On The Altar of her Tuscan Farmhouse

I’m in the kitchen cooking when the telephone rings. Onions are sweating, spinach defrosting and the meat is ready to go in. Ignore it. A sales call. Puccini is on at full volume as he often is when I cook, and the family is out. The telephone keeps ringing, Renata Scotto keeps singing and I keep cooking. Someone must win. But it could be family, run out of money, cancelled trains, school problems.

‘What are you doing?’ a woman’s voice on the other end.

‘What?’ I say. ‘Is this double glazing, appliance insurance or full-on scam?’

‘Don’t burn the onions,’ she says. I hang up. They always call at this time.

The minced pork and beef are now cooking with the onions, garlic, and dried herbs. I will use half for the smalto (stuffing) with spinach, breadcrumbs, egg and pecorino, and half for the sugo (sauce) with tomatoes, red wine, a little stock and a parmesan rind. I check the handwritten recipe for timings, Tosca realises God has abandoned her to a terrible fate, and the telephone rings again.

‘Don’t forget to use the best olive oil in the pasta- cold pressed and Italian.’

‘I know, but who is this? Is that you Morag? It doesn’t sound like you,’ I say.

‘No, stronzo, it’s Nonna!’

‘Go away!’ and I hang up again. I don’t recognise the voice: it was accent-less, ageless, but definitely not my twenty years dead Tuscan grandmother who had an accent as thick as Pasta e Fagioli on its third day.

It was she who wrote recipes for the grandchildren when I was too young to remember. The recipes came from her mother and her mother’s mother back into time, when they couldn’t read and write and learned everything at the wood stoves high up in the Garfagnana, above olives and vines, with a view of the Carrara Mountains in winter snow. She married my grandfather from the village across the valley, a route of marriage long trodden by donkeys, and they came to Britain to avoid crop failures, dying vineyards and the malnutrition that took her brother.

 In the 1960s, with money from their fish and chip shop, they bought a small farm in an Italy that remained stubbornly poor, built a farmhouse (with electricity!) and planted new vines and olive trees. My nonna spent every summer there until she was eighty. At her funeral we hung a photo on the altar of her in the farmhouse kitchen.

She was Italy to me, even when it was raining and cold and BBC Radio was playing in the background and there were red buses outside. Somehow her kitchen here in Britain had the same smell as the Tuscan farmhouse. It seeped into every fabric and grouted tile, sustained through the constant processing of the simplest ingredients which she arranged into perfect melodies: basil, oregano, tomatoes, carrots, celery.  And when she mixed spinach with parmesan, in a little appreciated alchemy, the floral perfume worked its way through the house like a writhing ghost. When I cook, that’s what I want; the taste of the Serchio Valley, of Barga, Coreglia Alta and Lucca, where I sourced the cold pressed olive oil as thick as axle grease and yellow because it contains real sun- I like to think.

In autumn, Quinto, who was Nonna’s brother, would go shooting in cold, English forests and bag pigeons for soup while she wandered off with her walking stick and basket to find mushrooms that no one else could, like a nomad sifting through the debris of a forest fire. Sometimes she would bring back wild garlic, berries, and nasturtiums, and sometimes rosemary or tomatoes sheltering near a hedge row.  Not far from the chip shop there was a railway embankment next to a sawmill where she picked sorrel, rocket and wild thyme while workers laughed at the old lady in her black mantilla and woollen stockings that made her look like a crocheted doll, as they ate cheese sandwiches and puffed on full tar cigarettes.

Puccini is on the second act and I my third glass of Barolo on an empty stomach, and I sway to an image of an Italy baked in the heat of childhood holidays and my father’s  Ektachrome slides. This time I swear at the phone.

‘Tordelli?’ she asks.

‘Ravioli,’ I say.

‘Tordelli! Are you following the recipe?’

‘But who…’

‘Then don’t! We don’t have time, it’s nearly Friday. Do you know how much this call costs?’

‘But you’re dead.  And where is your accent?’

