Traveling through Italy, our resident gourmet discovers that the more he absorbs the country’s landscape and language, the better the food gets.
In Dante's Inferno, the gluttonous lie freezing in filthy slush, torn apart by Cerberus, a giant three-headed dog. There Dante encounters a dead friend, a fellow Florentine who in life gorged himself so much that he'd earned the nickname “the Pig.” I'd like to ask him for some restaurant recommendations.
• • •
“This may have been a mistake,” Tom said.
Our first meal in Italy was at a little corner restaurant in Florence, run by a kindly old guy with a grey mustache. It may as well have been art directed - how could we go wrong here? Tom (a college friend), Tracy (his wife) and I kept jetlag at bay with one hand and ate spaghetti alla carbonara with the other.
I am a lousy cook. For me, the most mundane culinary task takes courage and mental preparation. But I think I could do better than the nest of pasta spattered with ham shrapnel that sat before me.
How could this be? Had we just gotten unlucky? Or was it, in fact, excellent pasta, but in a subtle way that my untrained American taste buds couldn't detect?
Or do visitors just think the food in Italy is wonderful because they eat it surrounded by Italy?
I don't speak Italian, but Tom does. Wherever we went, he acted as Virgil to my Dante, guiding me through this strange, fantastic landscape and speaking the local language while I gaped around and asked ignorant questions.
Early in the trip, he always ordered for all three of us. Mutely listening to him interact with the waiters, I never knew exactly what he said (“This has been willed where what is willed must be”?), but it worked.
But the food continued to disappoint. A passable chicken panini. A pedestrian ham and cheese omelet. Chicken and potatoes that were good while I ate them but left me feeling as though my bones were coated in butter.
This last was in a restaurant where we had a reservation, so Tom and Tracy urged me to use one of my Italian phrases: Ho fatto una prenotazione (“I have a reservation”). Instead, I lowered my head like a puppy and said to the hostess, “Uh, reservation?”
• • •
Dinner on the third night was the first great meal of the trip, and we made it ourselves.
By “we,” I mean “Tom and Tracy, while I wandered in and out of the kitchen with a glass of Chianti.”
We'd left Florence for a Tuscan villa that at one point was Machiavelli's hunting lodge. We stayed in what used to be the on-site parsonage, renovated to include that most intimidating of rooms, a kitchen.
Tom and Tracy buck one stereotype about New Yorkers: They use their kitchen. They truly enjoy cooking together. The little improvisations that I find so bewildering are things they take in stride, even seek out. The language on the groceries doesn't matter to people fluent in the grammar of cooking.
They did trust me with the task of chopping a clove of garlic, then chopping some basil, then chopping a big goopy sphere of fresh mozzarella. (“I'm helping!” declared my inner 4-year-old.) Otherwise, my job was to gaze out the window at the knee-melting scenery.
In all directions, expanses of deep green forest blanketed the hazy mountains, crosshatched by vineyards and olive groves. At lonely outposts from each other, a villa or a church stood silhouetted on the summit or nestled down below, its vodka-sauce-colored terra cotta roof propped up by walls the color of mascarpone. Closer in, the thick stone walls of the neighboring buildings dug themselves in, home to scurrying green lizards. Clean warm breezes drifted through our rooms and back out into the countryside.
We ate out on the deck. Friendship, scenery, and a sense of accomplishment seasoned the meal perfectly. Maybe this was what people meant when they discussed the heavenly cuisine in Italy.
I hoped not. That seemed like a rip-off.
• • •
It turned out that better food could be found at little hole-in-the-wall restaurants. Literally, in the case of Siena; hundreds of tiny trattorias are sunk into massive fortress walls built centuries ago to protect the city from attack from the Florentines. (Didn't work.)
La Torre is one such restaurant, crammed with tables offering views of a couple of sullen cooks peering disinterestedly back at us. This was one place where I sampled a local dish called insalata mista, an assortment of greens and vegetables served raw in an olive-oil-like substance called olio. I'm going to have to try that recipe now that I'm back in the States!
In all seriousness, my meager Italian did find its most confident foothold in the realm of food ordering. Halfway through the week, I was carrying on halting exchanges with waiters, listening and understanding as they ran off lists of options. (“Bolognese! I know what that is!”) I found that as my Italian improved, so did the food. Did pride act as a flavorful sauce? Did the waiters save the good food for people who could speak a few words of Italian?
Tom, my poet-guide, approved of my development, but concurred that the food just didn't thrill like it was supposed to.
• • •
One evening we stopped into a small restaurant inSan Casciano. I was still in search of the meal that would forever ruin me for American cuisine, but I was beginning to suspect that I was going to go unfloored.
The bruschetta I ordered was a small watershed. Instead of the mushy diced tomatoes on toast I was used to, it was a mound of cherry tomatoes, each sliced neatly in half, on a slab of bread drenched in thick, green, spicy olive oil. The red tomatoes burst between my teeth, spraying my tongue with fragrance, and interspersed were a few tart, firm, green ones.
It was the first dish that truly knocked me out of my complacency. It was a no-brainer dish that anyone, even me, could throw together. But all the parts fit, and I felt like this bruschetta might act as my training wheels into a higher level of tasting.
Then came the penne arrabbiata, “angry pasta” that seemed barely irked, and I was shrugging again.
That's fine, I thought. Food is far from the only reason to visit Italy. The sheer historical and scenic wonder of the place is amazing.
Dessert. Tom ordered tiramisu. I'd never liked tiramisu, with its soggy ladyfingers and substanceless sugar. But Tom couldn't finish his, and he offered the rest to me.
• • •
Oh my good lord.
• • •
Oh quanto è corto il dire e come fioco al mio concetto! e questo, a quel ch'i' vidi, è tanto, che non basta a dicer 'poco'.
• • •
Coffee chocolate and cream seeped from my tongue through my extremities, melting me from the inside and drawing my eyes closed so no external sensory input would interfere with the agonizingly beautiful dessert I bathed in.
It was overwhelming. What was I supposed to do with all that excess pleasure? How was I supposed to go home and enjoy a Snickers bar now?
Humbled and disoriented, I staggered out onto the San Casciano sidewalk. To steady myself I turned my gaze upward, there to behold the stars.
The Banquet of Life is a bi-weekly look at one man's life through the food he eats.
