There is a certain sharpness, a hyperreality to cooking here that renders each moment all the more fully lived. You are in Italy, after all, within a two-hour drive of a huge proportion of the greatest art treasures in the world, a place where the exotic nose of a Raphael Madonna appears on the faces of half the women on the street, where a common fresco-master’s trick is to frame his Annunciation or St. Anthony within the view that would exist if the wall behind it were not plaster and stone but glass, so that the simultaneous experiences of looking at a painting and not looking at a painting, of fixing your gaze on a pretty young woman behind a bakery counter and on a pretty young woman holding aloft the severed head of Holofernes, tend to fade into one another, and the heightened sense of beauty is all around, even in the food.
Mario batali showed up one day with some sausages, a few balls of buffalo mozzarella, and a crate of underripe San Marzano tomatoes he’d picked up that morning in Naples, all of which he bestowed upon Nancy with a small bow. He settled down in the piazza with a bottle of cold Grechetto. Nancy looked at the odd gift bemusedly, as if she were an Iron Chef contestant required to make a palatable meal out of the ingredients in an hour. She sent one of us out to gather all the arugula in her friends’ backyard gardens, and another to scavenge some salt-preserved anchovies from a neighbor. She scouted in her own refrigerator and found eggs. She melted down the bitter, wormy arugula with garlic and a big slug of the native olive oil, and she simmered it until the tough old greens became elusively smoky, almost sweet. She popped thick slices of the tomatoes into a slow oven. She coddled the fresh eggs in water whose simmer never quite broke a tremble, and teased apart the barely set whites and yolks into large pieces with her fingers. She grilled slabs of saltless bread and rubbed them with halved garlic cloves while they were still smoking hot, and in a big clay mortar pounded the anchovies with oil and still more garlic into a thin, powerful emulsion.
When I caught up with Mario in the piazza a few minutes later, right after Nancy’s offering finally made it out to the communal table, he had already commandeered the platter and sent some kids to the bar to buy more Grechetto, and he clutched an oozing bruschetta in each massive fist. Within an hour of blowing into town, Batali had gotten into the rhythm of summer. The rhythm of spring here, which centers around a post-Easter contest in which large cheeses are rolled down the hill into the next village, is another thing entirely, but I suspect Mario would get the hang of that one, too.
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