Read Online The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club by Marlena de Blasi - Free Book Online Page A

eaten figs on bread. How delicious but how strange I thought until I thought again, of Fig Newtons and then of raisin bread and then of my favourite biscuits, the ones stuffed with dried apricots. Dried fruit and something bread-like or cake-like to embrace it. Breaking through my Fig Newton reverie, one of the cousins announces, ‘
E arrivata la Miranda.
’
    Miranda has arrived. Am I mistaken or did he take off his cap, smooth his hair, place it back with a certain precision? Miranda-of-the-Bosoms – at seventy-six plus six – can still make the little boys cry. Sure enough the thrum of her
ape
– a three-wheeled, two-seat truck with a miniscule flatbed and tiny motor that sounds like a buzzing bee – sputters to silence and, in two beats, she shambles through the door, unwrapping her shawls, begins ladling out the beans and their good-smelling winey broth, refilling tumblers with the brawny teeth-staining red, asking after each of us, greeting the cousins and the she-ass. She takes a small piece of untoasted bread, holds it under the spout where the crushed, but not yet pressed, olives are sliding out in a dense, creamy paste. Letting a few drops of it fall onto the bread, she bites into it.
    Glorioso
, she says and the cousins pat one another on the back as though they, instead of the rain and the sun and the wind and the hundred-year-old lymph coursing through the trees, had made the olives good.
    Sitting herself down at the table with us, she reaches for the bottle of oil, pours out a few drops onto the fleshy part of her palm just below the thumb and sucks at the oil, rolling her eyes in delight.
    â€˜The only way to taste new oil,’ she says, laughing and smacking her lips. ‘There’s a pepper mill around here somewhere if anyone wants it for the figs. Am I to understand that this little convention is going about the work of resuming Thursday suppers?’
    â€˜I think it will be,’ I tell her. ‘It was warmth and wine and food we were after first, though. I was just about to …’
    Having helped herself to the beans, Miranda interrupts, ‘The oregano is good in the beans. Just enough.
Brava
,’ she says glancing at Ninuccia and nodding her head, her mouth turned down in a gesture of admiration. Shifting her gaze then to me, she asks, ‘So what will you cook, Chou?’
    â€˜To begin,
crostate di olivada
’ – free-form rounds of cornmeal pastry folded and pleated over part of the olive pesto. A lattice work of pastry over the middle. We would use the new oil in the pastry and also in the
olivada
. ‘I think it’s good to use what’s left of last year’s olives – the ones we brined and dried. And, in the same dish, to use the new oil. You know, old and new. Round.’
    â€˜Chou must always have a story with her bread,’ Miranda says. ‘
Bene, d’accordo
. Good, I agree. And then?’
    â€˜I would cook pasta in
novello – in the new wine
.’
    â€˜An ancient method.’ This is Gilda.
    â€˜Right,’ I say, relieved not to have been countered. ‘It’s the only way dried pasta was cooked for centuries … boiling it in water is a relatively novel notion. From the middle of the ninteenth century, I think.’
    Apart from Gilda, who is nodding her assent, the others swivel their heads in concert, looking to Miranda to dash this blasphemy. But she sits quietly, her silence a consent.
    I wait a few beats before saying, ‘The method is almost the same as for risotto. A little new oil warmed in the pot with a minced onion, the raw pasta is then tossed about to coat it well, kept moving in the hot oil until it takes on a golden crust …’
    â€˜Like the
tostatura
for rice?’ wonders Paolina, her shock softened by the comfort of something familiar.
    â€˜Exactly. Then – also like for risotto – begin adding the wine in small doses, stirring the pasta until