Another reason (what do you think of that for starting in media res?), in addition to the cold, that I have relatively few exciting restaurant experiences to write about is that Jeremy and I have been very social since we have been here, and with Italians, no less. Last summer, Jeremy and I both signed up for Italian pen pals using a website called Conversation Exchange. I can't, of course, speak to anyone else's experience, but we both had great success with it, finding lots of Italians wanting to practice their English over email, Skype, various chat servers. I picked people largely based on their poor English and desire to write more than chat; Jeremy, ever planning ahead, choose more wisely, finding two correspondents who live near Florence.
All of my pen pals petered out, largely due to my terror of chatting with them in Italian, but Jeremy has kept up with both of his. Even better, we have gotten together with both of his pen pals and their significant others, and all four of them have been incredibly nice. You've already seen photos of our day with Matteo and his girlfriend, who took us around the countryside, and then to Prato for passagiato and chinese food. We had drinks and pizza with Katia and Andrea a few weeks ago. All four of these people are fairly young (around thirty); all four want to leave Italy. Katia and Andrea have plans to more to Australia in August. All four speak adequate English -- much better than our Italian -- but could use some brushing up. All four are wonderfully patient with us as we stumble through their language. All four seem to take the idea that they are our hosts in this country as a serious obligation, but one they assume with gusto.
Once we arrived in Florence, one of my colleagues at the campus here, Henry, set us up with a friend of his, Enrico, as a conversation partner. Enrico is older, and has quite an established career as an art historian. He specializes in the baroque. He has, if you will excuse the colloquialism, a phat apartment. It is right on the corner of Piazza D'Azeglio, one of the largest green spaces in the centro. He has a top floor apartment that takes up the entire width of the building, so he has light everywhere, with views of the park out the front, and views of the terra-cotta roofs out the back. As one might expect, he has a lot of objects: furniture, paintings, tea sets, and things. His English is about the same as our Italian, so it feels like a fairly equal exchange. He wants to improve because he is organizing an exhibition about a particular collector whose collection has been scattered. Several of the pieces have ended up in English country estates, and he wants to be able to talk the owners into lending him their valuables. To prepare, he is reading Jane Austen, which led to me explaining to both him and Jeremy the concept of a drawing room.
Enrico is from Belluno, and every item of food he offers us is from Belluno. The cheese, the salami, the rice, the totally horrifying little hard nougat candies. Even the corn meal was from Belluno, and grown by his brother. In addition, Enrico has a small country house and garden, somewhere I believe not far from Florence. Everything that is not from Belluno is from his villa: the honey is from his bees; the fennel is from his garden. Best of all, the lemon marmalade is from his lemon trees. Enrico has a perfectly charming habit of wanting to give us small samples of the wonderful things he has, so both times we have met with him, I've come home with my purse full of jars and bags. That lemon marmalade has been the real score so far. It's delicious: just tart enough to remind you it is lemons, chunky with peel, rich with pectin.
Saturday, Enrico invited us to his flat for conversation, and then dinner with several of his friends. It was completely fascinating to watch his approach to entertaining. About twenty minutes before his friends were to arrive, he began to ponder his pantry items. Really: twenty minutes before a six person, four course meal, he begins to think about the menu. After quizzing me about the way I make risotto, he settled on making a dried mushroom risotto (I must have passed), with a lovely piece of beef he had bought at the market for the secondi. So obviously the menu wasn't totally on the fly, but I really think everything else was.
The first food we started cooking was a fascinating and simple torta. It started with wheat flour (it was some very special kind, no doubt from Belluno, but it seemed like straightforward, finely ground whole wheat flour to me). He added a large gulp of olive oil, and then enough water to make a very loose batter -- I would say just a touch thicker than pancake batter. Then, he threw in a few handfuls of raisins. Into a large -- very large -- well olive-oiled cake round. Then, more oil on top, several spoonfuls of sugar, and copious amounts of rosemary. Into the oven until it was cooked through. I'm pretty sure the recipe would be better with a little leavening of some kind, but the flavors were surprising and great: the raisins brought out the fruitiness of the olive oil, the olive oil brought out the greenness of the rosemary, and the nutty wholewheat grounded the whole thing. This is definitely a recipe to work with. I'll let you know if I ever get it right -- you do the same, okay? The photo at the top of this posting is of us making the torta. Check out Enrico's wonderfully farmhouse-y kitchen, right in the middle of the city.
