Every Day in Tuscany (35 page)

P
LACIDO’S
S
TEAK

Placido, known from childhood as “Plari,” is a grill master. Whether it’s porcini, slabs of pancetta, guinea hens, pigeons, or little birds—he times by instinct and smell and also remains perfectly at ease. He mans the grill at Ombretta and Piero’s annual Ferragosto party, where Lina sings as he cooks and everyone dances on the terrace. We all come to the
festa
with steaks in hand.

First, we go to Claudio’s, the
macelleria
right inside one of the Cortona gates, and ask for the same kind of steak that Plari buys for himself. Antonella, all dressed up behind the counter, selects a hefty piece and whacks at it a bit. We walk out with gargantuan steaks from those famous, huge white cows called
Chianina
. Tuscans like their steak
al sangue
, bloody, so grilling time here is approximate. After the steak is lifted from its oil bath, you can dip in slices of bread and grill them for quick
bruschette
.

Serves 1 or 2

1 big thick T-bone steak

Extra-virgin olive oil

Salt and pepper

Rosemary, minced

1 garlic clove, minced (optional—Placido does not use it)

Cut gashes in the strip of fat on the outside of the steak so that it doesn’t curl up in the heat. Prepare a pan large enough to hold the steak. Add oil, salt, pepper, rosemary, and garlic.

Place the steak on the hot grill. Do not touch it for at least 2 minutes. Turn over and cook for another 2 minutes. Bathe the steak in the oil bath on both sides, sprinkling more salt and pepper. Serve warm.

100 Jars of Summer Sun

“IT’S BEEN DRY OTHER YEARS, TOO—
porca miseria
. Why are they so rambunctious this year—sniffling out the damp roots under my oaks?”

“Hunting season has just been extended for this fall—there’s a population explosion.”

“One came eye to eye with me while I was in the pool. He leaned down and took a slurp.”

On the third Sunday of each month, an antiques market takes place in Piazza Signorelli. Everyone comes to mingle and look at bells, books, tools, and baskets. But this late-August morning, hardly anyone examines the andirons and old postcards of Capri. They are talking boar.

I’d like to look at the vintage cooking utensils, but no. Even Walter, our elegant architect, has had an invasion. Over his shoulder, I see a man aiming an imaginary rifle.

“Put out a bag of corn every night for three nights. On the third night, when there’s a crowd, shoot them,” Riccardo advises.

“Shoot—are you mad? You can kill a
person
in Italy easier than killing a boar off season.” Paolo makes the gesture of crossed wrists, signifying imprisonment.

Ed recounts our saga. The irrigation comes on at dawn and shortly thereafter, a battalion invades.

Rob tells us, “I slept outside on a cot for three nights and they stayed away. On the fourth night, I slept very soundly and woke up at dawn. The ground all around me was ripped away.” They’d frolicked around him, chomping his new lawn, possibly nosing his toes. The head of the
Cinghiale squadra
mumbles as he moves away, “Go sleep with your wife instead. Unless you want a tusk up your ass.”

In the afternoon, we walk the fence at Fonte, noting scuffle marks where they’ve squeaked under. Ed decides to build a wire fence behind the electrical and barbed wires. This war against the
cinghiale
is beginning to seem Sisyphean. I pick up windfall apples and sling them into the woods, hoping to slake their thirst.

T
HE APPLE TREE
branches bend under the weight of the fruit. When we bought Fonte, the tree was tangled with vines and full of dead branches. Beppe and Armando pruned and cleaned for a day and now it repays with lavish crops of old-style, small apples, hard, tart and sweet. Boars love the taste and so do I. They’d probably gobble up my late-summer rustic tart with an unformed crust. Just roll the pastry out, slide onto a cookie sheet, pile in sliced, lightly sugared apples and chopped walnuts. Dot with butter, and fold the edges of the pastry around the fruit. Bake in a 350 degree F oven until the pastry looks toasty. So very delicious dabbed on top with a mixture of sweetened mascarpone and whipping cream.

