It is 1993 and I have begun researching this book by spending the month of October on my cousin's farm in Tuscany, outside the town of Lucca. It is the end of the day of the grape harvest.
The fragrance of just-crushed grapes is seeping through the floor boards, rising from the wine vats in the barn below. At long tables crowded with food, seventy of us are feasting in the hayloft. Every person in this room has participated in this ancient ritual of bringing in the grapes.
From America, we, the children and grandchildren of immigrants from these hills, have returned to be with the children of those who stayed behind -- cousins Edda and Alcide. As every year, their friends have gathered to help, traveling from as far away as England and Denmark and as near as the next farm and village. Together we are drinking the wine of last year's harvest as the new wine is starting to ferment beneath us.
Four generations have been working in Edda's farm kitchen to prepare the harvest feast. Since yesterday, plied with strong coffee and biscotti, we family women have been cooking for the harvest party -- chopping vegetables and herbs, pounding beef cutlets and rolling pastry. Edda's mother, Amelia, two years shy of one hundred, nods from her chair. Edda's daughter, Antonella, and I share the big cutting board, while Antonella's toddler, Michèle, tries stuffing tiny fistfuls of bread into his mouth, missing half the time. Family is everything to Edda. She is the daughter of my grandmother's brother, and more sister than cousin to my mother since they first met as girls in 1928. That my mother and I have returned along with our husbands means to her that we are all finally together in our rightful home.
Our general is Francesca, Edda's older cousin. Though she adores Edda, Francesca will tell you, shaking her head, that Edda is hopeless in the kitchen. Edda laughs -- this is an old story between them. Francesca is the family's legendary cook. "She couldn't cook bad food if she tried," says Edda.
Planted between her two sauté pans, Francesca is frying off mounds of beef cutlets, tossing jokes and gossip at her crew while directing us in our chores. She is cooking in a pressed apron and pearls. "So what would you serve, la giornalista, Miss Professional Cook?" Francesca teases me, "What would you make?" Probably a simple buffet, light and casual, I explain. She stiffens. "Lynne, I don't mean to hurt your feelings, but that is barbaric!" She throws out her arms, embracing me, the kitchen, the vineyard, the world at large. "Lynne. From America, from England they come. Our neighbors give up a Sunday; everyone is here to bring in our grapes. A buffet! I would dishonor myself, and Edda and Alcide -- disgrace for the family."
Early that morning, Edda had taken me to the Vendémmia (grape harvest) mass. I knelt in the church where my grandmother, Enrichetta Pollestrini, knelt every Sunday until, at nineteen, she left Italy for America to marry my grandfather. Outside the church, the world she came from is all contained within the arc of the crescent-shaped ridge and the valley below. The church looks out from one end of the ridge. Across the valley at the opposite end is the sharecropper's house where Enrichetta, Edda's father and six generations of our family were born. The bread oven where my grandmother baked each week with her mother and sisters still stands next to the house. Bread bakes there still, made by old friends of Edda's, now the house's owners. On the slopes of the little valley between the two ends of the ridge's arc are the olive trees and vineyards my family worked. Crowning the center of the crescent's curve is the walled estate of the landowner who dominated their lives.
In the 1920s, Edda's father, Clementino, emigrated from the ridge to America. For him, the streets were truly paved with gold. He returned to the ridge wealthy and eager to claim his betrothed, and take her back to California. She refused to go: "I cannot leave my church. I cannot leave the hills." It was a refrain I would hear again and again as I traveled in rural Italy, talking with country people. For some it was prefaced with, "I will not leave my mother. I will not leave my village." Always home, family and the land kept them there.
So Clementino stayed, buying the farm over the ridge from where he was born. This son of a sharecropper became a landowner with sharecroppers of his own. He never saw California again; he is buried next to the church. After visiting his grave, Edda and I took the ridge road back home.
In grape harvesting, water and wine do not mix. Rain threatens. Everyone works fast, breaking away grape clusters with anything that cuts -- serrated blades of cheap kitchen knives, proper clippers, old scissors. No one stops. Children run snacks of cheese and bread out to the vineyard. My stepfather, son of a farmer from Piacenza and a retired New York businessman, roams the vineyard, a bottle of grappa tucked under one arm, a bottle of water under the other, offering pickers refreshment from the glasses he clenches in his fists.
