Final Fruit

The plums come from the tree in back of the house here. They were green when we arrived and now, on our last day, they are ripe and ready to eat. I am sorry that we won’t be here to enjoy them further; the sight of them makes me want to dig through old cookbooks in search of recipes for plum preserves, tarts, and succulent meat dishes. Rarely does such a quantity of fresh fruit fall into my hands, and these are all the more tantalizing because I cannot use them. They must be left here, perfect in their ripeness, while we leave and begin our lives again elsewhere.

There have been reports in the news for some months now of the global food crisis, and corresponding stories of individual Americans taking matters into their own hands, plantingneo-Victory gardens to cut their grocery costs, just as others trade cars for bikes as fuel costs also rise. I have never lived in a house with fruit trees before, just as I have never kept a garden and will likely never have one in New York City. So I am amazed and grateful to have watched this tree come to fruition, to feel its juice on my tongue, and to be reminded of the larger cycles that surround us.

One summer, during college, I spent weekends on a small farm near Minneapolis. My parents had bought a share of the farm’s vegetables through a community-supported agriculture (CSA) program, and as a requirement of membership we were asked to help out on the farm on occasion. I went back again and again after harvest day, and cajoled the small farm team to let me help them with whatever they were doing. One woman there was a chef at Lucia’s Restaurant who told me that she was working on the farm for a season in order to understand more about where food came from. This seemed like a novel idea to me at the time, and it struck my fancy that the act of eating might be linked to agriculture and land use and soil types and plant varietals, not just to fat and calories and oh-do-I-look-better-now-than-before concerns. I find it significant that I happened to visit this farm in the throes of an eating disorder, and wonder if these visits had anything to do with the new direction that food has come to have in my life since then. Looking back, I see that as my eating disorder waned, my interest in the broader aspects of food -- its origin, history, purpose, production -- increased.

I now feel that I straddle the twin worlds of the foodies and the recovered folks, equally interested in exquisite cuisine and body politics, but not quite reconciled to the fact that neither group seems to be talking to the other. Some psychologists feel that, to be recovered from an eating disorder, food should no longer play a central place in one’s life -- a stance which I disagree with, preferring to face food straight-on and thus dislodge it from its exceptional place in my imagination. On the other side, food writers rarely address the fact that millions of Americans cannot fully enjoy the food so lauded about in the food media because of their own preoccupations with weight and body image. (When I searched for the terms “eating disorder,” “anorexia” and “bulimia” on gourmet.com and bonappetit.com, for example, I found only one result -- a 2002 article in Gourmet about one woman's childhood experience in fat camp. "Obesity" turned up a few more hits, however.) But these issues are two sides of the same coin -- we can love food, but only so much; our bodies and minds will only stand so much food lust, and we must ultimately be satisfied with just enough. And, lest we forget, food has its times and places: there’s a season for plums and another for olives, a moment for birth and a death-hour. Modern grocery-store miracles aside, asparagus and fresh truffles can’t share shelf space.

For now, plums and vin santo; soft light over the patio; eggs being cracked in the kitchen; a good-bye to Italy and a hello to Spain.

Moderation

I keep thinking about hunger, and want to write more (always more! -- that's what hunger is about, isn't it?). But for today, I'll focus on moderation, which caught the attention of the ancient Greeks and the Buddha, who both spoke of the value of moderation, or the middle path, for one's health and happiness and the practice of the good life.

The Buddha also said (and I don't know about the Greeks on this point) that his students shouldn't take his word for everything, and he encouraged them to try out his teachings for themselves, to see if they were valid. And so I have, in a sense.

These last four years have been an exercise for me in moderation of appetite. A rather successful experiment, by the look of things.

If hunger makes food taste all the better, then it has been the act of allowing hunger back into my life -- of not fearing an empty belly, of contenting myself with less -- that has allowed me to become an eater. I take more pleasure in food now than I ever did when I was worried about fat and calories and my size, and it's not because I've managed to pull a fast one on my own nervous mind to convince myself that those things don't matter. They still do matter, to some extent, but they matter less and less as I find other things to take their place.

