I knocked on Anna Maria’s door to tell her we were leaving as Luciano stood at the ready, dressed to do his civic duty. Anna Maria and Giancarlo spilled out of the house and into their tiny garden and the warm afternoon sunlight to wave good bye. As we set off for downtown Mareno, they lingered there chatting. I could hear their voices as we strolled down our little lane hand in hand on our way to vote. Well, I was along for the ride, not yet able to have any say in how this country is run, but how could I stay home on a day filled with such beauty and political promise?

As we neared the end of our street we heard shouts coming from the neighbor’s yard. He was cleaning out the goat barn and his children’s enthusiastic soccer match was getting too close to his ramshackle collection of sheds and cages.

“Oh! Get out of here!” he bellowed at the children who screamed with delight. Behind him, lined up with faces pressed to the wires, all of his rabbits watched in horror at the commotion; their eyes in unblinking shock, unable to turn away.

“Where are the goats, Luciano?” I had just noticed that not only were the perpetually pregnant goats absent, the stinky, petulant ram was also gone.

“He sold them. I think I heard something about thieves taking one and he wanted to get rid of them all…”

Hmm.

I stood by in the basement of the 18th century villa as Luciano voted and pondered the absent goats and the remaining rabbits, all certainly destined for someone’s dinner table. In fact we do live in the countryside…and here obtaining food has often been difficult, leading to simple solutions: take from the land whatever and how one can.

As I was running along the Monticano last week I noticed women on the grassy banks collecting greens in a bag. For years I have been curious to know exactly what constitutes erbette, or field greens as we might call them. So I jogged up and asked. Without hesitation they showed me an example of small green plants they were collecting.

“They are very good in risotto or pasta bianca. A little butter and sage…”

As I ran home, I easily collected a handful of the plants, matching them to the one the ladies gave me, and cooked them up in a little butter. Luciano would have nothing to do with it. I’d like to report that they were delicious, delicate with a gentle bite, but they tasted like nothing, but they were green and collected wild on my way home. Anna Maria laughed with a memory.

“La Nonna loved dandelion greens. She was out there once collecting them and lost her equilibrium and fell over. She called out, ‘Giancarlo, come get me!’ Remember?”

Luciano taught me how to pronounce the name of the plants.
“S-ciocpet”

“Shopett?”

No, Serena. It is dialect. Try to say s-chocolate. Then change the ocolate to pet.

“S-chocolate…s-chopett. Is that right?”

“Not bad. We will work on it.”

He still would have none of it.


Post World War II in Italy was a tough time. Families lived in enormous group houses sharing food, clothes and body heat. Giancarlo grew up in a house of 40 where they ate meals in shifts and as he likes to tell it, stretched 40 meals out one fish by hanging it on a string above the polenta in order to flavor it. Greens collected in the fields were an important source of vegetables and knowing which ones to eat, a good survival skill.

Protein was another thing.

The citizens of Vicenza have long been teased by the story that, during and after the war, the residents resorted to eating cats. After all, rabbits dressed out in the butcher, look very much cats. It is disturbing enough that we don’t eat rabbit in our house. But the fact remains that in desperate times, some people took some pretty grim steps. No one will admit to it now, but I learned that there are ways to be sure you are being served rabbit for dinner and not a former pet in a less than reputable restaurant…I don’t need to go into it now, but apparently it used to be common knowledge, like knowing that one should never eat oysters in an “r-less” month.

Recently there was a bit of a television scandal on a popular network cooking show when the co-host, a know-it-all of a certain age in a moment of nostalgia, reminisced on the proper way to prepare a cat for cooking. His co-host, Elisa reacted with appropriate shock:



The co-host disappeared from the show immediately, starting his retirement early. There was a bit of a buzz in which the veracity of the legend was disputed, but everyone knows that during the dopoguerra (after the Great War) you did what you had to do.

~~~

Late in the night of Good Friday two men pulled a van up to the fence of our neighbor’s clutch of rabbits and chickens and stole every single one. The local papers reported, with headlines that read, “Stolen for Hunger”. They also reported that the month prior a man on a bicycle stole a chicken from another nearby house, but was so startled by a passing police car that he dropped the bag of struggling hen and thus was nabbed red handed.

I walked down to commiserate with our neighbor and found him scrubbing out the empty cages.

“I heard the news.”

“Can you believe it? It is disgusting. They took the babies, the adults; they even took my old hen. I had her for five years. Who is going to eat a five-year-old hen?”

“That is terrible.” I wondered if she was the same hen who had been hiding in the grass waiting for him two years ago. He seemed really hurt. I had no idea he was so attached.

“I read that the paper said they were stolen for hunger but I think if you are hungry you steal one rabbit, not thirty.”

“Yeah…and the babies? No meat on them yet.”

I wished him well and headed back home. I shared what I found out with the family.

“They even took the old hen. Why would they do that? She was too old to eat. I bet she wasn’t even laying any more.

“Serena, I don’t think they were checking ID. How would they know she was five years old? Would you know?”

Suddenly it hit me…here I was a girl from Berkeley, thinking like a farmer…egg productivity, rabbit stew, the toughness of an old chicken. I concentrated a moment, trying to conjure up my Northern California indoctrination. Wait a minute!

“Ciano! Maybe they set them all free. They pulled a van up to the fence and took all those rabbits and set them free.”

“Some kind of Mareno eco-terrorists you mean?”

“It could happen!”

“No, Serena. They have suspects. The robbers are brushing feathers and fur from their chin and they just don’t know they will be caught.”

These are tough times too. And while I feel sorry for the neighbor and his loss, I guess we can be happy that they were not stealing cats for hunger. Although there is no love lost between me and neighborhood cats as I dig yet another turd out of my garden, I would not wish the roasting pan on any of them. No, really.

A friend recently sent me a delightful story from the New Yorker magazine that made him think of me. That’s nice. The story, Pilgrims’ Progress written by American author and journalist Jane Kramer, was about the power of the turkey and that most classic American holiday, Thanksgiving, on her many foreign contacts. Indeed there is nothing, at least to the Italians I know, quite so mesmerizing as the sight of a whole turkey, even after my having roasted up several by now. The bird is a crowd pleaser.

I was momentarily annoyed by her mention of her house in Umbria “where we write in the summer” which sounds just a little bit pretentious. We picture a sun-washed house on a hill, music is playing, a wooden table in the garden is laden with fresh, simple local foods, a warm breeze moves a crisp white curtain against an ancient stone sill… It sounds so---Italian. Meanwhile, here in Mareno I remove yet another turd left by an Italian cat in my Italian garden, I have to pay yet another tax on my car and the recyclers again failed to pick up the huge bag of plastic that I dragged through the rain out to the curb from the school, and now I have to drag it back inside…and up the damn Italian stairs. Wouldn’t we all like to be able to summer in Umbria? Then it hits me that Luciano and I actually do “summer” in Berkeley…where I can only hope to write. So I will give her that house in Umbria.

Ms Kramer, however, achieved in her story what I think all good writers should be able to do - jar a memory. For me, it was her search for ingredients for a familiar dish in a foreign land.

I came to Italy a relatively short time ago, but that sweltering summer during which I roamed the aisles at the supermarkets studying the shelves in anonymity, absorbing the unfamiliar and the air conditioning seems like a different life. It was all fun and games when I was trying out new things, but quite suddenly I wanted to find the familiar.

“What is buttermilk in Italian?” I wanted to make cornbread.

“We don’t have it.”

What do you mean?

It doesn’t exist?

“Luciano, do you know what buttermilk is?

“No.”

“So how can you say it doesn’t exist?”

“You are right. What is it?”

At this point I stopped. How could I insist on something that I could not explain? There is no butter in buttermilk and, despite the name, contains less fat than milk or butter. But I could not find it…so I solved the problem with a mixture of half milk and half plain yogurt.

I got strange looks at Mio Market when I asked for corn syrup, brown sugar or cream of tarter. Asking at all, of course was a huge step for me, confidence-wise, but it got me nowhere gastronomically. Ingredients that were a staple for my Berkeley kitchen seemed unattainable here or at least very expensive. In my early searches I found that walnuts were sold in the shell only. If I wanted shelled walnuts, I needed to buy them in tiny packets at an exorbitant price or pull out the nut cracker. The same for almonds. The final insult is that they all come from California.

Before moving here I bought a book titled Living, Studying and Working in Italy. I wanted to be prepared, you know, be informed. Predictably Luciano and his friends roared with laughter at the advice on how to deal with Italians. But one tip stood out for me: the authors insisted that it was impossible to find muffin tins and baking powder in Italy. Not really thinking that through, I packed up several containers of baking powder to bring with me. But really, how does one imagine that cakes rise in this country without it?

After also discovering the lack of shelled walnuts, pecans, brown sugar, corn syrup, Tabasco and molasses, I stocked up at Costco on my summer trips to Berkeley. Seemingly prepared to make a spicy pecan pie, I also purchased reams of heavy duty tin foil and re-sealable plastic bags. The Italian tin foil is like tissue paper and plastic bags are stuck in the 70’s, with twist ties. It is a wonder I passed through customs with such odd suitcase contents. Perhaps they are distracted by my other possessions. I have so far not had any trouble getting through despite the cocaine-like baking powder. There is a four year old Sequoia sapling growing in Conegliano as testament to that.

