the umbrian supper club by marlena de blasi

PR A I SE FOR M A R L E NA de BL A SI

Praise for A Thousand Days in Venice

‘. . . a richly joyous declaration of love . . . the alchemy of a cataclysmic romance that whirls [de Blasi] headlong into another world.’

—Andiee Paviour, Who Weekly

‘So romantic it almost throbs in the hand . . .’—Debra Adelaide, Sydney Morning Herald

‘A luxurious story of sudden love, done properly . . .’—Kirkus Review

Praise for An Umbrian Love Story

‘Sure to have any Italophile pining for Umbria.’ —The Age

‘Plenty of food, wine and vivid descriptions of a life lived to the full in Italy, this time in Orvieto.’

—Courier Mail

‘The clever thing about de Blasi’s memoirs is their sharp focus on nurturing food for the table and for the soul. This being Italy, there is romance, too. Buon appetito.’

—Weekend Australian

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Marlena de Blasi is the bestselling author of A Thousand Days in Venice, Tuscan Secrets, An Umbrian Love Story, That Summer in Sicily, Antonia and her Daughters and a novel Amandine. She has been a chef, a journalist, a food and wine consultant and a restaurant critic. She is also the author of two internationally published cookbooks of Italian food. She and her husband, Fernando, moved from Venice to San Casciano in Tuscany and now live in Orvieto in the region of Umbria.

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First published in 2015

Copyright © Marlena de Blasi 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted inany form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without priorpermission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968(the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whicheveris the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educationalpurposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) hasgiven a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin83 Alexander StreetCrows Nest NSW 2065AustraliaPhone: (61 2) 8425 0100Email: [email protected]: www.allenandunwin.com

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The paper in this book is FSC® certified.FSC® promotes environmentally responsible, socially beneficial and economically viable management of the world’s forests.C009448

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For Barbara Jean Filippi Siegel and Bruce SiegelA family is made of love. Only sometimes is it also made of blood.

For Tony CanzoneriA quiet-spoken stalwart in the vanishing race of noble men

For Erich Brandon, Figlio mio

For Fernando Filiberto-Maria, amore mio

Francesco BrasiniAn Innocent who wanders nimbly among the wolves

and who, in a just world, would be king

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CONTENTS

PREFACE xiii

Part IMIRANDA 1

Part IININUCCIA 49

Part IIIPAOLINA 109

Part IVGILDA 211

EPILOGUE 299

THE RECIPES 307

m

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xiii

PREFACE

Linked by culture, blood, tradition, compassion, empathy and love, four rural women compose the Thursday Night Umbrian Supper Club. Their ages ranging from fifty-two to somewhere beyond eighty, they gather each week in a derelict stone house in the hills above Orvieto to cook, to eat, to drink and to talk. In another epoch – less distant in these parts than one might imagine – they would have been the women who gathered by a river to scrub clothes on stones or sat among meadow weeds to mend them, waiting for the weekly bread to bake in a communal oven. The four are linked, too, by their work, each one having earned her bread by making it. More specifically, the four are or were professional cooks who practise – or practised in the past – genuine Umbrian culinary traditions.

Inclined to things practical which, in their hands, somehow become also things romantic, the women say that gathering together

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xiv THE UMBRIAN SUPPER CLUB

by the fire and around the table is where one finds antidotes to life’s caprice. A good supper, they are convinced, restores to us the small delights that the day ransacks. Through crisis and catastrophe and rare moments of uninterrupted joy, it’s this round, clean and imperishable wisdom that sustains them: cook well, eat well and talk well with people who are significant to your life.

Long after I’d come to live in Orvieto and been befriended by the club’s matriarch, she risked making room for me at the Thursday table. The only ‘stranger’ among them, it wanted only time before I became of them, foraging, harvesting, making do, listening, watching, learning, enacting a few of my own ways and means upon them.

The narrative has a dual thrust: in exuberant detail it recounts what we cooked and ate and drank and, in at least as exuberant detail, it tells the stories of the women’s lives: fidelity, aging, men and aging, sexuality, aging men and sexuality, aging women and sexuality, children, abandonment, destiny, death, the Mafia and Mother Church being among the subjects explored.

‘Vivi per sempre, live forever,’ we’d say, as we set to work on the preparations for a meal. ‘Live forever,’ we’d say again, holding each other’s hands around the table, passing around loaves of still-warm, wood-baked bread, pouring out jug after jug of our own chewy, teeth-staining red, benevolence setting the scene for dining but, as much, for storytelling, invigorating memory, soothing rancour and even, once in a while, illuminating a fear long stuck in the heart tight as the stone in an unripe plum.