Ironically, one thing that does take the place of food worries is learning to eat well. I cannot stuff myself silly if I have just spent three hours cooking a meal for my husband and friends. Nor can I wantonly waste food if I know how hard it was to procure and prepare, having done so myself. Putting more effort into my food and more attention, instead of less, has made all the difference for me.

Though all of these efforts around food (it's just food, after all) might seem immoderate, I think it is quite natural to spend our time worrying about the next meal. After all, it is what our ancestors spent most of their time doing. I am reminded of this point here in Italy, where almost every tree in our valley has been planted for food cultivation. Down any lane you'll find grape vines, olive trees, and any number of fruiting trees, such as apricots, plums, figs, and cherries. No tree seems ornamental or accidental -- every one has a purpose, and nine times out of ten that purpose is to produce food for humans. It surprised me at first to discover that trees here weren't just oversize hedgerows, but in fact occupy an important role in the local food economy and culture. Now it seems eminently sensible: keep your food near you, and you'll never have to depend on others for your daily bread.

I am from one of the world's great food-producing regions -- the corn belt of the U.S., where the abundant loam of the prairies has been turned into rich soil for the U.S. agro-economy. Yet this notion of a "farm" is so different from the Italian azienda as for them to be almost mutually unrecognizable. In Umbria, a farm isn't something that happens "out there," where the exurbs end: instead, fields and houses intermingle, and to surprisingly good effect. For example, we can't overlook our dinner when it comes from right beyond the door, as our chard and tomatoes did last night. Nor can we forget that there's a season to all things when we learn that yesterday's cherries won't be back for another year. Where's the immoderation in that? There's no excess here, only the simple acknowledgment that real food comes with an expiration date, and obeys greater cycles than those determined by the supermarket aisle.

It has only been in the last one hundred years, in the wealthier countries of the world, that people have had the luxury to devote most of their waking hours to activities not consisting of food gathering or food preparation. But is it really such a luxury, I ask, to be able to ignore one's food? If food is one of life's greatest pleasures, then might we not deny ourselves some aspect of that pleasure by outsourcing our food preparation to others? I am thinking, again, of the sort of pleasure that can be had from the crafts of cooking, hunting, gathering, and gardening, and moreover, the satisfaction to be found in these activities beyond the products that they bring to us. This is real work, with immediate and substantial effects that we can judge for ourselves and be proud of.

I venture a guess that, in isolating ourselves from this kind of work, we make it hard for ourselves to take any satisfaction in food that is not degustatory, and thus we set ourselves up for thinking that act of eating food -- and not its provenance or its purpose -- is the only thing that matters. I strive to tip the scale in the other direction, away from the act of eating and towards the acts of finding and preparing food. Oh, how much pleasure there is to be had in knowing that an olive tree can produce oil! -- or seeing one's beans boil away contentedly on the stove, or planning next week's supper before it even occurs. For me, these are the paths towards alimentary moderation.

Creation

I love the way this summer is turning into a season of knitting and cooking.

Even as a small child I knew that I loved to create things: I sewed wall quilts and knitted woolen mittens, drew paper-dolls and followed the American Girls Handy Book for further inspiration. It didn't trouble me then, as it sometimes does now, that most of my crafts were of a decidedly feminine nature -- that I was reproducing, in the late 20th century, the same tasks that my great-grandmother would have learned as a girl in the late 1800s.

Now, I can point to any number of theories of gender role development to explain why I was drawn to knitting and cooking instead of heavy machinery and archery; why I still take more pleasure in the so-called domestic arts, and would rather not think too much about my computer's specs or my bike's components. Yet, whatever form it takes, I know that I am following an older desire to create that women and men have equal share in. I am speaking of the pleasure in one's craft, and of the delight of adhering to a technique so well as to be able to improvise from it. I am also speaking of a sort of physical act that cannot be replicated by what I am doing here, at my screen, typing and pushing words and images around. I yearn for the tactile, the colored, the savory and fragrant. And so my knitting -- ah, fiber! -- and puttering around the kitchen here, and hikes to find wildflowers, and trips to the market.

