A Moveable Feast (3 page)

Rhona McAdam is a Canadian poet and food writer who has eaten well in many countries. She has a master’s degree in Food Culture from the University of Gastronomic Sciences (Slow Food’s university in northern Italy), writes a food and poetry blog (the Iambic Cafe), and teaches an online course in urban agriculture and food security for St Lawrence College in Ontario. Her most recent full-length poetry collection,
Cartography,
was published in 2006, and two delectable chapbooks of her food poems
(Sunday Dinners
and
The Earth’s Kitchen)
are soon to be published. She is a Europhile who lived for many happy years in London, but currently lives, writes and cooks in Victoria, British Columbia.

I do not honestly know how many church dinners I have attended in my lifetime, but I know there have been many. My mother’s platters still bear our family name written in felt tip on the bottom, and I have memories of those modest, long-tabled spaces, the serving hatch with its retractable wooden shutter behind
which the church ladies wove their footsteps, the steam, the heat, the aromas.

So the setting for the meal offered us by the village of Vistagi, in central Crete, was and was not familiar. In the company of my twenty-three classmates at Slow Food’s University of Gastronomic Sciences, I had travelled to Crete on one of the several stages – field trips – we were to complete in the course of our master’s degree in Food Culture. We’d had an exhausting, uncomfortable, confusing – and exhilarating – time of it, criss-crossing the narrow mountain roads in three minivans, learning about such diverse matters as biodynamics, foraged foods, winemaking, irrigation management and small-scale food production on this rocky island.

We’d been on Crete several days already. Our arrival at Vistagi had been preceded by a wander up a mountain slope to gather wild greens; a dinner in a village taverna where we were individually pressed into song; a tour of a mountain village women’s baking collective; and a lesson on the making of baklava and those exquisite Greek donuts,
loukoumades.
We’d had a boggling run of boiled goat, wild onion and artichoke dinners; we’d had fava-potato purée at the start of every meal, a sweetish drink akin to church wine with our meal, and Cretan firewater (raki) at the end. But that, said Kostas, was the point: seasonal eating means repetitive eating. It means a cycle of menus where the variety occurs over the course of a year, not the span of a week.

The day of Vistagi had opened, as they all had, with thick, fresh yoghurt and honey, soft crusty bread with homemade jam, and coffee with milk from the goat tethered at the bottom of the garden. We piled into our minivans and followed Kostas’ nimble white Panda up the mountain. Literally. The track we were to follow intersected the road at a near-vertical angle, then twisted its way up to the mountain-top milking parlour in that uniquely
vertiginous manner of Cretan roads. The springtime vistas across the valleys were almost breathtaking enough to keep our eyes lifted from the shocking drops below our windows.

At the milking parlour, we watched a pair of shepherds swiftly divest their flock of the morning milk and release them to their grazing, scattering with the sounds of their bells down the hillside. Afterwards we stood together in the warming breeze, dutifully drinking raki and eating pastries, biscuits and fresh cheese –
mizithra
– with walnuts that the old shepherd cracked on a stone. While we ate, he talked about the life of a Cretan shepherd: the cooking and sewing and shoemaking skills each man had to take into the mountains when he travelled with the flock. The platter he thrust towards each of us time and again was heaped with cheese and we were told we had to eat it all. We ate and we ate, the raki curdling in our bellies.

Finally we were done, and gratefully decamped for the next destination: the cheesemakers’ hut at the bottom of the mountain. We hurtled down the dirt track, ears popping, giddy with raki and too much cheese, eyes fixed on the blue sky and the wildflowers that blurred in our wake. Down and down we sped, until we spilled out of the vans and into the shed, where the barrels of milk were being unloaded and poured into stainless-steel vats, while the earlier batches were strained into baskets and the cheesemakers in their white aprons and boots laughed and chatted through the steam.

It was a scene we’d seen played out a number of times already, for one of the specialisations in our course was cheese technology. But this humble building was a world away from the high-ceilinged Parmigiano-Reggiano
caseificio
, or the industrial steel-and-glass facility we had yet to visit in Burgundy. The ceiling was low; the room’s concrete floors were damp; the fittings functional, but occasionally improvised, like the shopping cart that held some of the equipment.

We stepped outside to the shade of an awning and another breathless view across the valley. A table had been generously spread with rusks
(paximathia)
and raki and – more cheese. This time it was
gravura,
the dense mountain cheese whose nearest cousin is gruyère. It was delicious, and we tried to put duty before hunger, but after a wedge or two I could hardly face another mouthful.

