They unlocked the doors, and we went up to the second floor, where we found ourselves in an immense dining room. From the dining room, we entered the largest kitchen I had ever seen.
“Ma cosè?” (“What is this?”) I asked Testa.
“It’s the most up-to-date commercial kitchen in Bologna,” he said. “It serves over three thousand meals a day during the trade fairs.”
“What am I to do with it?”
“Anything you like. It’s yours, at no charge, with all its furniture and equipment, for the three weeks of your courses.”
“How will I find my way around? How will I know how things work?”
“We have a man who is familiar with the operation, his name is Bruno. He’ll be here with you for the entire time that you will be using the kitchen.”
“How will I get my students here from the hotel?”
“With the same bus that you are going to be hiring for your field trips.”
To prevent our class from disappearing into the oceanic emptiness of the vast dining hall, we had to reconfigure the space. There was a score or more of tall sideboards lining the walls. Victor, with Bruno’s help, pulled enough of them around to create a small, screened dining cove near the entrance to the kitchen. He used the open shelves of the upper halves of the sideboards to display all the wines he had ordered for the class meals. He would be unable to discuss the wines with the students because he had to return to New York, to his work, and neither I nor anyone else there knew very much about them. His solution to that problem was to write descriptive cards that he placed alongside each wine. The cards led to yet another unexpected career for Victor, that of wine writer. Judith Jones, my editor at Knopf, came to Bologna to visit the class, and she was moved by Victor’s descriptions to suggest that he write a book on the wines of Italy. He took his time doing it, but when it was published by Knopf six years later, in 1982, Italian Wine was very well received. The subject was unfamiliar then to most wine lovers, and to make it more accessible, Victor organized the wines by categories of taste instead of following the conventional classification by place of origin. It was an unorthodox approach, but it caught on, and we have since seen many restaurants adopt it for their wine lists.
Cooking was only part of our program, perhaps no more than half of it. We wanted our students to experience Italian life as it was lived through food. In class, they ate what they had prepared, but for their meals outside of class, we took them to restaurants both in the city and in the countryside. In choosing the menus, we were careful never to repeat a dish or a wine that they had had elsewhere or in class. When my son, Giuliano, and I talked about this recently, he recalled the maddening time we had working with a large graph we had drawn, penciling in, and erasing, dishes and wines by date and place. One of the precepts that Victor tried to work by was “Never leave anything to chance.” The experience of the antique kitchen that had so nearly shipwrecked us led him to modify it to “Never leave anything to someone else.” He and I tasted every dish and poured every wine in advance of the students’ visit. As the date of our arrival neared, we called the restaurants to remind them of their commitment, and on the day before our arrival, I telephoned the chef to review every dish and its preparation.
Our classes were large, often exceeding twenty students, and their makeup—whether judged by geographic origin or professional, social, or economic position—was extraordinarily diverse. To lower barriers and promote congeniality, we would organize, very early in the course, an informal evening in a farmhouse or rustic trattoria, with hearty food, free-flowing wine, and old-fashioned Italian country music.
Marketing with students in Bologna
The farm-country fare of Emilia-Romagna introduced our international guests to food that they were not likely even to have heard of, let alone eaten. Appetizers might have been tigelle, a sort of crumpet that was sliced in half and layered with a finely chopped mixture of lard, rosemary, and Parmigiano; il gnocco fritto, a palm-sized dough dumpling that, when crisply fried, puffed up to create a hollow suitable for stuffing with slices of incomparable handmade salami. The pasta, always homemade, was often gramigna con la salsiccia, small, curved macaroni, sauced with the farm’s fresh pork sausages, or it could have been garganelli, hand-turned, ridged, short quill-like tubes sauced with prosciutto and peas. One of our farms made porchetta, a stuffed, roasted whole small pig brought to table stretched out on a plank. It was extraordinarily delicious, the skin crisp and savory, the flesh sweetly succulent. Instead of the pig, other hosts in other venues served roasted faraona, guinea fowl, or coniglio in umido, fricasseed rabbit. One of our country cooks, a woman named Perla, fried potatoes in lard and rosemary that so eclipsed all other versions of fried potatoes that one of our students returned for another course the following year, saying, “I came back just to have Perla’s potatoes.”
The music was provided by a foursome that we privately referred to as “i quattro vecchietti,” the four old-timers. The leader and the youngest was a septuagenarian called Spartaco, with a shiny bald pate of the classic billiard-ball type. He played the mandola, a lute-like instrument with four double chords, and he sang. Mori, the mandolin player, was the oldest. He was extremely nearsighted and wore glasses with thicker lenses than any I had ever seen, although he took them off to play, playing “blind,” so to speak. For him alone, we always made sure there was a bowl of tortellini in broth at dinner. He loved to eat them with large helpings of bread that he broke into the broth. Bagnoli, the smallest of the four, was completely toothless. His instrument was an organino, a small accordion, which he alternated with a twelve-stringed guitar. Scalera, grave-faced and
The old-timers’quartet. From left to right: Mori, Scalera, Bagnoli, Spartaco
somber, with a look of permanently suppressed anger, played a mandolin. After dinner, Spartaco sang old, romantic songs, and the group played country dance music, polkas, mazurkas, tarantellas. They always ended with a tarantella that the class danced, forming a line that snaked through the dining room, around the tables, and if we were on a farm, in and out of the yard.
