The Umbrian Thursday Night Supper Club (2 page)

Flailing her toasting fork now, she bosses us into our places at table, stoops down then to the small hearth on the wall behind it to turn the thick, spluttering slabs of pancetta, which have been slowly crisping on a grate over olivewood embers and branches of wild sage. Sitting deep in the red-hot ash below the grate is a long, shallow terracotta baking dish of potatoes, small as a thumbnail, and the luscious sage-smelling fat drips over them. From the pocket of her pinafore she takes a handful of dried wild fennel flowers, rubs them between her palms over the potatoes, and the maddening perfumes they send up cause sighs of longing from us. Struggling to rise from her bent position, steadying herself with one hand on the mantel, once she is upright, Miranda-of-the-Bosoms is flushed with delight. For the pancetta, for the potatoes. For her frying dance and because it's Thursday. Likely for much more than that.

‘
Quasi, quasi –
almost, almost,' Miranda laughs over her shoulder, her great beautiful form juddering back behind the faded flowery bedsheet that secludes the kitchen from the dining room in the tiny derelict and woodsmoked house she calls her
rustico
.

It's a Thursday in a long-ago October. And in this squat stone building, which sits on the verges of the Montefiascone road, we are nine still-hungry souls awaiting supper. Four women – five including myself – form the core group and, tonight, we are joined by four men: two husbands, the widower of a former member, and a lover, the last being Miranda's long-time friend, Filiberto.

The ten small tables at which Miranda's guests sit to dine on other evenings in the week have been pushed together into one, the diversity of their heights and widths smoothed over in green-checked oilcloth. Under sheaves of dried olive branches that hang from the slouching, split-beamed ceiling barely a metre above our heads, we sit on plank benches and half-broken chairs along its length. A merry troupe, having our way with Miranda's purple wine, passing along a thin-bladed knife and a two-kilo round of her crusty sourish bread, still warm from the wood-fired oven in the back garden, each of us saws off a trencher, passes it to the person on their right. When everyone has bread, we tear it into pieces, wet the pieces in the wine, and chew the fine pap with gusto.
Pane e vino
, bread and wine.

We slide further into our cups, wet more bread in more wine until Miranda parts the bedsheet curtain – keeping it pinned to the wall with a tilt of her hip – and comes forth holding a great steaming basin of wild porcini braised in red wine and tomato. Into small deep white bowls she spoons the mushrooms with their dark potent juices and directs someone to fetch more bread and another to remove the pancetta from the grate and lay it over the potatoes where it'll stay warm without burning. She asks if the wine jugs are full, then serves herself. We raise tumblers and voices in
buon appetito
and the house goes silent as stone save for low-pitched salacious murmurings.

We share in the clearing of plates and the resetting of others. One of the Thursday night rules is:
Once the supper begins, Miranda will not leave her chair at the table until the meal is finished
. And so, with two kitchen towels against its heat, I lift the pan of pancetta and potatoes from the embers and take it round the table for everyone to serve themselves. Next, one of us fetches from the kitchen two large chipped Deruta platters piled with chicken crusted in wild herbs – rosemary, oregano, fennel seeds, fennel flowers and thyme – and roasted with crushed tomatoes and olive oil, the whole of it doused in white wine toward the end of its cooking time. We fight over the pan juices and before we're ready to surrender the platters – crusts poised for a last swipe – someone whisks them away behind the curtain. Coitus interruptus. We suffer the noise of furtive slurpings. Then frenzied scrapings of the roasting pan left behind in the sink.

‘The chicory is outside in the bread oven,' Miranda says to no one in particular, knowing that someone will run to get it. This between-course bustle with too many of us trying to help seems always a four-minute farce, everyone bent on getting back to the table.

To complete the savoury part of the supper, Miranda has rolled steamed chunks of autumn squash in cornmeal and pan-fried them in olive oil. Only a whisper of sea salt and a grinding of pepper scent them, consenting to yet more sage leaves – sautéed in oil this time – which exalt the natural richness of the squash rather than conceal it with sugar and spices. Nothing much gets a mask in Miranda's kitchen. This reprise of sage – first, battered and fried, then to scent the pancetta and the potatoes and now with the squash – is an example of Miranda's theory of the
filo conduttore
: literally, the conducting thread. Often she uses an element more than once in a meal, thus connecting the various dishes, coaxing them into a harmonious whole.
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts
. Aristotle knew.

