Dreaming In Italian

OK, if you’ve ever heard of a Tuscan talked called Lucignano, raise your hand.  I thought so.  It is as unknown to you as it was to me when I stumbled across this little jewel of a town; one of countless such beautiful little towns in Italy. A few years ago the Lovely D and I stayed in an agritourismo in Tuscany. It was pretty much in the middle of nowhere but was an amazing place to stay. In fact it deserves a post all it’s own and I will do so soon. I will share one photo of the apartment we had.

Note the monster fireplace which still had a hook installed to hold pots for cooking. It was a great place to have as a home base and we did day trips all over Tuscany and usually wound up eating lunch out but then had dinner back in our 200 year old apartment.  The closest town that was even on the map was Monte San Sovino and that was 10 km away along a very windy road. Monte San Sovino was not very interesting but an even smaller town nearby named Lucignano was very picturesque – see the photos below. Neither of us had ever heard of it and it was in none of the Italian guidebooks. Of course we found this often to be true of small towns in Italy. Little gems are everywhere. But as is often the case, I digress (just ask my wife).

We walked around the town there one day and wound up having lunch in a restaurant that was completely underground. It had a high stone arched ceiling that one sees often in Italy. We were a little late and were the only ones in the place. We were able to talk a bit to the owner chef – in my halting Italian, of course, since the young chef did not speak a word of English. It was our wedding anniversary the next day and were looking for a place to celebrate. My wife is a fishetarian, that is she does eat fish but no other form of meat. The chef invited us to come back for dinner the next day with the promise of an outstanding fishetarian meal fixed just for us. We did and he lived up to his promise. Course after course arrived and they were all excellent. At the table next to us were two couples considerably younger than us and, especially as the wine worked it’s magic, we began to talk with them. None of the four at the other table spoke any English but the wine was definitely improving my ability to speak Italian. After this amazing dinner we moved the two tables together so that we could more readily talk. The waiter brought bottles of grappa and whisky for us. This is something that I think used to be more common. The spirits arrive at the table at the end of the meal along with glasses and it is all gratis. There is no charge and one drinks as much as seems right. We all had our share that night and somehow managed to talk for an hour more after dinner. It was such a satisfying experience that I came back and diligently studied Italian for a while before I lapsed once again.

I guess that there are two points to this post. The first is that there are lots and lots of picturesque towns all over Italy that are never in guide books but are worth exploring because you find such wonderful things just following your nose. The second is that even a little bit of Italian can go a long way in the right circumstances. Besides the inherent beauty found all over Italy it is really the people that you meet and interact with that really make so much of a difference.

Carmen is an amoral shameless hussy but man, can she sing. She gets into a knife fight, seduces the straight arrow captain, blows him off for the bullfighter, turns smuggler and …. but I wouldn’t want to spoil the ending.  As usual I kind of got ahead of myself  here so I’ll go back to the beginning. Twenty five years ago I would have laughed if anyone had said that I would like opera. I mean wasn’t that for the swells of New York or maybe that well fed Italian crowd that go to La Scala in Milan. But of course at least the Italians seem born to it. My parents were retired and living in Santa Fe which has a well known summer outdoor opera season. They bought me tickets to see the Barber of Seville once when I came to visit. So what the heck at least it was a comedy. I can’t say that I was really hooked on opera at first. It kind of had to grow on me. But really, what a spectacle! There’s an orchestra, sometimes literally tens of people on the same stage, costumed to the teeth and acting as well as singing. Many (spear carriers excepted) singing in the chorus. Soaring arias with incredibly trained voices. They do everything but dance and probably only skip that because it’s too hard to sing with such power and dance at the same time. Of course nobody can understand the words no matter what language that they sing in but after all, who cares. The strength and purity of the voice can be so astounding at times. But then there was Carmen. I like a lot of the others but Carmen still blows me away. So many tunes that continue to run through your head. I’ve seen it live two or three times now and seen a great movie version with Julia Migenes (who I don’t know from Eve) and Placido Domingo (who I definitely know from Adam) in the big roles. Since I have found the secret to playing YouTube videos I have had a really tough time deciding which version of the famous “Habanera” aria to show here. I like the one from the movie and there are also several versions from actual stage productions. However I couldn’t resist the one sung by Angela Gheorghiu. She is just so powerful. I hope that you agree.