Ed will be pleased tonight with the tart. All day he and Albano have been digging holes in search of a leaking tube. So far no luck. The wet spot extends for fifty feet and doesn’t seem wetter in any one place than another. Ed called the plumber and he answered from the beach at Rimini. A bad leak can take down a hillside. We’ve had enough of that.

On such days, I feel too ashamed to loll by the pool reading and feel that I should be as industrious as they. I decide to make Ed’s favorite pasta for dinner and to set the outdoor table out-of-mind around the corner from the wet spot. We’ll face the chestnuts and the view of Cortona instead. I start in the
orto
with a basket of
ciliegini
, little cherry tomatoes, some of which are splitting on the vine. I eat as I pick, understanding with each burst of quintessential flavor, that, yes, tomatoes are a fruit.

I wish Willie were here to help make
pici
. It’s the best pasta to make with a child—or an adult. As I measure the flour and crack the egg, I think of how much he’d love to thrust his fingers into the gooey mix.

Ed has the ambition to try every pasta in Italy. Our local mom-and-pop-sized grocery store carries fifty-something shapes of dried pasta. The Bottega della Pasta Fresca, just inside the Porta Colonia gate, turns out wheels and Mexican hats and pillows and snail shells. The number of different pastas in all of Italy must approach infinity. On every trip we collect a new
orecchiette
, the ear-shaped pasta that is so delicious with broccoli heads, or packages of
conchiglioni
, giant conch shells for stuffing with shrimp, or
strozzapreti
, the “priest strangler,” which once was fed to priests at Sunday dinner so that they were too full to eat much of the expensive meat served after the pasta course. I developed a passion for
fregula
—almost like Israeli couscous, only more delicate—in Sardegna.

We like the fanciful figurative language of pasta. The names bring a smile as you drop the box into your basket. Dinner is already getting off to a good start.
Farfalle
, butterflies, remind us of our garden, swarming with white and purple wings all summer. The sounds in
fusilli
twist like the curly pasta.
Mezze maniche
, half sleeves, look exactly like sections of a sleeve for a fat little arm. Hail is much feared locally because it can destroy the olive flowers at a critical moment. But a Tuscan pasta has been christened
grandinine
, tiny hail balls.
Occhi di pernice
, the miniature rings used in soups, resemble the eyes of a partridge. Lilies, stars, cock’s combs, radiators, elbows—good nouns of everyday life seem to adhere to pasta.

Despite our fascination with names and shapes, Ed’s progress toward eating all the pastas in Italy is distinctly hampered. After scanning a trattoria menu, he often says, as though it were a discovery, “I think I’ll have the
pici
.”

And I usually respond, “Yes, that sounds good.”

Pici
qualifies as the most robust of Tuscan pastas. No one seems to know the meaning of the name, though the De Mauro unabridged dictionary says the word came into the language in 1891. I think in these Tuscan hills
pici
has been around for eons, as essential as gnarly olive roots and bunches of grapes drying for
vin santo
in the rafters. Especially in the Siena and Arezzo provinces of Tuscany,
pici
appears on almost every menu.

In correct Italian, one says PEE-chee, but our local dialect slushes
-ci
sounds into
-s
sounds. Around Cortona, you hear PEE-she, just as you hear
cappushino
, instead of
cappuccino. Pici
, a plural like
spaghetti
, has no
picio
, singular, in the dictionary, though people in these parts offer a
picio
to a baby or pick up a dropped one from the floor.

Usually not included in cookbooks or seen on American menus,
pici
is the pasta closest to the Tuscan heart. Only the simple, down-home
tortelloni in brodo
comes close. We’ve had
tortelloni in brodo
every Christmas we’ve spent at our neighbors’ bountiful table. It’s quadruple the size of
tortellini
, those little meat-or cheese-stuffed nubbins of pasta whose shape was inspired by the navel of Venus. Fiorella’s herb and chicken
tortelloni
float in the hearty broth of an old hen, a dish that warms everyone at the holiday table. The plump squares are substantially stuffed, not just with a spoonful like ravioli.

I cover my pasta mound with a dishcloth for its brief rest, and take my glass of tea outside to watch the work. “I’m making
pici
,” I call to Ed.

