The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club

CONTENTS

ABOUT THE BOOK

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

TITLE PAGE

DEDICATION

PREFACE

Part I
MIRANDA

Part II
NINUCCIA

Part III
PAOLINA

Part IV
GILDA

EPILOGUE

THE RECIPES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

COPYRIGHT

Every week on a Thursday evening, a group of four rural Italian women gather in a derelict stone house in the hills above Italy's Orvieto. There – along with their friend, Marlena – they cook together, sit down to a beautiful supper, drink their beloved local wines, and talk.

Here, surrounded by candle light, good food and friendship, Miranda, Ninuccia, Paolina and Gilda tell their life stories of loves lost and found, of ageing and abandonment, of mafia grudges and family feuds, and of cherished ingredients and recipes whose secrets have been passed down through the generations. Around this table, these five friends share their food and all that life has offered them – the good and the bad.

Marlena de Blasi is the internationally bestselling author of
A Thousand Days in Venice
, as well as four further bestselling memoirs and a novel,
Amandine
. She has been a chef, a journalist, a food and wine consultant and a restaurant critic. She is also the author of two internationally published cookbooks of Italian food. She and her Venetian husband, Fernando, live in Orvieto in Umbria, Italy.

For Barbara Jean Filippi Siegel and Bruce Siegel
A family is made of love. Only sometimes is it also made of blood
.

For Tony Canzoneri
A quiet-spoken stalwart in the vanishing race of noble men

For Erich Brandon
, Figlio mio

For Fernando Filiberto-Maria
, amore mio

Francesco Brasini
An innocent who wanders nimbly among the wolves guided by a chivalrous heart and the uncluttered wisdom of a child

Linked by culture, blood, tradition, compassion, empathy and love, four rural women compose the Thursday Night Umbrian Supper Club. Their ages ranging from fifty-two to somewhere beyond eighty, they gather each week in a derelict stone house in the hills above Orvieto to cook, to eat, to drink and to talk. In another epoch – less distant in these parts than one might imagine – they would have been the women who gathered by a river to scrub clothes on stones or sat among meadow weeds to mend them, waiting for the weekly bread to bake in a communal oven. The four are linked, too, by their work, each one having earned her bread by making it. More specifically, the four are or were professional cooks who practise – or practised in the past – genuine Umbrian culinary traditions.

Inclined to things practical which, in their hands, somehow become also things romantic, the women say that gathering together by the fire and around the table is where one finds antidotes to life's caprice. A good supper, they are convinced, restores to us the small delights that the day ransacks. Through crisis and catastrophe and rare moments of uninterrupted joy, it's this round, clean and imperishable wisdom that sustains them: cook well, eat well and talk well with people who are significant to your life.

Long after I'd come to live in Orvieto and been befriended by the club's matriarch, she risked making room for me at the Thursday table. The only ‘stranger' among them, it wanted only time before I became
of them
, foraging, harvesting, making do, listening, watching, learning, enacting a few of my own ways and means upon them.

The narrative has a dual thrust: in exuberant detail it recounts what we cooked and ate and drank and, in at least as exuberant detail, it tells the stories of the women's lives: fidelity, aging, men and aging, sexuality, aging men and sexuality, aging women and sexuality, children, abandonment, destiny, death, the Mafia and Mother Church being among the subjects explored.

‘
Vivi per sempre
, live forever,' we'd say, as we set to work on the preparations for a meal. ‘Live forever,' we'd say again, holding each other's hands around the table, passing around loaves of still-warm, wood-baked bread, pouring out jug after jug of our own chewy, teeth-staining red, benevolence setting the scene for dining but, as much, for storytelling, invigorating memory, soothing rancour and even, once in a while, illuminating a fear long stuck in the heart tight as the stone in an unripe plum.

