Every Day in Tuscany (32 page)

P
OLLO CON
C
ARCIOFI
, P
OMODORI, E
C
ECI
Chicken with Artichokes
,
Sun-Dried Tomatoes, and Chickpeas

Chickpeas are a late love of ours. Just a taste of chickpea fritters, Sicilian street food, and we were fans. Now we roast them for snacks, serve them with herbs and tomatoes as a cold salad, and adore them with this super-fast chicken dinner in one pot. Soak chickpeas overnight and simmer them in light stock with onion, celery, carrot, and garlic. Cooking them yourself yields a much better texture than you’ll find in the overly soft and viscous canned chickpeas. Artichokes partner so well with
ceci
. Although fresh artichokes are a primary passion, in this recipe I opt for the convenience of canned or frozen ones.

Serves 4

5 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

1 whole chicken, cut in 8 pieces, seasoned with salt and pepper

½ cup red wine

¼ cup chopped Italian parsley

¼ cup thyme or marjoram leaves

2 cups chickpeas, cooked

1 can of artichokes, drained

½ cup sun-dried tomatoes

1 medium onion, chopped and sautéed

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Heat the oil in a flameproof and ovenproof casserole. Sauté the chicken for 3 to 5 minutes per side in the oil. Do in batches if necessary. Add wine and transfer to a baking dish.

Mix the remaining ingredients, pour over the chicken, and bake, covered, for 30 to 45 minutes, depending on the size of the pieces, turning the chicken once.

F
OCACCIA

What better place to focus on some focaccia than the
focolare
, Italian for hearth or fireplace, which could very well be the root of this ubiquitous bread. Willie and Ed make it often. It has a simplicity of preparation, a small number of ingredients, and everybody likes it. During the
vendemmia
, grape harvest, focaccia is baked for breakfast with small sugared grapes.

2 packages dry yeast

2 cups warm water

4 to 5 cups all-purpose flour

1 or 2 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for bowl

Coarse sea salt

Rosemary, minced

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.

Combine the yeast and water in a large bowl and let stand for about 10 minutes. Then add 4 cups of flour to the bowl and mix well. On a floured surface, knead the dough for 10 to 15 minutes, adding flour as needed, until the dough is uniformly elastic. Oil a large bowl, add the dough, and turn to coat all sides with the oil, then cover with a tea towel and put in a warm place for 1 hour.

Punch down the dough—it should have about doubled—then spread it with your fingers onto a parchment-lined sheet pan. Cover with a tea towel and let it rise again for about 45 minutes.

With your fingertips, dimple the dough all over. Sprinkle with the 1 or 2 tablespoons of oil and then the coarse salt and minced rosemary.

Bake in a hot oven for 20 to 25 minutes, then slide off the sheet pan onto a cooling rack.

Slice into 1-inch strips for snacks or 3-inch squares for sandwiches.

M
AIONESE ALL
’A
GLIO
Aioli—Garlic Mayonnaise

Aioli turns a sandwich into an event. A dab on asparagus, a dip for French fries or crudités, the binder for shrimp or chicken salads, a sauce for artichokes—aioli bumps it all up a notch. Since most people don’t bother to make their own mayonnaise, it’s fun to take a jar to hosts. By the way, you can make aioli in five minutes max.

Makes 1 cup

½ teaspoon dry mustard egg plus

1 egg yolk

2 tablespoons lemon juice

3 garlic cloves

½ teaspoon salt

1 cup extra-virgin olive oil

Put the mustard, whole egg and egg yolk, lemon juice, garlic, salt, and ¼ cup of the oil in the food processor and process for 30 seconds. Then with the processor running, slowly, slowly pour in the remaining oil in a thin, steady stream, and process until emulsified.

Since the Etruscans

SINCE THE ETRUSCANS, AND MAYBE BEFORE
, food in this hill town has been the daily focus of 99 percent of the population. Those tomb frescoes show people feasting even after death. They shimmy among the olive trees. And so it continues. Local people take their daily walk on the road below our house. Often, bits of conversation float up. We hear
ravioli, porcini, ricotta, noce, grappa, cinghiale, ciliege
. Often arguments ensue: “Lapo makes the best pecorino.” “No, it’s Carla.” “What shit you speak!” “Carla’s sheep graze on
insalata di campo
.” “Hah! She has rats in her barn.”

On and on. Where you eat well, where you don’t. Who’s stealing cantaloupes out of the fields, who raises rabbits on bread and greens, and who raises them on bought
mangimi
. Pruning the roses, clipping the hedge, we hear these
passeggiata
discussions constantly. We used to say,
Do they think of nothing but food?
Now we’ve joined them.

