Mediterranean Summer (14 page)

“This is mad! Absolutely mad!” Rick said as he ran into the pantry to grab more plates and give the call for the next course. “I can’t believe how fast these people eat!”

“What’s going on up there?” I asked.

“
Che meraviglia”
—what a marvel—“everyone says, and they grab the plates as soon as I can get them served. It’s impossible to stay ahead! Then
la Signora
wants me to keep pouring champagne!”

“And Ian is scrambling to keep up with the busing,” I said.

“Just keep sending me food and plates. Don’t worry about timing. You decide when to change courses. At this point it doesn’t matter,” Rick said as he disappeared behind the pantry door to the salon. His hair began to take on the look of a mad professor.

Kevin started to laugh at the insanity in the galley. “Do you think they’ll invite us to join them?” he said, adding another note of dry humor.

I could hear Ian on deck giving Scott the heads-up that more plates and platters were coming his way. There was a constant clatter of empty wine and water bottles being dropped into the bin on deck. By now, filled garbage bags were piling up in the crew quarters as Scott and Nigel worked in tandem from the deck to below. The over-splash from rinsing the masses of plates in the head had most of the floor in the crew area drenched. Pasta, sauce, and soaked pieces of bread blocked the drain. This couldn’t be dealt with until after the party tide was out. Nigel filled the sink with the flatware, which needed to be sorted before washing.

“Shit! The cheeses in the chain locker. They can’t get wet!” I exclaimed. I broke from the stove to go forward. Nigel helped me move the mounds of garbage so I could open the chain locker. Thank goodness, I had put garbage bags on top of the cheese to act as a cover.

“David,
la Signora
is asking for the
vitello”
—the veal. “How long?”

“Three minutes,” I said, the standard restaurant line cook answer that gives something the waiter wants to hear when you are not quite ready. I was now wet with rinse water and sweat. The floor was getting slippery. The humidity from the stove and dishwasher made the galley feel like a steam bath.

Kevin tried his best to keep up and stay out of my way, at the same time agreeing with Rick about how crazy this all was. Nigel delivered stacks of plates and as much flatware as he could carry by hand. “The sooner we get it out, the sooner it will be over,” he kept assuring me.

When the fourth platter of the meat course went up on deck, I knew we were close to the end. All I had to do was arrange the petits fours on platters, get them to the buffet table, then make the galley somewhat presentable so that I’d be in decent shape for race day. The sight forward was pretty scary. Our world had been turned upside down—
distrutto
—destroyed. It would take all of us to put the fo’c’sle back in order. We had our work cut out for us the next morning before the guests got up to have breakfast on deck. Garbage had to go out, the head had to be washed, rentals had to be put back in the crates, and some form of order had to be restored below while at the same time the deck had to be cleaned and all of the brass polished. I suddenly realized that Patrick had never come below to offer a hand.

For dessert, I could have sworn there were three boxes of chocolate petits fours. As I looked through all of them, a bit puzzled, I heard Ian say, “Uh-oh,” while he took a break at the mess table.

“What’s up?” I asked. I could see a look of embarrassment on Kevin’s face as he turned away.

“Well, we had a little problem last night,” Kevin said. “I seemed to have caught the edge of the box and felt icing squirting through my toes when I tried to climb up to my bunk. I can’t believe you didn’t hear us laughing when I hopped on one foot to the head to wash my foot off.”

My chocolate petits fours. I thought for a second about the efforts and skill of the
chef pâtissier
making these little gems. And then I thought about what I was going to do to make things right. But after my third nineteen-hour day, I had no energy left for either yelling or crying. We arranged the others on platters, and no one went home hungry. The meal had ended.

By midnight, we were cleaned up enough below for me to go on deck and get some fresh air. I stayed on the foredeck to check out the scene. The cool air—or what seemed cool compared with the galley—refreshed me. Gipsy Kings music blasted from the yacht next door, the Latin rhythms starting to lull me into a trance broken by the music from other parties on neighboring yachts. I watched small groups of guests chatting and laughing on
Serenity,
while attractive Italian women danced barefoot to the music in their little summer dresses on
Pegasus
with the night lights of the city behind them. I wondered what a hundred pairs of designer shoes looked like on the quay.

Another night I might have stayed up and watched the show, but I was so tired that I quickly went down and crawled into my bunk. I passed out after the second breath and went into a deep, comfortable sleep. Then the racket awakened me. A group of guests were stomping on the deck above me and banging on the hatch-cover glass, repeating in unison: “
Davide, Davide, abbiamo fa-me, abbiamo fa-me!”
—Da-vid, Da-vid, we have hun-ger, we have hun-ger! The words were coming out louder and louder, faster and faster.

Rick came into the cabin.

“David,
la Signora
wants pasta for everyone. Penne with spicy tomato sauce.” I looked at my alarm clock—it was two-thirty in the morning.
Damn it.