Spoken by Miranda one evening, maybe it’s these lines that can best introduce you to the Thursday Night Umbrian Supper Club:

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xvPREFACE

I don’t know how much more I could have learned about the point of life had I wandered farther away than the eight kilometres from where I was born and have lived for all my life to where I’m sitting right now. I think that wherever I might have gone I would have found you. Souls like you. We are magnificently the same. Not only us, all of us. Without pain, without fear, who would any one of us have become, what would we have to show for having lived? Any five women, wherever, whomever, put them together at supper around a fire and, ecco, ci saremo, there we’ll be. The point of life is to do what we’re doing right now. What we did yesterday, what we’ll do with what’s left of our time. Surely we are not barren of fantasy or dreams and yet none of us seem to be swanking about, reaching for great things or, worse, perceiving ourselves to be doing great things. There are no great things. After the myth of security, the second greatest myth ever inflicted on humans is the myth that we were meant to triumph. How wonderful it is to be content with holding hands around this mangled old table, with some nice bread, some wine, a candle and a fire. A blessed sleep waiting.

The narrative is set in the years 2004 through 2008.

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P A R T I

MIRANDA

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3

HAVING POURED OIL INTO A LARGE, DEEP POT, AND SET IT over a quiet flame, she sets out for a quick tour of the garden and the meadow just as we are arriving. Shedding coats and shawls, greeting one another as though years have passed since last Thursday night, we see to the table, to the filling of the wine jugs from the demijohn of red sitting in the corner. One of us lays uncut loaves of new bread on the table, another pokes about to see what it is that Miranda has cooking over the hearth fire though none of us dares to put a hand to anything without her command.

Her breath a bit short from fervour for her mission, Miranda returns holding her apron together with two hands and in its hollow there are what must be the last of the string beans – green and yellow – the first of the brussels sprouts, the chopped-off long leafy heads of celery, apples, zucchini blossoms, sage. Two brown-skinned pears she has stuffed into her sweater pockets for tomorrow’s breakfast.

‘Out of my way, via, via,’ she says, pushing us aside, bussing cheeks as she passes each one, then sets to the tasks of rinsing and drying and trimming, preparing her bounty for glory. All


4 THE UMBRIAN SUPPER CLUB

of us familiar with her frying dance, we surround her, hungry children in her thrall.

Starting with the celery leaves, dragging the branches a few at a time into a batter no thicker than cream, she slips the dripping things into the hot oil, letting them be until they rise to the surface of the now bubbling oil, the force of which turns them over – without a prod – to crust the other side of them. Her feet anchored in place, the whole of Miranda’s generous upper body sways, her hands flying over the leaves and the blossoms and the beans to the batter, to the pot, lifting batch after batch from the oil with a wide skimmer, turning the gilded stuff out to rest on a long, flat pan lined with a tea towel. We pass the pan among us, devouring the fritters out of our hands, burning fingers, burning mouths, and have barely placed the empty pan back to her reach – we still chewing and sipping and moaning – as Miranda piles it with another batch. And another. She saves apple peelings and sage leaves for the last, since these are what she, herself, craves most. As she lifts these onto the pan and moves the frying pot off the heat, she turns to us, taking a long pull from the glass of white someone slaps into her hand. Then Miranda eats, drinks.

‘Pan-to-hand-to-mouth food, I like the wine cold, nearly gone to ice following the hot shattering crust in my mouth, the contrast sending one’s whole body into ecstasy,’ she tells us. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever served a frittura at the table. No time to get it there since I’m always on to the next round of dragging things through the batter, slipping them into the oil, lifting them out dark and crisp. I prefer everyone gathered around the pot, waiting.’


5MIRANDA

Sighing and laughing and crunching and sipping, Miranda asks for more wine. The three bottles of white (a rare luxury is ‘bought wine’ on Thursday nights), which she’d cooled in a tub of supermarket ice, are dead soldiers. Someone suggests we drink the bottle of Champagne that has been lying on its side in some cupboard for months, a bottle from some lesser-known house in Reims, which was gifted – read: lifted – by one of the truckers among Miranda’s admirers.