It never failed to be a successful event, establishing a spirit of enthusiastic camaraderie that carried us for the rest of the course. Romantic liaisons may have developed during the evening, but I always shrank from learning the particulars. There was one exception, though, an open courtship of such charm that it touched us all. Juan was a distinguished, vigorous Cuban man in his eighties. His family had founded the Bacardi rum company. He had enrolled in the course because he wanted to take charge of the cooking on his yacht. The lady’s name I have forgotten, but I remember her looks; she was a very handsome widow in her sixties. Juan fell instantly in love and courted the object of his passion with public yet mannerly displays of admiration, which at one dinner took the form of a serenade. A few months after the course, I received an invitation to their wedding in Puerto Rico.
At the end of one of our evenings in the country, when everyone piled into the bus to return to the hotel, some of the students brought along unfinished bottles of wine and continued to carouse during the ride home. The driver told us he was worried that some of his passengers might lose their balance and get hurt as they weaved unsteadily along the aisle while the bus was moving. To prevent a recurrence of the situation on other trips, Victor amplified the Italian traffic code with a rule of his own devising. He informed students that Italian laws forbade drinking and carrying open bottles of wine and liquor on buses, and that if they were caught, they and the driver would be brought down to the station and fined, and the driver’s license would be suspended. Thereafter
, when traveling back to the hotel in the evening, we had the bus lights dimmed, and people snoozed on the ride home.
It astonishes me, as I recall the scores of expeditions we undertook with groups so dissimilar, that everything always went off as planned, that no one was ever hurt or lost. Actually, something did get lost once: a denture. On the way to our country dinner one week, we had stopped to visit the patrician estate and taste the wines of a prominent producer. I had learned that during such tastings, my students would not limit themselves to just a short, thoughtful sip, and I wanted them to put down some ballast so that they could handle the alcohol better. I had arranged for one of the cooks of the estate to make piadina, the flat bread native to Romagna, the region we were in, and to layer it with soft cheese, or sautéed greens, or prosciutto. As the class was getting back into the bus, the cook came up to my assistant, Margherita, with something concealed in a napkin. With great embarrassment, she unfolded the napkin to expose its contents, a denture, which one of the students had dropped. Everyone got back into the bus, but no one looked troubled or said anything to us. “Whoever lost it,” I said to Margherita, “will have a problem at dinner. Let’s have each of us”—Victor and Giuliano were also there—“focus on a different section of the table and when we see who is having difficulty eating, we can go up to him or her and discreetly return the denture.” We paid more attention to the students than to the food on our own plates, but we saw no one having trouble with anything that was served. We returned to the hotel, with Margherita still holding on to her little bundle. While we were all gathered in the lobby, goodnighting each other before going up to our respective rooms, one of the women spoke up, her voice ringing high above the chatter. “Margherita! Has anyone found a denture?” So much for discretion. I wondered whether she was used to such mishaps and whether she always kept a spare in her bag.
In the second season of the school, while I was still teaching in the kitchen at the Fiera, Danny Kaye decided to come for a week, bringing his daughter Dena. I was fond of Danny, but I was concerned about class discipline, which was never easy to maintain. Would he slip into one of his acts and draw attention away from the lesson? It turned out to be quite the other way around. He was such a serious and attentive, respectful student that the rest of the class was influenced by his example. He also showed me how to overcome one of my problems. My low voice made it difficult to talk above the conversations that students would sometimes have on the side. Danny had a magnificent whistling technique that any doorman hailing taxis could have envied. With two fingers between his lips, he produced an ear-shattering call to attention that immediately stopped all the background chatter. My whistling, unfortunately, was no louder than my speaking voice, but when Danny left, Victor gave me a silver whistle that got me through my classes for the next thirty years.
That Danny was on his best behavior didn’t prevent him from indulging in a little teasing. We had a woman in class, an Italian-American, whose family had a restaurant in upstate New York. It was astonishing to all of us how little she knew of basic Italian ingredients. The lesson one day included a roast of veal, and in describing the menu, which I always did before beginning to cook, I told the class that in an Italian kitchen, the aroma of rosemary sautéing was always associated with the making of a meat roast. Before I could go on, the woman interrupted me to ask, “Marcella, what is rosemary?” When I became persuaded that I was hearing the question correctly, I showed her a handful of sprigs. From that moment, Danny called
Lunch with Craig Claiborne and Tom Margittai at the San Domenico in Imola
her Rosemary, and he generated as many opportunities as he could to address her by the name he had bestowed on her.
