The Food of Love (29 page)

‘Well,’ he suggested, ‘we could be a little creative.’

‘What do you mean, creative?’ Benedetta asked suspiciously.

‘Instead of stuffing the rabbit with the peppers, we could stuff the peppers with the rabbit.’

Gusta laughed. ‘Are you joking? Our customers would riot if

you tried to pull a crazy trick like that.’

Bruno said nothing. He was looking at Benedetta.

‘It’s an interesting idea,’ she said slowly. ‘You could grill the peppers first, and then you could put some lemon zest in with the rabbit—’

Gusta looked horrified. ‘Now why in God’s name would you

want to do that?’

‘To balance the sweetness of the roasted peppers,’ Bruno

explained. ‘And I see that you have serpillo growing wild around here. You could put some of that in as well.’

A bitter wild herb, particularly used to flavour cheese.

‘Oh, you young people cook what you like,’ Gusta said impatiently, throwing up her hands. ‘I’ve got customers to attend to.’

While Bruno cooked the stuffed peppers, Benedetta made pasta.

But they were both watching each other surreptitiously.

‘Do you have some cloves?’ Bruno asked politely.

‘Yes. In the cupboard. But don’t use them.’

T thought just a couple—’

‘—would kill the delicate taste of the serpillo.” She glared at him.

‘Or complement it.’

‘Uh-uh. Too many flavours,’ Benedetta said firmly.

Bruno sighed. ‘May I be permitted some nutmeg, then?’

There was a pause. ‘A pinch, no more.’

She watched suspiciously as he grated a little nutmeg over the

rabbit meat. The message was clear: this was her kitchen and she was in charge of it. Bruno sighed again. Not since he’d worked for Alain Dufrais had he encountered anyone quite so opinionated

about cooking.

‘When you said that nutmeg makes people happy, why was

that?’ he asked, hoping some conversation would break the ice.

‘Because it does,’ she said tersely. ‘Just as fennel relaxes people, and cardamom is good for the digestion, nutmeg makes people

dance.’

It sounded like one of the crazy superstitions country grandmothers clung to. ‘I’ve never heard that before,’ he muttered.

‘Oh well, in that case it can’t be true, can it?’ she said icily. She pounded the pasta dough with her fists, a quick one-two that left deep depressions in the mixture. It occurred to Bruno that, skinny as she was, it wouldn’t do to get on the wrong side of Benedetta.

He got on with his cooking in silence.

He had to admit, though, that he had never seen anyone make

pasta as well as this. When she rolled out the sfoglia, the sheet of fresh dough, she barely glanced at it, but it was so thin and so even that he could see the grain of the wooden table through it.

He couldn’t help himself. ‘How do you get it so thin?’ he

asked.

‘Practice.’ Then, relenting, she added, ‘And I have the right

hands.’

‘What sort of hands would that be?’

‘Here.’ She held out her hands to him. They were warm,

almost hot. ‘You can’t make good pasta with cold hands,’ she

explained. ‘That’s the secret. So I eat a lot of peperoncino. It keeps my hands warm.’

Bruno opened his mouth to point out that this was unlikely to

be the cause of her warm hands, but closed it again. They were

just about talking to each other, and there was no point in starting another fight.

Benedetta was looking pointedly at her hands. With a start

Bruno realised that he was still holding them. Abruptly, he let go.

Benedetta turned back to her pasta. But just for a moment, a

ghost of a smile flitted across her face.

When she had finished making the pasta, Benedetta cut it roughly into maltagliati, random shapes that were traditionally made from leftover scraps. Then she pressed each piece against a strange

implement with long, stiff wires, like a comb.

‘What’s that?’ Bruno asked.

‘That’s the pettine.’

‘What’s it for?’

‘Don’t you have these in Rome?’ she said, surprised. “I don’t

know. I suppose it gives the pasta more grip.’

He nodded. He could see how that would work: the grooves

left by the comb would give the thin pasta more surface area,

which would hold a creamy sauce better.

‘Do they use them in Romagna and Abruzzo as well?’ he asked.

“I don’t know.’

‘When you go to other regions, don’t you eat?’

