so tuscan it hurts

I spent last Saturday picking olives in the hills with friends of a friend. I was grateful for the opportunity, not least because I was far too hungover to comtemplate doing anything else. How you harvest olives is, you spread a big net out under the tree, tucking it up all cosy around the trunk, and then you go over every branch with a sort of plastic comb, with teeth spaced just right to collect all the olives but let the leaves pass through unharmed. There is something gentle and hypnotic about it, just as if you were combing some great creature’s hair. As you rake off the fruit the tree releases its oil, surrounding you in a spicy, citrus-pungent cloud, and the olives drop into the net with a sound like rain, and the leaves whisper as they path through the teeth of the comb.

The couple who own the trees are also in possession of a very charming two-year-old and an alsatian big enough to put its paws on your shoulders and lick your face. When one or another of the nets got good and full they would take turns rolling around in the purple-green piles, mixing in a goodly portion of slobber and mud. Despite the best efforts of these two, we collected 250kg in a day. The olives were pressed on the Sunday, and that night I ate the new oil, gorgeously green and sharp, with my dinner.

sergeant major is my name

I have met an Italian teacher who wants to swap conversation lessons with me, and she tells me that I’m at roughly intermediate level. I’m not convinced, but I’m deeply pleased with the idea of achieving an intermediate level of proficiency at absolutely anything, and it reassures me that my somewhat eccentric approach to language acquisition is paying off. Fluency in the face of gross inaccuracy is my motto. I mangle Italian grammar beyond all recognition, and I have a disturbing tendency to fill the gaps in my vocabulary by just making words up. On the other hand, sometimes the words I make up actually exist. And when I need to, I find that I can do things like report a stolen bicycle (the policeman, with his silly moustache and silly cape, takes down my details, asks, single or married? I say single. He says, ‘Single as in you don’t want a boyfriend, or single as in you can’t find one?’ I say, ‘Wow, there are separate boxes to tick for that?’); establish that the bike rental shop wants a hundred euros for the stolen bicycle; consult a lawyer about fines for stolen bicycles; and tell a bike rental guy that if he thinks I’m paying him a hundred euros, he can go and do unspeakable things to himself.

When you arrive in a country not knowing how to pronounce your own phone number and expect to get by, your language skills tend to develop haphazardly, but they do develop, lessons or no lessons. I’ve never had a ruler over the knuckles for misconjugating an irregular verb, but I have known the shame of being taken for a junkie because I spoke too slowly when asking for a light. So I tend to prioritise social functionality over footling details such as, you know, grammar and vocabulary.

In case you’re wondering, I don’t hit my students over the knuckles with rulers.

And when I say I have been taken for a junkie, I mean it happened yesterday.

The latest development is that my internal monologue has taken to haranguing me in Italian every waking hour. It’s not the first time my brain’s created nonsense sentences, but it’s never been so damn pushy about it before. I think it’s a strategy I’ve developed in order to train myself to think in Italian instead of translating everything as I go. It’s getting to be a pressing issue, because after a while your ineptitude stops being charming and starts being merely humiliating. So I’ve evidently got in touch with my inner despotic prig, who screams at me with the stubborn persistence of a bush doctor trying to prevent a tsetse fly victim from falling asleep. ‘A return to Valdarno!’ ‘I’ll have the tuna salad!’ ‘Thank you, I’m well, except for the jaundice!’ In conversation this is a quite useful, as it really does keep you on your toes. When, on the other hand, you’re just trying to pair your socks or scrub the bathtub in peace, and your brain’s still bellowing, ‘I’d love to go to the opera! I’ll get the tickets! We can bring our friend the robot! He paints mice! What’s that you say? The crack baby’s eaten all the candles? Come let us tickle him to death, that mouldy, abject little saucepan!’ it gets really wearing.

from soup to nuts

Casting around for something to read tonight while I ate my home brand spaghetti with bottled red sauce, I settled on The Nuovissimo Big Cook Book (1982 edition) from my housemate’s collection. Its 840 pages include recipes for: rice with frogs; milk soup; stuffed tripe; mushroom conserve; whiskey risotto; pheasant with truffles; and a dessert called dead man’s bones—but my favourite chapter is the first in the book, entitled The art of receiving. Some excerpts follow.

