The Hemingway Cookbook (6 page)

Serve with large glasses of cold beer. Frederic orders a “demi,” which is a half-liter glass.

DINNER

As the tragedy of Catherine’s delivery unfolds, Frederic is sent to the cafe once again. This time it is brightly lit and crowded inside. Dinner, as with the two previous meals, consists of leftovers. This final meal at the cafe near the hospital, with the strange taste of eggs and beer, and the unfriendly clientele, sets the tone for Frederic’s hurried return to Catherine. “Suddenly I knew I had to get back.”
¹⁰
Hemingway has taken us through this ordeal, a day on the clock but the suffering of a lifetime, and engaged us through the otherwise benign act of eating. As Linda Underhill and Jeanne Nakjavani wrote in “Food for Fiction”:

As a result of this kind of specific detail, food and drink in Hemingway’s fiction become, at moments of crisis in the story, a code to signify the mood, lending truth to the setting, and representing adventure.
¹¹

Across the River and into the Trees

Other than a few brief visits in the 1920s, Hemingway would not return to Italy until 1948. He had seen three more wars firsthand, and the initial romance of that first war seemed immeasurably distant. When he returned to the location of his wounding in 1922, newly married and living in Paris, he learned a hard lesson: “Chasing yesterdays is a bum show,” he wrote in the
Toronto Daily Star
, “and if you want to prove it, go back to your old front.”
¹²
And even with this knowledge and nearly 50 years old, he bent down to bury a 1,000-lire note in a small hole beside the very crater where he was first struck down.

Hemingway returned to Italy a celebrity, the single bestselling author in Italy since World War II. He would no longer be staying in hotels across from train stations without any luggage, but at the Gritti Palace Hotel in Venice and Locando Cipriani in Torcello, traveling with 14 pieces of luggage. He was the aging veteran of his war and his art, looking in mirrors and denying the truth. His book began as a story about duck hunting, but soon it too began chasing yesterdays.

Ernest arrived in Genoa in the fall of 1948, at the same port from which he had limped home, an injured and changed young man, in 1918. Hemingway spent the next few months exploring the northern Italian countryside, visiting his old front and enjoying his star status in “the magical city of Venice.”
¹³
In December, on a hunting trip, Ernest met Adriana Ivancich, an 18-year-old Italian beauty descended from a long line of aristocratic Venetians. It was not long before Ernest was calling her “daughter.” She was the same age as Hemingway when he was wounded by the riverbank in Fossalta.

Throughout this trip to Italy, Hemingway was looking back over 30 years. He saw his own experiences of the war mingle with those he created in
A Farewell to Arms
, and he saw Adriana, the figure of beauty and youth, enticingly close. As Carlos Baker wrote of this experience, the “past and present, the imagination and the reality, contended within him for mastery.”
¹⁴
The only way he could wrest control again was to write. In the early spring of 1949, Hemingway began
Across the River and into the Trees
, the story of an old, embittered military man and his love for a very young, very beautiful Venetian countess.

Colonel Richard Cantwell, a composite of real-life military men, is primarily as Hemingway imagined himself had he become a professional warrior rather than a writer. Renata, the countess, is clearly based on Adriana. The details of their relationship, like Frederic and Catherine’s, was a wishful fiction. The essence was true—the battle-weary veteran seeking to recapture his youth in the eyes and heart of a beautiful young woman. Ernest was well aware that the name
Renata
—which he had taken from role model Gabriele d’Annunzio’s book
Notturno
¹⁵
—translated as “reborn.”

The Colonel’s battles are elsewhere as he and Renata share Venice together. Whether hunting near Torcello in the Venetian Lagoon, dining at the Gritti Palace Hotel, or drinking martinis at
Harry’s Bar, Hemingway’s story is a “prose poem essentially devoid of action but rich in meditative discourse … on the courage and equanimity, toughness and resilience, the interconnectedness and distance of youth and old age.”
¹⁶
As we saw when the war raged in
A Farewell to Arms
, the food and drink that Cantwell and Renata share reflect their indulgent passion. They feast, and Venice is alive.

HARRY’S BAR

Then he was pulling open the door of Harry’s bar and was inside and he had made it again, and was at home.
¹⁷

Guiseppe Cipriani began his career at age 14 in a pastry shop in Verona. Like Hemingway, he enthusiastically went to war in 1918. Fortunately for Guiseppe, the armistice was signed and the fighting stopped on the eve of his departure for the front lines. Upon his return he began working as a waiter, eventually settling in Venice. He recognized in himself the essential traits of a restaurateur: a passion for food, a love of people, and a desire to bring the two together to create a truly enjoyable dining experience.

In 1927, Guiseppe became the barman at the Hotel Europa-Britannia because the owner recognized that he “had a way with the customers.”
¹⁸
The following summer he met an American student named Harry Pickering, who came to Italy with his aunt to cure his alcoholism but ended up spending most of his time in the Europa bar. When Harry’s money ran out, Guiseppe lent him 10,000 lire. Harry promptly left. He returned months later, carrying Guiseppe’s money and another 40,000 lire with which they could open a bar together. On May 13, 1931, they opened Harry’s Bar. For the complete story of this legendary Venice landmark, read Arrigo Cipriani’s marvelous book,
Harry’s Bar
(Arcade, 1996).

Hemingway discovered Guiseppe Cipriani’s bar and restaurant in 1949 and quickly became its most famous regular customer. He and Cipriani became fast friends, and Guiseppe’s son, Arrigo, who now runs Harry’s, remembers that Heming-way was the first customer with whom his father drank.

