The Food of Love

The Food Of Love

By

Anthony Capella.

Laura Patterson is an American exchange student in Rome who, fed up with being inexpertly groped by her young Italian beaus, decides there’s only one sure-fire way to find a sensual man: date a chef. Then she meets Tomasso, who’s handsome, young - and cooks in the exclusive Templi restaurant. Perfect. Except, unbeknownst to Laura, Tomasso is in fact only a waiter at Templi - it’s his shy friend Bruno who is the chef. But Tomasso is the one who knows how to get the girls, and when Laura comes to dinner he persuades Bruno to help him with the charade. It works: the meal is a sensual feast, Laura is utterly seduced and Tomasso falls in lust. But it is Bruno, the real chef who has secretly prepared every dish Laura has eaten, who falls deeply and unrequitedly in love.

A delicious tale of Cyrano de Bergerac-style culinary seduction, but with sensual recipes instead of love poems.

TIME WARNER BOOKS

First published in Great Britain in 2004 by Time Warner Books

This edition published by Time Warner Books in June 2005

Reprinted 2005

Copyright Š Anthony Capella 2004

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any

resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely

coincidental.

Grateful thanks to Macmillan, London, UK for permission

to quote from The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking

by Marcella Hazan.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be

reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in

any form or by any means, without the prior permission in

writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any

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published and without a similar condition including this

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is available from the British Library.

ISBN 0 7515 3569 9

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‘An Italian meal is a lively sequence of sensations in which the crisp alternates with the soft and yielding, the pungent with

the bland, the variable with the staple, the elaborate with the

simple …’

Marcella Hazan, The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking

In a little side street off the Viale Glorioso, in Rome’s Trastevere, there is a bar known to those who frequent it simply as Gennaro’s.

It is, to look at, not much of a bar, being the approximate size and shape of a small one-car garage, but the passing tourist would

note that there is room outside for two small tables and an assortment of non-identical plastic chairs that catch the sun in the

morning, while the passing coffee lover would note that there is room inside on the stained zinc counter for a vast, gleaming

Gaggia 6000, the Harley-Davidson of espresso machines. There is

also room, just, behind the stained zinc counter for Gennaro,

widely regarded by his friends as the best barista in all Rome and a very sound fellow to boot.

Which was why, one fine spring morning, twenty-eight-year-old

Tommaso Massi and his friends Vincent and Sisto were standing at the bar, drinking ristretti, arguing about love, waiting for the cornetti to arrive from the bakery, and generally passing the time

with Gennaro before jumping on their Vespas to go off to the various restaurants around the city that employed them. A ristretto is

made with the same amount of ground coffee as an ordinary

espresso but half the amount of water, and since Gennaro’s espressos were themselves not ordinary at all but pure liquid adrenaline,

and since the three young men were in any case all of an excitable temperament, the conversation was an animated one. More than

once Gennaro had to remind them not to all argue at once - or, as the Roman vernacular has it, parlare }nu strunzo Ja vota; to only speak one piece of shit at a time.

The unusual strength of Gennaro’s ristretti was the result of his honing the Gaggia’s twin grinding burrs to razor sharpness, packing the basket with the resulting powder until it was as hard as

cement, then building up a head of pressure in the huge machine

and waiting until the dial showed eighty pounds per square inch

before finally allowing the water to blast into the packed coffee.

What came from the spout after that was barely a liquid at all, a red-brown ooze with a hanging quality like honey dripping off the end of a butter knife, with a chestnut-coloured crema and a sweet oily tang that required no sugar, only a gulp of acqua miner ale and a bite of a sugar-dusted cornetto, if only the bakery had delivered them. Gennaro loved that machine like a soldier loves his

gun, and he spent even more time stripping it down and cleaning

it than he did making coffee. His goal was to get it up to a hundred PSI, wray off the gauge, and make a ristretto so thick you

could spread it like jam. Tommaso was privately convinced that

even to attempt this feat was to run the risk of the Gaggia exploding and taking them all with it, but he respected his friend’s

commitment and ambition and said nothing. It was, after all, self evident that you couldn’t be a great barista without taking risks.

The conversation that morning was about love, but it was also

about football. Vincent, who had recently become engaged, was

being scolded by Sisto, to whom the idea of restricting yourself to just one woman seemed crazy.

‘You might think today that you have found the best woman in

the world, but tomorrow -‘ Sisto flicked his fingers under his

chin - ‘who knows?’

‘Look,’ Vincent explained patiently, or as patiently as he was

capable of, ‘how long have you been a Lazio supporter?’

‘All my life, idiot.’

‘But Roma are …’ Vincent hesitated. He wanted to say ‘a

better team’, but there was no point in turning a friendly discussion about women into a deadly fight. ‘Doing better,’ he said

diplomatically.

‘This season. So far. What of it?’

‘Yet you don’t start supporting Roma.’

‘Ah un altropaio di maniche, cazzo* That’s another thing altogether, you dick. You can’t switch teams.’

‘Exactly. And why not? Because you have made your choice,

and you are loyal to it.’

Sisto was silent for a moment, during which Vincent turned to

Gennaro triumphantly and ordered another ristretto. Then Sisto

said craftily, ‘But being a Laziale isn’t like being faithful to one woman. It’s like having dozens of women, because the team is

made up of different people every year. So you’re talking shit, as usual.’

