Amore and Amaretti Read online

  Afterwards there is a chunk of Parmesan, aged and crumbly, and a tangy pecorino from Sardinia to eat with a large bowl of various fruits. This is the winding-down stage of the lunch, when women begin to push back chairs and carry out plates and men light up cigarettes and pour whisky. Coffee brews aromatic from the kitchen, conversation subdues, becomes sleepy, comfortable and confidential. Pastries accompany the coffee: a wealth of shortbreads, crunchy almond biscuits, macaroons and iced eclairs bulging cream. Vin Santo, sweet and dark, is poured into small glasses; outside the evening has begun to descend, and Sunday lunch settles.

  Whereas at Montespertoli the high stone walls surround the house like a stronghold, and the sense of place comes only once you have passed the gates and commenced the descent down winding roads that curve through the fields of grapes and olives, Claudia and Vincenzo Sabatini’s villa sits on top of a hill, and looking down from the verandah you can see the vineyards stretch for miles. Even in winter clustered around their smaller hearth, warming hands, we always have the windows throwing up vistas of rich land, visions of space and ordered growth.

  And in summer it is all there below. Slow yellow afternoons pulse with warmth and the tiny incessant rhythms of a million twitching insects. The verandah has canvas drapes to shut out the sun, and the table is cool. As we arrive we are handed a glass of Vincenzo’s wine – not of his making but wine he collects weekly in huge vats from the villa next door, which he decants and stores in his cellar. Claudia is tasting the pasta sauce for salt: she looks harassed but happy, hair escaping from her bun and her apron spattered with flour. She has been making pappardelle, wide uneven strips of pasta that will be served with hare sauce. Vincenzo, having dispensed wine to his guests, is washing lettuces from his garden then drying them in his salad-spinner. Our movements are languid. We eat home-grown egg tomatoes drizzled with green olive oil and fresh basil, thick slices of moist white mozzarella, paper-thin cuts of cured beef dressed with oil, finely chopped rocket leaves and shavings of Parmesan cheese, mushrooms marinated in lemon juice and garlic, strips of red and green capsicum bathed in oil, garlic and parsley, slices of spicy pancetta. There is crusty bread to mop up the juices, and Vincenzo’s wine is flowing freely. Next comes Claudia’s pasta, rich and gamey. Then a pause before she brings out a casserole of pheasant scented with red wine and herbs. There is silverbeet sautéed in garlic, and tiny chunks of potatoes oven-roasted with rosemary and rock salt, and Vincenzo’s salad gleaming with oil. Afterwards comes a whole fresh ricotta cheese, and ripe pears.

  Much later, in the fading day, with the beginnings of breezes lifting leaves and stirring the air, Claudia brings out coffee and her famous biscuits, which it is never possible to eat in moderation, whose secret recipe she has given me and which I have lost. Cicadas start up their buzzing hum, and the vineyards lie pale and ghostly in the moonlight. I am drowsy, aware of the desire to freeze time so I can always remain in this comfortable chair, breathing in the fragrant evening air, all senses gratified.

  Gianfranco buys another restaurant with several partners. It is in the centre of Florence, with the Uffizi and a replica of David around the corner. I am in the enormous kitchen wearing an apron, being shown how to finely chop onions; how to make a basic tomato sauce; how to flick my right wrist so that the contents of a frying pan flip briefly in the air; how to cook pasta, separating the strands of spaghetti with a giant fork and knowing the exact moment when to drain it, just a touch ahead of al dente – firm to the bite – so the extra minute or so of tossing it in its hot sauce will render it perfect. I learn how to make crespelle – paper-thin crêpes – and béchamel, soups and slowly simmering stews, panna cotta without gelatine; and I learn the elaborate process of layering that goes into creating pasta sauces, like the salsa puttanesca.