Just a little bit more about the opera. It is by Bizet, set in Spain and sung in French. So, of course nothing about this opera is Italian except maybe that opera as an art form clearly has its roots in Italy and many of the most famous opera singers, composers and opera houses are in Italy. So it’s kind of like pizza – appreciated world wide but origins in Italy. I do really recommend the movie mentioned above. We (the Lovely D and I) rented it from a local video store a few years ago. I checked Amazon and it is available but ridiculously expensive but I also noted that Netflix has it. There is another aria that is probably familiar even to those who’ve never set foot in an opera house – the Toreador Song. To make it even more international this one is sung by a Russian!

Carmen has a good mix of both serious and comic scenes but like so many operas it is the tragedy that wins out. Give it a try. If you can’t warm to Carmen then opera may just not work for you.  If you too have experience with opera (for better or worse) leave a comment and let me know.

I so wish that it could be called Festo Pesto but that would not be correct Italian (Festa Pesto is accurate). I did use that once for the party invitation because I thought that it was cool and few, if indeed any, of the participants knew any Italian at all. I call them participants because this is not your typical party. We make pesto of the best known basil variety. We make a LOT of pesto –  more than 5 gallons on one occasion. Let me start at the beginning. Over 20 years ago I was down at the local supermarket sometime, probably in early August, and found that bundles of basil were ridiculously cheap because it was at the peak of the season. So I thought “Why not give pesto a try?”. I bought handfuls of basil, some pine nuts, garlic and olive oil. Armed with my trusty cuisinart I cranked out lots of pesto. Great stuff. Reading further I found that if you don’t add the requisite cheese the stuff freezes magnificently. Being a little, well, lazy (pigro) and also a little cunning (furbo) I decided that I could get people to help out on this and benefit at the same time. Kind of like Tom Sawyer and painting the fence except with more benefits to the participants. So I invited a bunch of people over with the following proposition. Bring a one quart wide mouth jar and a quart of olive oil. Wide mouth is important because it’s going to get filled with pesto. I highly recommend that people divide it later at home into smaller jars because once defrosted and opened it will not last forever in the fridge. A jelly jar is about right. The quart of oil needs to be decent extra virgin olive oil. Nothing fancy smantsy but not the el cheapo of questionable origin. If it’s really cheap there’s probably a reason. I provide food, buy basil, garlic, nuts etc. We all make pesto. I wind up with plenty for the freezer and hopefully some left over olive oil to help defray the costs of the whole operation.  Oh, yes, I feed people too. I always have two pastas, one with last year’s pesto if available and usually a non basil sicilian pesto. There always some snacky things too – cheese, fruit, chips, etc. The success of the party has waxed and waned over the 20 successive years that I’ve had the party. That’s quite a milestone. The last few years there have been lots of people, usually 25-30 so that’s a lot of pesto. And that lazy part? Well this is really a lot of work both in the preparation and the cleanup so that didn’t work out so well but it’s a fun party to have. During these years I reserve lots of basil at produce purveyors to restaurants and markets and pick it up early on Saturday morning for the party later that day. I’ve had as many as 3 big boxes of it – 30 pounds. The photos below show the start of the process. The table set up with tools for production  – nice and clean at this point. The basil pickers starting to strip leaves off of the stems and the Dr. Squeeze who always provides the music.

I keep records from year to year to try and estimate the amount of each thing that I need to buy. It always varies some, especially depending upon the quality of the basil. Since I buy by the pound you never know how lush or scrawny the plants will be. I also have switched from pine nuts to walnuts because the walnuts work adequately and pine nuts just became ridiculously expensive. I bought a second cuisinart at a garage sale and various bowls and measuring cups for each cuisinart station to make the process easier. Some people like to pick basil leaves off of the stems and put them into containers for transport to the production area. Some people do the production duty –  the cuisinart crew.  At the end of the day a cooking funnel and ladle move the finished product into jars to take home (or go directly into my freezer). More photos below . The first cuisinart crew. This usually rotates as people volunteer or are “coaxed” into that role. Age is no limit as Sylvia (probably about 12 at the time) demonstrates. Hey, where did those flamingos come from. Next, the final product (over 5 gallons this time around) is being put into jars.

