Living in a Foreign Language (15 page)

Dancing on the Pian Grande

Today, Castelluccio's main industry is tourism. There are shops and stands that sell the famous products of the region—lentils, pecorino cheese, sausages, honey and
farro
—and we wandered around after lunch, shopping.

On the way back, we stopped again to check out the sheep and noticed a couple of other cars parked near the flock. When we got close to them, we heard loud music being piped out of one car's CD player—a wild folk-type music, almost Celtic, featuring drums and mountain pipes and soaring fiddles, not unlike the
pizzica-pizzica
we had danced the tarantella to in Puglia the year before. There were three couples—in their mid-sixties, perhaps—dancing in a makeshift conga line, waving their arms and whooping to the sky. Before anyone could blink, Jill—who will dance at the slightest provocation—was
among them, instantly organizing the line into something more cohesive.

Under her lead, the merry band found the beat of the music and started dancing more as a group than as individual drunken sots. Her hands were on the shoulders of the woman in front of her. The man behind her—grinning like a fool—had both his hands cupped around her buttocks as the conga line wove between the wildflowers and the steaming mounds of sheep dip. Before long we were all dancing and whooping to the sky like idiots—except Caroline, who puts far more trust in dogs and sheep than she does in humans. The old guy behind Jill, who had taken one hand off her ass so that he could wave it up to the mountains, yelled at me across the circle,
“C'era Limoncello! Cera Limoncello!”
He was blaming their behavior on that sweet, subtly dangerous after-dinner liqueur. Apparently they had had a good lunch, too.

W
E INVITED
B
RUNO AND
M
AYES
over for dinner. We hadn't seen as much of them as we had some of our other new friends, partly because they're both busy—either off around the world somewhere doing a film, or in their studio in Trevi preparing to do one—but also, we decided, because they thought of us as the people who took their Rustico away. Of course, we'd paid them for it and all that, but we knew—Jill especially—that Mayes hadn't really been ready to let it go, and perhaps she was hesitant to come over and be a guest in what she still thought of as her house. It may not be logical, but there you are. So Jill and Caroline proposed that I cook dinner for them at the Rustico as a good way to get over this hump and see what kind of friendship could develop.

It's daunting to cook Italian food for an Italian—even more so to cook it for a Roman. Most Romans haven't accepted the fact that they don't still rule the civilized world, and Bruno is no exception. And whereas he might be willing to hear other opinions about politics or art or philosophy,
he's very adamant—dare we say arrogant?—when it comes to
la cucina Italiana
. He's what they call in Italy a
buona forchetta
, which literally means “a good fork” but more loosely translates as one who knows how to handle himself at the table. He's also one of the world's great restaurant hounds—he can sniff out formidable feeds in places that most people don't know exist. Every Sunday he sets out with Mayes to discover his latest trattoria, or
osteria
, or taverna—usually far out into the Valnerina where sheep dot the hillside and the smell of
fertilizer naturale
drifts down from the mountains into the valley below. Usually it'll be what we in the States would call a roadhouse—a local tavern where the tables are packed with farmers, shopkeepers, shepherds . . . and Bruno. Mama's at the stove, Papa's at the bar and the food is purely and blissfully local.

I had cooked for him once before—a casual lunch that I threw together shortly after we got here. He came over to show me where things were—the fuse box, the garden tools, the propane tank—and I fed him a quick, little lunch. I served—audaciously—that most Roman of dishes:
pasta all' a-matriciana
. Except that I substituted the local Umbrian pasta,
strengozzi
, for the traditional
bucattini
and finished it with
parmigiano
instead of
pecorino Romano
—which to a Roman is as blasphemous as missing lunch. But I was confident. I'd been cooking this dish for twenty-five years—ever since I tasted it on my first sojourn in Rome. And doing it here in Italy where I can get house-made
guanciale
, the famous Canarra onions and tomatoes from my own garden made it virtually foolproof. And even though Bruno pointed out my substitutions immediately, he was smiling broadly when he helped himself to his second portion. He even called his mother in Rome: “Mom, you won't believe what this guy did. . . .”

So for this dinner—when we were trying to woo them—I decided to make the dinner as authentic as possible; no profit in turning off Bruno at the outset. I decided to give us all a break from Umbrian cuisine and do a pasta Bolognese; then a simple salad of
rucola
and
parmigiano;
then a couple of chickens—flattened, marinated and grilled over the fire. I had already made the Bolognese sauce the day before with fresh ground
vitellone
I got from the butcher in Pissignano.
Vitellone
is older veal—just before it's considered beef. There's
vitello, vitellino, vitellone
—all different ages of the calf. Vitellini, it's been explained to me, is when the calf is still suckling from the mother; vitello is when it's both suckling and grazing; and vitellone is when it's completely weaned and subsisting on grass. The butcher and I had a consultation as he ground the meat, adding just the right amount of
grasso
(fat) into the mix so that I got the maximum amount of taste. Then I picked up a couple of carrots, an onion and two stalks of celery from Gloria, the
ortofrutta
lady in Campello-—you can buy celery one stalk at a time here; they just snap off what you need—and some fresh tomatoes which I peeled and seeded for the sauce. I used a Grechetto, the local white wine, and the freshest milk from a local cow. It was to be the best Bolognese I've ever made.

There's a fresh pasta store right down the road from us that's owned and run by a woman named Laura—who happens to be the wife of Domenico, who takes care of our garden. We found him through his aunt Vittoria, who is our cleaning lady—plus our fresh egg supplier, our source for seasoned firewood and our identifier of the wild herbs and greens that are growing all over the stone walls that surround our land. She is the person we go to when we need to connect with any- and everything local.