  Spaghetti alla puttanesca

  Olive oil

  1 medium onion

  3 cloves garlic

  4–6 slices pancetta

  Dried chilli (optional)

  2 tablespoons black olives

  5 anchovies

  1 tablespoon capers

  1/3 cup red wine

  400 g peeled tomatoes

  Salt and pepper

  Chopped parsley

  Heat the oil, then add finely chopped onion and garlic together with sliced pancetta and chilli, if desired. Sauté 5 to 8 minutes on medium heat, stirring frequently, until translucent. Throw in olives. Cook several more minutes, then add finely chopped anchovies and capers. After several more minutes, slosh in wine. Bring to the boil and bubble until evaporated, then add peeled tomatoes and about half a cup of water. Season cautiously with salt and pepper, bring back to the boil, then simmer 30 to 40 minutes. Garnish with parsley.

  Gianfranco becomes less patient and more critical, however. There are days when I can do nothing right. I see the flipside of his creativity, a sort of madness. Saucepans fly, crashing into walls. An hour later, he is carving a rose out of a radish, his face gentle and his fingers graceful. For a country boy, those fingers are strangely delicate, almost feminine – each night he scrubs his nails vigorously with Jif.

  Six months later, I am running the kitchen of the restaurant while Gianfranco escorts customers to tables. And we are living together, having moved into a flat nearby. I have grown thin with the long, unforgiving hours of work, but mostly with love and anxiety.

  One summer midnight I am the only woman in a carload of murmuring men. We park near the river not far from Gianfranco’s village and I watch as torches thread through the darkness and down to the edge, where bottles of bleach are poured into the water. Downstream, more torch lights illumine men wading with plastic bags, into which they throw the dead trout. I am appalled, disillusioned, excited and terrified all at the same time.

  The next day, a long table is set under trees at lunchtime. There are dishes full of steaming potato gnocchi with rabbit sauce, and platters of trout simply grilled. Everyone eats the sweet pink fish; nobody becomes ill. Glasses are raised to the fishermen.

  Other times we go hunting for mushrooms. Autumn is the season for porcini – these treasures lurk around the base of chestnut trees and oaks. Often the size of dinner plates, they are as fleshy as meat. Many trattorie place baskets of porcini at the entrance, and, like lobsters at Chinese restaurants, they are selected by the customer, weighed, cooked and served. Studded with slivers of garlic, brushed with good olive oil and grilled is the best way to enjoy these musky, musty gifts from the forest floor, with their flavour of faintly sweetish decay.

  On these mushroom expeditions I am fascinated by delicate, beautiful specimens in iridescent colours, which Gianfranco warns me are deadly. I dare not even stand too close, lest the air is contaminated by their garish toxicity. We pick, pluck and gather and, because he is a country boy, we have no need to carry our collection into the nearest farmacia, where they would readily identify the various types for us. We dine on massive porcini, with lots of bread for the luscious juices.

  Salsa di coniglio

  (Rabbit sauce)

  Olive oil

  Bay leaf

  1 rabbit, jointed*

  1 medium onion, finely chopped

  2 sticks celery, finely chopped

  1 carrot, finely chopped

  3 cloves garlic, finely chopped

  1/2 cup white wine

  400 g peeled tomatoes

  Salt and pepper

  Dried chilli (optional)

  Heat olive oil in low, wide pan and add bay leaf and rabbit. Brown rabbit pieces all over, season, then remove and set aside. In the same pan sauté onion, celery, carrot and garlic until softened, about 8 to 10 minutes. Return rabbit to pan. Slosh in white wine and let it bubble up and evaporate before adding peeled tomatoes, about 1/2 cup water and chilli if desired. Season again, bring to the boil, then simmer about 40 minutes for farmed rabbit and 2 hours if wild
, topping up with water when sauce reduces too much. Check seasoning. When cool, remove rabbit meat from bones, then return to sauce, reheating at least 5 minutes before tossing through pasta.

  * If using wild rabbit, soak it overnight in water or wine and herbs to remove some of its ‘gaminess’.

  Several months into my Florentine life, life with Gianfranco, I hear about permanent contact lenses. Lavish advertisements depict their miraculous powers: lenses you can keep in for days at a time, lenses you can sleep in, lenses that will change your life. Having been desperately short-sighted since my teens, as I juggled glasses with contact lenses I must remove every night, I am naturally intrigued, then seduced. And despite their tremendous cost – but then what value can be placed on a miracle? – Gianfranco is marching me briskly into Pisacchi the optometrist.