‘We don’t have accents here.  Now listen, when I said garlic and onion I meant good onions. And fresh spinach, basil and oregano, and the wine must be from the hills: new and undrinkable.’

‘Not from the supermarket?’

‘Santa Maria, Lorenzo, do you not respect your Nonna?

‘Of course…’

‘Then follow the recipe. Ciao bello, and remember, work hard at school.’

‘Nonna, I am 35,’ and she hangs up, Puccini doesn’t, and the wine bottle is empty.

I’ve lost the thread. Who wouldn’t after that? Then the music stops, and the speakers say, ‘Lorenzo, follow the recipe not the words. I only used tins in Britain back then as I had no choice. Start again.’ And she gives me a full list of instructions: shops, names, addresses, even directions, which I write down then crash into bed as my family arrive home.

I wake with a hammer in my head and a flea in my ear. My wife says that I was drunk last night and threw away good food. I head off with dead Nonna’s list to Fazzi’s Deli where they have meaty, plumb tomatoes and quality pecorino on the wheel. Then to a Turkish greengrocer who has spinach as strong as tennis rackets, and basil and oregano from a hot house.  At the allotments I find Berto who has the onions he used to grow in Barga, and then at the farm shop I collect the beef and pork joints as instructed which I will mince at home.

Finally, I go to old Uncle Rino, whom I haven’t seen for years. He airlifts Tuscan grapes from his brother’s vineyard and ferments wine in his garage in old lemonade bottles. It tastes of vinegar and lemons and sometimes explodes. I take two bottles and carry them at arm’s length.  

He says, ‘What’s wrong with you?  Back home I used to take crates of bottles up hill to the farmers and no one got hurt, except that donkey that was spooked by the bang and fell over the terraces.’ He won’t accept payment but instead slips five pounds into my hand like he used to do when I was a schoolboy.

‘Uncle, I am thirty-five now.’ And he laughs, like I’m not.                                               

When I get home with Nonna’s specific ingredients, I make the pasta on her old wooden board she used to perch between the table and her belly. I allow the dough to rest while the smalto cools and the fresh sugo bubbles bright red like Vesuvius.  

Then I roll the pasta and cut it into squares. If feed a spoon of smalto onto each and fold and crimp as she taught us. I lay twelve portions on wooden trays to dry until Sunday. The phone rings. I answer before my wife does.

‘Pronto. Nonna. I have everything and it’s all drying. Yes Nonna. I love you,’ and as I put the phone down there is a look of confusion or pity on my wife’s face. ‘It’s Nonna,’ I explain.

‘What, dead Nonna? Your very dead and decomposed grandmother?‘ my wife asks, incredulously.

‘Yes, I only had one, silly.’

‘Lay off the vino, it’s barely midday.’ And she heads off to hide the wine, strega, limoncello, and two bottles of grappa I keep for national emergencies.

Sunday. My wife has set twelve places at the table. The little puckered pasta parcels, turned twice, are dry and will boil for three minutes, moved by a gentle wooden spatula. We toast each other and start on the antipasti of mortadella, prosciutto, figs and home baked bread.  The secondi will follow the tordelli. After there are cheeses and my wife has made Nonna’s zabaglione recipe. The wines start white with crisp Tuscan Vernaccia before the big boy Barolo is unleashed.

The tordelli is heaped in Nonna’s old terrine decorated with painted vines. I pour the sugo on top and cover with grated cheese from above like it is snowing on the Apennines. We take our first mouthfuls and await the memories of Nonna and her kitchens. I look at eleven happy faces as the telephone rings.  

Then my mobile phone, my wife’s, my son’s, and I say, ‘Whatever you do, don’t answer, it’s Nonna.’ My wife looks at me, her hand confiscates my glass, but it’s too late. I am already in those Tuscan hills, high up where its bright and warm and smells of wood stoves and coffee and pastries from Geraldo’s, and I hear my dad’s Vespa buzzing up the hill and Nonna shouts at me through the speakers to stop playing with the chickens and come and wash my hands.