“That’s what they’re saying,” I said, still in a daze.

“They’re nuts! It just won’t stop!” he said as he went to get the service wares together.

“How many people are out there?” I asked when I went into the galley.

“Maybe thirty or forty, mostly friends of the kids.”

I was in no mood to cook. It would take almost an hour to boil the water, plus I had to make the sauce. Then it came to me. This was why the cases of pasta and the big pot had been delivered. After a long and challenging few days, I learned firsthand the meaning of the Italian party tradition after a late night called the
spaghettoni.
An hour later, eight pounds of pasta with spicy tomato sauce were being portioned on deck, and just short of nauseous I made my way back to the bunk and finally to sleep.

I awakened to Ian
handing garbage bags up to Scott through the crew way. Rick was still sleeping. I went above to see what was going on, the clear and bright morning landing hard on my eyes. Kevin and Nigel were hosing and brushing the deck. On the quay, I saw two of the owners’ twenty-something-year-old kids jump out of a taxi. Ties loosened and collars opened. I got the sense that they were returning from a night at the casinos and wanted to board their boat before their parents awakened and saw that they had been out all night. Still sorely lacking sleep, I edged my way onto the pier and sleepwalked to the bakery. Thankfully, only one stop today.

I should have felt good. Every meal had been a success so far, but I was so tired and so cooked out that even though this was the day of the Grand Prix, I couldn’t generate any excitement. At least lunch would be easy—sliced cured meats on platters, an arrangement of cheeses, and a big basket of
panini
were all anyone would get for lunch.

As I walked through town, I had to acknowledge that
la Signora
’s menu plan for the weekend had actually been well thought out, clearly a result of having done this before. She had put together a doable menu for the numbers even in a space and facility not equipped to handle the volume. But in a proper kitchen with a couple of other cooks, prep time would have been halved. On the front end, our decision to rent lots of service wares to make the occasion casual yet elegant was not only smart but necessary. I just wished we had a little more than four days’ notice to provide all of it. The guests must have been invited in advance to plan their schedules, so why wait to tell the staff that would be doing the procurement?

Rick’s contributions to the ingredient list, I realized, were also good ones. I shouldn’t have snapped when he returned with frozen seafood and concentrated veal stock base. They were quality items in their own right. Did I really want to clean twenty pounds of baby octopus and twenty-five pounds of shrimp? I probably could have been smarter and gotten away with a little cheat on the red wine sauce. I made the sauce in the traditional, time-consuming manner. Roast the bones, make a rich stock, do a wine reduction, make a sauce base, pass through a sieve, then simmer to clean the sauce and reduce, finally passing again through a
chinois
for a clean, clear consistency. Even in a proper kitchen, this can be a thirty-hour process.

The few gallons I needed for the party could have been made with a nice red wine reduction blended with a double concentrate of the veal base then thickened with some cornstarch. With a final flavoring from a jolt of red wine to bring up the acidity and some herbs and seasoning, it would have been finished in a fraction of the time. Plus, that late in the evening, no one would have noticed the difference if the flavors were on.

Rick had been around this block before. I realized I was the neophyte. When I returned to the boat later that morning, I apologized to him for snapping.

“Don’t worry about it,” he responded. “You’re a perfectionist. Now you know for the next time.”

Race time began an hour after lunch. My responsibilities were over. I climbed the ratlines to the spreaders near the top of the mast to watch my first Grand Prix with Kevin and Ian.
La Signora
told me to be careful going up and didn’t think it was a great idea. She knew I was exhausted. I went up anyway and attached a lifeline around my waist. As the race began, all eyes were on the serpentine racecourse. I watched for a while but found myself pulled by another view. I looked east, down the coast toward San Remo and Portofino, toward Italy, toward a place I felt comfortable enough to call home. Not even the loud pops of downshifts and cheers from the massive crowd could break my gaze. Italy was only a week away.

Six

Sea Dates

Portofino and the Italian Riviera

O
ur cruising schedule was determined, in part, by longstanding yachting superstition.
Il Dottore
did not want any departures on Fridays, and so we were ready to leave for Portofino late Thursday evening, an hour before midnight. By hedging the consequences of maritime lore, we would keep out of harm’s way.

At a quarter to eleven, four days later in base port, we were all on deck ready to perform the parting procedures we had been assigned. A few late-night strollers on the quay watched, and friends from neighboring yachts stopped by to wish us well. For the next three and a half months, we’d be cruising along the western shore of Italy, and I had that unmistakable sensation of change, that the life I had carved out for myself here in Antibes, a triumph from my years abroad, might become a part of my past.