A work party is a lot of fun. People don’t just stand around and talk to people that they know because there is work to be done and they get to know each other pretty well after picking though a few pounds of basil, taking their turn at the production table and enjoying the wine and music. The question now is whether to continue the party. This year it just didn’t work out for various reasons but people have emailed asking when it is so I know that it a popular item. One more year and it will be an official adult. At the end of the day people are feeling good and we just need to toss out the stems – well, recycle.

What follows is a recipe for approximately 5 gallons of pesto. If that it a bit much then I recommend the first Marcella Hazan cookbook which is the basic recipe that I have used over the years.

Basil 30 pounds (4 cups per cuisinart load)

Walnuts 4 pounds ( 1/4 cup per load)

Galic 2 pounds (4 cloves per load)

Salt 5 ozs (1 tsp per load)

Olive oil until we run out of basil or oil (1 cup per load)

— add when dressing the pasta — combination of grated parmigiano and pecorino cheeses

Add the ingredients to cuisinart bowl and puree until smooth. Dump in bucket and repeat – a flexible spatula helps. A note on the salt. I find that 1 tsp is just slightly too much so after a while stir up the bucket contents and taste. If too salty don’t put in the salt for a while. When it starts to taste like it needs salt resume adding it.

Once you are ready to eat some of the fruits of your labors, you start cooking the pasta. You will need some grated cheese. Marcella says that it is best with a mix of about equal parts of pecorino and parmigiano, You know, she’s absolutely right. Leave out the pecorino and you have a suboptimal dish. I put pesto in a measuring cup and a little of the pasta cooking water just before it’s done. Also it pays to keep a little of this water around in case the concoction is too dry after you add the cheese. I have added one small refinement. In season I roughly chop some nice tomatoes and put them in the colander. I pour the cooked pasta and water over the tomatoes. They don’t cook but kinda get loosened up. The pasta and tomatoes go into a bowl, add the cheeses, mix, moisten if needed and feast!

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I would really be interested to know of other pesto experiences as well as other interesting themed parties. You can let me and others know with a comment.

This post could be subtitled “Why I Started Studying Italian Again”. It was a fortuitous sequence of events that led me to take up Italian again. My wife (the lovely D) has a client who had started studying Italian because of her love of Italy. I believe the connection from that point was a familial one, i.e. a language teacher was organizing an informal group to meet in a local cafe to speak Italian. Thus was I led to the lovely Mira. You can see her website here. So I started attending and stumbling along in my very rusty Italian with Mira and Victor. After some weeks we were joined by others and the core group now typical includes a total of five. The members are Mira, who is from somewhere in the Midwest but speaks several languages.  I think Italian is the best other than English. Then there is Victor. He is quite a character as well as an inspiration. He started studying Italian about a year ago at 69. The goal was to be able to talk to the locals during his long planned stay in Italy for his 50^th wedding anniversary. So anyone that thinks that they are too old to take up the study of a new language should consider Victor. Also he wrote the original “Friday the 13^th” movie script and has ever since been accumulating enough good karma to cancel that out. He also has a website that you can find here.  The next regular to join was Angela who is a reporter and has done a number of articles on local topics as well as having work in broader based publications.  Finally there is Doak. Yes, Doak, is not a typo. Apparently there was some famous football player about the time that Doak was born with that name and he has had to explain both the spelling and the story ever since. He’s an elected union official and seems addicted to the study of Italian.  There is another participant who I have only seen a couple of times and really don’t know much about him. His name is Jackson and he is a student at San Diego when he’s not here for the summer.

Aside from meeting at the cafe we recently had a dinner together at Angela’s house. Spouses were not invited so that we could speak Italian for the whole evening without apology and we almost did it. In a moment of excitement (and fueled by wine) I had to break the English barrier to discuss a point that I just couldn’t muddle through with my Italian. In any case it was a great evening and I think that we all were perhaps a little surprised that we could speak Italian almost the whole time and have real conversations. I could even understand Mira a couple of times when she spoke more rapidly than she usually does. Here is a photo of the evening. From the left: Angela, the lovely Mira, Victor, me and Doak.

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