The Food of Love (28 page)

‘And there’s not much the Galtenesi don’t know about funghi.”

The Galtenesi, it turned out, was the collective name for those

who lived in these hills.

‘You see those two?’ the man continued, nodding at a mongrel

scratching itself in the dust, not far from where a weatherbeaten old man with a long stick was methodically polishing off an enormous bowl of taglierini. ‘That’s Alberto, and his dog Pippino.

He’s one of the best trifolai in all Italy.’

Bruno looked at the old man with new respect. If there were

truffles here, that explained why the locals ate so well and

seemed so contented with their simple lifestyle. A good trifolau, or truffle hunter, could make a fortune during the winter season.

Then, for the rest of the year, he could relax and tend his smallholding.

‘But

don’t the best truffles come from Piemonte?’ he

remarked. This caused a gale of laughter from his eating companions, and more laughter as his comment was repeated up and

down the long table.

The villager shook his head. ‘The Piemontese have the best

markets,’ he confided, leaning forward conspiratorially, ‘and of course they like to pretend that what you buy in the markets

comes from the hills in their own region. But if it wasn’t for

Le Marche, the market at Alba would be empty most of the

season. As for us, we’re happy to sell them up north. Here there are so many truffles that we wouldn’t get anything like the same price.’

This conversation was interrupted by a sudden shout from the

direction of the bar. A little terrier was scurrying from the door, carrying off a huge joint of meat in its jaws, hotly pursued by a red-faced Gusta, yelling profanities. The chuckles of the villagers rapidly turned to alarm when it became clear that the animal had just made off with the capretto, the joint of kid that had been

going to be the secondo.

There was a long wait, punctuated by occasional bursts of

shouting from inside the house. Tensions in the kitchen were

clearly running high. Then there was a double burst of shouting, followed by a loud crash, and silence.

Bruno got to his feet. ‘Excuse me,’ he said politely to his companions, “I think I should go and offer to help.’

The man looked at him in alarm. ‘Are you crazy? There are

knives in there. And believe me, the women in that family have a temper; they’re famous for it.’

Bruno shrugged. ‘Still, I’d better see what I can do.’

He made his way into the tiny bar, and from there to the

kitchen behind it. It wasn’t much bigger than the bar and it contained both Gusta and her daughter, who were staring fiercely at

each other across the kitchen table. Evidently he had walked in to the middle of a row.

‘Excuse me,’ Bruno said mildly, “I came to see if you would like some help.’

‘Everything’s fine,’ yelled Gusta, flapping her apron at him.

‘Go and sit outside.’ She glared at her daughter. ‘And take

Benedetta with you.’

‘For example,’ Bruno continued, “I thought perhaps I could

turn the leftover porchetta from last night into meatballs, while your daughter makes a tomato and olive sauce, and you, signora,

prepare some finocchio fritto.”1

There was a brief silence while the two women thought about

this.

‘For that matter,’ Benedetta said at last, ‘we have some sheets

of pasta left over from making the taglierini. We could make a sort of vincisgrassi.”

‘We don’t have a food processor,’ Gusta said dismissively. ‘If we have to dice all that porchetta by hand, we still won’t have fed everyone by the time evening Mass starts.’

‘With respect, signora, I am a very fast worker,’ Bruno said.

‘You’re a man,’ Gusta said with an air of finality, as if it were self-evident that this ruled out both the possibility’ of Bruno being a cook and of him being a fast worker. Bruno found himself wondering whether there had ever been a signor Gusta.

‘True, but—’

LPorco DioP yelled Benedetta. ‘Can we stop talking and start

cooking?’

Bruno reached for a knife, a chopping board and, since no one

stopped him, opened the meat safe to remove the platter that

held the remains of the porchetta. There was rather less than he had remembered: even if he flayed every ounce of meat from the

bones, it was going to be hard to make it stretch to feeding the twenty or thirty hungry villagers who were waiting outside.

‘We’ll need some stale bread,’ he decided. ‘We can soak it in oil and use it for bulk. And some herbs, of course. What do you have in your garden, signora?’