The portholes below were latched shut; the marine band radio, radar, and navigation lights were turned on. Even the temperate and breezeless weather of the night added to the sensation of going away. Patrick started
Serenity
’s growling engine. I was on the aft deck when he made the call: “Everyone ready…stern lines off!” They were taken off the bollards by yacht club attendants onshore as Nigel and I pulled them on board. As soon as Patrick engaged the engine into forward, Kevin started to bring in the anchor while Ian packed the chain in the lockers below.

As we slowly and carefully started pulling out of our slip, we heard from the other sailors on the quay, “
Bon séjour!
” “Good luck!” “See you in September.”

Once we had cleared the marina breakwater, Patrick called everyone to the cockpit to explain the watch schedule. “I want two of you on deck at all times, with a change occurring every hour, on the hour.” Given that there were seven of us, this meant two hours on, five hours off, regardless of the time of day, until we arrived at our destination. For the trip to Portofino, we would all be needed for one rotation. We chose the order for the passage. Rick proudly volunteered for one of the graveyard shifts from two to four. “At this hour, what’s the point in going to bed when I’m not even tired and we will be in Portofino by six or seven? I’m pulling an all-nighter!”

I liked the responsibility of watch duty. It made me more than a below-deck crew member. One of us would drive the boat, keeping it on course by following the predetermined compass headings. The other watched for traffic at sea and, when sighting another vessel, made an assessment, based on the arrangement of red, green, and white lights mounted on its masts and decks, of what type it was and, most important, what direction it was headed. Then its course was tracked in order for us to proceed with prudence. At the same time, we were both expected to eye the sails, monitor the radio, and make the required log entries recording any events or course changes. On deck, the only illumination was the dim map light in the chart house just forward of the cockpit and the compass light inside the binnacle. The cockpit took on the comfortable feeling of a late-night, darkened cocktail lounge. For those couple of hours on watch, I was not just the cook on board. I was a sailor, sharing responsibility for the welfare of the boat and helping in the safe passage to a destination.

But time on watch was also a time for conversation. While in Antibes, at the end of the workday on the boat, everyone would go back to his life onshore. Except for Rick, I didn’t get a chance to get to know the rest of my crewmates very well. But standing under the stars, bound together for two hours in shared responsibility, acting as captains of our ship, with little to do other than keep the boat on course and stay alert to some adverse occurrence, we would be silent. Eventually we’d begin to speak of things that revealed who we were.

“Have you ever been to Italy before?” I asked Scott after getting settled into driving the boat on the heading that Kevin told me, upon relieving him, would keep us on a straight shot to our destination.

“No, never,” he said while looking into the dark void of the night beyond the rail. It seemed like I had interrupted his thoughts.

“You’ll love it,” I said.

“If we were going on our terms, possibly. But since we are going by virtue of our employers, I see this as work, not as a holiday.” He spoke as if wherever we’d go, it wouldn’t much matter to him.

“But if you’ve never been, here’s a paid opportunity to go there. You don’t have to be on a vacation to get something out of a place you’ve been.”

“True, but Italy just hasn’t been on my list of must-see destinations.”

On this topic, it seemed we had nothing in common. I figured it best to change the subject.

“I noticed you brought a lot of books on board.”

“I’ll be able to catch up on my reading when the owners are on board.”

“No repairs or maintenance then, right?”

“Something like that,” he said.

I got the sense he knew a lot. All kinds of things. Which was appropriate for a marine engineer. He
had
to know a lot. We spent the rest of the hour in our own wandering thoughts, which were occasionally broken by matters relating to our course and heading.

When Nigel came up for my second hour, he was interested in how long I had been moving from one restaurant to the next. As he was on a round-the-world tour, we talked about the challenges of living out of duffel bags and backpacks.

His tour was a time to see as much as he could and possibly find ways to put enough money away so that when he got home, he could pursue his dream and settle down.

“All I want to do is make enough money to support my diving habit, mate,” he told me.

Not long after sunrise,
I was awakened after a few hours of sleep by the change in engine noise, going from cruising RPM to quiet idle speed, meaning we were approaching our destination. I put the jumbo espresso pot on the stove for the crew coffee, and then went up on deck to see that we were just outside the inlet to the marina of Portofino.

Patrick brought the boat to the mouth of the harbor. From this vantage point, the huddled harbor buildings, some with roof terraces adorned with large terra-cotta pots filled with vibrant flowers, were fronted by rows of small colorful boats on moors and backed by lush greenery blanketing the steep terrain that went up to the sky. I was taken by the almost surreal beauty of this protected marina. I wondered what it must have been like centuries past when Portofino was a working harbor, built to service those that worked the vessels that went out to sea.

For now,
Serenity
needed to be seen by Antonio, the harbormaster who lived and operated his business from a little sailboat tied up at the middle of the quay. Antonio watched over this popular marina where there were only a few spaces that could take a boat as large as
Serenity.
When I saw Patrick coming over to me with a bottle of whiskey and a handheld radio, I knew what he wanted. The whiskey was for Antonio, and I was sent to shore in the launch.

