A Moveable Feast (26 page)

He shuffled into a back room, and came back with a bottle, which he wiped with a soft, clean cloth.

‘Millenovecento sessant’uno,’
he said, with relish.

‘Buono?’
I said.

‘Molto buono.’

I smiled and pointed at him. He shook his head sadly.

‘Sono aceto,’
he said. I understood: I’m vinegar.

I asked the price of my birthday wine, which was expensive even then. I told him I was a student and would like his cheapest bottle.

He returned with another bottle, and wiped it with the same care. Then he brought two glasses and seemed to ask if I knew how to drink the wine properly. I shook my head no. With great style and ceremony he opened the bottle, sniffed the cork, and had me sniff it. Then he poured a small amount into the glass, lifted it by the stem to look at the colour in the light, then swirled, and dipped his long nose into the glass to smell.

I watched, fascinated. It had never occurred to me to do anything with wine but drink it down fast, since all I’d been exposed to was Boone’s Farm strawberry wine. I followed his ritual and accidentally snorted some of the wine when I sniffed, since my nose is short.

He laughed and poured me a glass, and I gestured that he should pour himself one, too. The wine had so many flavours going on at once, woods and fruits and earth. The man picked up the bottle with his gnarled hands and placed it on a huge stone table with a view of the vineyards, and with few words, him gesturing occasionally to the birds and the sunflowers, that old vinegar man and I drank the whole bottle.

Secondi
- Porchetto (maialetto) al mirto
- Arrosto di vitello con funghi

Contorni
- Patate al forno
- Verdura mista

The pasta plates have been cleared, and the men are perking up: now the serious eating is about to begin. The meat.

Beppe’s sister, next to me, tells me we are having a couple of traditional specialities: baby pork in
mirto,
the island’s herbaceous liqueur, and roast veal with wild mushrooms. The rich aromas reach the table, awakening my already much-sated appetite.

There was a time when I wouldn’t have dreamt of eating baby animal anything, or meat at all. I was a vegetarian for many of the years I visited Italy. In my late twenties, I went to Italy with my then-boyfriend, an Italian-American named Vince, to visit a woman who’d stayed in our place in San Francisco. The first evening we arrived, Renata fixed dinner: a Florentine steak
and
a roast. ‘This is to make up for him having to live with a vegetarian,’ she said as Vince tucked into the meat, his eyes glistening.

I sat there and swore I was content with just the pasta. We went out to eat another night, and I had celery with olive oil for my main course. I refused pancetta, roast rabbit, salty
bresaola
and carpaccio with capers. I said no to meat in Bologna. I turned down the prosciutto in Norcia. One evening in Fiesole, the chef brought out some homemade sausages as a special treat to the American guest, and I demurred, explaining I was a
vegetariana.
My Italian friends suddenly acted like they didn’t know me.

I’d been a vegetarian for a lot of reasons, some having to do with health, and some philosophy, with not a small helping of moral righteousness. But at a certain point I realised that if I was to stop being neurotic about food and try to eat like an Italian – eating fresh food socially, with pleasure – then being a vegetarian just didn’t fit with the plan. Nor did it make much sense to my friends that such an otherwise hedonistic woman had this one ascetic streak. Italians like to eat with people, and it happens that people are omnivores.

The veal almost melts in my mouth. It is so tender it reminds me of the paper-thin horse I’d tried at Beppe’s house earlier in the week. And the baby pig in
mirto
I’d have at my last meal. It was worth coming to Sardinia just to eat that piglet.

The meat dishes come with
contorni,
side dishes of potatoes and greens. They look wonderfully cooked, but with all the splendid meat dishes, I don’t see the point of the vegetables. I take a bite of greens for old time’s sake.

- Sorbetto al limone

I think this is dessert and the meal has finally come to an end. That might not be so bad, because while it has been an enormous pleasure, it has also been an enormous quantity. I’m surprised they’re just having a little dish of sorbet for dessert, though.

