The Italian diet proceeds on the basis that isolation is the natural condition of a foodstuff. This is why it is so psychologically relieving. Nothing is hidden behind anything else. The tomato is one entity; the olive is another. The potato stands alone, and solitary is the asparagus in its sheaf of clones. To introduce one foodstuff to another represents a whole level of culinary attainment: it is a kind of marriage, inviolable, and hence requiring the utmost care to arrange. To form a group of three is an achievement even more significant. Often the third member of the group will be an herb, whose purpose is to enhance the attraction of the two principals. Sometimes the marriage will be so successful that the two food families will form a lasting alliance. A whole dynasty can spring from their union: tomato and mozzarella cheese, for example, together control an entire region of the national cuisine. It follows that to combine a large number of foodstuffs in a single dish would be tantamount to revolution. But every society needs its revolution, and Italy is no exception. That revolution occurred: its result was ragù. And ragù has given the Italian diet its manpower, its successful exports like spaghetti alla bolognese, the famous feat of engineering that is the lasagne.
But in food, as elsewhere in Italian life, the protection of interests is all. The introduction of new ingredients does not occur. The country’s portals are firmly closed to the spices of the East, to the hybrid notions of the Pacific Rim, to the satay and the flambé and the jambalaya. Everything that is eaten in Italy is grown in Italy. And within those boundaries there are no outcasts, no unwanted elements. The old bread has a soup specially designed for it, the leftover risotto becomes rice cakes, even the hag-ridden cold spaghetti can find a home. These codes of alimentary conduct are deeply ingrained. There is only one way to do it and that is the way Mamma did, or better still Nonna, who after all taught Mamma everything she knew.
Tiziana’s mother is a good cook. Every now and again she makes a rabbit stew for Jim, to shore up his commitment to the wooden hut. Rabbit stew is Jim’s particular favorite. He is always calm and conciliated after he has eaten it, as though someone had injected him with a powerful tranquilizer. He doesn’t cook much himself. He’ll make a fry-up, or sometimes mince and tatties. He invites his English friends round for mince and tatties and ardently believes that they enjoy them as much as he does. When he goes home to Scotland he stocks up with tins of baked beans to bring back to Italy.
I ask Tiziana what the local specialities are and she shrugs. Ragù, she says, tossing her mane around proudly. I have noticed that the restaurants around the village all have precisely the same menus. What is the reason for this? Tiziana shrugs again. If I want something different, she says, I should go to Anghiari. They have different food there. Anghiari is a village eight kilometers away. One day we do go there, and what Tiziana says is true. We are given a kind of hot vegetable terrine called sformata, and a thick tomato soup we have not encountered before. Tiziana nods when we tell her. She knows about sformata. But nobody makes it here.
In our village there is a shop, known as Gianfranco’s. It is a small supermarket whose giant white-haired proprietor roams the aisles in a stained white factory coat, bellowing and gesticulating with his spadelike hands. He is like a polar bear with bespattered fur, roaming its enclosure at the zoo. His enormous body is a kind of spectacle, half bathetic, for he is old and unfree: he doesn’t sit in the shade of the café terrace like the other old men, so neat and combed and compact, nursing their tiny glasses of dark wine. Instead he paces the stacked aisles with his loping gait, or shuffles behind the refrigerated cabinets, dipping his giant hand into salvers of ground meat, paring red mottled disks from a length of salami that fall one after another from the spinning circular blade onto a sheaf of white waxed paper he holds in his palm. With the old women he has a tutelary air as he provisions them for the day ahead. With the young ones he is cheerful and avuncular. But the whole enterprise depends for its survival on the dominance of his personality, and so it is in the work of servicing his own myth that Gianfranco is the most assiduous. He laughs his giant, husky laugh; he bellows and roars, he sees things out of the corner of his eye that launch him into quixotic displays of chivalry. He pats the children on their heads and pinches the babies’ cheeks. At the back of his shop there is a little bar, where certain customers are invited with great ceremony to partake of an espresso or a glass of Gianfranco’s own wine, a profound, inky substance that drenches the blood with its indelible tannins. During these interludes Gianfranco’s wife and daughter command the meat cabinet and the tilclass="underline" Gianfranco’s surgeries at the bar are not to be interrupted. For ten minutes or more he is locked in deep consultation, like a minister with his aides. He leans over to rest his massive forearms on the dented chrome surface. The stained white coat presents its forbidding rear aspect to the shop. It is clear that interests are at stake. Advantages are being pursued, connections soldered. Customers are being reinforced in their commitment to Gianfranco’s, which is smaller and more expensive than the supermarkets a few kilometers away in Sansepolcro. One day we ourselves are summoned to the political engine room and offered coffee and wine. Afterward we tell Jim, and he shakes his head. You must have been spending a pile of money, he says, laughing. Gianfranco must be banking on you paying for his summer holidays. He gives us directions to the Pam in the industrial park outside Sansepolcro.
It is in Gianfranco’s that we study the lexicon of Italian food. The more we consider it, the more bewildering the absence of complexity becomes. We cannot translate our appetites into this abbreviated tongue. We cannot create something from ingredients like a child’s building blocks, sturdy and unfaceted, primary-colored. Up and down Gianfranco’s aisles we walk in our stunted condition, searching for food. There is cheese. It is white. There is young cheese and middle-aged cheese and old cheese. The young cheese is soft. The old cheese is hard. There is meat. It is red. There are olives like beads on an abacus. There is bread as tough and plain as a shoe. There is oil that revives the dead things, like an infusion of pure oxygen, or like an explanation for something unknown. There is pasta, blank as an empty page. We gaze at these things, tongue-tied and inarticulate. Our mouths are full of whole sentences that strain to be uttered and yet can’t be. What is it that we wish to say? What is it that we want? The first generation of people who came to England from the Indian subcontinent bought tinned baked beans in English supermarkets which they washed of their sauce in order to be able to cook their own dishes. I can imagine the blankness out of which their whole conception of food had to be redescribed, the same blankness that I feel when I try to express myself in Italian and cannot find the words to do it. Sometimes I find a word that is similar to the one I wanted and I use that instead. But it was not our intention to translate our English diet: we planned to abandon it outright. We are not scouring Gianfranco’s for the means of making steak and kidney pie. It is Italian food we want to cook, but it seems that we must have more than Italian ingredients with which to do it.
Jim renews his offer of mince and tatties. Imperiously, I refuse. I say that I do not want mince and tatties. I do not want the fodder of the cold North. Even the idea of them sticks in my throat. I want to remain loyal to the ardent suppositions of my own imagination, to my southern ideal, whether or not it exists. Jim is very offended. I have to apologize several times before he is appeased. In the field near our house there is a grove of olive trees. Their biblical forms are so ancient, their fruit so bitter: they are like the ancestors of the cultivated earth, so dry and bitter-tasting in their wisdom. Their subtle leaves make an antique filigree pattern against the duck-egg-blue sky.