The yellow of this lace shawl echoes the evening sunlight here in Umbria, the fuzzy bodies of bees and wasps, and the inside of the bell peppers that we stuffed for dinner the other night. Half-finished, the shawl is still caught up in its creation, still evolving and revealing itself -- not unlike this season, these days of summer's peak.

I want to dedicate this summer, half-fled, to creation in all its forms. I want to roll in the grass with pagan delight and visit old Roman temples without a tour book. I want to taste sweet new wine and discover new ways to wind a ball of yarn. I want to dance to samba music and plan long expeditions in the hills. I want to live.

Here's to summer and to yellow lace and to all of the jubilant acts of creation which the season inspires in us!

Venezia

About Venice, writes Henry James in Italian Hours, "There is notoriously nothing more to be said about the subject." Yet he, like I, find that even the most exhausted topic, the most-written about city of the world, can be added to.

Yes, Venice has been visited before, and written about before. But I am not so jaded a traveler as to believe that a place is not worth visiting -- or writing about -- if it has already been "discovered" by others. I have tried that kind of travel before, as when I sought out abandoned Jesuit missions in northern Argentina, or found someone to take me to the Chilean altiplano to see the peaks of the high cordillera. There are thrills to be had in ordinary, plain-Jane travel as much as in those kinds of adventure, although they may be more exotic and breath-taking.

One doesn't have to visit Venice. One chooses to visit Venice and one visits Venice for pleasure -- as we did in these last few days -- not for duty. And so Venice became a city for just the two of us, for my husband and I, a breathless interlude between one Tuscan day and another -- Venice! There could not be a place in Italy more different from the Tuscan hill towns that we have frequented as of late, with their somber stone citadels overlooking olive groves and hay fields. Venice is baroque, extravagant, a wedding-cake of a metropolis, decadent and in decay.

Like Rio de Janeiro or Hong Kong, Venice is so spectacularly situated between land and sky that this would be enough to call attention to itself, even if Venice were not full of Medieval and Renaissance palaces, charming gondoliers, and hidden passageways. We spent our days divided between exploring the city on foot, and cruising the canals and ports of Venice and its neighboring islands by vaporetti, Venetian ferries. I cannot think of a more delightful way to spend a summer afternoon than to board a vaporetto and make one's way to Burano, Murano, and Torcello, the outer islands. This was our itinerary for one day and, despite getting a bad sunburn, I preferred the sea air and the sun to the city's many churches and museums, which run together in my memory.

Venice is still here, but the seas are rising, and it is uncertain how much longer the city will be able to withstand the tides. More than anything, the knowledge of the city's possible demise, and its current state as a living museum, make Venice a city of double losses: the geopolitical decline of the maritime republic (a loss which has already occurred) and the destruction of the physical city to the waves and salt (a future loss). Caught between such images of the fall, is it any wonder than Venice is somewhat melancholy, somewhat tawdry in its shine and gloss?

I would return to Venice again, if it were possible for the same person to visit the same city twice (Heroclitus), but I suspect that Venice is better once-visited, as a young bride, than left for future comparisons, for who is to say that both the city and I won't be worse for the wear?

The good life

Today I spent nearly the entire afternoon sitting in the shade under the wisteria arbor, listening to a LibriVox recording of Moll Flanders, knitting various pieces, and reveling in the rare opportunity to do exactly as I pleased.

Yet I know that if I let too many days pass this way -- long lunches followed by a nap and knitting -- I'll soon feel restless. The voices in my head, perhaps some remnant of Puritan duty, will scold me for enjoying myself too much, as if there should be a limit to pleasure. Should there be?-- when my pleasure consists of such simple, honest things, like books and music and fiber and food and, lastly, bicycles? Where is the wrong in these things? Where else should my duty lie, in these fallow moments, if not in seeking such pleasures, the better now than later, when more somber responsibilities might indeed call?

I began this web-log to write about the things that make me happy; to write about my avid and eager search for happiness in the face of external burdens that, at times, made life almost unbearable this spring. Yet, now relieved of some of these concerns, I feel almost guilty in taking my pleasure today, as if I only deserved it when there was real hardship in other areas of my life.