She didn’t answer.

‘You’ve never been outside Le Marche, have you?’ he guessed.

‘Why would I want to?’

It was a good question. Changing the subject, he asked, ‘What

sort of pasta are you making?’ ”Pasta con funghi?

He watched as she took a bowl of strange, round, reddish

brown mushrooms out of the larder. The air was immediately

filled with their rich, earthy scent. Ripe as a well-cellared cheese, but tinged with the odours of leaf-mould and decay, it reminded

Bruno a little of the smell of offal in his native Roman dishes.

‘How many kinds of funghi do you cook with?’ he asked.

‘Oh - hundreds. It just depends on what I find in the woods.’

‘You pick these yourself?’

‘Of course.’

As the smell of funghi combined with the scent of hot butter

and garlic in the frying pan, Bruno felt his nostrils flare. And not just his nostrils. The aroma was stirring up his blood, awakening sensation in a part of him that had been quiescent for a long time.

‘They say these are an aphrodisiac,’ Benedetta said, as if reading his thoughts. ‘Of course, it’s just a kind of superstition that the old grandmothers like to talk about.’

‘Of course,’ he said stiffly.

Was it his imagination, or was the look she gave him almost one

of pity?

Two could play at that game, though. Bruno’s retaliation was to

make a dolce.

For sheer showrmanship, it is hard to beat the creation of a

really flashy dessert. Without asking Benedetta’s permission,

Bruno assembled his ingredients. Eggs. Sugar. Cream. Pastry. A

large dish of blackcurrants and other fruits from the garden.

First he spun sugar into delicate lattice bowls of crisp brown

caramel. Then he made meringues, inside which he placed individual baked peaches. Where the peach stone had been he inserted

a berry gelato, made with pieces of solid fruit. It was pure Alain Dufrais - virtuoso, exuberant, and completely over the top.

‘Careful,’ was all Benedetta said when he had finished. ‘We

don’t want our customers to think we’ve gone completely poncy.’

‘They won’t think that when they taste it.’

‘People round here,’ she said firmly, ‘have pretty high expectations.’

‘They

won’t have eaten anything like this, I can assure you.’

‘Hmm.’ She squeezed past him to get a whisk. ‘Excuse me.’

Their eyes met. just for a moment, Bruno was confused by what

he saw there. Are we fighting? he wondered. Or flirting?

He decided on the direct approach. ‘How long have you been

going out with Javier?’ he asked casually as he wiped down his

prep surface.

But Benedetta, nowr carefully slicing salume for antipasto, would not be drawn so easily. ‘Wrho told you I was going out with Javier?’

‘One of the villagers.’

‘People here do love to gossip.’

‘Actually, I don’t think my informant was too keen on the idea.

He said you’d soon be cooking for a husband rather than the

whole village.’

‘People here like to think about their own stomachs, too.’ She

stretched across him for a pan. He felt her softness press briefly against his shoulder. Flushing, he pushed himself back as far as he could. Luckily, Benedetta didn’t seem to notice.

This is a tiny kitchen, he told himself firmly. If you are going to work here - and lefsfacc it you have to work here, since your tractor driving skills are non-existent -you will simply have to learn to be professional about your co-worker.

Laura, in Rome, does not spend the nights crying any more. She

attends concerts with Kim; small gatherings for a select few, held in the salons of baroque palaces. But sometimes, in the intervals, she surreptitiously takes out her mobile phone - the mobile phone that no longer plays Rod Stewart or Eric Clapton when it rings,

but Vivaldi - and scrolls through the text messages until she finds one that she rereads for the hundredth time:

There was something I wanted to cook tonight

recipe of love

Take 1 American girl with honey-coloured skin & freckles like

orange-red flakes of chilli on her shoulders.

Fill her with flavours, with basil and tomatoes and pine nuts

and parsley.

Warm her gently with your hands for several hours, turning

occasionally, and serve with wine and laughter, straight from

the dish.

- but sadly 1 of the ingredients was missing. Maybe tomorrow?