I drove down to Laura's place and was waited on first by her daughter. I told her I had made a Bolognese and couldn't decide whether I wanted to serve it over tagliatelle or tortellini. She reached down and took out a tray of very freshly made tortellini, stuffed with veal, cheese and herbs, and that decision was taken care of. Then I asked her if she knew where I could get great chickens. She said she'd have to ask her dad. A few moments later Domenico came out from the back with a big smile and a
“Come va?”
and asked how he could help.

“I'm looking for some great chickens—
nostrani,”
which means fresh and local. He shrugged and shook his head. He didn't know where to send me. Whereas all the butchers had good fresh chickens, they would have been raised on poultry farms and, although they would be far superior to anything we could find in the States, they wouldn't be the backyard, dirt-scratching, dinner-scraps-fed chicken I was looking for. Then he had an idea and told me to wait while he went in the back to talk to Laura. A few minutes later she came out—also with a smile, and a long string of incomprehensible Italian words.

She asked what I was going to do with the chickens, and I told her
“diavola”
—grilled flat, with pepper, over wood coals. She raised her finger for me to wait and helped another man who had just come in. When he left and the store was momentarily empty, she whispered that she had chickens for me—but that I mustn't tell anyone where I got them; she wasn't, after all, in the chicken business. After I was sworn to secrecy, she went in the back and brought out two chickens—
gelati;
which sounds like chicken-flavored ice cream but just means they've been frozen solid. These chickens were local to the point of being members of her
family; they'd grown up with her kids. They were also the weirdest looking poultry I have ever seen. Wrapped in plastic wrap, sticking out of the shopping bag, they looked too long and thin to be chickens; they looked more like jackrab-bits. She told me to soak them in water, white wine and lemon to defrost them.

I paid her for the pasta and the birds and headed down to the piazza to get some fresh
rucola
from Gloria. Now I was ready to start cooking.

Once the chickens had thawed, I was able to get a good look at them. Their legs were at least a foot and a half long, and their bodies were leaner and more compact than the chickens I'd formerly hung out with. They seemed to be built for speed—though not enough speed to escape being dinner.

I split them down the back, removed the backbone, chopped off the tips of the wings and pressed the chickens against the board until I heard a satisfying crack. Now they were flat enough to cook evenly on the grill. I salted them, bathed them in olive oil and rosemary, then ground rather more pepper than usual over them and rubbed it in. A lot of black pepper is what makes
diavola
so diavo-lish. Then I covered them and put them in the fridge for a couple of hours to let the flavors seep in.

That evening there wasn't that much work left to do. I slowly reheated the Bolognese—which would be even better having spent a day in the fridge to sit and pull itself together—and started a wood fire in our
camino
in the living room.

Our fireplace is raised about two feet off the floor—there's wood storage below—and I can comfortably get my eyes even with the cooking surface. The grill rig has four different levels so that I can instantly adjust the relationship
between the heat and the meat. And I can add smaller twigs (preferably clippings from the olive trees), which give an almost instant rush of very high temperature when I need that.

I brought my long, thin, Modigliani-like chickens up to room temperature in their marinade. I set them on a rack so that they could drip off the excess oil, and when the wood coals were perfect I set them side by side, skin side down, onto the grill. Every ten minutes or so, I held my hand over the fire at the level of the grill to get a feeling of the intensity of the heat. If I felt the fire was flagging, I added some sticks and got them going with an old bellows that I'd bought at a flea market. The bellows also blew the dust off the old coals and kept them lively.

Bruno and Mayes arrived with two bottles of wine that they had siphoned off from a huge jug that Bruno kept in their basement. The jug was filled on a regular basis at a wine cooperative somewhere in Montefalco. I asked Bruno if he could introduce me to the people at the cooperative and he smiled and said, “Sure,” but I could see in his eyes that this wouldn't happen anytime soon. Some secrets you take to the grave.

Bruno and I took our glasses of wine into the living room to watch the chickens slowly grill on the fire while the girls got to know each other in the kitchen. Caroline, who is a formidable sous-chef, tended the sauce and started the pasta in the boiling water. Jill—known internationally for her lettuce drying—worked on the salad. Mayes helped set the table. And the little house filled with the sound of their chatter and laughter. Bruno and I sat, sipped and appreciated the palpable glow that can emanate from three such exquisitely beautiful women.

Mayes and Bruno

“You know, you could really lighten this place up,” he said, his eyes darting around the room. “I had plans to knock this wall down so that it opened up to the new section. And then maybe move the fireplace more to the middle.”

Knock the wall down? It's 350 years old; I'm going to knock it down? “Sure, why not?”

He grinned. “You got a pen?”

I fetched a pen and paper and he started sketching. I watched over his shoulder as our dark little
salotto
turned into a gracious, sun-filled room with space for a long dining table with all our friends around it, and comfy chairs by the fire. There was a curved staircase in the new part that led to a new master bedroom upstairs—also equipped with a fireplace. He did all this with a few quickly drawn lines on paper.

“You want a Jacuzzi?” That grin again.

I started salivating with the possibilities.

“Martin said we might—”

“Yeah, Martin's good,” he said dismissively, his eyes moving around the room again.

Martin's an architect; Bruno designs movie sets. Martin deals with real houses; Bruno makes pictures—beautiful pictures.