It is one of the quirks of small-town summer life that most of us here spend our time not escaping from what we do during the rest of the year, but doing whatever it is we do in a purer way. The painters paint, the film star dazzles, the writers colonize the corner tables outside the best town bar. The crossword fiends plot to acquire one of the few Herald Tribunes that come to the newsstand each morning. I spend a lot of my time tearing around the countryside in a rented Saab, looking for the grungier sorts of artisanal cheesemakers and the trattorias where those cheesemakers might be tempted to take a wine-soaked, three-hour lunch.
Meanwhile, the passionate cooks among us seem to spend most of their days behind the tiny propane stoves in our tiny kitchens, braising the sweet cipolline from the onion fields down by the lake; roasting peppers; sweating leeks; arranging vast and beautiful still lifes of infant zucchini and cherry tomatoes. Marinated lake eels twist across platters of peppery arugula. Young wheels of Pecorino bought just that morning from a sheep farmer over the next ridge are baked slowly until they all but collapse, then drizzled with the bitter honey collected from bees who graze on corbezzolo, a Sardinian shrub that looks like gorse.
The best kinds of cooks can’t help themselves—they are hard-wired for generosity, the urge to feed people, and the desire to share the zolfino beans they found at a roadside stand that morning. Many of the cooks who come through happen to be chef friends of Nancy Silverton, of the Los Angeles restaurant Campanile, who owns a small house a few steps outside the Perugina gate. On certain hot nights, when everyone’s up at Nancy’s and friends of friends drop by from their summer houses near Montalcino or Orvieto, the amount of food that makes its way from Nancy’s kitchen could feed a restaurant on a fully booked Saturday night.
I know vacationing chefs also tend to cook like this when they end up in Corsica or on Martha’s Vineyard, but the pull of the stove is especially hard to resist in this corner of Italy, where flavors practically burst from the ground demanding to be expressed, the goodness of the summer-roasted soil is everywhere around, and the days disappear into a blissful haze of marketing and gardening, cooking and eating. Given the local ingredients, even simple spaghetti carbonara, vitello tonnato, or pan-roasted chicken, the stuff of simple weekday suppers back in California, become the sorts of dishes that could make a pious man fall to his knees.
The best beef in Italy comes from the Chiana Valley, not 20 minutes north; the best pork from Norcia, a hard hour’s drive southeast; the best sheep’s-milk cheese from around Pienza, a scant half hour to the west. Our village overlooks a big lake, home to tench, trout, and eels. At one of the town’s two markets, the proprietor, Linda, slices her Parma prosciutto in a machine but carves the local product into transparent pink curls by hand; at the other, Iolanda slips vegetables into paper bags with the knowingness of a teenager uploading a White Stripes CD onto her best friend’s iPod.
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