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.