The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club (26 page)

Four years have passed since that evening when Miranda announced her sham retirement and the tribe went to grief, the dialogue contemptuous about
La Festa di Babette
and murdered turtles and quail lying in state in pastry coffins, the air chastening around my two meekly spoken words:
I'll cook
. Surely that early chafe is gone but still Ninuccia drags a toe across the dirt. My side, their side. Maybe it's not Ninuccia who plagues me this evening. More, it is Barlozzo, who said: ‘For you, my darling girl, being separate is being safe. You can hardly lament the status you've bestowed upon yourself. Separate you will always be. You're like Sicily. An island. Only you're an island born not of nature but of your own craving to be one.'

Miranda's gaze brings me back and, noticing that the bowl of mousse is nearly empty, I rise to take it to the kitchen, thinking to refill it but Miranda says, ‘Leave the rest, thin it with a little broth and wine. Our soup for next week.' Waving her hands, palms inward, she says, ‘Niccolò, you're on.'

A rare, maybe unique, departure from Thursday rules, a
man
has been sanctioned in the kitchen.

When we'd all sat at Bar Duomo after last Saturday's market to talk of this week's menu, Niccolò was there. Sitting at another table plying three farmers with grappa and old stories, when he heard me say that I would make
umbricelli con le briciole
, he declared, loudly enough for the entire bar to hear, ‘
Devi fare quelli in modo mio
. You must make them my way.'

Alone now in a rampage behind the bedsheet curtain, we hear Niccolò slapping the flat of a knife on the work table, stirring, cussing – ‘
Questa maladetta cucina
, this damned kitchen' – the splash of pasta hitting the colander, then the soft plop of it into the wide shallow serving bowl, two metal spoons hitting one another as he tosses and tosses and then Niccolò begins to sing. ‘
Funiculi, funicula
,' and we all sing with him as Miranda herself holds aside the bedsheet curtain for his entrance.

This is a dish that causes Ninuccia's happiness. First of all,
umbricelli
are the quintessential pasta of Umbria. Thick, imperfect, hand-rolled ropes of flour and water dough, these reflect the Umbrian character: rough, austere, wonderful. In the region of Tuscany, the very same pasta is called
pici
, these, too, reflecting the Tuscan character: rough, austere, wonderful. Yet should one be fool enough to suggest the similarity of their pasta, less the Umbrian and Tuscan characters, one could well incite hours of fist-pounding, shrieked threats, the biting of forefingers, endless and impatiently delivered litanies about how the water is different, the earth in which the wheat has grown up is of a another colour and texture and composition, the very manner in which the
trebbiatura
, the threshing, is conducted is not the same. And let's not even speak of the different ‘hand' in mixing and rolling. Far more than a geographical border separates Tuscany and Umbria. Italy is not a united country but a group of individual ‘city states', much as it was in the medieval.

Having chosen to soften what I knew would be her displeasure at the suavity of the borlotti mousse, it's the sauce for the
umbricelli
that pleases Ninuccia: stale bread – roasted and pounded to rough crumbs – the best oil, half a large head of perfectly crisp, perfectly creamy white garlic smashed to a paste, a pair of well-rinsed anchovies preserved under sea salt, also pitilessly smashed, a little of the pasta-cooking water. Mixed together with the hot, hot pasta, the result is sumptuous and yet it's
a supper made of sticks
. Certainly this way of dressing pasta is a take on
aglio, olio, peperoncino
, a sauce so simple that, when concocted out of it's territory, it's likely to be desolated by flawed elements used in erring proportions: acrid, green-hearted garlic, chillies older than most marriages, who knows what oil.
Only a masterful hand can make supper out of sticks. Anybody can make good food from extravagant elements:
Ninuccia's mantra.

Of Niccolò's pasta, the tribe eats as one, smelling, absorbing, tasting, chewing, their eyes gone glassy with the very comfort of it. I think to a long-ago night, a Venetian night when, as Fernando slept, I cooked pasta for myself, lit a candle, opened the window to moonlight, sat and slurped, inhaled, twisted the strings about my fork – just as he'd instructed me never to do. That was the last time that pasta tasted this good to me.

‘And now for the
secondo
, the main plate,' Niccolò says, with a whiff of challenge in his voice.