‘Shouldn’t it be drunk cold?’ she wants to know but two of the men are already fiddling with the foil, the wire, shouting ‘Attenzione, attenzione,’ though the cork slides out with a quiet plunk. We pour it, flat and sour, into one another’s tumblers, toasting Miranda and the thieving trucker. They go quiet, all of them, searching for some motive to compliment their first taste of ‘real French’ when Miranda says, ‘Yeasty stuff, we might better have made bread with it.’

I begin a cliffs-notes version of the story of Dom Pérignon and the sometime glories of what came to be la méthode champenoise but Miranda couldn’t be less interested. She says, ‘Leave a monk in a cellar and there’s bound to be a travesty.’

Flailing her toasting fork now, she bosses us into our places at table, stoops down then to the small hearth on the wall behind it to turn the thick, spluttering slabs of pancetta, which have been slowly crisping on a grate over olivewood embers and branches of wild sage. Sitting deep in the red-hot ash below the grate is a long, shallow terracotta baking dish of potatoes, small as a thumbnail, and the luscious sage-smelling fat drips over them. From the pocket of her pinafore she takes a handful of dried wild fennel



flowers, rubs them between her palms over the potatoes, and the maddening perfumes they send up cause sighs of longing from us. Struggling to rise from her bent position, steadying herself with one hand on the mantel, once she is upright, Miranda-of-the-Bosoms is flushed with delight. For the pancetta, for the potatoes. For her frying dance and because it’s Thursday. Likely for much more than that.

‘Quasi, quasi – almost, almost,’ Miranda laughs over her shoulder, her great beautiful form juddering back behind the faded flowery bedsheet that secludes the kitchen from the dining room in the tiny derelict and woodsmoked house she calls her rustico.

It’s a Thursday in a long-ago October. And in this squat stone building, which sits on the verges of the Montefiascone road, we are nine still-hungry souls awaiting supper. Four women – five including myself – form the core group and, tonight, we are joined by four men: two husbands, the widower of a former member, and a lover, the last being Miranda’s long-time friend, Filiberto.

The ten small tables at which Miranda’s guests sit to dine on other evenings in the week have been pushed together into one, the diversity of their heights and widths smoothed over in green-checked oilcloth. Under sheaves of dried olive branches that hang from the slouching, split-beamed ceiling barely a metre above our heads, we sit on plank benches and half-broken chairs along its length. A merry troupe, having our way with Miranda’s purple wine, passing along a thin-bladed knife and a two-kilo round of her crusty sourish bread, still warm from the wood-fired oven in the back garden, each of us saws off a trencher, passes it to the person on their right. When everyone has bread, we tear


7MIRANDA

it into pieces, wet the pieces in the wine, and chew the fine pap with gusto. Pane e vino, bread and wine.

We slide further into our cups, wet more bread in more wine until Miranda parts the bedsheet curtain – keeping it pinned to the wall with a tilt of her hip – and comes forth holding a great steaming basin of wild porcini braised in red wine and tomato. Into small deep white bowls she spoons the mushrooms with their dark potent juices and directs someone to fetch more bread and another to remove the pancetta from the grate and lay it over the potatoes where it’ll stay warm without burning. She asks if the wine jugs are full, then serves herself. We raise tumblers and voices in buon appetito and the house goes silent as stone save for low-pitched salacious murmurings.

We share in the clearing of plates and the resetting of others. One of the Thursday night rules is: Once the supper begins, Miranda will not leave her chair at the table until the meal is finished. And so, with two kitchen towels against its heat, I lift the pan of pancetta and potatoes from the embers and take it round the table for everyone to serve themselves. Next, one of us fetches from the kitchen two large chipped Deruta platters piled with chicken crusted in wild herbs – rosemary, oregano, fennel seeds, fennel f lowers and thyme – and roasted with crushed tomatoes and olive oil, the whole of it doused in white wine toward the end of its cooking time. We fight over the pan juices and before we’re ready to surrender the platters – crusts poised for a last swipe – someone whisks them away behind the curtain. Coitus interruptus. We suffer the noise of furtive slurpings. Then frenzied scrapings of the roasting pan left behind in the sink.



‘The chicory is outside in the bread oven,’ Miranda says to no one in particular, knowing that someone will run to get it. This between-course bustle with too many of us trying to help seems always a four-minute farce, everyone bent on getting back to the table.

