Under the Tuscan Sun (26 page)

We hurry to the six-nineteen train and miss it. As we wait, I
mention the black bag I didn't buy and Ed decides it would be a
terrific Christmas present, although we have said we only are buying
things for the house. He and Jess literally
run
back to
the shop, halfway across town from the train station. Ashley and I
are uneasy when it's five minutes until departure but here they come,
smiling and panting, waving the shopping bag just as the train is
announced.

On Christmas Eve eve, we take off on a quest in Umbria. Ed
thinks we must have one of his favorite reds for Christmas dinner, the
Sagrantino, impossible to find this far from its origins. I am after
the ultimate
panettone.
I called Donatella, an Italian
friend who's a wonderful cook, and asked if we could make one
together, thinking the homemade would be better than the commercial
ones stacked in colorful boxes in every grocery and bar. “It takes
twenty hours of rising,” she says. “It must rise four times.” I
remember how many times I've killed the yeast when making simple
bread. When her mother was small, she tells me,
panettone
was just ordinary bread with some nuts and dried fruits tucked into
the dough.
La cucina povera
again. “It's really best to
buy it.” She gave me several brands and I picked out one for
Francesco's family. As I was about to take another, a woman buying at
the same time told me that the very best are made in Perugia. She
wrote the name of a shop, Ceccarani, on a piece of paper. So we are
off to Perugia.

Ceccarani's window display is a full crèche intricately
executed in glazed bread dough. Dough must be a good medium; the
figures have expressive faces, sheep look woolly, fronds on the
palm trees are finely detailed. The nativity scene is surrounded
by marzipan mushrooms and
panettoni
hollowed out on the
side. Inside each—what else but a miniature crèche?
Incredible!

Throngs of women fill the shop. I push to the back and select
a
panettone
as tall as a top hat.

Deeper into Umbria, we come to Spello and walk all over the
steeply terraced town. Coming down from Spello, we see the early
moon hoisting itself over the hills. We keep losing it as we turn then
face it again, the largest, whitest, spookiest moon I've ever seen.
All the way to Montefalco, home of the Sagrantino, we dodge the
moon. Two or three times we see it rise again, over a different
hill. Jess has taken to calling Ed “Montefalco” for his black
leather jacket and tendency to speed. He makes up Montefalco
adventures as we take several wrong turns. In the piazza, the wine
store is open but the proprietor is missing. We look around, look
outside, come back—no sign of him. We take a walk around
the piazza. The store stands wide open but still the owner is gone.
Finally, we ask at the bar and the bartender points to a man
playing cards. We buy our four bottles and head home, chasing the
moon across Umbria.

On Christmas Eve, Ashley and I launch into cooking. Jess, a
novice, is given tasks and entertains us with rock lyrics. Ed
dedicates the morning to squeezing silicone around the windows. He
runs into town to pick up tonight's first course,
crespelle,
from the fresh pasta shop. The delicate crêpes are filled
with truffles and cream. Our menu after the
crespelle:
a
warm salad of
porcini,
roasted red peppers, and field
lettuces, grilled veal chops, the local cardoons with
béchamel and toasted hazelnuts. For dessert, a family cake
I know by heart and
castagnaccio,
the classic Tuscan
chestnut flour cake. My neighbor says not to try it. Her grandmother
used to make it when they were very poor. “All it takes is
chestnut flour, olive oil, and water,” she says, grimacing.
“My grandmother said that they always had those. They flavored it
with rosemary and some pine nuts, fennel seeds, and raisins if they
had some.” I've never worked with chestnut flour, an ingredient I'd
considered esoteric until I learned that it was a staple of
la
cucina povera.
This recipe is decidedly weird. As my neighbor
indicates, it must be one of those acquired tastes.

“But where are the sugar and eggs—can this really turn
into a cake? And how much water to use? The recipe only says to
use enough for the batter to pour easily.” My neighbor just shakes
her head. I'm intrigued. This cake will send us back to the roots of
Tuscan cooking. Ashley and Jess are not so sure they want to be
transported that far.

Before siesta, we walk over the Roman road into town for
last-minute lettuces and bread. Where is our “angel”? In winter, he
does not seem to come to the shrine. I watch for his slow approach,
his eyes on the house, then his long pause while he places his
flowers. Would he bring a twig of bright rose hips, a shriveled
bunch of dried grapes, a spiny chestnut casing split to reveal
three brown nuts? Perhaps he walks elsewhere in winter, or stays
in his medieval apartment, feeding logs into the woodstove.

Cortona is hopping. Everyone carries at least one
panettone
and one basket of cellophane-wrapped gift
foods. No shop plays that canned, generic Christmas music I find so
dispiriting at home. People crowd the bars, stoking themselves with
coffee and hot chocolate because the sharp
tramontana
has
started to blow in from the north, bringing frigid air from the
Alps and northern Apennines.

Peaceful eve, bountiful feast, dessert by the fire. We all
hate the chestnut cake. Flat and gummy, it probably has the exact
taste of a Christmas dessert during the last war, when chestnuts
could be foraged in the forest. We trade it for a platter of walnuts,
winter pears, and Gorgonzola, a dessert for the gods. Long before
midnight mass, which we'd hoped to experience in one of the small
churches, we fade.

ED CALLS UP FROM DOWNSTAIRS, “LOOK OUT THE WINDOW.”
Snow fell in the
night, just enough to dust the fronds of the palm tree and glaze the
terraces with a sheen of white.