  I submit to the sort of eye examination I have had regularly since I was thirteen, and the optometrist speaks slowly and carefully to make sure I understand. My two years of university Italian, combined with the six weeks or so at the Michelangelo Institute, all reinforced by the past months in which Italian is what I mostly hear and speak (if not perfectly understand), have made me a little reckless, even cocky in my confidence. ‘Si, capisco’ – Yes, I understand – I say. We pay for my exciting new lenses with half my month’s salary and then speed off to Viareggio to spend what remains of our day at the beach. The world seems brimming with possibilities that the past decade and a half of myopia had closed to me. As we drive, Gianfranco is telling me how Italy has long been at the forefront of optical technologies, pioneering techniques and equipment.

  We arrive at the beach in blazing sunshine, change into swimming attire and hurl ourselves into the water. I am so accustomed to keeping my eyes fiercely shut under water that it has become instinct. And yet the optometrist had spoken so enthusiastically about ‘il fare la doccia’ – having a shower – or ‘un bagno’ – a bath, or bathing – that the next time I go under I stare wide-eyed and defiant into the glassy curl of wave.

  In that moment a strange sensation takes place as the sharp clarity of my vision gives way to a soft and familiar blur. The expensive lenses have floated out of my eyes, lost in the infinite expanse of ocean, possibly even drifting towards Australia. I can hardly believe it has happened, that I possessed those permanent lenses so temporarily. It is only afterwards, when I confess to Gianfranco what has happened, that the optometrist’s directions are revealed to me. The only thing you cannot do, Gianfranco smiles as he reports what had apparently been said in one of those sentences I pretended to understand, is to open your eyes under water.

  The Fiat is slipping through drifts of snow and navigating treacherous bends to bring our carload of friends, unharmed, to Pettino. A lone farmhouse glows amber, welcoming us in. We are the only guests tonight at this trattoria, where the family, clustering around the fireplace, springs into attendance. The dining room is merely long wooden tables and wooden benches. The ambience soon softens around the curl of cigarette smoke, the uncorking of wine bottles and our shrill exuberance at having risked such roads in such conditions. There is no menu; we have come to eat truffles. I have heard about the nonchalance with which Umbrians treat this precious ingredient, like parsley or potatoes. Instead of being finely grated or shaved, they are often cut into chunks.

  First arrives the crostini, crisp little toasts piled with a mixture of anchovies and finely chopped mushrooms specked with black truffles. There is a frittata perfumed with pecorino and truffles. Eggy threads of fresh tagliatelle arrive truffle-flecked and glistening with green oil. Everything else – the snow outside, the members of the family coming and going, the sharp wooden contours of the austere room – becomes a fuzzy frame for our truffle tasting. We stay for hours and the euphoria carries us all the way, dangerously back, cosy beyond caring.

  Wherever we end up – at the midnight end of busy restaurant days, on our precious one day off, during an impromptu arrival of friends, in Florence or out – our meals are always memorable. Gianfranco possesses the happy combination of both peasant background and swish Swiss hospitality training, so I am mostly happy to let him do the choosing. He knows about food; his palate is impeccable. The other sides I begin to see of him – the moody volatility, the surly suspiciousness – are often with us now, like unwanted guests at a feast, faceless and brooding. He has begun to ignore me inexplicably and we live in the thick walls of my love’s jealous silences. Later, when his mood has recovered, he justifies it on the grounds of jealousy towards someone like the corner greengrocer whose name I do not even know. And yet, when I watch his skill at mealtimes, my admiration for him enables easy forgiveness.

  We invariably eat whatever is seasonal, freshest, del giorno, and a little unusual. He heads immediately for the kitchen of whatever establishment we are visiting, where through the servery windows I watch him dip fingers into steamy cauldrons. All the places we frequent are staffed by waiters or chefs whom he knows, or with whom he has worked. Their stories are told to me over crisp-crusted pizza with curls of prosciutto on top, and are continued through the last lemon vodkas of the night. How Tonino squandered a family inheritance on gambling and is now forced to work three jobs; why one of Silvio’s legs is shorter than the other; where Paolo takes his mistress to dine on the nights he is able to escape his overbearing, cruel wife.