To complete the savoury part of the supper, Miranda has rolled steamed chunks of autumn squash in cornmeal and pan-fried them in olive oil. Only a whisper of sea salt and a grinding of pepper scent them, consenting to yet more sage leaves – sautéed in oil this time – which exalt the natural richness of the squash rather than conceal it with sugar and spices. Nothing much gets a mask in Miranda’s kitchen. This reprise of sage – first, battered and fried, then to scent the pancetta and the potatoes and now with the squash – is an example of Miranda’s theory of the filo conduttore: literally, the conducting thread. Often she uses an element more than once in a meal, thus connecting the various dishes, coaxing them into a harmonious whole. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Aristotle knew.

Though Miranda almost never prepares a traditional dessert on Thursday nights, sometimes, when she’s set ewe’s-milk ricotta in a sieve to drain overnight, she’ll place a lush, creamy pat of it on a yellow plate, a big hunk of honeycomb and a pepper mill beside it, and everyone will take a tablespoonful or so in a teacup, break a piece of the comb over the ricotta, and grind on pepper with a heavy hand. Without fail, ricotta or not, she always reaches into the armoire where she keeps flour and sugar and dried beans, and takes out a fine old metal tin. Oval in shape, its pale blue and silver paint left only in patches, it’s always filled with


9MIRANDA

tozzetti, hard, twice-baked biscuits made with whatever nuts or fruit or seeds she has to hand. These and a good ambered vin santo in which to wet them, that’s how Miranda ends Thursday nights. We began our supper by dipping bread in wine and end with the same gesture. Amen.

Patting his chin with a napkin, Filiberto then lays the square of tattered blue cloth flat on the table; after smoothing and folding it into a small triangle, he places it in the pocket of his woollen shirt. Another of the Thursday night rules is: Anyone who wants one brings their own napkin. He rises then, walks to Miranda’s place, takes her hand in his and, in the style of the old cavaliers, brings it close to his lips without touching it. Turning from her, he strides the few metres to a chair set near the hearth and takes up his waiting mandolin, and begins plucking the strings in a minor key. One of the two shepherds who tend the flocks on the far-flung meadows of this parish on the Montefiascone road, Filiberto sings, his voice a cracked whisper. Hoarse, ragged.

Miranda shuts her eyes, totters her chair back on its hind legs and, as though all of us and even the little room itself have fallen away, she is alone with Filiberto and his tender wail. His voice, his music, are her after-supper prize on Thursday nights. Miranda-of-the-Bosoms, goddess of abundance, la Madonna of the burners in a kitchen-towel turban, Juno-esque breasts, soft and brown, bursting from the bodice of a white pinafore as she rocks her chair like a cradle, its creaking keeping time with Filiberto’s plucking. When he stops, she rouses, and her old rheumy eyes are drenched blue-black flowers flitting from one to another of us with what seems like regret. She sips the heel of her vin santo,



runs a hand across her cheek, pinches her upper lip, pats her kitchen-towel turban. Miranda has been consenting to the age seventy-six for several years now but I think one of her recent birthdays was her eightieth.

It was a cold January night when I first met Miranda, six years ago now. While still living in the stable in San Casciano, Fernando and I were in the thick of our search for our ‘next house’; somehow we found ourselves accidental guests at a festival to honour Sant’Antonio Abate – Saint Anthony the Abbot – in a tiny Umbrian village near the hilltown of Orvieto. A wooden crate of just-baked bread balanced picturesquely on her head, Miranda had gone about the little festa swinging her prosperous hips, causing the men to pause in their quaffing and orating whenever she passed by. I remember one man in particular would bite the side of a forefinger each time she came near. A forceful gesture this, indicator of many sentiments. But that man’s motive for finger-biting was undeniably desire.

As it turned out, we soon found our ‘next house’ – in Orvieto – and waited out the two years it wanted to restore it; for all that time and ever since, Miranda has been an affectionate and generous presence in our lives. My first Umbrian friend, my enduring one. When I was too-long kitchenless she put the keys to the rustico in my hand, invited me to complete the work of testing recipes for a manuscript perilously overdue. And when Fernando and I finally moved into Number 34 Via del Duomo, again it was she who swanned me through the markets, introduced me to the farmers, helped me – the first American ever to set up in Orvieto full-time – to slash a path through the spiny cultural


11MIRANDA

labyrinth of the centro storico, the town’s historic centre. Always there, Miranda was. Always near in the Umbrian way of being near. Close by but not too close.