Six rules for dinner parties:
- Never serve two courses that both contain cooked cheese
- Absolutely never serve two courses that are both stews or broths.
- Don’t serve two courses in the same meal that are both fried.
- Don’t serve pasta and rice in the same meal, no matter how diversely prepared.
- Don’t serve two courses with an egg base.
- Don’t serve the same vegetable prepared in different ways, no matter how far apart.

On dessert:
In a meal of a certain tone the dessert should never be missing; that is not to say that only ‘fancy’ meals should finish with a dessert. Dessert, if well managed, is even more desirable if made by the housewife herself. It is good etiquette that the hostess, as for the other courses but especially in the case of dessert, does not brag that ‘I made it with my own hands,’ nor discourse at weary length upon the recipe.

From a section entitled At table with the Ancients, an authentic menu from a meal eaten by Petrarch (who was from Arezzo, by the way) in 1365, in the home of Bianca di Savoia in Milan (the bits still in Italian are the words I can’t be bothered to look up):
Baked meat, fish and sucking pig; fritters of pike and hare; veal and trout terrine; quails and partridges on the spit; ducks, herons and marsh birds; ox meat and capon fat; beef and eel pie; bovine gelatine and fish; kid on the spit; hare and kid; venison and oxmeat in iron pots; capons and chickens; peacocks with savoy cabbage and beans; salted tongues; roast peacocks, swans and ducks; junket and cheeses; seasonal fruits; candied fruits and raisins.

From the Culinary Disasters and handy tips section:
- A soup or stew has ended up too salty? Peel a potato, drop it in and stir it around. After ten minutes the excess salt will be absorbed.
- The boiled beef has turned out too tough to eat? Add three spoons of grappa to the cooking water for every kilo of meat.
- Parasites infesting your dried legumes? Add two spoons of salt to the container.
- To ascertain that a cauliflower is fresh, be sure that it is not covered in a face powder-like dust.
- To avoid crying while cutting onions, simply stand near a pot of boiling water.
- To make an excellent vinegar at home, it is enough to preserve in a bottle, day after day, the lees of your table wine—providing, of course, the wine is of good quality.
- A highly efficacious de-greaser for dirty dishes—better than any commercial product—is the water in which potatoes have previously been boiled.

The owner of this book is turning out to be a mite high-strung. She tells me in great detail of her digestive disorders, yells at me for using too much hot water after a four-minute shower, and only likes me to have guests one night a week, when she is out of the house. She’s also moved on from descanting on her own character (she’s the sort of person who is always saying ‘I’m the sort of person who…’) to making rather presumptuous comments about mine. ‘I’ve been observing you closely. I’ve noted that you put up walls. And you’re quick to get annoyed. Whereas I’m very easy-going. I mean, we’re both strong characters. I’m probably stronger than you… [a pause ensues that may or may not involve a minor staring competition] …or not, you know, it’s not important. The point is…’ The point is, though her fits of pique are quite amusing and I’m learning lots of Italian psychobabble, I may decide to pack up and move again. I’m scheming to smuggle that book out the door with me. I’m the sort of person who’ll compromise my morals pretty seriously for the perfect mascarpone cream.

Page 465:

Let 300g of mascarpone cheese stand for a while at room temperature. Lightly beat two egg yolks. Put the mascarpone in a bowl with 4 tablespoons of sugar and the egg yolks and stir with a wooden spoon. Add a small glass of brandy to the mixture a bit at a time, continue stirring until you have a dense and consistent cream. This may take a while. Put it back in the fridge for a couple of hours before serving with a dusting of cocoa and a few biscotti.