Then she allows a tear to roll silently down her cheek until

it reaches the corner of her lip, where she licks it off absentmindedly, salty and insubstantial and tasteless on her tongue.

to Gusta’s surprise, the new menu at her little osteria was

a great success. Since there was almost no choice of dishes, the customers were forced to try what they might otherwise have

spurned; and having tried it, they decided that they liked it. What was more, they talked about it to their friends. Within a few days Gusta was having to put out extra tables.

‘It’s just a novelty,’ Benedctta told her, shrugging. ‘It’ll settle down in a week or so.’

It seemed as if each lunchtime they fed the whole village.

Labourers in vests and blue serge trousers sat alongside the priest and the doctor. Children, released from school for lunch, ate with their parents before sliding from their chairs to run riot in the square while the grown-ups chatted in the shade before their

siesta. People were even starting to come by car and scooter from villages further down the valley.

One person who was always there, usually eating with his

“lends, was Javier. Bruno noticed now that, although Benedetta

Was friendly towards Javier, and would sometimes sit with him

while he had an amaro after his meal, she never kissed him or sat on his knee as the other courting couples did. He wondered about their relationship, but thought it best not to enquire further.

Giorgio, the owner of the miniature tractor, was often there

too. One day Bruno overheard him talking about the new disc

brakes Hanni had finally fitted to his tractor, and decided that it was time to pay the mechanic a visit himself.

He found his van propped up on bricks, which seemed to indicate

that Hanni had started work; but the mechanic was apologetic.

‘I’ve phoned round all my contacts but none of them have the

necessary parts,’ he explained. ‘They will come, eventually, but we just have to be patient.’

‘No problem,’ Bruno said. Now that he’d found work, a couple

of weeks’ wait wasn’t the end of the world. Besides, the villagers were talking about this weather turning into a heatwave, so maybe staying up here in the relative cool of the hills for a while wasn’t such a bad idea.

Abruptly, summer had come to the Marches. Bruno was used

to the city, and to the scorching temperatures of restaurant

kitchens. But the fierce humidity that enveloped them now was

another matter. Tendrils of heat reached from the plain right up as far as the village, and only at night did a breath of cooler air press down from the hills above them. Lunch was served early, and

dinner late. In the kitchen, Benedetta had taken to working in

shorts and a T-shirt. The insidious smell of her skin mingled with the cooking smells, distracting Bruno. He gritted his teeth and did his best to ignore it.

The heatwave lasted only a few days, a brief harbinger of the furnace to come. One morning Bruno woke up with a start, certain

he had heard Benedetta’s voice. He listened. It was still dark. He must have dreamed it.

‘Bruno?’

It was her. She was standing in the doorway of his little room.

Just for a moment a crazy notion popped into his mind.

‘Do you want to come and pick funghi? she whispered.

So that was why she was here. He pushed the crazy notion

away. ‘Sure.’

‘Come on then. I’ll see you downstairs in ten minutes.’

A little while later they set off uphill in the darkness, both carrying the shallow wicker baskets in which they would bring home

their haul. ‘Are you sure there’ll be any? At this time of year, I mean?’ Bruno asked.

‘Of course. Perhaps not so many now as autumn. But there’ll

be coprini, and orecchietti, and piopparelli, and pleurate, and cepatelliif we’re lucky—’

‘OK,’ he said hastily, “I get the idea. And none of these are poisonous?’

‘Some

of them are very similar to poisonous mushrooms, yes.

But don’t worry. I know what we’re looking for.’

By the time they reached the woods it was starting to get light.

She led Bruno to where, in the long, lush grass at the edge of the trees, a darker green circle twenty feet across stained the paler green of the pasture.

‘Gambe secche. A fairy ring. This one is quite old - it gets a little bigger each year as the mycelium spreads out.’

‘It’s edible?’

‘No, but once the fairy ring’s established, the prugnolo comes

and shares the circle.’ As she spoke she was rummaging in the wet grass, pushing it apart gently with her fingers. ‘See? This is the prugnolo - what the people here call San Giorgio.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Because it first appears on the feast of San Giorgio, of course.’

She twisted the mushroom deftly from its stalk and put it into her basket. ‘There’ll be more, if you take a look.’