Our time here has exactly paralleled the rise in food and wine consciousness within Tuscany. When Ed and I first visited the local
trattorie
in 1990, the waiters offered two wines—
bianco
or
nero
. The menus could have been printed at a central office, because they were all the same. This was fine with us—we loved wild boar with pappardelle, hearty
ribollita
, grilled sausages, and the hefty
bistecca
with oil and rosemary. After a while, we began to seek out the one or two specialties of each trattoria: the marinated zucchini at one, the spinach gnocchi at another, the superb veal roast at our local restaurant that also catered for the Pope. Cheese was cheese:
parmigiano
or pecorino, and maybe a taleggio at the grocery store.

Fast-forward to the present and you find an amped-up culinary scene, an exploded wine appreciation, and an expansion of knowledge around artisan foods of all kinds.
Astounding
. For so long, Tuscany did not change; now change is coming rapidly. In our town of 2,500 within the ancient walls, you easily find of an evening, not just a Brunello tasting, but an esoteric evening with Arnaldo pairing the wines of Friuli with cheeses aged in caves, or bringing forth whole dinners built around
lardo di Colonnata
. The authentic Tuscan food still reigns, but chefs also have come to town (okay, maybe from only five miles away) who devote themselves to taking local ingredients and creatively upping the ante. This is a fine state of affairs: the baby basking in the bathwater. Old traditions stay intact and the new coexist. The same philosophy that would enable Luca to be able to find his house in Cortona today.

I brought Marcella Hazan and a few other books from California, where we’d long reveled in the grassroots food revolution that eventually transformed American restaurants and contributed to that greatest of changes, the revival of farmers’ markets across the country. I’d studied with Simca and later cooked my way through the books she wrote with Julia Child. I loved Paula Wolfert’s
Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco
and Diana Kennedy’s tome on regional Mexican food. I took classes in Chinese cooking at extended ed.

In my family’s southern home, we were already talking about what was for dinner while at lunch. Southern food, America’s greatest culinary tradition, in some ways represents the polar opposite to Mediterranean food. Tuscans like to fry, too, but southerners will fry
anything
not moving. Ever had a fried dill pickle? And we used lard, bacon grease, lots of butter. The delicious desserts are loaded with sugar. Vegetables used to be cooked to death with a slab of salt pork. Just thinking about the southern table I pulled my chair up to makes my cholesterol level jump. But there are other strong, positive similarities between my mother’s kitchen in Georgia and my own
cucina
in Italy: local, high-quality meat, farm vegetables and eggs, chickens that have roamed, fruit picked off the tree, especially peaches to eat over the sink because they’re drippy with juice. Like my Italian neighbors, we didn’t eat processed food, except for potato chips, mayonnaise when Willie Bell didn’t have time to make it, and the ubiquitous canned cream of mushroom soup, that binding ingredient of both green bean casserole topped with fried onion rings, and the family heirloom, squash and cheddar casserole. My mother didn’t favor the popular jewel-colored Jell-O salads that appeared at our church’s dinner-on-the-grounds; she preferred spicy tomato aspic in a ring mold and a delicate gelled chicken salad in a charlotte mold. Those I would not eat, once I heard that gelatin came from horse hooves. Today I would love to find that delicate nut-and-celery-studded chicken on my refrigerator shelf.

Tenet number one of the Mediterranean diet crosses easily into the southern kitchen: When ingredients are good, you don’t have to torture them into complex recipes. One, two, or three flavors, bold and fresh.

Writing this, I’m hungry. I’m missing that table set with embroidered organdy mats and my mother’s blue and white Spode. The air-conditioner labored in the dining room window and when Willie Bell swung through the kitchen door, bearing her cornmeal-stuffed chicken, a blast of hot air whooshed in. After everything was cleared, Willie Bell sat down at the kitchen table for her own noon meal. I sometimes sat with her. I’d have another biscuit or a glass of her pineapple tea. My parents went to their afternoon naps. My sisters disappeared into their room to play records and curl their hair. The yellow kitchen in memory is always one hundred degrees, with a fan stirring a little air from the corner. Willie still had the dishes to do. This was long ago, another era, and in so many ways a wrong one. But I dearly loved her.

W
HEN
I
BEGAN
to be invited into Tuscan homes, began to ask my neighbors how they made cabbage soup, or
tortellini in brodo
, or
pappa al pomodoro
, I often thought of Willie Bell and my mother, launching into their day. I wished they could come with me to visit Tuscan friends in their kitchens.

Very quickly, I stored my cookbooks. They began to seem fussy. During those first years, I realized that none of my Italian friends used them at all, except sometimes for baking. Baking, other than bread, doesn’t occupy much of a Tuscan cook’s time. If a dessert other than cheese and fruit is called for, most just throw together a fruit
crostata
, which they know by heart.

