Amore and Amaretti (23 page)

There are twelve students, mostly Italian and mostly women, but there are a few Asians, a South American, a German and me. Over six weeks, we bond little more than the exchange of shy smiles during some procedure. At the end of the evening, when we are urged to stay, chat and sample the cooking, I am too impatient to be away, striding briskly towards the looming back of the Duomo through the darkening streets to reach my bus in time for the return home. I am also aware, halfway into the expensive course, that I am not learning as much as I had hoped – that, in fact, I know more than I thought I did.

Un buon vino, un buon uomo e una bella donna durano poco

A good wine, a good man and a pretty woman last a short time

At La Cantinetta I have slipped so effortlessly into the role of dessert-and-cake-maker – it is my greatest joy. I continue to bake my famous cheesecakes in a wealth of variations. I bake almost-flourless chocolate truffle cakes lacquered with dark icing, and enormous carrot cakes studded with walnuts and smothered in cream cheese icing. I simmer oranges until they are soft enough to whizz to a paste, then fold through ground almonds and sugar and eggs and transform it into Claudia Roden's Middle Eastern orange cake.

I make pies and tarts, falling back almost guiltily on my own recipe for perfect pastry, one I have been using since I was about twelve years old, which never lets me down regardless of the temperature of my hands. I mostly make apple pies with lattice lids, which I gild with egg yolk for a gorgeous golden finish.

Often it is a
crostata
, a pastry shell, which I fill with custard and top with fruit. The mixed berry ones always look spectacular with their glazed tumble of blueberries, raspberries, blackberries and other tiny berries whose names I do not even know. Sometimes the egg yolks are so brilliantly yellow that the resulting
crema pasticciera
(custard) emerges lustrous and luscious, and it is such a pleasure to smooth it thickly into the cooled, cooked base of the flan.

Like last time, Gianfranco in a cheerful frame of mind will tease, applaud and indulge me in my sweet-making, but when tense and short-tempered, which is mostly, he will bead his eyes malevolently in my direction and so I gallop to a hasty conclusion, my heart pounding foolishly like a reprimanded child.

For large functions he often sets me the task of creating enormous
crostate
on a special wooden board. This involves quadrupling the amount of pastry I usually make, rolling it out in sections carefully and neatly onto the board, pinching up a border all the way around and filling it with a creamy custard. Gianfranco always insists on helping me with the topping and it is one of those precious moments when we are quietly working together, our heads lowered in focused concentration as we arrange kiwi fruit, strawberries, blueberries and figs in exquisite patterns, joking and teasing, joined in our shared passion for the artistry of food.

Guido, the bearded banker, brings into the kitchen a plate of
ovoli
he found growing by the road. His delicate fingers lift the mushrooms to show me their resemblance to hard-boiled eggs. These are the most valuable of mushrooms, he explains, costing up to 80,000 lire (€40) a kilo, pointing out how the white ‘shell' has been partly peeled away to expose a rich golden ‘yolk'. Gianfranco has joined us; Guido always cheers him up, loosens the tension around his mouth and eyes and has him laughing, which he is doing now, expertly inserting the point of his tiny knife under the white part of the mushrooms and lifting it off so we can admire the perfect gold fungus beneath. I remember eating these once in Siena with Piero, cooked simply in butter and tossed with shreds of
tagliolini
, very thin fresh pasta.

Tonight we all dine together when the kitchen closes early. Ignazio and Cinzia set one of the inside tables, while Gianfranco is preparing carpaccio of lean, pale-crimson eye fillet, adorning it with slender slices of Guido's
ovoli
, which he has tossed in new green olive oil. I contribute the pungent
pecorino stagionato
I bought earlier in Greve, still encased in its waxy paper, and one of my apple pies. Buried in rice in the fridge I am saving up the precious black truffle presented to me by Mario, our
fungaio
.

Having started this season at La Cantinetta plump, I grimly resolved not to become plumper. I am sliding there in spite of all the promises that I made to myself on the flight coming over, all my earnest diary entries and letters to friends and family.
‘È più forte di me'
– I can't help it – is a saying I hear regularly and one which I find I use increasingly as an excuse for second helpings, too much bread, the chunk of tangy Parmesan that I nibble on slow evenings with a glass of Chianti. I glance at Guido's much younger wife, a beautiful woman with skin a peachy flawlessness and the body of a ballerina. She once confided to me that she never diets, but simply avoids consuming both bread and wine. Bread and wine! A sacrifice too great for a woman whose excesses are commonly justified on the grounds of loneliness, failure to be appreciated or cared about, infrequent communication from Australia, and the gibes and criticisms of Gianfranco and Ignazio.

There is an absence of mirrors – La Cantinetta is almost devoid of any, except the small high one in the bathroom, which requires tremulous balancing on the edge of the tub for unsatisfactory viewing. I find this lack of reflection unsettling; as if my own image were the only core of reassuring familiarity I have in this temporary strange world. Guido's wife is the sort of graceful poised Italian woman beside whom I feel large and clumsy, to whom I blurt out my insecure inner life over too much late-night Chianti, conscious of being too eager and too friendly and too, finally, misunderstood. A messy splashing around beside her self-contained creaminess and her slender dignity, only vindicated, at least a little, when Gianfranco carves himself off a thick-crusted wedge of my apple pie and sinks his teeth into it with a look of rapture. At least there are my desserts and cakes to redeem me, to rescue me, to restore my value.

It is autumn and the menu has changed again. I am plunging my hands – almost up to elbows – in Gianfranco's
salsa di pecora
, the mutton sauce he has been slowly simmering all morning and which we will serve with rigatoni. To the standard base of onion, celery and garlic is added the dismembered sheep he carved up earlier, several bones, some ordinary minced topside, then later the red wine and the peeled tomatoes. I am peeling the flesh from the bones. It is a fatty sauce with a fatty earthy aroma reminding me of the heavenly oxtail sauce, the
salsa di coda
, we were making two years ago.