The beef was also a surprise. He browned it in a pot -- not a sauté pan -- with a lot of oil, salt, pepper, and a spice mixture labeled "spices for braesola" (except in Italian). As it was browning, he put the lid on. Every cooking instinct I had started to scream that this would ruin the meat, which was pretty lean to begin with. Maybe a tri-tip roast? I think I deserve extra credit for successfully biting my tongue. He cooked the meat that way, turning it occasionally, for maybe half an hour, not on super high heat. Somewhere in there, he added a big squeeze of fresh lemon. It never went into the oven. Somehow, magically, when it was time for the secondi, the meat was perfectly cooked. It was rosy and tender on the inside, with nice caramelization on the outside, and the oil and meat juices had combined to make a light and unctuous sauce. He served the meat with chopped chicory sprouts, lightly dressed in a vinaigrette, that would have been too bitter without the richness of the meat to offset it. Utterly divine.
Dinner was surprisingly informal: we ate at his large kitchen table rather than his formal dining room. Antipasti was cheese and salami passed on a wooden round, with no plates. Slices of bread were set directly on the table next to the plates. Wine was in water glasses, and water was nowhere to be seen. We talked about novels and films and whether fast zombies were truly zombies. Even I managed to follow and participate. Once again, the entire group was amazingly friendly and welcoming and patient, and I found that it was, in many ways, easier to talk about topics near and dear to me, since I didn't have to rely on idioms as much. The frozen vodka at the end of the meal may have helped.
The first food we started cooking was a fascinating and simple torta. It started with wheat flour (it was some very special kind, no doubt from Belluno, but it seemed like straightforward, finely ground whole wheat flour to me). He added a large gulp of olive oil, and then enough water to make a very loose batter -- I would say just a touch thicker than pancake batter. Then, he threw in a few handfuls of raisins. Into a large -- very large -- well olive-oiled cake round. Then, more oil on top, several spoonfuls of sugar, and copious amounts of rosemary. Into the oven until it was cooked through. I'm pretty sure the recipe would be better with a little leavening of some kind, but the flavors were surprising and great: the raisins brought out the fruitiness of the olive oil, the olive oil brought out the greenness of the rosemary, and the nutty wholewheat grounded the whole thing. This is definitely a recipe to work with. I'll let you know if I ever get it right -- you do the same, okay? The photo at the top of this posting is of us making the torta. Check out Enrico's wonderfully farmhouse-y kitchen, right in the middle of the city.
The beef was also a surprise. He browned it in a pot -- not a sauté pan -- with a lot of oil, salt, pepper, and a spice mixture labeled "spices for braesola" (except in Italian). As it was browning, he put the lid on. Every cooking instinct I had started to scream that this would ruin the meat, which was pretty lean to begin with. Maybe a tri-tip roast? I think I deserve extra credit for successfully biting my tongue. He cooked the meat that way, turning it occasionally, for maybe half an hour, not on super high heat. Somewhere in there, he added a big squeeze of fresh lemon. It never went into the oven. Somehow, magically, when it was time for the secondi, the meat was perfectly cooked. It was rosy and tender on the inside, with nice caramelization on the outside, and the oil and meat juices had combined to make a light and unctuous sauce. He served the meat with chopped chicory sprouts, lightly dressed in a vinaigrette, that would have been too bitter without the richness of the meat to offset it. Utterly divine.
Dinner was surprisingly informal: we ate at his large kitchen table rather than his formal dining room. Antipasti was cheese and salami passed on a wooden round, with no plates. Slices of bread were set directly on the table next to the plates. Wine was in water glasses, and water was nowhere to be seen. We talked about novels and films and whether fast zombies were truly zombies. Even I managed to follow and participate. Once again, the entire group was amazingly friendly and welcoming and patient, and I found that it was, in many ways, easier to talk about topics near and dear to me, since I didn't have to rely on idioms as much. The frozen vodka at the end of the meal may have helped.
We had Katia and Andrea (that's masculine name, here, by the way) over for dinner here last night, and I think it went pretty well, other than our total failure to utter more than twenty words in Italian. I think the night before drained us of all words. We spent most of the night talking about Lost, which they have been watching to practice English. I think I smell a little bit of a bait and switch, because surely if they can follow that series, they must speak much better English than they led us to believe. Interesting, they said they can understand everyone but Sawyer. And Charlie, but he died early, so he didn't matter so much. I tried to follow Enrico's lead, and keep things simple and easy: cured pork products and burrata for antipasti, orecchiette with zucchini flowers and grana, sliced chicken breasts with butter and sage, biscotti and vin santo for dessert. I was nervous about cooking Italian food for Italians, but they ate everything and seemed to think it was good.The dessert was not a success -- the vin santo had come as a gift from our landlady, and maybe it wasn't of the highest quality. It was, in short, cooking sherry. And, we already have a text from them they want to get together again soon, so it must not have been that bad!
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