‘Sage, thyme, marjoram, oregano, bay, basil—’

‘And what vegetables?’

‘Celery, courgettes, peas, tomatoes—’

‘Bring in as much as you’ve got,’ Bruno said, ‘particularly the

celery and the zucchini.” As he spoke, his knife, almost without his thinking about it, was dancing over the carcass of the pig,

Lasagne of the Le Marche region, named after an Austrian general, Prince Windisch-Graetz, who fought against Napoleon. The authoritative vincisgrassi is made with Bechamel sauce and a meat base comprising lamb testicles, liver, cockerel giblets and no tomatoes but, like pizza, there are many variations possible on the basic theme.

stripping it of meat. He saw Benedetta glance down at his hands, her eyes widening a little, although she said nothing. She reached for a length of tomatoes, still attached to their vine, and with her own knife began to chop them without even bothering to strip them from the stem.

Bruno started to dice the strips of pork into tiny pieces. Not

needing to look at what his own hands were doing, he looked

instead at Benedetta’s. She was good, he thought: she must have been cooking for years. Her knife was a blur as she worked her way along a celery stalk. He realised that Benedetta, too, wasn’t looking at her own hands but at his. Then, at the same moment, they both looked up at each other’s face and their eyes met.

Bruno’s knife didn’t miss a beat, but he felt a shock of recognition.

It was like looking in a mirror.

‘You’re left-handed,’ he said, noticing.

‘And you’re a chef,’ she said drily.

‘Yes.’

‘So what are you doing in Galtena?’

‘Just passing through.’

‘Really? The road up here doesn’t go anywhere else.’

He opened his mouth, and a moment later felt a sharp pain on his knuckle as the knife sliced deep into the skin. ‘Shit!’

‘There are plasters by the sink,’ Benedetta said, sounding

amused.

He rinsed the cut and wrapped the plaster around it before

picking up the knife again. ‘I’m a little out of practice,’ he muttered.

‘So

I see. Never mind, we need all the meat we can get, even if

it comes from your fingers.’

Angry with himself for making such an elementary mistake,

Bruno chopped even faster, as Gusta returned with the vegetables.

In half an hour the three of them prepared a meal that would

normally have taken four or five hours. It was not the best dish he had ever cooked, Bruno admitted to himself as he sent the first plates out of the door, but it was one he would always remember.

In particular, he would remember the way that he and Benedetta

had worked together, in silence but in perfect accord.

Finally there were just three plates left, and the small child who had been roped into service as a waiter reported that everyone

outside was eating.

‘These are for us,’ Gusta said, taking off her apron. ‘Let’s go

outside.’

If the customers had minded the wait, they didn’t show it. The

accordions were out again and the children were being allowed to run around, teasing the dogs and each other into a frenzy of

excitement. There were places left at the main table, but Javier was sitting there, his food untouched, waiting for Benedetta with a

scowl on his face. Bruno thought it was probably tactful to go

back to the table he’d been sitting at before.

‘Did you make this?’ the man he’d been talking to earlier

wanted to know.

Bruno shrugged. ‘Well, I helped.’

“It’s not bad,’ the man commented, ‘though there’s a touch

too much marjoram for my taste.’

Damn, Bruno thought as he ate his own plateful, he’s probably

right at that. These country people had more sophisticated palates than any he’d come across at Templi. To change the subject, he

said, ‘What happened to signor Gusta?’

‘Ah. He ran away. Years ago, when Bene was just a little girl.

People say that’s why his daughter learned to cook so well,

because she had to help her mother instead of going to school

Now,’ he sighed, ‘we’re going to lose her anyway.’

‘Oh? Why’s that?’

‘Are you crazy? She’s twenty-one, she’s beautiful and she cooks

like an angel. Every young man in the Galteni wants to come

home to her, temper or no temper. Sooner or later she’ll be cook ing for her own husband in his kitchen, and none of the rest of us will get a look in. What’s more, her mother won’t be able to

manage all by herself so the bar will probably have to close too. All in all, it’s a disaster.’