Tommaso, who until now had taken no part in the argument,

murmured, ‘The real reason Vincent and Lucia got engaged is

that she said she’d stop sleeping with him if they didn’t.’

His friends’ reactions to this piece of intelligence were interestingly different. Vincent, who had after all told Tommaso this in

strict confidence, looked angry, then shamefaced, and then - when he realised that Sisto was looking distinctly envious - pleased with himself.

‘It’s true,’ he shrugged. ‘Lucia wants to be a virgin when we

marry, just like her mother. So we had to stop sleeping together until we got engaged.’

Vincent’s statement, apparently illogical, drew no comment

‘Literally: ‘That’s another pair of sleeves’.

from his friends. In a country where literal, fervent Catholicism was only a generation away, everyone knew there were as many

grades of virginity in girls as there were in olive oil - which, of course, is divided into extra-virgin (first cold pressing), extra-virgin (second pressing), superfine virgin, extrafine virgin, and so on, down through a dozen or more layers of virginity and near

virginity, before finally reaching a level of promiscuity so

unthinkable that it is labelled merely as ‘pure’, and is thus fit only for export and lighting fires.

‘But at least I’m getting it now,’ he added. ‘I’m sleeping with

the most beautiful girl in Rome, who adores me, and we’re going

to be married and have our own place. What could be better than

that?’

‘Tommaso gets it too,’ Sisto pointed out. ‘And he isn’t getting

married.’

‘Tommaso sleeps with tourists.’

Tommaso shrugged modestly. ‘Hey, can I help it if beautiful

foreign girls throw themselves at me?’

This amiable conversation was interrupted by the arrival of the cornetti, a tray of tiny sugared croissants, which in turn called for a final caffe before work. While Gennaro flushed the pipes of his beloved Gaggia in readiness, Tommaso received a sharp nudge in

the ribs from Sisto, who nodded significantly towards the window.

Coming down the street was a girl. Her sunglasses were tucked

up on the top of her head amid a bohemian swirl of blonde hair

which, together with her calf-length jeans, single-strap backpack and simple T-shirt, marked her out immediately as a foreigner

even before one took in the guidebook entitled Forty Significant Frescoes of the High Renaissance that she was holding open in one hand.

‘A tourist?’ Sisto said hopefully.

Tommaso shook his head. ‘A student.’

‘And how do you know that, maestro?’

‘Her backpack is full of books.’

‘Psst! Biondina! Bona? Sisto called. ‘Hey! Blondie! Gorgeous!’

Tommaso cuffed him. ‘That isn’t the way, idiot. Just act

friendly.’

It seemed puzzling to Sisto that any girl fortunate enough to

be blonde and attractive would not be impressed by having the

fact pointed out to her, but he allowed himself to be guided by his more experienced friend and closed his mouth.

‘She’s coming over,’ Vincent noted.

The girl crossed the street and paused next to the bar, apparently oblivious to the admiring stares of the three young men.

Then she pulled out a chair, put her backpack on the table and sat down, arranging her slim legs over the next chair along.

‘Definitely a foreigner,’ Vincent said sadly. Because every Italian knows that to sit down to drink coffee is bad for the digestion and will therefore be penalised by a surcharge costing three times as much as you’d pay at the bar. ‘You wait. She’ll ask for a cappuccino.’

Gennaro,

watching the pressure gauge of the Gaggia intently,

snorted dismissively. No proper barista would dream of serving

cappuccino after ten a.m, any more than a chef would offer cornflakes for lunch.

‘Buongiornol the girl called through the open door. She had a

nice voice, Tommaso thought. He smiled at her encouragingly.

Beside him, Vincent and Sisto were doing exactly the same. Only

Gennaro, behind the zinc counter, maintained a suspicious frown.

“giorno^ he muttered darkly.

”Latte macchiato, per favore, lungo e ben caldo?

There was a pause while the barista thought about this.

Although the young woman had spoken in Italian, she had

revealed her origins as much by what she had ordered as by her

accent. Latte macchiato - milk with just a splash of coffee, but served in a lungo or large cup, and ben caldo, hot, so that it could be drunk slowly instead of being thrown down the throat in a

couple of quick gulps in the proper manner. She was indisputably American. However, nothing she had ordered actually offended

propriety - she had not asked for espresso with cream, or de-caf, or hazelnut syrup, or skimmed milk - so he shrugged and reached

for the twin baskets of the Gaggia, while the three young men

tried to look as handsome as possible.

The girl ignored them. She pulled a map out and compared it,

with a somewhat perplexed expression, to a page in her guidebook.

A telefonino rang in her backpack: she took that out, too,

and proceeded to have a conversation which those inside could

not overhear. When Gennaro finally judged his macchiato worthy

of being served, there was a scuffle to be the one to deliver it to the girl’s table, which Tommaso won easily. He took one of

Gennaro’s little cornetti as well, placing it on the saucer and presenting it to the girl with a smile and a muttered, ‘On the house’.

But the girl was engrossed in her call, and her smile of thanks was all too brief. He had time to notice her eyes, though - grey eyes, clear and untroubled, the colour of a sea bass’s scales.