As much as Ernest enjoyed the interior of Harry’s (see The Montgomery, page
189
), he loved the excellent duck hunting near the island of Torcello in the lagoon. Hemingway resided at the Cipriani’s guesthouse on the island and took several wintertime hunting trips to the surrounding marshes and canals. In 1935, he had written an article for
Esquire
magazine that explained his passion for hunting these beautiful and spirited birds. The behavior and the calls of some seemed designed to aid the hunter, while he found that those that were harder to hear were better to eat:

Why does the curlew have that voice, and who thought up the plover’s call, which takes the place of noise of wings, to give us that catharsis wing shooting has given to men since they stopped flying hawks and took to fowling pieces? I think that they were made to shoot and some of us were made to shoot
them and if that is not so well, never say we did not tell you that we liked it.
¹⁹

It is not surprising that Ernest took every opportunity to fight the early morning bitter cold to hunt again and again in the Venetian environs. One such trip provided the wonderful opening scene of
Across the River and into the Trees
:

His head low, he swung the gun on a long slant, down, well and ahead of the second duck, then without looking at the result of his shot he raised the gun smoothly, up, up ahead and to the left… and as he pulled, saw it fold in flight and drop among the decoys in the broken ice.
²⁰

Arrigo Cipriani fondly remembers Papa’s early morning duck hunting trips in Torcello with Emilio, his boatman. Cantwell reminisces about the ducks he once offered to the bellman at the Gritti Palace, who could not afford a meal of such expense. We, too, may feel that roast duck is, as the bellman put it, “outside of our way of life.” And yet with the help of Signore Cipriani we may truly indulge ourselves in the spoils of Hemingway’s love of hunting ducks in the icy waters outside of Venice.

I never knew that anything could be so wonderful to eat. When your teeth close on the small slice of meat it is an almost unbelievable delight.
²¹

Roast Duckling (
Anitra Arrosto
)

From
The Harry’s Bar Cookbook

6
TO
8
SERVINGS

For the Sauce

6 tablespoons olive oil

Necks, wings, and giblets (except livers) from ducks

Chicken bones or carcasses or extra duck carcass

2 ribs celery, cut into chunks

2 onions, coarsely chopped

2 carrots, cut into chunks

1 teaspoon chopped fresh thyme, or ¼ teaspoon dried

1 teaspoon chopped fresh rosemary, or ¼ teaspoon dried, crumbled

1 clove garlic, halved

1 cup Marsala

½ cup dry white wine

6 tablespoons flour

1 quart hot chicken stock, or more as needed

Salt

Freshly ground pepper

For the Ducks

2 3- or 4-pound ducks

Salt

Freshly ground pepper

6 flat-leaf parsley sprigs

6 fresh rosemary sprigs

4 fresh thyme sprigs

2 cloves garlic, halved

1 large onion, sliced

½ cup Marsala

Preheat the oven to 450° F
.

To make the sauce, put 2 tablespoons of the olive oil and the duck necks, wings, and giblets and the bones and/or carcasses in a roasting pan and roast until they are well browned, about 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, heat the remaining oil in a soup pot over high heat. Add the celery, onions, carrots, herbs, and garlic and cook, stirring frequently, until they begin to brown, about 5 minutes. Pour the Marsala and white wine into the pot and boil hard, stirring constantly, until the wine has evaporated. Sprinkle on the flour, stir it in well, and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, for 3 or 4 minutes. Add 3 cups of the stock to the pot and whisk it in until it forms a thickened sauce. Add the roasted bones to the pot.

Pour off the oil in the roasting pan and deglaze the roasting pan with the remaining cup of stock, scraping up all the brown bits from the bottom of the pan. Add this to the pot and bring it to a boil.

Stir the mixture as well as you can, reduce the heat, and simmer, uncovered, over low heat, for 1 hour. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Set aside.

To roast the ducks, place a shallow roasting pan with a rack in the oven to preheat at 450° F. (This will keep the ducks from sticking.) Season the cavities of the ducks with salt and pepper and fill with the parsley, rosemary, thyme, garlic, and onion. Place the ducks breastside up in the preheated roasting pan and roast until golden brown, about 30 minutes. Prick the skin of the ducks well, especially the breast and thighs, reduce the heat to 350° F, and continue to roast for 1 to 1½ hours longer. Prick the ducks every 20 minutes to allow the fat to drain from beneath the skin. Start testing the ducks for doneness after 1 hour by piercing the flesh near the thigh bones with a sharp fork; when the juices run clear, with no sign of pink, the ducks are done.

While the ducks are roasting, finish the sauce. Strain it. If it is too thin, boil it, uncovered, to reduce it. Taste and carefully adjust the seasoning.

Remove the ducks and the rack from the roasting pan and spoon off as much fat as possible, leaving any juices in the pan. Set the roasting pan over the burner, pour in the Marsala, and cook over high heat until reduced by half, about 3 or 4 minutes, scraping up all the browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Add this to the sauce, stir to combine well, and heat through. Taste and adjust the seasoning. Carve the ducks and put them on a platter. Serve the sauce on the side.

GRITTI PALACE HOTEL

From their large corner room on the third floor, Ernest and his fourth wife, Mary, commanded a magnificent view of the Grand Canal as it turned sharply to wrap itself around them. The luxurious Gritti Palace Hotel with its worldclass restaurant served as a fitting domicile for the Hemingways (and Cantwell) as they sated themselves with Venetian charm. The Colonel and Renata dine repeatedly at the Gritti, enjoying dinner and breakfast served with wit and elegance. As they arrive, they are greeted by the Gran Maestro, a friend of the Colonel’s from the war and a fellow member of
El Ordine Militar, Nobile y Espirituoso de los Caballeros de Brusadelli
, a fictitious organization named after a Milanese profiteer who, during a property dispute, publicly blamed his young wife for clouding his judgment through her “extraordinary sexual demands.”
²²
Nevertheless, the Colonel and Renata partake of a feast befitting their passionate reunion and their surroundings.