We did what we could and then Kostas, after one of the endless consultations on his cell phone, hustled us back to the vans. Lunch, he said, was waiting for us. I thought he said ‘forty dishes have been prepared’, but I knew that couldn’t be right; I must have misheard.

More twisting mountain roads, more stunning vistas, more dips and rises, and we reached the village, quiet in the noonday sun. We parked the vans and started on foot up the narrow road, where blue doors and pots of flowers lined the way. In one alcove, a donkey was tethered. In another, a flock of chickens sheltered from the heat behind a wired opening. The distant tinkling of goat bells was the only sound we could make out. There was no-one about.

Or so we thought, until we rounded the last bend and looked up to find the town hall, where twenty or thirty villagers of all ages were gathered on the top step, waving and beckoning. Just below them was a fire pit, where the men were sitting on a stone wall, smoking and keeping an eye on the meat that was trellised on sticks, its fragrance stirring something that might once have been appetite, had it not been smothered by cheese.

We approached the crowd, and one woman, Popi, stepped forward. ‘She is going to read you a poem of welcome,’ said Kostas, and she did: the kind of four-line poem the Cretans engrave on the daggers the men tuck into their belts. She welcomed our tribe of students, and we – from Canada, the US, China, Taiwan, Germany, Australia, Denmark, Spain, Japan,
Austria and Korea – stepped into the group of villagers, with no more to offer in return than our greetings.

Honoured and welcomed, we entered the hall. This is where I recalled the church hall dinners: long tables lined three walls, laden with food. Behind each table were the women, waiting to explain what they had prepared for us: the snails, the ash-cakes, bread, pastries of wild greens, wild onions, artichokes. Potatoes, lemons, fava beans, omelettes. Rabbit, chicken. The men were piling platters with the meat off the charred bones from the fire.

Kostas led us round the room, translating, as the women spoke quietly about their dishes. It was a humbling experience, for these were the most personal of gifts. Each had not only prepared her dish, she had grown or cured or foraged its ingredients. The men had raised the animals, and seen to their deaths.

At the end of the trail of tables, we came to the wine: 12 different kinds, according to Kostas. Made from village grapes, these wines were presented in old and new plastic bottles of all shapes and sizes, including gas cans, and we drank from plastic cups while we ate. Afterwards, someone pulled their car near to the building and blasted folk music from the stereo so the men could dance, in their black boots and brown trousers, their Cretan daggers tucked into their belts.

Replete doesn’t describe our state by the end of this day. The feeling was more of a cultural satiation: Vistagi’s table had been lavishly laid just for us, twenty-four strangers who could barely pronounce our local thank yous, but we’d become, however briefly, part of the village by sharing in its food. In the words of Popi’s poem: ‘We are all brothers when we eat’.

David Downie is an American author and journalist based in Paris. For the last twenty-five years he has been writing about European travel, culture and food for magazines, newspapers and websites worldwide. David’s writing has appeared in a dozen anthologies. His nonfiction books include
Enchanted
Liguria: A Celebration of the Culture, Lifestyle and Food of the Italian Riviera
;
Cooking the Roman Way: Authentic Recipes from the Home Cooks and Trattorias of Rome;
The Irreverent Guide to Amsterdam
and
Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light
. David’s latest books are
Paris City of Night,
a political thriller; and three critically acclaimed regional travel, food and wine books:
Food Wine the Italian Riviera & Genoa
,
Food Wine Rome
and
Food Wine Burgundy
. He is married to photographer Alison Harris (
www.alisonharris.com
). His website is
www.davidddownie.com
.

Alison rolled me on my side. But I wasn’t snoring. The grunts and squeals came from the garden, and they had awakened me long before dawn.

Lifting the flaps of the dark green shutters, we peered down, blinking. The sky was clear, the air already too hot for May, even on the Italian Riviera. Below us, olive trees and spiky artichoke plants were silhouetted against the spreading pinkness of the Gulf of Genoa. We could hear waves lapping at a promontory, and the spluttering of a solitary fishing boat. Then the ruckus started up again, followed by the crack of a breaking branch, the scurrying of cloven hoofs, a cacophony of terrified oinks, and a series of half-suffocated human imprecations.
Porca
was the only word we made out, delivered by a gruff voice. The rest was easy to guess.