Then come the fish courses.

- Gamberi alla vernaccia
- Aragosta alla catalana
- Pesce misto in bella vista (alla griglia)
- Monzette in teglia

No-one cooks fish like Sardinians. Here, as in Sicily, still exist the remnants of
mattanza,
the great tuna kill, facilitated with a complicated
structure of nets designed by the Arabs, and celebrated for weeks on end. Fish is life on these islands.

For the past few years, as a traveller through Italy, I have steadily gravitated towards the south. That’s partly because the southern parts of Italy – Puglia, Sicily, Sardinia – still seem like Italy, with small stone villages where most people don’t care about speaking English. It’s also because the cuisine is fresher and lighter than in the north, based on olive oil, fresh vegetables – and fish. There’s something so elemental about fish as food: it comes straight out of the ocean, still plentiful in these parts, you grill it, and it’s delicious.

The platters arrive with lobster cooked
‘alla catalana’
– recalling the Spanish who settled on the north-west part of the island – and shrimps, and quantities of plump, moist, steaming grilled fish. But I am so full that all I can do is stare at the fish, as if in an aquarium. Aren’t they beautiful.
Non posso piu.
I just can’t eat any more.

Then the plates of snails arrive, peeking out of their garlic caves,
monzette in teglia.
My eyes tear up because there is nothing I want more in the world than to eat these little snails. Everyone in my family, everyone I grew up with, would shudder at these slimy creatures. Everyone here will be at another Sardinian wedding in their lives, and will taste more of these
monzette.
I sigh, to see if there is room in my stomach, in some small corner, for a little snail. There is room only for my desire.

Frutta e desserts
- Frutta mista
- Gelato

The desserts arrive, then coffee, but everyone has pushed back from the table as the music starts. Everyone wants to move by now, and they crowd the dance floor, from ages sixteen to eighty.
We dance and dance around the couples, whose faces are glowing with pleasure, with the love of their huge community of friends and family, supported by the food they’ve made, the sustenance of their culture.

I dance until three in the morning, when suddenly a switch turns off and I can no longer understand a word of Italian, nor dance another step. Despite years of speaking and eating Italian, I’ve turned into an American up long past her bedtime.

Beppe accompanies me back to the house before returning to the party, to dance until dawn, and to down an espresso before heading to the beach.

Between a farm in Canada and a farm in Thailand, Jeffrey Alford spends a lot of time these days with crickets, frogs, green manure and machetes. He is currently at work on a book tentatively titled
Eating Leaves: A Cookbook Memoir
. Together with Naomi Duguid he has co-authored two cookbooks (
Flatbreads and Flavors
and
Hot Sour Salty Sweet: A Culinary Journey Through South-East Asia
), both of which won the James Beard Cookbook of the Year Award. Alford thinks of himself as a writer, a photographer, a cook, but most of all, a traveller.

The other night I was across the street at Oie’s playing with her one-month-old baby, Off. There were a bunch of us sitting together on a wooden platform under a roof made of simple thatch. We call it
ban off,
or ‘house of Off’. Oie and her partner, Mai, built it one day a few weeks back, having nothing else to do on a hot late April day here in north-eastern Thailand, in a farm village named Kravan, just a stone’s throw from Cambodia.

Suddenly from the pitch-black evening Tey, Oie’s younger brother, aged thirteen, emerged with a flashlight attached to his head, the type that miners wear, only not so fancy. He threw a muslin bag down on the platform and then took the light from his head – turning it off in one quick, efficient movement. Still without saying a word, he opened the bag and pulled out a snake, approximately a metre and a half long, now dead. He reached further into the bag and brought out half a dozen large frogs. People around the table were impressed and told him so, but he’d saved the best for last. Out came a large plastic Coke container almost half-filled with crickets,
jinglets
as they are called here. He’d scored and he knew it.

