The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club Read online

  CONTENTS

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  PREFACE

  Part I

  MIRANDA

  Part II

  NINUCCIA

  Part III

  PAOLINA

  Part IV

  GILDA

  EPILOGUE

  THE RECIPES

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Every week on a Thursday evening, a group of four rural Italian women gather in a derelict stone house in the hills above Italy’s Orvieto. There – along with their friend, Marlena – they cook together, sit down to a beautiful supper, drink their beloved local wines, and talk.

  Here, surrounded by candle light, good food and friendship, Miranda, Ninuccia, Paolina and Gilda tell their life stories of loves lost and found, of ageing and abandonment, of mafia grudges and family feuds, and of cherished ingredients and recipes whose secrets have been passed down through the generations. Around this table, these five friends share their food and all that life has offered them – the good and the bad.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Marlena de Blasi is the internationally bestselling author of A Thousand Days in Venice, as well as four further bestselling memoirs and a novel, Amandine. She has been a chef, a journalist, a food and wine consultant and a restaurant critic. She is also the author of two internationally published cookbooks of Italian food. She and her Venetian husband, Fernando, live in Orvieto in Umbria, Italy.

  For Barbara Jean Filippi Siegel and Bruce Siegel

  A family is made of love. Only sometimes is it also made of blood.

  For Tony Canzoneri

  A quiet-spoken stalwart in the vanishing race of noble men

  For Erich Brandon, Figlio mio

  For Fernando Filiberto-Maria, amore mio

  Francesco Brasini

  An innocent who wanders nimbly among the wolves guided by a chivalrous heart and the uncluttered wisdom of a child

  PREFACE

  Linked by culture, blood, tradition, compassion, empathy and love, four rural women compose the Thursday Night Umbrian Supper Club. Their ages ranging from fifty-two to somewhere beyond eighty, they gather each week in a derelict stone house in the hills above Orvieto to cook, to eat, to drink and to talk. In another epoch – less distant in these parts than one might imagine – they would have been the women who gathered by a river to scrub clothes on stones or sat among meadow weeds to mend them, waiting for the weekly bread to bake in a communal oven. The four are linked, too, by their work, each one having earned her bread by making it. More specifically, the four are or were professional cooks who practise – or practised in the past – genuine Umbrian culinary traditions.

  Inclined to things practical which, in their hands, somehow become also things romantic, the women say that gathering together by the fire and around the table is where one finds antidotes to life’s caprice. A good supper, they are convinced, restores to us the small delights that the day ransacks. Through crisis and catastrophe and rare moments of uninterrupted joy, it’s this round, clean and imperishable wisdom that sustains them: cook well, eat well and talk well with people who are significant to your life.

  Long after I’d come to live in Orvieto and been befriended by the club’s matriarch, she risked making room for me at the Thursday table. The only ‘stranger’ among them, it wanted only time before I became of them, foraging, harvesting, making do, listening, watching, learning, enacting a few of my own ways and means upon them.

  The narrative has a dual thrust: in exuberant detail it recounts what we cooked and ate and drank and, in at least as exuberant detail, it tells the stories of the women’s lives: fidelity, aging, men and aging, sexuality, aging men and sexuality, aging women and sexuality, children, abandonment, destiny, death, the Mafia and Mother Church being among the subjects explored.

  ‘Vivi per sempre, live forever,’ we’d say, as we set to work on the preparations for a meal. ‘Live forever,’ we’d say again, holding each other’s hands around the table, passing around loaves of still-warm, wood-baked bread, pouring out jug after jug of our own chewy, teeth-staining red, benevolence setting the scene for dining but, as much, for storytelling, invigorating memory, soothing rancour and even, once in a while, illuminating a fear long stuck in the heart tight as the stone in an unripe plum.