‘Contrast,' I'd pleaded as we sat last week over the menu for tonight. ‘After the simplicity of the pasta, let's make a … more complex dish.'

It was Ninuccia herself who said,
fagiano in salmi
. She went on to say that Pierangelo had four fat pheasants hanging in the cantina, nearly ‘ripe' enough to be cooked. ‘And
salmi
is a family recipe invented by my father's sister. Or his aunt, I can't remember. If someone could barter a black Norcia truffle, we'd be set.'

Though words collided in my throat, shackling the breath in my chest, I knew better than to free them. I would not tell Ninuccia Santacaterina née Marchesini that her family's
fagiano in salmi
is an adaptation of the Franco-Piemontese repertoire of the early 1900s, that it came to fame when French gastronomy held sway over the
borghese
– the upper class – in northern Italy. I won't say that
salmi
is a reworked French ‘civet' – a ragout of game cooked in butter and wine. Even the word
salmi
is derived from the French
salmigondis
, which signifies melange, amalgam, concoction. I will not say that, over the years, the dish was claimed and rusticised by the Tuscans and the Umbrians – among others – so that now it lies among the celebration dishes in the most modest kitchens. I will not say that salamagundi is an Anglicised word for hodgepodge, muddle. I allow myself to say, ‘Wonderful. I'll find the truffle.'

This evening Ninuccia brought a potful of dismembered pheasants, which she'd earlier wrapped – while still whole – in pancetta and roasted at a high temperature only ontil the flesh was rosily undercooked. Cutting them into pieces then, she'd set them to cool in a bath of red wine. In the rustico kitchen, she put together the sauce. With not the smallest justification for the impiety of it, she melted what looked like half a kilo of butter in Miranda's braising pot, scraped in a fine mince of the pancetta in which the birds had been wrapped, carrot, celery, porcini, rosemary and sage, and began the slow dosing of the fats and aromatics with red wine. Each time the wine reduced, she added more. After two litres of wine and nearly an hour's worth of distillation, she spent the flame, stirred in three or four anchovies, rinsed and mashed, covered the sauce. ‘
Ecco, fatto
. There, it's done,' she'd said, not even asking me about the truffle which, though I'd tried every reputable supplier in town, I had not been able to find. ‘Too early, only
scorzone
now,' they'd said.

Ninuccia thickly sliced the great round loaf she'd bought in Ciconia, readied the trenchers for the grate and, while the rest of us were at the business of Niccolò's
umbricelli
, she'd added the pheasant to the sauce, slowly reheated the mass and set about roasting the bread. I'd gone into the kitchen to help her plate the
salmi
but she smiled, told me to stand by should she need me. Ninuccia Santacaterina née Marchesini was in her glory, laying quarters of the birds on the hot bread, ladling the sauce, which, after its rest, had gone so deep a red as to seem black. Glossy. Redolent of the wine but as much of the woods, of pine needles and oak leaves crunched underfoot, and maybe some whiff of the apples on which the birds had fed in the orchards bordering Pierangelo's hunting fields. How I wanted to stick my finger in the sauce, pull a sliver of flesh from one of the breasts. With the tail of an eye, she kept vigil over me. As she finished plating the first two portions, I began to pick them up, to take them to the table but she slapped my arm. ‘They must always be brought out together on a tray. You'll take one side of the tray.
Un onore
. An honour,' she told me.

Maybe she has smudged the line between us, at least for tonight. Or have I?

•

‘I've never known anyone to hunt porcini at dusk,' I tell Gilda.

‘Which is why I always do. Nothing worse than some old
fungarolo
brandishing a pointed stick at you as though every oak in the copse was his own,' Gilda tells me as she hikes herself up next to me onto the sheepfold wall.