Foraging is serious stuff here in Kravan. Pee, my partner, is one of the best in the village, and well known for it. ‘Pee,’ I asked one day, ‘which do you like best, rainy or dry season?’

‘Rainy season,’ she shot back immediately, as she almost always does when she responds to what she considers to be yet another idiotic question. ‘In rainy season I catch frogs every day, no problem.’ Pee loves frogs, maybe even more than she loves crickets, although for most people here it’s just the opposite. My theory is that she loves frogs more than crickets (though not to get me wrong, Pee loves crickets, too) because for cooking, frogs are more versatile. And Pee loves to cook, maybe even more than she loves frogs.

Pee wakes up almost every morning between four-thirty and five, the sun not coming up until well after six. She knows that I am deeply asleep, but still I hear her voice, as if in a dream: ‘What you like for breakfast? You like frog? You want chicken?’

She gets out of bed and heads immediately down the steep wooden stairs of the traditional Khmer-style house, perched high on wooden stilts, finding her way in the dark to the three small earthenware stoves set up immediately in front between the house and the dirt road, just like every house in the village. She
gets one fire going, maybe two. To light the charcoal, she first lights long, thin, resinous sticks, and when they’re burning, she starts to stack the charcoal. All the charcoal is made household by household and ‘cooked’ in mud ovens that look like bread ovens using prunings from mango trees, jackfruit and tamarind; Kravan is intensely tropical.

Once the fires are started, Pee will take a shower or stroll across the street to chat with Oie or An. Early-morning life is very social in the village. By five o’clock I am generally the only person in the village not yet awake. When I first arrived here, I was accustomed to waking at nine o’clock, a good ‘compromise’ hour, not too early, not too late. Initially, Kravan was a big adjustment!

If Pee decides to cook chicken, she simply takes a slingshot hanging from a nail on the wall and finds a few stones, then, with deadly aim, targets a chicken that she’s most likely had her eye on for a while. One afternoon, sitting on the large wooden platform in the shade of the overhang (where we spend most of every day here in the hot season), she scornfully nodded her head, a typical gesture in north-eastern Thailand, in the direction of one particular squawking chicken. ‘Noisy chicken,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow, soup.’

Kravan, in Thai terms, is a poor village, as are most villages in this part of Thailand. Last year, before coming to Kravan, I lived for a year on a farm about an hour’s drive west of here; I write cookbooks for a living, so
here
for me is both life and work, but the two have become increasingly indistinguishable these last few years. It was on the Yindichati farm where I lived previously that I first encountered the concept of ‘free’ food. Mae and Pa – the two incredible people who owned the farm, and who have knowledge and skills specific to the farm that no future generation can ever hope to have – would tell me at night to eat more rice: ‘free food’. ‘And eat more fish,’ father would say, smiling. ‘Free.’
Free food is the food that’s grown, that’s harvested, and it accounts for almost everything eaten. There’s very little cash money, but there’s food, unbelievable food.

When I first arrived in Kravan a few months back, everything felt wonderfully familiar, all life revolving around rice farming and subsistence agriculture. But in Kravan, I’ve found over time, there’s actually much that’s different. Kravan is ethnically Khmer. Everyone, when speaking together, speaks Khmer, a language absolutely not related to Thai or to Lao. When they speak with me, they speak Lao or even Thai, especially the children now learning Thai in school. Also, Kravan is an actual village, a very tight, intimate assemblage of houses, and the rice fields surround the village. The Yindichati farm, in contrast, is in a region primarily populated by people who speak Korat, a language somewhere in the middle between Lao and Thai. What they call ‘the village’ are individual farms set one after another in a two-mile stretch down a dirt road, like farms in the American Midwest.