  Spoken by Miranda one evening, maybe it’s these lines that can best introduce you to the Thursday Night Umbrian Supper Club:

  I don’t know how much more I could have learned about the point of life had I wandered farther away than the eight kilometres from where I was born and have lived for all my life to where I’m sitting right now. I think that wherever I might have gone I would have found you. Souls like you. We are magnificently the same. Not only us, all of us. Without pain, without fear, who would any one of us have become, what would we have to show for having lived? Any five women, wherever, whomever, put them together at supper around a fire and, ecco, ci saremo, there we’ll be. The point of life is to do what we’re doing right now. What we did yesterday, what we’ll do with what’s left of our time. Surely we are not barren of fantasy or dreams and yet none of us seem to be swanking about, reaching for great things or, worse, perceiving ourselves to be doing great things. There are no great things. After the myth of security, the second greatest myth ever inflicted on humans is the myth that we were meant to triumph. How wonderful it is to be content with holding hands around this mangled old table, with some nice bread, some wine, a candle and a fire. A blessed sleep waiting.

  The narrative is set in the years 2004 through 2008.

  PART I

  MIRANDA

  HAVING POURED OIL INTO A LARGE, DEEP POT, AND SET IT over a quiet flame, she sets out for a quick tour of the garden and the meadow just as we are arriving. Shedding coats and shawls, greeting one another as though years have passed since last Thursday night, we see to the table, to the filling of the wine jugs from the demijohn of red sitting in the corner. One of us lays uncut loaves of new bread on the table, another pokes about to see what it is that Miranda has cooking over the hearth fire though none of us dares to put a hand to anything without her command.

  Her breath a bit short from fervour for her mission, Miranda returns holding her apron together with two hands and in its hollow there are what must be the last of the string beans – green and yellow – the first of the brussels sprouts, the chopped-off long leafy heads of celery, apples, zucchini blossoms, sage. Two brown-skinned pears she has stuffed into her sweater pockets for tomorrow’s breakfast.

  ‘Out of my way, via, via,’ she says, pushing us aside, bussing cheeks as she passes each one, then sets to the tasks of rinsing and drying and trimming, preparing her bounty for glory. All of us familiar with her frying dance, we surround her, hungry children in her thrall.

  Starting with the celery leaves, dragging the branches a few at a time into a batter no thicker than cream, she slips the dripping things into the hot oil, letting them be until they rise to the surface of the now bubbling oil, the force of which turns them over – without a prod – to crust the other side of them. Her feet anchored in place, the whole of Miranda’s generous upper body sways, her hands flying over the leaves and the blossoms and the beans to the batter, to the pot, lifting batch after batch from the oil with a wide skimmer, turning the gilded stuff out to rest on a long, flat pan lined with a tea towel. We pass the pan among us, devouring the fritters out of our hands, burning fingers, burning mouths, and have barely placed the empty pan back to her reach – we still chewing and sipping and moaning –
as Miranda piles it with another batch. And another. She saves apple peelings and sage leaves for the last, since these are what she, herself, craves most. As she lifts these onto the pan and moves the frying pot off the heat, she turns to us, taking a long pull from the glass of white someone slaps into her hand. Then Miranda eats, drinks.

  ‘Pan-to-hand-to-mouth food, I like the wine cold, nearly gone to ice following the hot shattering crust in my mouth, the contrast sending one’s whole body into ecstasy,’ she tells us. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever served a frittura at the table. No time to get it there since I’m always on to the next round of dragging things through the batter, slipping them into the oil, lifting them out dark and crisp. I prefer everyone gathered around the pot, waiting.’

  Sighing and laughing and crunching and sipping, Miranda asks for more wine. The three bottles of white (a rare luxury is ‘bought wine’ on Thursday nights), which she’d cooled in a tub of supermarket ice, are dead soldiers. Someone suggests we drink the bottle of Champagne that has been lying on its side in some cupboard for months, a bottle from some lesser-known house in Reims, which was gifted – read: lifted – by one of the truckers among Miranda’s admirers.

  ‘Shouldn’t it be drunk cold?’ she wants to know but two of the men are already fiddling with the foil, the wire, shouting ‘Attenzione, attenzione,’ though the cork slides out with a quiet plunk. We pour it, flat and sour, into one another’s tumblers, toasting Miranda and the thieving trucker. They go quiet, all of them, searching for some motive to compliment their first taste of ‘real French’ when Miranda says, ‘Yeasty stuff, we might better have made bread with it.’