Spoken by Miranda one evening, maybe it's these lines that can best introduce you to the Thursday Night Umbrian Supper Club:

I don't know how much more I could have learned about the point of life had I wandered farther away than the eight kilometres from where I was born and have lived for all my life to where I'm sitting right now. I think that wherever I might have gone I would have found you. Souls like you. We are magnificently the same. Not only us, all of us. Without pain, without fear, who would any one of us have become, what would we have to show for having lived? Any five women, wherever, whomever, put them together at supper around a fire and,
ecco, ci saremo
, there we'll be. The point of life is to do what we're doing right now. What we did yesterday, what we'll do with what's left of our time. Surely we are not barren of fantasy or dreams and yet none of us seem to be swanking about, reaching for
great things
or, worse, perceiving ourselves to be doing
great things
. There are no great things. After the myth of security, the second greatest myth ever inflicted on humans is the myth that we were meant to triumph. How wonderful it is to be content with holding hands around this mangled old table, with some nice bread, some wine, a candle and a fire. A blessed sleep waiting.

The narrative is set in the years 2004 through 2008.

HAVING POURED OIL INTO A LARGE, DEEP POT, AND SET IT
over a quiet flame, she sets out for a quick tour of the garden and the meadow just as we are arriving. Shedding coats and shawls, greeting one another as though years have passed since last Thursday night, we see to the table, to the filling of the wine jugs from the demijohn of red sitting in the corner. One of us lays uncut loaves of new bread on the table, another pokes about to see what it is that Miranda has cooking over the hearth fire though none of us dares to put a hand to anything without her command.

Her breath a bit short from fervour for her mission, Miranda returns holding her apron together with two hands and in its hollow there are what must be the last of the string beans – green and yellow – the first of the brussels sprouts, the chopped-off long leafy heads of celery, apples, zucchini blossoms, sage. Two brown-skinned pears she has stuffed into her sweater pockets for tomorrow's breakfast.

‘Out of my way,
via, via,
' she says, pushing us aside, bussing cheeks as she passes each one, then sets to the tasks of rinsing and drying and trimming, preparing her bounty for glory. All of us familiar with her frying dance, we surround her, hungry children in her thrall.

Starting with the celery leaves, dragging the branches a few at a time into a batter no thicker than cream, she slips the dripping things into the hot oil, letting them be until they rise to the surface of the now bubbling oil, the force of which turns them over – without a prod – to crust the other side of them. Her feet anchored in place, the whole of Miranda's generous upper body sways, her hands flying over the leaves and the blossoms and the beans to the batter, to the pot, lifting batch after batch from the oil with a wide skimmer, turning the gilded stuff out to rest on a long, flat pan lined with a tea towel. We pass the pan among us, devouring the fritters out of our hands, burning fingers, burning mouths, and have barely placed the empty pan back to her reach – we still chewing and sipping and moaning – as Miranda piles it with another batch. And another. She saves apple peelings and sage leaves for the last, since these are what she, herself, craves most. As she lifts these onto the pan and moves the frying pot off the heat, she turns to us, taking a long pull from the glass of white someone slaps into her hand. Then Miranda eats, drinks.

‘Pan-to-hand-to-mouth food, I like the wine cold, nearly gone to ice following the hot shattering crust in my mouth, the contrast sending one's whole body into ecstasy,' she tells us. ‘I don't think I've ever served a
frittura
at the table. No time to get it there since I'm always on to the next round of dragging things through the batter, slipping them into the oil, lifting them out dark and crisp. I prefer everyone gathered around the pot, waiting.'

Sighing and laughing and crunching and sipping, Miranda asks for more wine. The three bottles of white (a rare luxury is ‘bought wine' on Thursday nights), which she'd cooled in a tub of supermarket ice, are dead soldiers. Someone suggests we drink the bottle of Champagne that has been lying on its side in some cupboard for months, a bottle from some lesser-known house in Reims, which was gifted – read:
lifted –
by one of the truckers among Miranda's admirers.

‘Shouldn't it be drunk cold?' she wants to know but two of the men are already fiddling with the foil, the wire, shouting ‘
Attenzione, attenzione,
' though the cork slides out with a quiet plunk. We pour it, flat and sour, into one another's tumblers, toasting Miranda and the thieving trucker. They go quiet, all of them, searching for some motive to compliment their first taste of ‘real French' when Miranda says, ‘Yeasty stuff, we might better have made bread with it.'

I begin a cliffs-notes version of the story of Dom Pérignon and the sometime glories of what came to be
la méthode champenoise
but Miranda couldn't be less interested. She says, ‘Leave a monk in a cellar and there's bound to be a travesty.'