Nor did he shrink from razzing me when my English gave him the chance. On the evening that we were going to go to the farm, I described it as having many beautiful pickups on its grounds. I meant “peacocks.” “Oh, Marcella!” said Danny. “You are amazing. Pickups! You really want us to have a good time. How soon are we leaving?”
It was curious how my malapropisms often seemed to lead to ribald interpretations. I was at lunch with the class at a restaurant that was becoming famous in Italy and that would eventually be celebrated abroad, Imola’s San Domenico. I was fond of its brilliant teenage chef, Valentino Mercatilli, whose cuisine was a hybrid of the savory dishes he had learned at home and French-accented cooking he had brought back from a stint in a Paris restaurant. I wanted my class to taste the splendid food that Valentino could cook. For me, he tried to tone down his acquired French accent, letting more of the local dialect come through. It was my custom whenever I took the class to a restaurant to introduce each course, describing its making and its place on the menu. We had just had a fine risotto as a first course, and guinea hen was coming up as the second course. In between, Valentino was serving a luscious onion tart. I stood up, described how it was made, and added, “In a simpler meal, it would be the second course, but today we shall have it for intercourse.” A New York lawyer shot up out of his chair and exclaimed, “Marcella, I know that Italians are imaginative cooks, and I have heard that they are wonderful lovers, but I never thought they could combine both talents with a single dish.” Lucky for me, Danny wasn’t there that week.
In that second year at the Fiera, James Beard came with Marion Cunningham to take a week’s course. His arrival at the hotel precipitated a small crisis. The bathroom in the room he had been given had a shower cabin that had been designed to take up the minimum amount of space, with sliding doors that, when pulled aside, left a small opening in the corner of the cabin to enter and exit by. Jim had somehow managed to wriggle inside the shower, but once he was done, he was unable to wriggle out. What happened next I have forgotten: Who helped extract him? Was he moved to a room with a larger shower or did Mr. Gallieri’s maintenance crew adjust the cabin’s opening so that he could get in and out of it on his own?
Jim had serious circulation problems, and he had been ordered by his doctor to avoid salt completely. I never made allowances for special diets—it would have been impossible to teach if I did—but
With Jim Beard in the kitchen of the Fiera, Bologna
Jim was dear to me; he was like a favorite uncle. I held back a portion of everything we cooked in class and made it for him without salt. Jim tried to go along with that, but only for a very short while. He loved flavorful food too much. I always put a special unsalted portion on a dish for him, but he pushed it aside and served himself what everyone else was having. He had come down from Venice with large, striped gondolier’s T-shirts, which had to be changed constantly because he ate with such abandon that you could deduce from them everything that had been on the menu. His enthusiasm kept everyone’s spirits high. The class was one of the jolliest I have ever given. On the last night, at the diploma dinner in my hometown, Cesenatico, a few students surprised us with a musical tribute to Jim, Victor, and me. The words were their own; the melody was that of “Making Whoopee.” One of those involved in that charming production was Lynne Rossetto Kasper, out of whose introduction to Emilia-Romagna came an important cookbook, The Splendid Table.
Victor and I had a meeting with Gianpaolo Testa. The school had had extraordinary press coverage, with stories running in many newspapers and magazines, including a two-page spread in The New York Times Magazine. There had already been a notable increase in American and other foreign visitors to Bologna. Gianpaolo agreed with us that we needed to find a permanent facility independent of the Fiera, where we could expand our season to the spring and fall and offer many more courses. “Let me talk to Gallieri,” he said. “The hotel may have the space for a permanent kitchen for you, and I know how to find the funds to build it.” In the courtyard in back of the hotel, there was a covered area where carriages had once been parked. It had subsequently been leased to the baggage handlers of the railway station, who used it to store their carts and other equipment. It was the rawest possible space: it had walls on three sides; the fourth side,
facing the courtyard, was closed by battered plywood panels and a lopsided door; inside it had a low dropped ceiling and the floor was plain, hard earth. There were no utilities, no electricity, no water, no gas. The hotel ceded that area to the city for a period of ten years, and Testa got the city to budget the funds to build a kitchen on it to our specifications.
After we had given our last course at the Fiera, Victor and I met with a contractor that the hotel had chosen, and we drafted a fully detailed design for the kitchen. We asked that it be completed by early spring so that we could inaugurate it at the beginning of June. Back in New York, Victor told his father that he would be traveling to Italy frequently that winter to check on the building of the kitchen, and in the spring he would altogether stop working in the fur business.
Giuliano was no longer in New York—he was a freshman at Swarthmore—and I had stopped giving classes at home. I was working with Judith Jones, finishing up my second cookbook, the first that we had done together. When we were all but ready to go to press, we still didn’t have a title for it.
“Why not call it ‘Volume Two,’ as Julia has done with hers?” I asked.
“No, no, ‘Volume Two’ doesn’t sell well,” Judith said.
“How about ‘The Second Classic Italian Cook Book’?”
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