  I begin a cliffs-notes version of the story of Dom Pérignon and the sometime glories of what came to be la méthode champenoise but Miranda couldn’t be less interested. She says, ‘Leave a monk in a cellar and there’s bound to be a travesty.’

  Flailing her toasting fork now, she bosses us into our places at table, stoops down then to the small hearth on the wall behind it to turn the thick, spluttering slabs of pancetta, which have been slowly crisping on a grate over olivewood embers and branches of wild sage. Sitting deep in the red-hot ash below the grate is a long, shallow terracotta baking dish of potatoes, small as a thumbnail, and the luscious sage-smelling fat drips over them. From the pocket of her pinafore she takes a handful of dried wild fennel flowers, rubs them between her palms over the potatoes, and the maddening perfumes they send up cause sighs of longing from us. Struggling to rise from her bent position, steadying herself with one hand on the mantel, once she is upright, Miranda-of-the-Bosoms is flushed with delight. For the pancetta, for the potatoes. For her frying dance and because it’s Thursday. Likely for much more than that.

  ‘Quasi, quasi – almost, almost,’ Miranda laughs over her shoulder, her great beautiful form juddering back behind the faded flowery bedsheet that secludes the kitchen from the dining room in the tiny derelict and woodsmoked house she calls her rustico.

  It’s a Thursday in a long-ago October. And in this squat stone building, which sits on the verges of the Montefiascone road, we are nine still-hungry souls awaiting supper. Four women – five including myself – form the core group and, tonight, we are joined by four men: two husbands, the widower of a former member, and a lover, the last being Miranda’s long-time friend, Filiberto.

  The ten small tables at which Miranda’s guests sit to dine on other evenings in the week have been pushed together into one, the diversity of their heights and widths smoothed over in green-checked oilcloth. Under sheaves of dried olive branches that hang from the slouching, split-beamed ceiling barely a metre above our heads, we sit on plank benches and half-broken chairs along its length. A merry troupe, having our way with Miranda’s purple wine, passing along a thin-bladed knife and a two-kilo round of her crusty sourish bread, still warm from the wood-fired oven in the back garden, each of us saws off a trencher, passes it to the person on their right. When everyone has bread, we tear it into pieces, wet the pieces in the wine, and chew the fine pap with gusto. Pane e vino, bread and wine.

  We slide further into our cups, wet more bread in more wine until Miranda parts the bedsheet curtain – keeping it pinned to the wall with a tilt of her hip – and comes forth holding a great steaming basin of wild porcini braised in red wine and tomato. Into small deep white bowls she spoons the mushrooms with their dark potent juices and directs someone to fetch more bread and another to remove the pancetta from the grate and lay it over the potatoes where it’ll stay warm without burning. She asks if the wine jugs are full, then serves herself. We raise tumblers and voices in buon appetito and the house goes silent as stone save for low-pitched salacious murmurings.

  We share in the clearing of plates and the resetting of others. One of the Thursday night rules is: Once the supper begins, Miranda will not leave her chair at the table until the meal is finished. And so, with two kitchen towels against its heat, I lift the pan of pancetta and potatoes from the embers and take it round the table for everyone to serve themselves. Next, one of us fetches from the kitchen two large chipped Deruta platters piled with chicken crusted in wild herbs – rosemary, oregano, fennel seeds, fennel flowers and thyme – and roasted with crushed tomatoes and olive oil, the whole of it doused in white wine toward the end of its cooking time. We fight over the pan juices and before we’re ready to surrender the platters – crusts poised for a last swipe – someone whisks them away behind the curtain. Coitus interruptus. We suffer the noise of furtive slurpings. Then frenzied scrapings of the roasting pan left behind in the sink.

  ‘The chicory is outside in the bread oven,’ Miranda says to no one in particular, knowing that someone will run to get it. This between-course bustle with too many of us trying to help seems always a four-minute farce, everyone bent on getting back to the table.