Armed with my exotic American ingredients I felt more powerful…cool even, rationing myself carefully in order to make it all last until next summer. But then, as my search widened here, I found huge bags of shelled walnuts, almonds, Tabasco, brown sugar and yes, even baking powder which of course exists. It is lievito in polvere which is in fact an exact translation. Now I feel a little silly to have dragged a five pound bag of nuts across the Atlantic when there are people who will do that for me, for much less trouble. And muffin tins are everywhere.

But I am still out ahead with the tin foil and Ziplock bags. Knowing that I truly have to wait for a trip to California to restock, I wash and reuse it all. Anna Maria, after getting several uses out of the heavy duty foil wrapped around a chunk of turkey that I brought her, asked if she could have another piece of it. I brought her the end of a roll that I had made last two years. I have another one. And anyone visiting Anna Maria will forever be in her good books if you come bearing re-sealable plastic bags, the large size. All the better to store that magical of all foods: leftover turkey.

Yesterday I stood at the kitchen counter mashing persimmons through a strainer. I found myself in this situation against my will. Two weeks before Zio Danilo, while lunching with us on Santo Stefano, calmly asked if anyone wanted a few persimmons. A gift to one of the priests, probably from a backyard tree, was sitting unwanted in the church basement.

“Campo,” Anna Maria said. The field across the street was her solution for many unwanted things; old fruit, Christmas trees, worn out clothes, my kitchen table. Of course she used it as a metaphor…most of the time.

“Sure, I’ll take them,” I said, not wanting to turn down free local produce. Of course I had not understood exactly how much fruit he had been talking about until Zio Danilo reappeared from a dark room under the church with a crate of the carrot-orange fruit. He swung it into the car as I stared at the work cut out for me and rethought my decision.

So I educated myself on how and, most importantly, when to use persimmons, called cachi in Italian. Hachiya persimmons, as I discovered, must be eaten only when extremely soft, like a water balloon. “Unripened persimmons contain the soluble tannin shibuol, which, upon contact with a weak acid, polymerizes in the stomach and forms a gluey coagulum that can affix with other stomach matter.” I got that off Wikipedia and while alarming, the first sign that a persimmon may not be ready to eat would be the throat-closing astringency. The gluey coagulum is just the cherry on top, so to speak. As I scooped up the gelatinous flesh into the strainer, repeating to myself water balloon, water balloon, I wondered who on earth might have been the first person to eat such a fruit. No wonder they hang unused on trees everywhere here. I sighed as I picked up one more caco. Water balloon, water balloon.

Yesterday was the Epifania, the celebration of the visitation of the Magi to the Baby Jesus. I got that off Wikipedia too. Here it is simply celebrated with 40 foot bonfires, candy toting witches and hot mulled wine. We were expected next door at Anna Maria’s and Giancarlo for lunch, sort of a closing-out-the-season-blow-out meal. Before going, as I mashed cachi, I listened to a variety show on television, sort of a Catholic televangelist holiday special. In the living room I could hear the host wishing a “serena epifania a tutti” or a peaceful epiphany to everyone. I thought that was nice.

Epiphany also marks the day that we can take all the Christmas decorations down, though truth be told, I had already removed the beautiful, but frail tree that I had bought to replace Luciano’s. I had banished his five year old tree that just wouldn’t die to the outside terrace this year, but decorated it with a bag full of old ornaments I bought at the market. At the same market I purchased its replacement, a symmetrical, elegant specimen that almost immediately dropped almost all its needles in a spiteful rain of green confetti which then lay in drifts beneath its suddenly naked branches. It now sits in the sun facing the campo, awaiting the inevitable. Luciano’s tree, squat and smug, is going nowhere.

At lunch we ate roast pork and new potatoes, grilled radicchio and artichoke crème. For some reason, even after eating entirely too much in the last few weeks, it tasted wonderful; honest and satisfying, full of flavor without being heavy. I complimented her again and asked for the artichoke recipe which I have written up along with Luciano’s favorite artichokes in the cooking section.

Again she commented, “I am not a chef, I am a woman who cooks.” With that she pulled out a card from a hidden drawer of the table. With a quick look at me she opened it and read. I closed my eyes to concentrate. She often tries to read the cards she gets from my family, but the English, read in pure Italian pronunciation, is really tough to get. Nobody understands anything. This time, it was Spanish and then…Italian! A Christmas card from my sister-in-law written in Italian. With a satisfied smile Anna Maria snapped it shut.

I told her about my freezer full of persimmon flesh, ready to use. I did not mention the coagulation issue.

“That is great. Have you used the pomegranate seeds yet?”

This was last year’s free case of local produce, a gift from the family down the street, that I had processed, frozen and not yet figured out how to use.

“Not yet.”

She wagged her finger at me, “I don’t want to see that persimmon come over here this summer.” Every year I bring over a few items for her to keep for me in her freezer while we are away. The pomegranate seeds had already summered there. I need to get cracking.

I also told her about the news of Spot our neighbor the doctor’s dog who had recently learned how to climb over the fence to dance in the street, blissfully dodging cars and death. I had gotten the latest from the doctor’s wife when I went in to refill my prescription. I have become quite attached to Spot, a gangly untrained English setter, but it was alarming to see him on our side of the fence, not just a little out of control. During his last escape Spot ended up under a car. He was unhurt but the understandably shaken driver of the car knocked on the doctor’s door after seeing the dog who, knowing he was in trouble for something, had gotten back over the fence and was nonchalantly whistling his best “who, me?” in the garden. He has since been exiled to a friend’s house who is keeping him in his roofed cage next to his wiry, hungry hunting dogs while a new prison…er, kennel is being built. Poor silly Spot.

“How do you know all this?” Anna Maria demanded to know.

“Sometimes I get the scoop”, I answered.

Una Serena Epifania a Tutti!