In the summers, some friends and I occupy a small, scenic village in a pretty corner of Umbria, close enough to Rome and Florence to be able to catch lunch and a subtitled Clint Eastwood movie in either of them, but remote enough to warrant barely a sentence or two in even the most comprehensive guidebooks to the region. The village attracts a certain number of visitors, mainly French people and Dutchmen who have become Renaissance art completists, but even for them it is what my father used to call a 15-minute town, a pleasant hilltop on which to pause just long enough to take in the single notable fresco before climbing back into their Escorts and Clios to steal off to the next painting on the itinerary. If they are visiting their first fresco of the day, they may spring for a glass of beer or a souvenir bottle of grappa; if it’s their third, maybe a bowl of truffled pasta or a broiled guinea hen. From this, and not necessarily from the likes of us, is the town’s small living made.
The village, a sort of medieval fortress built into the top of a steep hill above rolling olive groves, is ideal for families with young children—with traffic severely restricted within the city walls, and the outside world so far away, there is only so much trouble even a six-year-old can get into, although Ida broke her foot a couple of years ago when she tried to vault a fountain, and a shadowy dirt-clod incident once persuaded the town constable to briefly lock seven or eight of our children into a jail cell.
Summers here are not much different than summers anywhere, I suppose—lazy days at the lake, books and hammocks, impromptu trips to the sandwich shop for a hearth-cooked torta al testo, which amounts to the local equivalent of ham and cheese. Rural Italy glides to a halt every day between noon and about five in the summer, which may be a problem when you’re a tourist trying to cover 12 cities in 10 days, but seems about right to the indolent traveler, time enough for a leisurely lunch, 100 pages of Balzac, and a nap before the evening meal.
The contours of the village are what Italians call a chiocciola, “snaillike”; picture one of those old-fashioned mazes where you have to trace a line to the center, the highest point, which is where you’ll find the town hall. Some of the apartments look out onto the opera set of a main square. Others are built into the walls of the fortress itself, and some of those have small garden plots where the town moat was filled in years ago. Almost as permanent as the battlements are the town fixtures—the cat lady, the bar owner, the composer, the fixer, the professor, and the man who stands most of the day at his window waving a big Italian flag at the cars coming up the hill. Children play soccer in the steeply sloped square until their mothers call them home. The town elders wander down to watch the sunset from the belvedere below the castle walls, and although one never really gets to know them, when you nod and say “Buona sera” enough evenings in a row, it can seem as if you do.
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.
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.
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.