Bruno looked across to where Benedetta was sitting next to

Javier. ‘So is Javier the one she’ll marry?’

The man shrugged. ‘Who knows? It’s the dog who howls at the

moon, but the fox who eats the chicken. Just because he’s following her round like an idiot doesn’t mean that he’s getting

anywhere. In fact, he’s probably doing it as much to impress his rivals as anything.’

Looking at Javier’s vast frame as he silently shovelled food into his mouth, Bruno could see how that would work. But it was

nothing to do with him. He was just passing through.

Back in Rome, Tommaso was looking at the empty walls of his

apartment. He had already sold all of Bruno’s kitchen appliances, his own watch and his digital camera. The restaurant had been

picked clean of its wine: he was down to a skeleton stock of just half a dozen bottles and there was barely a corkscrew left to open them with. Yet still the bills kept coming. Now there was nothing left but to sell his prized CD collection, and when the money

from that was gone, he would have to fire Marie.

Sighing, he packed the CDs into boxes and lugged them downstairs to where the vast Porta Portese street market stretched from

the Tiber right up to the Viale Glorioso. There was a record dealer just across the street. Tommaso put the box down on his stall.

‘How much for all of them?’

The stallholder flicked through the collection, which was full of Japanese imports and rare bootlegs. ‘Five hundred,’ he said at

last. It was worth double, but he recognised a fire sale when he saw one.

‘Done,’ Tommaso said wearily. The stallholder pushed some

notes into his hand quickly, as if afraid Tommaso might change his mind.

As he was going back to his door, Tommaso heard a voice

220

221

;) n, Ś Uiji!

whispering from one of the doorways: ‘Grass, speed, pills,

coke …’ It came from an ageing Scottish hippy who hung around the markets, doing a little dealing to fund his own prodigious

habit. Tommaso stopped. A desperate idea had just begun to form

in his mind.

That evening, the menu at II Cuoco was reduced to a choice of

just one pasta, followed by a single secondo.

Unknown to the four couples wrho comprised the restaurant’s

only customers, their spaghetti carbonara had been dusted not

with pecorino romano but with a highly idiosyncratic and frankly unpredictable mixture of cheese and ecstasy. What Bruno had

achieved with his culinary skills, Tommaso was hoping to replicate with simple pharmacology.

Bruno, meanwhile, had finally made the acquaintance of Hanni

the mechanic, who was examining his old van with a portable

lantern and an expression of dismay.

‘You’re looking at about four weeks,’ Hanni informed him.

‘More if I can’t get a gearbox.’

‘Four weeks? But that’s impossible. Nothing takes four

weeks.’

‘The problem is, they don’t make these any more.’ Hanni

shrugged. ‘It’s like waiting for a heart transplant. Some other

vehicle has to die and give up its parts before yours can be

repaired.’

With a sense of dread Bruno asked, ‘And how much will it

cost?’

Hanni shrugged again. ‘Who knows? Could be a hundred,

could be five hundred. We’ll just have to see what’s available.’

The results of his experiment exceeded Tommaso’s expectations.

Once again the air at II Cuoco was filled with passion. True, it was a little more anarchic than before. Of the four couples, one was trying to kill each other, and a woman was dancing very slowly on the bar, half naked, while her partner was nowhere to be seen. But everyone was having a good time, that was undeniable.

‘This is how we cook rabbit in Rome,’ Bruno said. ‘A little sage, a little rosemary, then we leave it to simmer in the wine.’

‘Interesting,’ Benedetta said. ‘But incorrect. In Le Marche we

stuff the rabbit with peppers, pancetta and liver before cooking.

And when we simmer it we leave the lid off, like this.” She reached out and pushed the lid of Bruno’s pan askew. ‘That way it reduces while it cooks.’ She glared at him.

Bruno sighed. His plan to ask Gusta for a job in exchange for

board while he waited for Hanni to get the spare parts he needed was proving trickier than he’d expected. Gusta had insisted on

giving him a trial run, and Benedetta in turn had demanded that

he use it to demonstrate that he could cook the local dishes in the local way - which, of course, meant her way.