The hills that plunge down to the lake are covered with olive trees, and the local oil, strong, green stuff that scorches the back of the throat, is a substance to be used fondly, but sparingly. (Most of our landlords contribute to the product made in the village co-op, and if you prefer a milder oil, it is understood that you will have the courtesy to hide the bottle from plain view.) The moat gardens are planted with marjoram and basil, thick rosemary shrubs, and rudimentarily staked tomato plants whose fruit pops into sweetness around the end of July. Everybody knows whose laurel tree has the most fragrant leaves, which wild patch of flowering nepitella marries best with porcini. When Nancy goes out to gather fennel pollen from the wild plants that blanket the upper slopes, the old men of the town frequently come out of their houses to nudge her hand, to tell her to wait a couple of months to harvest the much more pungent seed.
Until the town council put a stop to it, we used to set up a long table outside a ground-level apartment on the far side of the piazza, and most of us would drift down to it at one point or another in the course of an evening, bearing a chunk of Pecorino or a spreadable salame we’d picked up in the Marches that afternoon, a kilo of fennel-scented porchetta from a liquor bar named Play Pig on the far side of the lake, and little almond tarts from Perugia. A few bottles of Sagrantino or Vino Nobile floated around, and when they were finished, plenty of the local wine that some of us derided as lake water appeared. If nobody had done much foraging, there was soppressata, thinly sliced lardo and hand-cut Umbrian prosciutto, big plates of lentils, crumbly salted ricotta with roasted peppers, and almonds gently fried with lemon peel. The locals are amused by the idea that Americans aspire to cook like Umbrian grandmothers.
It was only after Nancy closed on her house that she learned that she now also owned the old village bread oven—and considering that she is conceivably the best-known artisanal baker in America, and that she bought the property with money she made when she sold La Brea Bakery to an Irish conglomerate, this was eerily appropriate. The vast, sooty slot in her foundation, set deep enough to accommodate two dozen rustic loaves, was as greedy for wood as a steam locomotive. It was also so poorly insulated that she set the joists on fire every time she baked a pizza, a problem that took thousands of euros and armies of workmen to fix. She arranged the purchase of kitchen equipment through Aldo, the owner of one of the town bars, and her living room sported a commercial sandwich press and a gleaming, full-size deli slicer weeks before there were tables or chairs. She ripped out the old foliage, uprooting acres of scrub and several thousand fat scorpions, and planted some laurel, 100 olive trees, and a dining pergola that overlooked the valley far below. In other words, she transformed the house into something resembling an enormous dining room with a few vestigial bedrooms attached, and when you came to visit, you were press-ganged into duty in her proper if slow-moving brigade, slicing, trimming, or basting under her command, and woe be unto you if you nibbled at the grilled mushrooms before they were officially set out for lunch.
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