Kravan, I am quickly coming to realise, is also considerably poorer than the Yindichati farm. People’s landholdings here are tiny in comparison. Pee has four
rai,
or approximately 1.6 acres, while the Yindichati farm has 117
rai.
Late one afternoon a few days back, I went to the farm with Pee to forage. The fields are deadly dry here in late April and early May, parched beyond description with the fierce heat of every day. We sat under a big tree talking about the weeks to come, about how we will plant the fields and what we must do to get them ready. At some point Pee got up to go, a plastic bag and her long narrow (and always razor-sharp) spade in hand. We headed off across the fields, Pee looking down, an eagle on a hunt. Mid-conversation she suddenly started to dig, fiercely, through the red lateritic soil now baked hard as clay brick.

‘Maybe snake,’ she told me matter-of-factly. ‘A crab hole, but maybe a snake moved in.’ The hole was long, and Pee kept
digging, horizontally. Finally, nothing. So we moved on. Another hole, this one fruitful: a crab. Pee picked it up, put it into the bag, and we moved on again. Pee foraged for an hour, maybe more. She found crickets, more crabs. ‘Everything goes under the ground now. It’s too hot. Soon the rain will come and the frogs will come back.’

As early evening at last began to arrive and the heat finally began to give way, the towering coconut palms, the fifty-year-old mango trees, the
leucaena,
everything all around took on a soft tropical glow. Pee set down her spade and turned her attention to picking tree leaves.
‘Khilek,
you know?’

‘Yes,’ I answered proudly, knowing it from the Yindichati farm. But unfortunately it was the
only
one that I did know. Pee moved from tree to tree, explaining as she picked the leaves what she’d use them for. Some are
kom,
or bitter, a common taste here in the wild foods that I am still trying to get used to. It’s
yaa,
or medicine, people always explain to me when eating very bitter leaves. And I am sure they are right, but for me, bitter’s still bitter.

Other leaves are for
nam prik,
a category of chilli pastes, or salsas, for lack of a better word. There are a million different
nam priks,
and most are complicated and labour intensive. They’re the heart of the cuisine, the number-one sign of a cook’s skill. Almost exclusively they’re made in Thai-style mortar and pestles, the pestle being made from a hard tropical wood. The
nam prik
is made by pounding, pounding, pounding. Little red hot bird chillies will usually be the first ingredient pounded, followed by tiny garlic and small Asian shallots. But from then on there’s infinite variety.

One of Pee’s favourite ways to use tiny frogs (and I mean tiny, about an inch to two inches in length) is to grill them over charcoal in a metal grilling basket. Most of the grilled frogs get pounded into a
nam prik.
One of Pee’s favourites is a combination
of grilled frog and green mango, a
nam prik
so fiery hot you would not believe.

When I stagger down to breakfast, proud of myself at six in the morning, Pee is often grilling tiny frogs. I squat down to watch what she’s doing; Pee will cook for an hour, squatting, never sitting. When the frogs start to crisp, she’ll open up the grilling basket and give me two or three frogs to nibble on. They’re hot and delicious.

‘Lao khao?’
Pee will inevitably ask.

‘Sure,’ I answer; the combination of rice whisky – mixed with a Chinese medicinal herbal drink – served with hot, freshly grilled frogs is impossible to turn down. It’s the essence of morning in Kravan. A few weeks ago it dawned on me that I hadn’t drunk a cup of coffee in months, and I’m a person who’s been drinking coffee religiously for thirty-five years!

As we were about to leave the farm that day, dusk giving way to dark, Pee let out a scream. Up a tree she’d suddenly spotted a large red ant nest, the prize of the day. She found a long length of bamboo and tied her spade to the end of the bamboo, then dislodged the nest without having to climb the tree. She gathered the red ant eggs into her plastic bag and we happily rode the motorbike back home in the dark.

Red ant egg salad is my personal favourite, even better than crispy grilled tiny frog.

It’s amazing how the rites and rhythms of life slip inside you here, out in the country. How one thing flows so easily into another, dawn to dusk, dry season to rainy season, frog to chicken to snake.

Yesterday Pee and I got married. Work merged into life.