He gives me a thumbs-up. “Soul food.” This late in the summer, he’s as tan as an Italian. I remember a friend’s description,
the muscular poet
. His workouts with kettle bells have pumped up his biceps even more. Shirt off, sweating, he flashes a smile and goes back to wielding the shovel. I’m happy that we’re having dinner alone. The greengage tablecloth, a few white roses, candlelight, and the moon—with the background music of snorting boar.

I like to make my strands of
pici
at least a foot long and about as thick as spaghetti enlarged three times, so that the bite is chewy and substantial. I’ve seen it almost pencil-thick, coated with goose sauce. Most of dried
pici
, available in every
gastronomia
, is quite scrawny by local standards. Although the dried variety works well, fresh is definitely best. A good bowl of
pici
brings you to the ample bosom of the
signora
who invented it when the larder was almost bare.
Pici
emerged from
cucina povera
, the poor kitchen, source of countless inventions in the repertoire of Italian cuisine. Surely the first
pici
maker had fieldworkers to feed at the end of winter when the
prosciutto
and
salumi
were gone. The thick shape of this pasta makes it seem like meat. It stokes the energy of wheat gatherers and olive pickers, as well as those now climbing steep streets in order to see a painting by Signorelli.

Some foods, as Proust with his madeleines knew, are memory foods. Like biscuits for southerners, tortillas for Mexicans, tagines for Moroccans, and, who knows, perhaps haggis for Scots,
pici
by now catapults me back to happy associations.

I didn’t know how deeply the local people felt about
pici
until I went into Maria and Vitalia’s fresh pasta shop on Liberation Day, Italy’s memorial to the end of World War II. I looked in the kitchen where Maria was lifting off the long ropes of pasta as they extruded from the machine. A small line formed at the counter. “We’ve sold one hundred and eighty kilos [almost 400 pounds] of
pici
this morning,” Vitalia told us. I ordered our five hundred grams, plus a few of the borage-stuffed ravioli. Later in the morning, we saw Vitalia in his white coat crossing the piazza, tray aloft, making his deliveries for the one o’clock
pranzo
rush. A scene from a Balthus painting, a visitor might observe, but locally, it’s just
normale
. By one o’clock, rich aromas of chefs’ special sauces drifted from the doorways and we rushed into Santino Cenci’s Trattoria Toscano, suddenly starving.

Every day Santino offers a homey specialty, such as veal shank, beef stew, or
polpettone
, his version of meatloaf that banishes forever my old dorm-food associations with that dish. He makes terrific
pici
with the classic duck sauce. I’ve never seen it elsewhere, but he makes a leek sauce as well. Santino always comes out to say hello and make sure everyone is eating well. “Do Americans order
pici
?” I asked him.

“Yes—always the duck. There’s not a
picio
left on the plate.” Ah, there’s the singular again, which doesn’t legally exist. Obviously, the local wines go well with
pici
. Cortona’s hills are attracting big attention among winemakers recently. Of course, this area always had wine—from someone’s Uncle Anselmo’s to the prestigious vineyards Avigonesi and Poliziano, between here and Montepulciano. Now we have several DOC wines and everywhere a new awareness of wines not stored in the family cantina demijohn. With my
pici
on Liberation Day, however, I told Santino’s son, Massimo, “I don’t want to drink any wine. Only water. I have work to do.” He rolled his eyes and threw up his hands. In a few minutes he brought over two glasses of wine anyway and we drank them.

At nearby Trattoria Dardano, home away from home for us, Paolo’s mother and grandmother epitomize
casalinga
, home-style cooking. Their intense
pici
sauce is the basic
contadina
tomato sauce that has spent an afternoon on the back burner. During hunting season, Ed prefers the hare or boar sauce. We’ve known Paolo, now in his late twenties, since he was Willie’s age and already happily helping bus plates for his parents. He’s putting his own touches on the family business. He loves to hear people guess the ingredients of his special
digestivo
, which arrives as a gift after dinner. Following the model of
limoncello
, Paolo invented a concentrated, malachite-green elixir made from bay leaves. Potent and perfumy, this little shot feels as though it could cure anything from migraine to palsy.