Antonio, a true salt, slightly graying and fit, loved
Serenity
and didn’t hide his pleasure at having her call on his port. I received a big “
buon giorno!
” from him when I arrived at his boat. I handed him the bottle, and for a few minutes we chatted away about which yachts were cruising the Mediterranean and which had been in port thus far. I then asked him if we could bring
Serenity
in. “Of course,” he said, beaming. He assigned us a berth next to the ferry dock for the week-end, telling me it would be no problem as long as we were out by seven o’clock Monday morning. I called Patrick, and he slowly backed the boat along the narrow stretch to the quay. It never occurred to me what would have happened if Antonio said no. The owners expected to step onto their boat that afternoon.

After helping to clean the deck and dry the varnished wood with a chamois, I headed to Panificio Canale, the bakery at the center of town, to get some freshly made focaccia, the pride of Ligurian bread making. The tiny shop was busy, locals shuffling in to get first dibs on the second bake of the morning. The smell reminded me of a pizzeria—hot, yeasty bread, olive oil, tomato sauce, but without the cheese.

“
Ciao, marinaio!
” was how Mary, the woman behind the counter, acknowledged me, her voice sailing over the crowd as soon as I walked in. Amazingly, she remembered me from my last visit. I had been here when I worked at Cà Peo, a restaurant tucked in the hills behind Chiavari just down the coast. “The
americano!
” she shouted out, blowing any plans I might have had to pass as a native. “What boat did you come in with?” It seemed that she had a special thing for sailors and would give them a little extra attention—the way local bartenders give special treatment to home port fishermen.

“Serenity.
We’ll be here for the weekend,” I replied loud enough for her to hear me at the other end of the shop.

“Fantastico!
What can I get for you?” she asked, as she worked her way down the counter to hand me a piece of warm focaccia she had cut with a scissors from a large sheet. “Try this,
caro,
it’s the best!” She reintroduced herself as Mary instead of Maria, but I told her I remembered. This pleased her.

The focaccia was delicious—thin with a slightly crispy outside and spongy inside, olive oil filling the dimples on top and sea salt crystals crunching in my mouth at the first bite. All I needed was some soft and tangy
stracchino
cheese spread over the top, and my preference for savory over sweet in the morning would be satisfied.

I made an executive decision that the crew should experience a taste of local flavor our first day here. Mary convinced me to buy a full sheet of plain focaccia, and then another with a thin layer of tomato sauce that had black olives strewn on top. Both were cut into quarters, wrapped in white paper, and then tied with string as they do in cake shops. Immediately, the oil started to show through the paper that had been warmed by the bread. I honored some of the other crew requests with some
cornetti
—croissants—filled with marmalade for those that craved sweet. As soon as I turned to leave, Mary greeted her next customer without missing a beat: “
Ciao, bellissima!
”

The rest of the crew were deep into maintenance or polishing tasks when I got back to the boat. Our day was under way, and there was an aura of stress on the crew members’ faces as they seemed to work a little faster than normal. I assumed it was because this was our first weekend with the owners on board in Italy. Nigel and Kevin were the only ones who seemed interested in the focaccia, grabbing a couple pieces from the platter I left on the mess table and taking them back up on deck. The rest didn’t seem to care, and even though I put another pot of coffee on the stove, I had the sense that my effort was good, only late in delivery.

I sat at the table to pull some ideas together for the weekend’s menu. This area reminded me of fish, seafood, and lots of great vegetables. After reviewing my notes from the restaurants where I worked in Liguria and Lombardy, I looked through my Italian regional cookbook and other great resources, Alan Davidson’s
Mediterranean Seafood
and Pellegrino Artusi’s
L’arte di mangiar bene.
I was inspired to make poached or baked fish with a classic condiment of the region,
salsa genovese,
a green homogeneous blend of parsley, garlic, capers, anchovies, a few olives, olive oil, a touch of vinegar, and a cooked egg yolk or two making it different from
salsa verde
; seafood salads; the purple-tipped artichokes from the region; crêpes with the same wild-greens filling and walnut sauce as traditionally used in a pasta called
pansotti;
and an almost flourless chocolate cake that would go perfectly with a light and fluffy
crema di mascarpone
—mascarpone cream—both of which I learned from my friend Franco at Albergo del Sole. For this one, I’d exchange the rum in the
crema
recipe for espresso. I already had all the dessert ingredients in the yacht’s stores save the mascarpone, which would be easy to find in any
latteria
.
La Signora
had suggested when in Portofino to keep an eye out for
bianchetti
—tiny fish that are deep-fried whole and served to her preference with lemon on the side. And I thought of pesto, that simple amalgam of basil, garlic, pine nuts, and oil, admiring how classic and important it had become to the history of Italian cuisine. Christopher Columbus carried it on his voyages from Genoa and so would
Serenity.