Though Miranda almost never prepares a traditional dessert on Thursday nights, sometimes, when she's set ewe's-milk ricotta in a sieve to drain overnight, she'll place a lush, creamy pat of it on a yellow plate, a big hunk of honeycomb and a pepper mill beside it, and everyone will take a tablespoonful or so in a teacup, break a piece of the comb over the ricotta, and grind on pepper with a heavy hand. Without fail, ricotta or not, she always reaches into the armoire where she keeps flour and sugar and dried beans, and takes out a fine old metal tin. Oval in shape, its pale blue and silver paint left only in patches, it's always filled with
tozzetti
, hard, twice-baked biscuits made with whatever nuts or fruit or seeds she has to hand. These and a good ambered
vin santo
in which to wet them, that's how Miranda ends Thursday nights. We began our supper by dipping bread in wine and end with the same gesture. Amen.

Patting his chin with a napkin, Filiberto then lays the square of tattered blue cloth flat on the table; after smoothing and folding it into a small triangle, he places it in the pocket of his woollen shirt. Another of the Thursday night rules is:
Anyone who wants one brings their own napkin
. He rises then, walks to Miranda's place, takes her hand in his and, in the style of the old cavaliers, brings it close to his lips without touching it. Turning from her, he strides the few metres to a chair set near the hearth and takes up his waiting mandolin, and begins plucking the strings in a minor key. One of the two shepherds who tend the flocks on the far-flung meadows of this parish on the Montefiascone road, Filiberto sings, his voice a cracked whisper. Hoarse, ragged.

Miranda shuts her eyes, totters her chair back on its hind legs and, as though all of us and even the little room itself have fallen away, she is alone with Filiberto and his tender wail. His voice, his music, are her after-supper prize on Thursday nights. Miranda-of-the-Bosoms, goddess of abundance,
la Madonna
of the burners in a kitchen-towel turban, Juno-esque breasts, soft and brown, bursting from the bodice of a white pinafore as she rocks her chair like a cradle, its creaking keeping time with Filiberto's plucking. When he stops, she rouses, and her old rheumy eyes are drenched blue-black flowers flitting from one to another of us with what seems like regret. She sips the heel of her
vin santo
, runs a hand across her cheek, pinches her upper lip, pats her kitchen-towel turban. Miranda has been consenting to the age seventy-six for several years now but I think one of her recent birthdays was her eightieth.

It was a cold January night when I first met Miranda, six years ago now. While still living in the stable in San Casciano, Fernando and I were in the thick of our search for our ‘next house'; somehow we found ourselves accidental guests at a festival to honour
Sant'Antonio Abate –
Saint Anthony the Abbot – in a tiny Umbrian village near the hilltown of Orvieto. A wooden crate of just-baked bread balanced picturesquely on her head, Miranda had gone about the little
festa
swinging her prosperous hips, causing the men to pause in their quaffing and orating whenever she passed by. I remember one man in particular would bite the side of a forefinger each time she came near. A forceful gesture this, indicator of many sentiments. But that man's motive for finger-biting was undeniably desire.

As it turned out, we soon found our ‘next house' – in Orvieto – and waited out the two years it wanted to restore it; for all that time and ever since, Miranda has been an affectionate and generous presence in our lives. My first Umbrian friend, my enduring one. When I was too-long kitchenless she put the keys to the rustico in my hand, invited me to complete the work of testing recipes for a manuscript perilously overdue. And when Fernando and I finally moved into Number 34 Via del Duomo, again it was she who swanned me through the markets, introduced me to the farmers, helped me – the first American ever to set up in Orvieto full-time – to slash a path through the spiny cultural labyrinth of the
centro storico
, the town's historic centre. Always there, Miranda was. Always near in the Umbrian way of being near. Close by but not too close.