  To complete the savoury part of the supper, Miranda has rolled steamed chunks of autumn squash in cornmeal and pan-fried them in olive oil. Only a whisper of sea salt and a grinding of pepper scent them, consenting to yet more sage leaves – sautéed in oil this time – which exalt the natural richness of the squash rather than conceal it with sugar and spices. Nothing much gets a mask in Miranda’s kitchen. This reprise of sage – first, battered and fried, then to scent the pancetta and the potatoes and now with the squash – is an example of Miranda’s theory of the filo conduttore: literally, the conducting thread. Often she uses an element more than once in a meal, thus connecting the various dishes, coaxing them into a harmonious whole. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Aristotle knew.

  Though Miranda almost never prepares a traditional dessert on Thursday nights, sometimes, when she’s set ewe’s-milk ricotta in a sieve to drain overnight, she’ll place a lush, creamy pat of it on a yellow plate, a big hunk of honeycomb and a pepper mill beside it, and everyone will take a tablespoonful or so in a teacup, break a piece of the comb over the ricotta, and grind on pepper with a heavy hand. Without fail, ricotta or not, she always reaches into the armoire where she keeps flour and sugar and dried beans, and takes out a fine old metal tin. Oval in shape, its pale blue and silver paint left only in patches, it’s always filled with tozzetti, hard, twice-baked biscuits made with whatever nuts or fruit or seeds she has to hand. These and a good ambered vin santo in which to wet them, that’s how Miranda ends Thursday nights. We began our supper by dipping bread in wine and end with the same gesture. Amen.

  Patting his chin with a napkin, Filiberto then lays the square of tattered blue cloth flat on the table; after smoothing and folding it into a small triangle, he places it in the pocket of his woollen shirt. Another of the Thursday night rules is: Anyone who wants one brings their own napkin. He rises then, walks to Miranda’s place, takes her hand in his and, in the style of the old cavaliers, brings it close to his lips without touching it. Turning from her, he strides the few metres to a chair set near the hearth and takes up his waiting mandolin, and begins plucking the strings in a minor key. One of the two shepherds who tend
the flocks on the far-flung meadows of this parish on the Montefiascone road, Filiberto sings, his voice a cracked whisper. Hoarse, ragged.

  Miranda shuts her eyes, totters her chair back on its hind legs and, as though all of us and even the little room itself have fallen away, she is alone with Filiberto and his tender wail. His voice, his music, are her after-supper prize on Thursday nights. Miranda-of-the-Bosoms, goddess of abundance, la Madonna of the burners in a kitchen-towel turban, Juno-esque breasts, soft and brown, bursting from the bodice of a white pinafore as she rocks her chair like a cradle, its creaking keeping time with Filiberto’s plucking. When he stops, she rouses, and her old rheumy eyes are drenched blue-black flowers flitting from one to another of us with what seems like regret. She sips the heel of her vin santo, runs a hand across her cheek, pinches her upper lip, pats her kitchen-towel turban. Miranda has been consenting to the age seventy-six for several years now but I think one of her recent birthdays was her eightieth.

  It was a cold January night when I first met Miranda, six years ago now. While still living in the stable in San Casciano, Fernando and I were in the thick of our search for our ‘next house’; somehow we found ourselves accidental guests at a festival to honour Sant’Antonio Abate – Saint Anthony the Abbot – in a tiny Umbrian village near the hilltown of Orvieto. A wooden crate of just-baked bread balanced picturesquely on her head, Miranda had gone about the little festa swinging her prosperous hips, causing the men to pause in their quaffing and orating whenever she passed by. I remember one man in particular would bite the side of a forefinger each time she came near. A forceful gesture this, indicator of many sentiments. But that man’s motive for finger-biting was undeniably desire.

  As it turned out, we soon found our ‘next house’ – in Orvieto – and waited out the two years it wanted to restore it; for all that time and ever since, Miranda has been an affectionate and generous presence in our lives. My first Umbrian friend, my enduring one. When I was too-long kitchenless she put the keys to the rustico in my hand, invited me to complete the work of testing recipes for a manuscript perilously overdue. And when Fernando and I finally moved into Number 34 Via del Duomo, again it was she who swanned me through the markets, introduced me to the farmers, helped me – the first American ever to set up in Orvieto full-time – to slash a path through the spiny cultural labyrinth of the centro storico, the town’s historic centre. Always there, Miranda was. Always near in the Umbrian way of being near. Close by but not too close.