Miranda and I have spent untold hours – we two, alone, and in the company of others – working and talking, laughing ourselves to tears and then weeping ourselves back to laughter, cooking and baking and sitting down to supper. And when she asks, I give a hand in preparing the suppers she serves in the rustico on three or four nights other than Thursday when Miranda hosts twelve or so people. Her guests on those nights are mostly locals who live alone, truckers passing through or couples living on ‘caffe latte pensions’ – a sum that barely allows them to put supper on their own tables and would prohibit any thought of dining out. For all of them the handwrought sign – Miranda – swinging from a metal arm above her old green door and backlit by a flame in an iron lantern announces a kind of sanctuary, the broken-down castle keep on the Montefiascone road.

Miranda cooks whatever she has, whatever others have brought to her. No bill is brought to the tables at the end of the evening. People leave what they can, be it a few euros, eggs wrapped in newspaper, a sack of just-dug potatoes smudged in wet red earth, or a crate of artichokes, their round barbed heads lolling on thirty-centimetre leafy stems. The arrangement works. Miranda makes it work.

I think of all this and wonder what troubles Miranda-of-the-Bosoms this evening, why her eyes shine with tears that won’t fall.

Still sitting by the hearth, Filiberto wonders, too. ‘Amore mio,’ he says, looking over at her, ‘are you not feeling so well?’



‘Sto bene. Sto veramente bene ma,’ she says. ‘I’m well, truly well, but . . .’

‘Well then, what is it?’ asks Gilda. A delicate fifty-something beauty, Gilda’s face seems made of white silk in which her amber eyes have burned great round holes. ‘I can also see you are a bit down.’

‘I think it’s a matter of fatigue. Our little Miranda is doing too much. Maybe there should be a nice interval in our Thursday nights,’ says Ninuccia, a stout red-haired women with gorgeous grey eyes and a tendency to rule. The tribe’s portatrice della verità, the carrier of truths, Ninuccia knows what is and what isn’t and rarely is she disputed.

All’ Italiana, everyone around the table begins to speak at once, each one hearing only themselves. No one wants to surrender the Thursday suppers nor do they disagree that Miranda should be doing less. At least for a while. The rumpus builds until she commands quiet.

‘My nephews have promised to do a bit of work on this old place. Not much, mind you – shoring up the beams, laying down a truckload of antique tiles one of them bought from an auction in Viterbo. Some paint. Even though they’ll be working only in the evenings, I should think a month would be enough. Sometime after the raccolta they should be finished. The olives will be ripe enough to harvest by mid-November this year, wouldn’t you say?’

A murmur of accord. ‘Yes, after the harvest and before the first snow, the boys should be finished.’


13MIRANDA

‘Benissimo. And then we will resume our rhythm,’ says Pierangelo, who is Ninuccia’s husband. The last words he tilts upward in question.

‘Actually, I had more than an intervallo in mind,’ Miranda says, not looking up. ‘I’ve been thinking to close down the rustico.’ Crushing a crust of bread against the green and white oilcloth, she lifts her empty glass to her lips, trying to sip from it.

Thunder rumbles the room.‘No, no, I mean close it down except for our Thursdays,’ she

hastens to explain. ‘I won’t be opening up on the other nights. That’s what I mean.’

Over the others who chant praises to the saints, Miranda is still trying to be heard. ‘But if we do start up again . . . when we start up again, I won’t be cooking. I want you to know that. I’ll be here to help. We’ll keep the same system, everyone contributing what they can to make the supper. For a while there’ll be little enough growing in anyone’s orto save pumpkins and black cabbage and caulif lower, but persimmons will be ripe by November, and pomegranates. If everyone would leave a few porcini to dry, we’d have a windfall for winter suppers. But dry them right. Better, bring them to me and I’ll string them up, let them swing from the beams in my attic.’

‘I’ll have leeks even after the snow,’ says Ninuccia. ‘And I’ve a cellarful of apples and potatoes. Everyone’s got chestnuts.’

‘Good. Bravissimi. But remember, only what’s fine,’ Miranda cautions.

A Thursday night rule: Humble or rich, always offer only the best of what you have.



‘And whoever can spare something from his hunt, well, feel free to hang the haunches, or the beasts entire, in the cheese hut out back. Birds, hare, boar. Remember to wrap a hoof or a foot or a wing with the date, written legibly, so we’ll know the order in which to use them.’

‘No need to date a bird, Miranda. Once it’s putrid, it speaks for itself.’