How stunned Willie Bell and my mother would have been to take their seats at the Cardinali table, to sample fresh fava beans with pecorino, Fiorella’s pasta with
funghi in bianco
, a white sauce with porcini, and a falling-apart osso buco underlined with a few threads of local saffron. I think they would have felt right at home, as I have. Still, they might want to offer their hosts a southern dessert. I made that mistake. What a treat, I thought, my grandmother’s coconut pie or my mother’s chocolate fudge cake. The current American sugar consumption level of 137 pounds per person per year was probably even higher in the South when I grew up. Plain to see, by what they left on the plate, my Italian friends couldn’t take more than a few tastes of the sugar-stunned desserts. I have retooled myself over the years and compromise with fruit tarts made with half the usual amount of sugar. But sometimes when expat friends come to dine, we celebrate our sweet heritage of walnut buttercream cake or profiteroles.

I’ve learned the most from Giusi, Fiorella, and Gilda. I’ve eaten at the best restaurants in New York and San Francisco, the ones with all the hype and the food shows and the books. After dinners at the di Palma house and the Cardinali house, I can’t worship at those urban temples. These two home cooks have a depth of information on ingredients, a vast—
vast!
—range of dishes they serve, and an inborn aptitude for knowing what’s ripe next week, what’s ripe today. Years of cooking with them and with many others revealed to me the unprinted, un-researched side of the Mediterranean diet.

Why is the food so good? What secrets do they harbor? So much about olive oil. We began pressing our oil as soon as we cleared the land that had been abandoned for thirty years. Picking olives immediately connects you with the ancient cycle of the seasons. The brand-new greeny oil was a revelation. Even buying expensive oil in the United States, we realized, was only a shadow of the real thing glowing like liquid emeralds in the demijohn.
¹
Our salads became paradigms. We made every bruschetta imaginable. As we began to try to duplicate Giusi’s eggplant parmigiana, her
arista
, pork loin, even her plain green beans, we fell short. Then we watched closely. Whereas we drizzled the olive oil into the pan, she flipped off the spout and poured. She used three times what we did.

As I recounted in
Bringing Tuscany Home
, we became curious and began to ask friends how much oil they used per week. The average for a small family or couple turned out to be about a liter a week. We’d had things backward. While we meted out the olive oil in our California kitchen, we poured the wine freely. After a dinner for eight, we’d haul about that many bottles out to the recycle bin.

In Italy, back in the
nero
and
bianco
days, I recall seeing the
carabinieri
at lunch, pouring water into their wine. Even now, with farm wine, I still see that occasionally. Among our friends, we began to notice that after a party there would be only two or three empty bottles, and equally that many, or more, of water bottles. And the wine drinking commenced when the food was served. Only a few friends thought to offer a glass before dinner. We got it! Wine is for food, a part of the balancing act that comprises the Italian
cena
.

Olive oil, in the Mediterranean, is not only an ingredient; it’s a libation, a holy substance that connects you to the earth and promotes a sense of belonging in time.

Time turns out to be the major ingredient of Tuscan dining.
Ritmo
, rhythm: Time is stretched by the pace of the dinner, which arrives in four or five distinct courses. This makes a tremendous difference, this balance, this dance of courses, this symphonic development—or maybe it’s a series of arias.
Antipasto, primo, secondo, dolce
. Each is savored.

The American way: a light first course and an enormous main course with the plate filled. Perhaps a salad after. Then a rather stupendous dessert. What differs here in Italia is that courses are equal. Moderation is assumed. What else? The amount of meat. I never knew a rabbit or chicken could be cut in so many pieces. Even big grilled steaks are usually cut for two or three. So the quantity of meat consumed is quite small. The famous six-hour dinners, even eight, are stretched and stretched by the arrival of cheese, the
dolce
, the bowl of clementines or grapes, then the after-dinner grappa or
digestivo
. Each movement of the symphony is nicely defined and serves to punctuate what’s going on at the table.

“You never grow old at the table,” Tuscans say. The grinding wheel of time stops at the dining room door, leaving those who pass the pasta bowl suspended in the aromas of rising steam. And it seems true.

At the call
“A tavola!,”
to the table, you flush with pleasure; you are coming into a celebratory ambience. Something wonderful is about to happen. Food is natural, eaten with gusto. It must affect your digestion if you think the first quality of pasta is that it’s fattening. If the word “sin” is attached to dessert. I’ve never heard of a dish referred to as “your protein” or “a carb,” and there’s no dreary talk at all about glutens, portion control, fat content, or calories. Eating in Italy made me aware of how tortured the relationship to food is in my country. After a long Tuscan dinner, I feel not only the gift of exceptional company, food, and wine, but also an inexplicable sense of well-being, of revival. Dinner invigorates the spirit as it nourishes the body.