Every Day in Tuscany (36 page)

On Piazza Signorelli, Taverna Pane e Vino serves
pici alle molliche
, also a simple recipe: anchovies, coarse, crunchy bread crumbs, and a hint of hot peppers. Ed is wild for that. Pane e Vino, owned by Debora and Arnaldo, attracts a young clientele from all over the region, drawn by the simple food and the inspired wine list, the best in town. With this
pici
, we always drink a Tenuta Sette Ponti Crognolo, from a polestar vineyard right up in the rural Val d’Arno area north of Arezzo. While there, Ed said, “Why don’t we start making
pici
?” He has already made the flat, wide
pappardelle
for wild boar sauce, and flat sheets for lasagne and cannelloni. As we left, he took out his phone. “Let’s call Silvia.”

Silvia uses ingredients from her own gardens and nearby farms and interprets them with freshness and verve. She’s the only chef I know who manages to make
pici
light, with her sauce of cherry tomatoes, fava beans, and a few dabs of pesto thinned with olive oil. Silvia, a beauty who dazzles us with a sense of style that permeates every aspect of her life, comes from a local family of women who can flat-out cook. For decades, her mother owned Locanda del Mulino, a small inn on a stream, with a cozy restaurant where the tablecloths were angled layers of checked fabrics in cheerful colors. She recently turned the inn over to Silvia and Riccardo, who promptly remodeled the rooms and brought their own inimitable style to the restaurant, while keeping the cooks. The back terrace, overlooking a rushing stream, became one of the best spots on earth for a bowl of
pici
on a summer evening.

Silvia’s aunt owns Fontelunga, a complex of farmhouses for rent, with dinner served in her own home. Needless to say,
pici
is on the menu, sometimes with goose sauce, along with farro soup, splendid guinea hens on the spit, veal roasts, and cheeses from a local shepherd.

“W
ILL YOU TEACH
us to make
pici
?” Ed asked Silvia. Before we could set a date, Riccardo was on the line, too, planning a feast after the lesson. “Bring friends,” he insisted. “We’ll have three kinds of
pici
, then a leg of lamb roasted in a crust …”

A serene kitchen is a good sign of a fine meal. At Il Falconiere, the kitchen is blue-and-white tile, traditional
cotto
floor, a wall of copper pots, and gleaming, spotless counters with baskets of pristine vegetables.
Pici
, I soon learned, is easy to make. One of Silvia’s assistants, Ulive, formed the flour into a volcano shape, worked an egg into the well, and added enough water to make the dough pliable and not sticky. She formed a dome and covered it for a nap. This is the part of pasta and bread making that I love. There—done, the satisfying soft loaf resting under a white towel. We moved to the stove. The kitchen filled with robust aromas of garlic, duck pieces cooked with celery, carrots, onion, and handfuls of basil torn into quartered cherry tomatoes. Three sauces going at once. For the
pici all’aglione
, with garlic, toasted bread crumbs,
parmigiano
or pecorino, and liberal olive oil, Silvia simmered the chopped garlic in milk, then threw away the milk. The bread crumbs she stirred into the garlic were quite fine. “And the pecorino?” I asked.

“The cheese is stirred into the just-drained pasta,” Silvia explained, “
before
the sauce is added—this makes the cheese cling to the pasta instead of melting into the sauce.”

I jotted this
truc
in my notebook.

When the pasta dough had rested, Ulive cut a slice off the loaf and quickly rolled it out. She then cut the flattened circle into strands with a knife. This is where the fun began. She and Silvia showed us how to roll each piece until it was a yard long. Ulive worked on the board, pulling to lengthen as she rolled. Silvia preferred to roll in the air, letting gravity extend the length. Memories of making snakes with Play-Doh! We had fun looping the strands onto a tray, noticing how their
pici
achieved more uniformity than ours. Inevitably, some break. The result is a distinctly homemade product, with a sense of excitement from the actual creation of something only experienced previously through machines or the hands of others. “I love this!” I tell Ed. “It’s fun, like crafts at camp—knitting potholders or gluing together trivets with wine corks.” We’re big proponents of the Slow Food movement. Making
pici
by hand is so nicely slow. The motion is meditative and the result soul-stirring.

Dinner in the garden after our lesson lasted five hours. The arched iron rose pergolas framed the night views of the valley and at the end of the garden came the musical sound of water falling into the ancient cistern. Dining here, I always sense the presence of Riccardo’s ancestor, the seventeenth-century poet who raised falcons. Each of the three
pici
was served separately, with just-right wines to match. With the lightest, the
pici
with cherry tomatoes, the newest fava beans, and pecorino, we drank a Capanelle Chardonnay. With the piquant garlic
pici
, we had a red wine from over in the coastal Maremma area of Tuscany, a Morellino di Scansano made by Moris Farms. Ed and I often drink Moris Farms’ Avvoltore and are happy to try their Morellino. With the duck-sauced
pici
, Riccardo poured his own poetic estate wine, Rosso Smeriglio Baracchi 2001. The duck sauce was
magnifico
. After the duck was sautéed with the vegetables, ground veal and pork were added, along with fresh tomato sauce. The simmered result was incomparably rich and savory. I resolved to take the time to peel my tomatoes from then on.