‘You’re just about reaching the putrid stage yourself, Iacovo,’ Miranda assures a handsome man in a hand-knitted black sweater, navy basque and grey canvas trousers tucked into knee-high boots – the same hand-knitted black sweater, navy basque and grey canvas trousers tucked into the same knee-high boots he’s been wearing summer and winter, it’s been observed, since the day his wife passed away half a decade before.

‘For the last years of his life, Michelangelo never took his boots off, my darling girl,’ Iacovo tells her. ‘It’s in deference to him that keeps me night and day in mine.’

‘Bah. Where was I? Yes, the wine and the oil will be here, wood for the fire, for the bread oven.’

‘And the pecorino,’ Filiberto says. ‘There’ll always be cheese.’Miranda looks at Filiberto, blows him a kiss.‘Certo, certo, you’ve done more than your share and now

we’ll . . . we’ll take over. Take turns.’ As usual, it’s Ninuccia who decides for all of us.

Once again, everyone speaks at the same time, all of them agreeing that Miranda should indeed retire from her stance in front of the old iron stove. ‘Yes, yes, of course, è giusto, giustissimo, it’s right, very right,’ they repeat again and again though their


15MIRANDA

voices and the pace of their words wane, their conviction a diminishing chord. A tentative whistle in the dark. They are bewildered babes who’ve lost their piper.

A soft but unshy voice makes a small rip in the silence.‘I’ll cook.’The voice is mine.I have just offered to prepare supper for as many as fourteen

people once a week in a place with no electricity or gas. I shall cook over the three holes of a wood-and-coal-fired stove and a length of chicken wire stretched between the andirons of a Lilliputian hearth. The people who will come to eat what I cook – some of them of a certain age – are culinary traditionalists, old-school Umbrians who work the land, shepherd flocks, raise courtyard animals, hunt birds and wild boar, and have never in their impressively long existences eaten an egg plucked from a carton but always from under the warm derrière of a hen. Rigid are their gastronomic formulas: a rabbit is either tugged through a small hill of flour and fried in bubbling lard or wrapped in pancetta, roasted with rosemary and splashed stintingly with white wine once it’s been carried to the table; this last ceremony giving up luscious vapours, which settle back to rest deep in the beast’s soft, hot flesh. Chicken is chopped into small pieces, roasted with crushed tomatoes, olive oil and handfuls of wild herbs. It gets its white-wine sousing halfway through the cooking. A Sunday chicken can be pan-sautéed with yellow capsicums and fat black olives. Oregano is the prescribed herb to scent it. Lamb, a leg or a shoulder, is roasted with potatoes. Its tiny ribs are charred fast over a wood fire. The only sauce is olive oil – green



as sun-struck jade – splashed in small, lustrous puddles through which one skates the flesh, the fat, the bones, the potatoes, the bread. In the last best drops, one skates a finger. Pig, suckling or mature, is roasted with sage and rosemary and often, but not always, with wild fennel, or, yet more ubiquitously, it is boned, stuffed with a poultice of its innards, run through with a metal rod and rotated over a slow fire until its skin, glistening like rubbed mahagony, is brittle as caramel gone cold.

The rural folks’ bible is long, its codes chiselled in Umbrian stone. I am not Umbrian. My own bible is a crucible, a composite of riches gathered from all the places where I’ve lived and worked and cooked. Even for these canonical Umbrians, I know I shall be wilfully tempted to blasphemy. I might sauté a rabbit with wild thyme and shallots in the rich, salty fat rendered from wild herb-perfumed lard, splash it with good black beer, braise it until its plump flesh goes bronze as August wheat and, if barely prodded with a single tine of a fork, falls from its bones in succulent heaps. Worse than this, I will likely serve the same black beer to drink as the one in which the rabbit was drowned. In other words, I shall cook for these Umbrians in the way that is natural for me. This feels right. In fact, it feels wonderful.

It must feel right to Miranda as well, her broad smile making glittering blue-black slits of her eyes. She’s laughing now, her kitchen-towel turban – singed in some earlier combat with the flames – sits askew and wilting in the smoky mists of the dying fire. I notice that it’s only Miranda who laughs.

‘I thought you would, Chou,’ she says. ‘In fact, it’s you I’ve had in mind to . . . ever since Rai Uno showed that old film, La


17MIRANDA

Festa di Babette. Since then, well, I’ve been thinking that we’re like those locals who’d lived on salt cod and water and that you could be her, that Babette woman, sitting us down to some strange supper on a Thursday. La Festa di Babette.’