Safe behind our shutters, we watched a shadowy figure untangle itself and slide down the trunk of a tree beyond the terraced garden. Muttering, it swished open a path between the artichoke fronds, stooped under a vine-draped trellis and crossed a creek to a nearby cluster of pastel-hued village houses. A light went on in one of them, and the figure reappeared on a top-floor balcony. The scene looked suspiciously picturesque, lifted from an operetta set.

‘Boars,’ Alison whispered. I nodded, wondering how much damage they’d done. The vegetable patch was the pride and passion of a reclusive man whose name we knew to be Oreste. His wife shouted it several times daily across the olive groves.

Though we had glimpsed Oreste planting and weeding in the bright light of day, he – like most craggy residents of the rocky Riviera – had remained in chiaroscuro, unknowable among the high-colour masses of day-trippers, long-term sojourners and sometime-residents. Outnumbered ten-to-one, the locals rarely mixed with outsiders.

Our coffee cups in hand, the sun now scorching, we stood in the pocket-sized garden above Oreste’s vegetables. The Mediterranean lolled a thousand feet below, its jagged shore covered by fantasyland villas and hotels. The moment you
climbed away from them onto the steep, terraced hillsides, things changed. Many mountain hamlets were abandoned, others depopulated, and armies of wild boars descended from the Apennines to feast in gardens and orchards like Oreste’s.

A clump of calla lilies lay toppled at our feet. I hoped the owner of the house did not blame us. Immediately below, at the base of a stone wall, luxuriant zucchini plants had been mangled. A tree limb dangled.

‘It broke under my weight,’ said a baritone voice. Oreste loomed up, carrying a wicker basket and shears. ‘I wanted to scare them,’ he added, approaching with caution. ‘I hope you were not awakened?’

‘No,’ Alison lied. ‘But what a shame about your vegetables. They’re so lovely, and you work so hard.’

Oreste waved the shears. I noticed his white teeth under a white moustache, and his blue eyes, rare in this part of Italy. They flashed. ‘One moment,’ he commanded. I realised he had been speaking English, his apparent caution evaporating like the dew. With a deft gesture he snipped off a zucchini, its flower attached, then another and another. He rummaged among the artichokes, snipping and yanking, before turning to a lemon tree hung with yellow orbs. Soon the basket was bursting, its contents carefully arranged. He handed it up to us.

‘How gorgeous,’ Alison said. ‘May I take a photo of it?’

‘Please,’ he replied. ‘Take the vegetables. They’re for you.’

‘But we couldn’t deprive you,’ I protested unconvincingly.

‘You will be doing us a favour,’ Oreste insisted.

Leaving us to talk about the garden, the unseasonable heat and the pestiferous boars – Oreste said they symbolised the death of local traditions – Alison rushed upstairs, returning with a brace of cameras. She moved the basket and shot it, pulling it to the left and the right, raising a zucchini flower here, a sprig of herbs or chard there, then changing cameras, lenses or both.

‘What will she do with all those pictures?’ Oreste asked, lifting his hat.

‘You’ll see.’

We reached down and he reached up to shake hands.

It was several days later when we heard Oreste digging in his orchard again as dawn broke over Genoa. Alison darted into the garden with the basket, now empty, and a large manila envelope. I watched through the half-shuttered window as she handed them down. Oreste slipped on a pair of reading glasses, which opened like scissors. Perched on the bridge of his broad nose, they instantly transformed him from rustic peasant to unlikely yuppie.

‘Bello,’
he exclaimed.
‘Bellissimo!’
He turned to face his house.
‘E-o!
Maria-Antonietta!’ he shouted. ‘Come and see!’

On the balcony across the creek, a neatly dressed woman of middle age appeared. She yelled back, stared for a few seconds into the rising sun and then vanished through a beaded curtain. A minute later, Maria-Antonietta was beaming as she held the photograph at arm’s length. She plucked the glasses off Oreste’s nose.