As promised, the dinner proceeded to three-month-old lamb, butterflied and spread with herbs, then wrapped and baked in bread dough. With this pièce de résistance, Riccardo honored us with the unveiling of his big-lipped, mellow-voiced Baracchi Ardito 2001. This was an exciting moment. We were there the spring he planted the vines, when the grapes were picked, and when the juice went into barrels. Now the wine pours. We rejoiced that such a blissful wine came from the hills spreading out below us, then rising to the noble profile of Cortona in the distance.

T
HE MOTION OF
rolling the strands in the air feels fundamental, like spinning yarn from wool. Good, I’ve made too much. Thinking back on all the fun and warmth around eating
pici
, I also think forward to lunch tomorrow. Reheated, the strands will have absorbed more of my fresh garlic and tomato sauce. Maybe I’ll dab on some
robiola
cheese to melt into the tastes. For now, loops are arranged like necklaces on a cookie sheet.

My apple tart waits on top of the stove. Table set, wine selected, roses plopped into a pewter jug: immortal joys.

A
T THE END
of August, this high up, the garden peaks. At Domenica’s house, her outdoor kitchen becomes a tomato factory. We pick as many as we can haul from our
orto
and search cabinets for all the empty jars from last year. Only our tops have to be replaced every year. All the hardware stores sell the equipment for this ritual. I’ve always wanted one of those outdoor burners with the aluminum pot that’s big enough to bathe in. For our purposes, the stove works well.

The process is deeply familiar. My mother and Willie Bell devoted a day at the height of Georgia peach season to making their special Pickled Peaches, sterilizing the jars on the outdoor fireplace in a black iron pot. The entire yard filled with the scents of peaches and cloves, and, in turn, when the peaches appeared alongside the Thanksgiving turkey or the Christmas quail platters, the dining room filled with a summer morning.

Putting up tomatoes couldn’t be simpler, but still it’s a lot of work. After the jars are sterilized in a big vat, you pack in the tomatoes and top with a few leaves of basil. Then you cap the jars and lower them into a boiling bath for one hour, Domenica lets the water cool, then with tongs lifts the jars onto the counter. The lids must whoosh down in the center, then you know they’re airtight and will last for more than a year. While a hundred or so suffice for us, the pantries of Gilda, Domenica, Giusi, and Fiorella are jammed by now with three or four hundred jars. Aren’t we fortunate that the Americas gave Italians the tomato?

For us, there’s no greater satisfaction in the kitchen than rows of jars of tomatoes lined up, ready to pop open. They’re wonderful gifts to expat friends who don’t devote their Augusts to this lovely slavery. It’s fun to say to family members visiting while we’re gone, “Use all the tomatoes you want.” When one of us is alone for dinner, these jars offer a quick soup or pasta sauce with all the comfort of a real meal without time spent in the kitchen. Gilda and I save bits of cloth all year so we have bright patterns to cut into squares, place over the lids, and tie with raffia or ribbon. Gilda also puts up roasted peppers, sausages, and cherries. Ivan makes quince, fig, and squash preserves. Fiorella even puts up jars of eggplant.

T
OMATO PALOOKA PARALLELS
another seasonal passion. Now we snip wild fennel flowers, dry them on screens for a couple of days, then shred them of their stems and store the fragrant flecks in small jars. People on their walks carry small bags for yellow fennel flowers they can reach above the roadsides. How many ankles have been broken in mad leaps over ditches in hot pursuit of this delicate flower? Everyone knows that a gentle scattering transforms pork roasts and potatoes. The green-gold color and the mysterious antique scent remind me of medieval herbal cures and love potions. I think there’s some mythic attraction to fennel, perhaps because we first received fire when Prometheus ferried coals inside a fennel stalk. Baked fennel is superb. A little eponymous sprinkling doesn’t hurt that dish at all.

While cutting the fennel flowers, I pull an apple off the tree. Via my scented hands I learn that fennel and apple dance to the same tune. A pan of apples is baking in the oven and the added scent of fennel smells right.

For the
contadini
, St. John the Baptist’s day (June 24) is when you stomp down the garlic spears to stop the energy from going into the aboveground shoots; St. Filbert’s Day (August 22) is when you gather the hazelnuts. Probably a mnemonic from when people were more tied to the church calendar than to their electronic agendas, the association of a farm task with a saint, speaks to a drastically different state of mind. I enjoy the image that arises. John up in my
orto
stamping down the garlic with his boots, Filbert reaching over the hydrangeas to pick up the hazelnuts in their frilly shells. Today should be championed by someone—maybe the local Santa Margherita—as fennel picking day.