It is the Thursday after the grand Niccolò–Ninuccia supper and we are just returned from a tramp in the woods. Between us on the broken stones where we sit, there is a large lidded basket filled with loam-smelling wild mushrooms. Gilda shakes one of the fat creamy-coloured things against a stone, loosening clods of wet black earth and, with the metal bristles of a small brush, she cleans it, being careful not to touch the tender underside of the cap. As she finishes with one, she hands it to me to wipe with a strip of old linen she keeps in the basket for that purpose. With a single sharp twist of my wrist, I separate the caps from the stems. Leaving the caps whole, I lay them in Miranda's old, well-seasoned tin. The porcini ‘legs' – as the stems are called – I stow in a cloth sack. Once we're in the kitchen, I'll mince the legs almost to a paste with some rosemary and garlic and a rasher of
lardo di Colonnato
, fresh pig fat perfumed with wild herbs and flowers and aged in marble vases in a village that sits at the feet of Michelangelo's mines in western Tuscany. I'll scrape the paste into the caps, and set the tin in the embers until the porcini give up their juices. My thumb over the bottle, I'll splash on some white wine then, urging the mushrooms to drink and plump a while before I spoon them and their thickened sauces onto roasted bread. We'll begin supper with these tonight.

Straight up from the cluster of rosebushes rambling along the wall, small birds swarm and rustle, fly into the west. A breeze shivers the rosehips, carnal red on the naked brown arms of the bushes, and I feel the end of autumn. Long after we've finished with the mushrooms, Gilda and I stay there looking at the light. The trees across the road are thin black sticks against a reddening sky and the light seems like old light, light from the past. I feel as though I can see into the past. As though Gilda and I are there.

When the bells of San Bernardino in Canonica ring five and the sky has gone nearer to dark, we head back to the rustico. Filiberto's dogs bark, chase some fool creature across the meadow and its final hellborn shriek precedes a sudden silence. Gilda whispers ‘
Poveretta
, poor thing', and makes the sign of the cross on her breast. Through the kitchen window we see Miranda already working on the fire, once again breaking her own rules about Thursday suppers. We wave but she is oblivious. We enter the kitchen just as the hot crescendo of
Bamboleo
wails up from Miranda's disc player. Tonight's supper we have mostly prepared over the past few days, leaving little to do now but light the stove, the hearth fire. Still we putter about, Miranda, Gilda and I.

There's a fine old grey stone crock I've filled with a mousse of goat cheese, butter, Cognac and unshy turns of the pepper mill, and which I'd set to ripen in the back of my armoire at home several days ago. We'll roast walnuts at the last moment and warm the walnut-cornmeal
focacci
e I baked this morning. I've cooked the duck at home. Slow-braised duck. Very slowly braised duck. This we will rewarm over the fire along with a pan of potatoes roasted with butter and thyme. There's another bread for that dish, one enriched with a few spoonsful of the duck pan juices, which render the crumb tender and moist, as though it's already been smeared with fine savoury fat. Even tonight's
dolce
will have benefited from its day or so of rest: a cornmeal cake made with white wine and olive oil. And just before we serve the duck, we'll set to warm by the hearth a bowl of blood oranges sautéed in salted caramel dark as molasses, the red flesh of the oranges and their juices, the nearly burnt-sugar intensity of the caramel saved from cloy by the tenuous crunch of salt. ‘
Una cena ricca
,' Miranda says; a rich supper. Nearly every dish made with butter. There is amnesty from the tribe's butter rancour since once a year, maybe twice and only when the weather is turning cold, one of the farm wives brings butter to the Saturday market, kilo loaves of it tied in kitchen towels and piled in a bushel basket lined with asphodel leaves.

We take stock of what's done, what is still to be done. We set the table. Gilda says she'll go home to bathe and change and be back at half-past six. I want to do the same but I can tell that Miranda would like company and so I content myself with a quick hands-and-face wash in the kitchen sink. A swipe of Russian Red across my lips, I brush bitter chocolate on my eyelids and draw a thin black Cleopatra line close to my lashes and out toward my temples. I unbraid my hair, gather all the tight waves the plaits have made into a chignon. I go to sit by the fire where Miranda waits.

•

‘You two are so much alike. Deadpan as
la Gioconda
, both of you. Skin white as the dying Camille's, your faces with those jutting bones, chins square as a warrior queen's, I wouldn't do battle with either one of you despite those voices all whispery. Your mouths are different though, yours a full-blown peony, hers a rose, just come into bud.' It's clear that Miranda much prefers the rose just come into bud to the peony. ‘Ninuccia wears the guise of harpy but she's all butter inside. Paolina is pure butter. You and Gilda could be sisters.' Miranda nods to the glass of wine she's poured for me and left on the hearth stone.