Miranda and I have spent untold hours – we two, alone, and in the company of others – working and talking, laughing ourselves to tears and then weeping ourselves back to laughter, cooking and baking and sitting down to supper. And when she asks, I give a hand in preparing the suppers she serves in the rustico on three or four nights other than Thursday when Miranda hosts twelve or so people. Her guests on those nights are mostly locals who live alone, truckers passing through or couples living on ‘
caffe latte
pensions' – a sum that barely allows them to put supper on their own tables and would prohibit any thought of dining out. For all of them the handwrought sign –
Miranda –
swinging from a metal arm above her old green door and backlit by a flame in an iron lantern announces a kind of sanctuary, the broken-down castle keep on the Montefiascone road.

Miranda cooks whatever she has, whatever others have brought to her. No bill is brought to the tables at the end of the evening. People leave what they can, be it a few euros, eggs wrapped in newspaper, a sack of just-dug potatoes smudged in wet red earth, or a crate of artichokes, their round barbed heads lolling on thirty-centimetre leafy stems. The arrangement works. Miranda makes it work.

I think of all this and wonder what troubles Miranda-of-the-Bosoms this evening, why her eyes shine with tears that won't fall.

Still sitting by the hearth, Filiberto wonders, too. ‘
Amore mio
,' he says, looking over at her, ‘are you not feeling so well?'

‘
Sto bene. Sto veramente bene ma,
' she says. ‘I'm well, truly well, but …'

‘Well then, what is it?' asks Gilda. A delicate fifty-something beauty, Gilda's face seems made of white silk in which her amber eyes have burned great round holes. ‘I can also see you are a bit down.'

‘I think it's a matter of fatigue. Our little Miranda is doing too much. Maybe there should be a nice interval in our Thursday nights,' says Ninuccia, a stout red-haired women with gorgeous grey eyes and a tendency to rule. The tribe's
portatrice della verità
, the carrier of truths, Ninuccia knows what is and what isn't and rarely is she disputed.

All' Italiana
, everyone around the table begins to speak at once, each one hearing only themselves. No one wants to surrender the Thursday suppers nor do they disagree that Miranda should be doing less. At least for a while. The rumpus builds until she commands quiet.

‘My nephews have promised to do a bit of work on this old place. Not much, mind you – shoring up the beams, laying down a truckload of antique tiles one of them bought from an auction in Viterbo. Some paint. Even though they'll be working only in the evenings, I should think a month would be enough. Sometime after the
raccolta
they should be finished. The olives will be ripe enough to harvest by mid-November this year, wouldn't you say?'

A murmur of accord. ‘Yes, after the harvest and before the first snow, the boys should be finished.'

‘
Benissimo
. And then we will resume our rhythm,' says Pierangelo, who is Ninuccia's husband. The last words he tilts upward in question.

‘Actually, I had more than an
intervallo
in mind,' Miranda says, not looking up. ‘I've been thinking to close down the rustico.' Crushing a crust of bread against the green and white oilcloth, she lifts her empty glass to her lips, trying to sip from it.

Thunder rumbles the room.

‘No, no, I mean close it down
except
for our Thursdays,' she hastens to explain. ‘I won't be opening up on the other nights. That's what I mean.'

Over the others who chant praises to the saints, Miranda is still trying to be heard. ‘But if we do start up again …
when
we start up again, I won't be cooking. I want you to know that. I'll be here to help. We'll keep the same system, everyone contributing what they can to make the supper. For a while there'll be little enough growing in anyone's
orto
save pumpkins and black cabbage and cauliflower, but persimmons will be ripe by November, and pomegranates. If everyone would leave a few porcini to dry, we'd have a windfall for winter suppers. But dry them right. Better, bring them to me and I'll string them up, let them swing from the beams in my attic.'

‘I'll have leeks even after the snow,' says Ninuccia. ‘And I've a cellarful of apples and potatoes. Everyone's got chestnuts.'

‘Good.
Bravissimi
. But remember, only what's
fine
,' Miranda cautions.

A Thursday night rule:
Humble or rich, always offer only the best of what you have
.

‘And whoever can spare something from his hunt, well, feel free to hang the haunches, or the beasts entire, in the cheese hut out back. Birds, hare, boar. Remember to wrap a hoof or a foot or a wing with the date, written legibly, so we'll know the order in which to use them.'