‘You’ve hardly fared on fish and water all these years,’ I say, raising my glass. Everyone follows suit and we drink to the health and joy of the goddess of Buonrespiro.

‘Brava, Miranda, bravissima, bravissima.’ Everyone’s on their feet, coming to surround her, kissing, embracing, placing their hands on her sweat-shined cheeks. Miranda has ruled her tribe justly and so merits their love. But the brio quietens perhaps too quickly and, once back at their places, they resume a collective sulk, one fidgeting with his ring, one flicking a middle finger and thumb against errant crumbs. Some fix a perplexed gaze in my direction, as though I was someone else, someone new. Which, in a way, is what I am. Being someone new is who an expatriate is always.

Though I’ve known these souls who compose Miranda’s famous Thursday suppers for all the years I’ve lived in Orvieto – at least to greet in the markets or wherever our paths cross – it was only last spring that she first invited Fernando and I to join the ranks of her inner circle. But more than the longevity I lack, it’s my straniera, my stranger, status that worries them. How, oh how, can l’Americana slip into the old white clogs of their beloved Miranda?

I know better than they that I can’t. But what I know that they don’t is that I have no wish to. It’s not Miranda’s shoes I’ll try to fill; I’ve got shoes of my own. I like that Miranda sensed I would



offer to cook. So often I have made her privy to this longing of mine for a large family around my table. I suspect she, too, knows the others would make a muddle of taking turns. ‘A good hearth has only one Vesta,’ she always says when, unbidden, someone dares insist upon her territory.

The fire’s gone cold and the little room is nearly dark save the last flames hurled up by the guttering candles. One of the Thursday night rules says: When the candles are spent, the evening is over. No one moves to leave.

The deeper the dark, the looser their tongues. A triangular dialogue prevails among Ninuccia, the woman called Paolina, and the one called Gilda. We listen.

‘I don’t know this film. Come si chiama?’ asks Ninuccia.‘La Festa di Babette; it’s a pretty film, pretty enough but . . .’

says Gilda. ‘I saw it, too. This cook killed a turtle; after I saw that scene

– enough, ’ says Paolina.‘Did she cook it over the ashes?’ asks Ninuccia.‘I think she made a broth,’ Gilda tells her.‘I’ll tell you right off, I don’t eat such things,’ says Paolina.‘Nor do I,’ Ninuccia agrees. ‘But what else did she serve?’‘Maybe it would please you to eat a quail suffocated inside a

thousand-layer pastry coffin,’ Paolina says.‘Davvero schifoso. Truly disgusting,’ Ninuccia says. ‘The lowest

circle in hell should be reserved for people who play with food.’Truly disgusting – they are all in agreement and as I listen to

them I am sympathetic. Braised quail tucked inside buttery pastry caskets seem a trumpery to them, as it seemed a trumpery to me


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not so many years ago as I sat at El Bulli wondering why I wasn’t in front of some small tottering table in the ancient village of Sarrià hung high in the hills above Barcelona, dragging charred baby leeks, thin as my finger, into a little pot of romesco, rather than staring at a menu that promised Kellogg’s paella – Rice Krispies, shrimp heads and vanilla-scented mashed potatoes – or sizzled embryonic eels afloat in espresso foam. The world is rife with the hungry and yet big-boy chefs must play with food. I think about what Ninuccia has just said: The lowest circle in hell should be reserved for people who play with food. I would add: especially those who play with food and get paid for it. But is that what these Umbrians are supposing I shall do?

My reverie is broken by Ninuccia, herself, who is asking me, ‘So will Thursdays be like in the film? Is that what we can expect?’

‘No. Not at all like in the film. I’m not like her. Not so much like Babette. (I was not telling the whole truth here . . . hence, the hesitation, almost the admittance that I am very much like Babette in that I have and I would again spend my last lire to feed you . . . and more . . . one good supper taken together is a symbol of everything that matters in life.) I promise you a good supper. We’ll be together. Every week on the same night. Something to count on. Ritual. Ceremony. Continuance. The idea is pure Umbrian. But the food . . . well, the food can’t be if I’m cooking it. I don’t have your history, your hand. But I have another history, my own hand . . . will you give me a chance?’

The stillness is brief, electric. It’s Gilda who interrupts it. ‘Why not? It would be, well, it might be interesting.’


the umbrian supper club by marlena de blasi

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