“Beautiful! Turn up the heat.” My bare feet feel icy. I
pull on a sweatshirt, jeans, and shoes and run downstairs. The front
doors are wide open, the frosty light pouring in. Ed scrapes a
snowball off the outdoor table. I jump aside and it lands in the
hall. The sleeping beauties have not yet emerged. We take our coffee
to the wall, brush it off, and watch the fog below us moving like
an opalescent sea. Snow on Christmas!

Is this much happiness allowed? I secretly ask myself. Will the
gods not come down and confiscate this health, abundance of cheer,
these bright expectations? Is this the old scar, this rippling of
want and fear? My father died on the eve of Christmas Eve when I
was fourteen. The funeral day was rainy, so rainy that the coffin
floated for a moment before it settled into the earth. My pink
tulle Christmas dance dress hung on the back of my closet door. Or
is this unrest just part of the great collective holiday blues all
the newspapers focus on every year? Many Christmases in my adult
life have been exquisite, especially when my daughter was a child.
A few have been lonely. One was very rocky. Either way, the season
of joy comes with a primitive urge that runs deep into the
psyche.

After breakfast, we build up the fire and open presents. We
brought over a few and slowly have accumulated the usual pile around
the tree. We hadn't intended to have so many but the day in Florence
inspired us to pick out soaps, notebooks, sweaters, and a surprisingly
huge quantity of chocolate. One of our gifts is a chestnut roasting
pan, which we put to immediate use. We're gathering at four at
Fenella and Peter's and one of our contributions will be roasted
chestnuts in red wine. We cut a thin slit on each, shake them over
the coals for less than ten minutes, then prepare to ruin our nails
peeling them. Perhaps because they are fresh, the shells come right
off, revealing the plump toasted nut. Everyone takes a job and we
fly through the preparation of two
faraone,
guinea hens,
and a rustic apple tart made by rolling a large round of pastry on
a cookie sheet, piling the buttered and sugared fruit and toasted
hazelnuts in the center, then flapping the pastry irregularly around
it. Our cook, Willie Bell, would be proud of my variation on her
cream gravy. To the
faraone
pan juices, I add
béchamel and chopped roasted chestnuts. I want chestnuts
in everything. Fenella is preparing a pork roast and polenta,
Elizabeth will bring salad, and Max is in charge of another vegetable
and dessert. We could fast before such a feast but we have a light
lunch of wild mushroom lasagne. A Christmas walk is a long tradition,
for Ashley and me at least. Ed and I haven't told them yet where
we are going.

We drive to the end of a road near our house and get out. We
discovered this walk purely by chance one day when we walked this
road and spotted a path at the end of it. We kept walking and made a
fantastic discovery. It was one of the great walks I've ever had and
we decided then to come back at Christmas. Water is flowing where I've
never seen it in summer. Sudden streams gush out of crevices and wash
over the road. We come to a waterfall and several torrents. Soon we're
in a chestnut and pine forest of huge ancient trees. We see a few
patches of snow in the woods and more snow higher up in the distance.
The air, deeply moist, smells of wet pine needles. We come to paving
stones laid end to end. “Look, a path,” Ashley says. “What is
this? It's wider up ahead.” Out here in nowhere, we're on a Roman
road in incredibly good condition for long stretches. We never have
reached the end but Beppe, who knows it from childhood, told us it
goes to the top of Monte Sant'Egidio, twenty kilometers away. Instead
of winding and skirting, Roman roads tend to go straight to the top.
The chariots were light and the shortest distance between two points
seemed to have governed their surveyors. I've read that some of their
roadbeds go down twelve feet. We're on the lookout for the distance
markers but they have disappeared. Cortona lies below us, and below
the town the valley and the horizon look polished and gleaming. We
see mountains in the distance we've never seen, and the hilltowns of
Sinalunga, Montepulciano, and Monte San Savino rise sharply like
three ships sailing against the sky. The last knot of my unrest
unravels. I start to hum “I saw three ships come sailing in on
Christmas Day, on Christmas Day in the morning.” A red fox leaps
down onto the path ahead of us. He sweeps his plumy tail back and
forth, regards us for a moment, then darts into the woods.

THE ROAD TO FENELLA AND PETER'S NOBLE FARMHOUSE IS
rough enough in
summer. Now we're holding on to pots and trays and trying not to
empty them into one another's laps. The poor Twingo's axle! We
ford several impromptu streams and almost get stuck in a washout of
near-ditch proportions. When we arrive everyone is gathered by the
gigantic fireplace, already into the red wine. This is one of the most
magnificent houses in the local vernacular. The living room, formerly
a granary, soars two stories high with rows of dark beams. The immense
room is filled with a lifetime collection of antiques, rugs, and
treasures. The space is too large to heat, however, so we settle
into big sofas in the former kitchen, with its fireplace large enough
for the original cooks to set their chairs inside it and tend their
pots. Downstairs the thirty-foot-long table is laid with pine boughs
and red candles. Ghosts of Christmases past join us in everyone's
stories of other holidays. Fenella pours the hot polenta onto a
cutting board. Ed carves the
faraone
while Peter slices
the succulent roast. We pile our plates. Fenella has journeyed to
Montepulciano for a stash of her favorite
vino nobile,
which travels around the table. “To absent friends,” Fenella
toasts. “To the polenta!” Ed rejoins. Our little expatriate band
is merry, merry.