Back in the kitchen, we are staggering. "We need air!" proclaims Francesca, leading us behind the house to where vegetables and herbs grow beneath the oldest vines, planted there by Clementino himself. Edda calls it the "women's vineyard." The family women have always harvested these grapes alone, perhaps because of their proximity to the kitchen. We begin twisting clusters from the vines. Jokes start. Francesca hums, goes into singing a bawdy song. Her niece and Edda's daughter, Antonella, winks as she starts singing. Sweet cousin Lahlia tries to scowl and look embarrassed. Edda finally leads us back to the kitchen for more coffee and cooking.
The grapes are in. Teenagers are relaying food through the garden and out to the barn's hayloft that Edda converted into a room for celebrations. Wet harvesters clamber up the hayloft stairs, shaking out slickers. A fire blazes on the wide corner hearth. Across the room, the pizza oven is stoked with wood, keeping pastas and meats hot. The ceiling's beams are thick tree trunks, the walls rough plaster. Wide floorboards slope a little east and a little west. Patiently, we bow our heads during the priest's blessing. Then pitchers of wine are being emptied into tumblers. Everyone is passing platters and huge bowls brimming with course after course of antipasti, pasta, beef cutlets, roast chickens, vegetables, salads, tarts, cookies and cakes. The harvest is in. We are together. All of us, friends and relatives, are family on this night. We are all home.
Every time I drive down country roads in Italy, I wonder what people are cooking in those farmhouses I pass, what their lives are like, what stories they have to tell. With this book, I set out to find the answers to those questions. I wanted to learn about the home cooking of Italians who live from the land. I wanted to know what country people eat every day when they come together around the table, and what they reminisce about when they talk of the cooking of their parents and grandparents.
For me, these are the elements that make Italian food Italian. It always begins on the land and in the home. That link to the land tied into my longtime interest in organic foods and sustainable agriculture. Were any Italian farmers in those houses talking about these issues? And how were the European Union's new food production laws affecting their lives?
Another part of this curiosity must come from my heritage. I am the granddaughter of Italian immigrants. My grandparents on both sides came to America from Italy at the beginning of the century. My mother's mother was a Tuscan sharecropper's daughter, who married an estate manager's son from a nearby village. I don't think I wanted to acknowledge it at the beginning of the adventures that became this book, but my fascination with the farm and country food wasn't just about finding what I believe is the soul of Italian cooking, it was also the beginning of exploring my own sense of home.
My penchant for spending a lot of time in small, remote areas of Italy shaped this book. In over twenty years of exploring, I still have not seen all of Italy. One friend joked that when I was writing about the Emilia-Romagna region in my first book, The Splendid Table, it took me six months just to get out of one country village -- I kept discovering more to know. I love to linger in places where life changes slowly. So for this book, instead of, for instance, visiting all of Tuscany's farming areas, I couldn't pull myself away from the region's remote Garfagnana and Lunigiana mountains. Puglia, the region that is the heel of Italy's boot, captivated me for the same reasons. Most people still live from the land and the food always tastes homemade. To me, Puglia is the Tuscany of the South. It has the same kind of unadorned cooking that delivers an immediacy of taste. I dream longingly of Puglia tomatoes -- maybe the best I've ever eaten.
Few Americans visit the Alto Adige, the region that sits right up against Austria's border, but border food is fascinating and farm life there is governed by different laws than the rest of Italy -- I had to go. And I had to stay in a single village and thoroughly explore its valley and surrounding mountains. There was so much to learn. So this book tells about country life in the places I couldn't leave.
Country life museums all over Italy became one of my doorways into understanding something of how people lived from the land in each area I visited. In the Alto Adige, I found Italy's only outdoor farming museum -- a whole village of antique farm buildings brought from all over the region and spanning several hundred years. The museum's director is Hans Griefsmair, a professor and historian who understands country life from firsthand experience. He was raised in the mountains, the son of a local cowherd. One farmhouse h...
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