  Massive Claudio’s pizzeria in Piazza Santa Croce is one of our favourites. I love best his spinach sautéed quickly in garlic, chilli and olive oil, which I eat with too much bread, while all around me waiters knock off for the night to play cards, smoke and drink with up-rolled sleeves.

  Spinaci con olio, aglio e peperoncino

  (Spinach with oil, garlic and chilli)

  Wash and squeeze-dry a bunch of spinach. Heat olive oil in a pan and add garlic slivers and dried chilli, then the spinach. Season with salt and pepper, then toss for several minutes. Serve with a squeeze of fresh lemon juice and a generous slick of extra virgin olive oil.

  We eat often at the elegant Antica Toscana, which specialises in tour groups and is owned by a gravel-voiced man called Lorenzo, one of Gianfranco’s partners. I warm to Lorenzo immediately, to the fact that he is not only urbane but clearly a devoted family man who takes great pride in the two sons who are often there helping out. It is here that I meet a multilingual, accordion-playing, walrus-moustachioed waiter called Raimondo, who is to become a great friend. We pull up at service stations along the autostrada, where in sparse, near-empty dining rooms Gianfranco knows to order soupy stews of intestinal organs, salt cod with silverbeet, wide ribbons of pasta glistening with duck sauce, fresh figs draped with pancetta, a log of creamy tomino bathing in golden oil. In summer, we drive 110 kilometres to the seaside town of Viareggio one evening just to eat fish. In an art deco building on the promenade we are served, naturally, by ex-colleagues of Gianfranco, a banquet of endless platters piled high with seafood stirred through spaghetti or chunked into risotto, or simply gloriously grilled. Sometimes we choose the traditional Tuscan baccalà, peasant food now fashionable again.

  Gianfranco’s ancient mother shuffles through the service station, a tiny figure dressed in black, moustachioed, hair bandaged in a scarf. I find her toothless, colloquial Italian incomprehensible, yet we smile at each other constantly, shyly. She prepares all the meals, her fingers pressing breadcrumbs onto veal cutlets, podding beans and twisting tubes of spinach-stuffed pastry into snakes. Her broad practical hands show me how to iron and fold Gianfranco’s white work T-shirts. (I iron them quickly and badly, humiliated by this servile role.) When all the dishes have been brought out to the dining room and the extended family – which now includes ‘la Veeky’, the earnest Australiana – is noisily jostling with platters, Mamma slips back into the kitchen, where she eats on a chair by the stove.

  Baccala alla Fiorentina

  (Florentine salt cod)

  2 leeks

  Olive oil

/>   3 cloves garlic

  400 g peeled tomatoes

  Salt and pepper

  800 g salt cod, soaked overnight in several changes of water

  Flour

  Sprig rosemary

  To serve

  1 tablespoon chopped parsley

  Polenta

  For the tomato sauce, clean and finely slice leeks, then soften in olive oil together with 2 cloves of whole, peeled garlic. When the leeks are beginning to colour, add the tomatoes, season with salt and pepper and simmer for 30 to 40 minutes, adding extra water as required.

  Meanwhile, wash and drain the salt cod well and cut into large pieces. Flour and fry both sides in hot olive oil, to which you have added rosemary and 1 clove garlic. Drain on paper towels and, when the sauce is ready, lay salt cod on top in a single layer. Leave to simmer on low heat for 5 minutes. Check seasoning and serve sprinkled with finely chopped parsley on a bed of polenta.

  I love her food and the way it always ends up a feast. I love the way she rolls taut ripe tomatoes onto the table, and carves the bread, resting the loaf on her chest – one sharp cut, with her weathered finger pressing down on the blade of the utility knife. She salts everything lavishly, and throws nothing away. Her basic tomato sauce floods the kitchen with a rich sweet perfume as her small sturdy hands prod, test and stir the disintegrating fruit.

  I love the way she looks at Gianfranco, her youngest boy, made good in the city, with his high-heeled boots and his jewellery and his bewildering foreign girlfriends. I am frustrated by my inability to express this love, and so I carry plates out to the kitchen, and smile and smile.

  Pomarola

  (Basic tomato sauce)

  Olive oil