‘Il cestino di Orestino,’
I heard her remark. Her powerful voice pierced the stillness, rising to where I stood two storeys above. ‘I call him Orestino, because we’ve known each other since we were children.’ She wiggled her palm a yard above the ground. ‘How beautiful you’ve made Orestino’s basket and zucchini look,’ she continued. ‘Oreste, why not fill another? How about some field greens? I’ll teach them to make a vegetarian meatloaf …’

When next we heard the boars of dawn and glanced down at the garden wall, atop it sat the basket. This time it contained cherries and a jar of Maria-Antonietta’s pesto, made, Oreste told us later, with olive oil pressed from the fruit of these trees, and basil grown here, in the half-shade of the vegetable garden. ‘Basil grows best like this,’ he insisted, mopping his brow. ‘In full sun it is too strong and tastes of mint.’ Vegetables and pesto were an obsession of seafaring folk, he added, rattling off a recipe. People who eat fish every day and stare at the waves crave greenery, and Oreste was no exception.

He lifted the basket and offered it up. From a plastic bag I pulled out a book and handed it down. Oreste seemed surprised. He thanked us lavishly, flipping through the pages, admiring the photos and reading our names aloud not once but twice. He remarked, as if in an after-thought, that he had worked in the port of Genoa for something like thirty years. Now he was preparing to retire. It was the end of an epoch, and he would like to immortalise it in some way. Since we appeared to enjoy the dawn, and food and photography, he wondered if we would consider joining him on the docks one day soon, followed by lunch at a trattoria we surely did not know.

‘I think you might enjoy yourselves,’ he concluded in fluent, euphonically accented English.

We accepted with pleasure. Between exchanges of the basket, we had learned a few things. Oreste had been born and brought up in a humble house in this tiny hamlet on the hillside, but he was no village hayseed. As his Homeric name suggested, he was a distinguished captain, the head pilot of the harbour pilots who shepherded the giant container ships and ferries into one of Europe’s busiest ports. He had lived most of his life on ships, but his true love was growing vegetables and cooking.

‘The guards will let you in. Look for the tall, glassy tower.’ He pointed. ‘You can see it from here. Everyone knows where the
piloti
are found.’

At precisely 4.45am we left the house, pausing on the path to watch as three white-striped baby boars trotted south into the underbrush. We walked in the opposite direction, counting the 1057 steps of the zigzag staircase that lowered us through olive groves to a sleepy resort town by the sea. The moon illuminated an inky blue sky, dotted with stars veiled by wispy high clouds. The songbirds kicked in at 5am. Panting, we clambered onto a battered commuter train. The station’s dusty clock showed 5.17am.

We got off at Genova Brignole, a handsome hulk from the nineteenth century, apparently unmolested by modernity. Stoplights flashed as a pair of Fiats raced each other along the six-lane boulevard to the harbour. Cranes and funnels rose in the distance. After twenty minutes we had passed through the security gate and were shaking hands with Oreste. In his sporty uniform, he seemed taller, younger. From nowhere, thimbles of espresso appeared, and focaccia still warm from the oven, glistening with olive oil.

Inside the control room, high above the port, we stood spellbound as the sun spilled around the Portofino peninsula, a sudden, blinding beam. The air-conditioning kicked on. A radar antenna spun, humming and throbbing. Oreste introduced us to his colleagues, their eyes glued to screens, or the horizon. They joked about
il capitano
retiring, and wondered how the port would survive.

‘At least we will have photographs to remember him by,’ laughed one radar man, watching Alison at work.

More coffee and focaccia arrived. The sun raked around, striking the thousand-year-old black-and-white tower of a church, then a series of frescoed townhouses, and the medieval, castellated walls that ran like a roller coaster around old Genoa. I had never seen the city from this angle, or at so early an hour. The tall stone buildings merged with the light and seemed unnaturally white, bleached by centuries of sun. They stood out against the gentle green of the hills, hills that cupped Genoa, a fortress city within the bastions of the boulder-strewn Apennines.

Amid the container ships, cruise boats and cranes on the opposite side of the harbour rose La Lanterna, Genoa’s symbol, a lighthouse built nearly 700 years ago. Giant oil tanks marched up the grade behind it. Hovering on a ridge above stood the sanctuary of the Madonna della Guardia, protector of sailors.

‘That is where the best basil comes from.’ Oreste pointed. ‘Not from the Madonna, but from Prà, at her feet. Of course, my basil is better, but Prà’s is more famous, with protection. Over the hills, in Piedmont, where my wife is from, my real kitchen garden and vineyard grow.’ Oreste smiled. ‘But the boars, Mother of God, the boars are even worse there. No-one is left. The villages are empty.’

He excused himself to consult with a colleague, then spoke in French over a crackly radio. A Belgian ship wanted to dock but the port was full. ‘Try Savona,’ Oreste continued, ‘repeat, try Savona.’