Perhaps the guilt that I feel is the only truly Puritan part of this dilemma, for ancient philosophers had something to say on the matter of happiness as well. Aristotle, for example, believed that though the end of life was happiness, happiness did not come from the possession of material goods (as is so often presumed), but from living a life of virtue, and practicing moderation in all things. This notion is sometimes referred to as "the good life," and was a principal concern of Thomas Jefferson as well, who made sure to write it into the Declaration of Independence, changing John Locke's right to "life, liberty, and property" into the inalienable right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."Gautama Buddha talked more of ending suffering than of finding happiness, but what is the path to enlightenment if not a middle road between the two, another way of stating Aristotle's principle of moderation?

I already know that I am not after money or property in my pursuit of the good life. I also know that, having seen more than my share of suffering in these short 25 years, and having emerged from my sorrows mostly unscathed, I wish to help others out of theirs. But still I am searching for that "happy medium" in my own life, a way to balance the good with the bad, the joy with the pain, and to not err too much towards excess in any direction. Thus, this space, these words. Avid happiness, happy life: A V I D A L E G R I A.

Stone fruit

I cannot get enough of the fruit here in Italy. Especially the stone fruit, like the melange of peaches, plums, and apricots that I have stuffed with Acacia honey and fresh ricotta and baked under the broiler for an after-lunch dessert.

I rarely bother to buy these fruits in the U.S. There have been too many supermarket disappointments for me to waste my money on rock-hard apricots and mealy peaches. But here in Umbria, I cannot devise enough ways to eat these fruits; fresh they are delicious, but cooked and stewed they become something else altogether, an elixir of summer.

This morning we took a walk through the countryside near the house where we're staying. We saw groves of olive trees, vineyards, tomatoes on trellises, ducks in a duck-house, and rabbits in cages. One neighbor had a small orchard in his yard whose trees were laden with red peaches and green pears; we walked by with longing, but bought our fruit in town. It was probably picked this morning or yesterday, in a valley north of here, where most of the produce that we eat comes from.

Lunch today will be pork sides stewed in porcini and tomato broth; pasta; a green salad; and Umbrian wine. We may visit Cortona later today, after siesta -- Cortona is the city made famous by Frances Maye's Under the Tuscan Sun, and apparently somewhat ruined as a result of the publicity that she brought to the town. I will see if the place's charm comes through despite the nick nack shops and the gaggle of American tourists. And maybe I'll read the book, too, just to see what all the fuss is about!

Gelati per tutti

I love how Italian gelati are arranged in such a harmonious way, colorwise. They are so very tempting! -- but I'm beginning to think that gelati looks better than it tastes, for I've yet to find a cone that I've been truly satisfied with here. I don't know if I should attribute this to the fact that we're staying far from Italy's major cities, but in the meanwhile there's only one solution: to eat gelati in every city we visit, in search of that perfect cone.

Even with cone in hand, it's hard not to contemplate the next one:

Borlotti

When I spotted these beans in their long, pink-and-white pods at the market the other day, I immediately knew that I wanted to do something with them.

Borlotti, or cranberry beans, are common in Italian cooking, especially in Umbria, where the people are jokingly called mangiafagioli, or "bean-eaters."

I usually make thick, hearty, vegetable-strewn stews out of my beans, but these beans, fresh and fragrant, called for a technique to bring out the very earthiness of them. We cooked them simply, in fresh water with a little salt, then drained them and served them whole, with only olive oil, salt, and pepper as condiment.

I have never eaten beans like this before: so fresh and face-forward, unaccompanied by the usually cream, bacon, or herbs: beans alone -- what a revelation!

Assisi

As a child, I loved the books of Scott O'Dell, which were, for the most part, compelling stories of Native American life before the coming of the Europeans, like his most famous book, Island of the Blue Dolphins. The historical fiction that I read as a child, more than anything, is what made me so interested in history as an adult, so willing to slip into other worlds and other times, as we did in Assisi yesterday.

In Assisi, I was reminded of another of O'Dell's great stories, The Road to Damietta, which, like all good children's books, is something that I would probably enjoy today, if I were able to get my hands on it (apparently it is now out-of-print). The Road to Damietta is about the life of St. Francis of Assisi, the man who made the city of Assisi famous and whose devotion and simple poverty inspired so many faithful Christians to emulate his lifestyle.

In Assisi today, with its lines of antique shops and its overwrought churches and basilicas, there seems to be little of that medieval devotion, though the city has plenty of charm, nonetheless. Chuan and I spent several very happy hours wandering up and down the streets of Assisi, until a thundercloud engulfed the city and we took refuge, quite literally, in the massive complex of the Church of St. Francis, to revel in its frescoes (supposedly Giotto's) and explore its crypt while we waited out the storm.

It rained on and on, so we said "What the heck," and set out again through the stormy city, touched upon two more churches (Santa Chiara and San Nicolo), and hailed the first bus we could back to the train station. When we arrived our train was just pulling in and we raced off the bus, through the tabacchi store in the station, out to the platform and on to the train -- drenched, but in good time. I've never been so close to missing a train.

When we arrived in our town again, just a few valleys over, the sun was shining as if rain had never seen Umbria, and it was a long trek up and through the town to get back to the house again. Gelati made a fitting end to our pilgrimage:

Albicocca

Everything tastes better in Italy. And it’s not just me. I think most of us can concur that there's just something about the food in Italy. I'll try to get at that elusive something in the coming posts, as best as I can in pixels and bytes.

Take, for example, the apricot -- damasco in Spanish and Portuguese, albicocca in Italian. I thought that I'd never eat a better one than the fruit from my friend Mayra's tree in Chile, ripened in the sun of the Atacama desert. But here, in Umbria, the dry heat of Central Italy has produced quite a fruit, the very blossom of summer.

We bought a basket of albicocca at the local market this morning, where we were attended by a balding shopkeeper with a sense of Italian propriety who showed much patience with my patois of Spanportuitaliano. He opened a jar of black truffles that had just been picked this morning and invited us to smell them, apologizing for their poor aroma -- apparently, it's not really truffle season yet (late fall is the better time for them), and we didn't dare ask him where they came from, for fear of offending him with such a prying question.

Instead, we smelled them and fingered the fruit and thought about lunch to come.

Lunch was veal with jarred truffle sauce and fresh mozzarella di bufala, and slow-cooked zucchini on the side. It could deserve its own commentary, but I didn't make it, and the apricot clafoutis was mine, plucked out of The Silver Spoon (oh how glad I am that I brought that with me here!).

I can only describe the flavor of the cooked apricot, drizzled in its own syrup, as a sort of super-albicocca, what you might imagine the first, divine apricot tasted like many years ago, on the plains of Central Asia. It is tart and sweet at the same time, a rare combination, and the creamy base of the egg custard is a perfect complement to such forthright flavor:

















Because at least one reader of mine wanted to see recipes with my postings, I reproduce the following recipe for clafoutis alle albicocche (apricot clafoutis) from p. 1056 of the Phaidon Press version of The Silver Spoon:

Clafoutis alle albicocche

Serves 6

Ingredients:
1 1/2 T. sweet butter, melted, plus extra for greasing
1 2/3 c. superfine sugar
2 T. vanilla sugar (didn't use, it was fine anyway)
rind of 1 lemon, grated
1 lb. 2 oz. apricots, halved and pitted
3 eggs, separated
1/2 c. all-purpose flour (I substituted rice flour to make it gluten-free)
2/3 c. warm milk

Preheat the oven to 400 F. Grease a cake pan with butter. Pour 1 cup water into a pan, add 1 1/4 cups of the superfine sugar, the vanilla sugar and the lemon rind and bring to a boil, stirring until the sugar has dissolved. Boil for 5 minutes, then add the apricots and simmer for a few minutes more. Drain and set aside. Beat the eggs yolks with the remaining sugar in a bowl until pale and fluffy, then stir in the melted butter, flour, and milk. Stiffly whisk the egg whites in a grease-free bowl and fold into the mixture. Pour into the prepared cake pan, arrange the apricot halves on top and then push them down into the mixture. Bake for 40 minutes and serve warm or cold.

Ai Lu's comment: We saved the syrup left over from cooking the apricots, and it made a delicious nectar which we poured over the dessert itself. About 2/3 cup remains and will likely provide a sweet topping to some plain yogurt later today.

A certain slant of light

Last night, after jumping back and forth from pool to badminton, we sat down to a simple salad with lettuce and radicchio.

I love the soft evening light cutting through the patio in this photo, lighting up the yellow of the lettuce and the yellow of the aperitivo that I've mixed with mineral water. Aperitivo, like so many things that I am finding here in Italy, is a throwback to the herbal tonics that I drank occasionally in Buenos Aires.

As I anticipated, I am seeing Italy through what I know of Latin America. It is a bit like when you meet someone who bears a striking resemblance to a close friend (or enemy) of yours, and you are inclined to treat that new person with the same affection (or disdain) that you would treat your long-time acquaintance, until enough time goes by that you are able to differentiate the two, and the new person is no clouded with the specter of that other. I think this is what I am experiencing with Italy: in it I see bits and pieces of pastoral Chile, Argentina's grand metropoli, and Brazil's Baroque cities. I have to restrain myself from pointing out such coincidences to my companions, for they are my own associations, and are likely to bore them. In the meanwhile I have my eyes open as wide as they will go, trying to stamp these new sights onto my lens so that this month is lived in the fruitful, breathing present.

Departures

Tonight is the night before the night before the day I leave for Italy.

It has been two years since I have lived abroad, and though the coming six weeks hardly measures up to my longer soujourns, I cannot think of a better way to spend my summer than among the fields and orchards of Umbria.

Italy came upon us suddenly; an offer in March finalized shortly thereafter, and at once we had our summer taken care of, long and leisurely, a throwback to childhood. Here we are, my husband and I, in the scant months before graduate school, poised between the working world and a return to being students -- and Italy has come between. Italy!

I imagine that Italy will remind me of Argentina, where so many Argentines carry around their grandparents' memories of pre-war Italy like proud badges of their europeidad, enacting their roots in Italian cultural organizations, soccer clubs, elementary schools, widows' funds, and opera performances. More than one and a half million Italians came to Argentina between 1880 and 1950, out-pacing all other immigrant groups in Argentina and leaving traces of Sicily and Sardinia in the Argentine accent, with its lilting quality uncharacteristic of the rest of Latin America, and in Argentine food, abundant in pastas and cured meats, tomato sauces and basil relish. As neo-Europeans, Argentines impose a European imaginarium on the vast stretches of the Pampa, in the same way that the architects of Buenos Aires remade the city into a European capital after Haussmann's Paris, installing broad avenues and Mansard-peaked town houses. Buenos Aires is the "balcony onto Europe," but most of all, a balcony onto Italy.

I spent one year in Argentina, in 2003, when the country was still reeling from the effects of its fantastic economic crisis in December 2001. I lived in Buenos Aires with a 70-year-old woman named after Dante's love; the child of an Italian father and a Romanian mother, Beatriz had studied opera and voice at the Teatro de Colon, Buenos Aires' most eminent theatre, and spent her dotage as a contralto in a professional choir. We spent the evenings talking of music, and listened to her old tapes of Jessye Norman and Martha Argerich while she served me polenta with tomato sofrito and regiannito cheese, the Argentine version of Parmigiano (sans the A.O.C.).

So, the clearest version of Italy that I have is the memory that an old woman in Argentina has of her father; it's an Italy that hasn't seen the television, or witnessed the return of its emigrants' children and grandchildren after the most recent crisis. It's an Italy that melds together with my impressions of Little Italy here in New York; of Verdi and Puccini and Vivaldi; of The Splendid Table; of Umberto Eco and The Name of the Rose; of Marinetti's futurismo and other manifestos of modernity.

This Italy of my imagination is kitsch crossed with nostalgia for a past that was never mine. On Friday I will see how much of the present it can contain, and whether or not it will be satisfied with its liminal and transitory role in our lives, crossroads between the post-college work years and the doctoral programs that are before us. Is this the last chance for pleasure-walks and cooking extravaganzas? The last hurrah before the candle burns low? Or merely more of what has been, and signs of goodness still to come?

I wait anxiously for my departure, to know something more of this country that already holds such a place in my narrative.