Living in a Foreign Language (12 page)

Caroline's Prosciutto

They insisted that she march through the streets, holding the prosciutto for all to see. Bruce explained that they wanted everyone to know that it was actually possible to win something at their booth. Caroline cradled the ham in her arms like a baby, and we all pointed at it and screamed, “
Il pesce!”
until everyone understood that she had won the grand prize.

“Bruce can show you how to slice it properly. It's an art,” said JoJo, once we had schlepped the heavy ham the half-mile to the car.

“Well, you need a prosciutto holder. You can't do anything without that. Then a very sharp knife and you're in business. After three or four years' practice, of course.”

We drove home over the twisting, dark roads, digesting our onions, listening to Bruce cheerfully holding forth on the fine art of prosciutto slicing.

I
T SEEMS WE NEVER HAD TIME TO GET THINGS DONE
because our days were filled to the brim with lingering. Breakfast became a longer and longer linger. Not mine, which is just coffee and a crossword puzzle. But Jill and Caroline have a way of making breakfast into a full-length play which unfolds in long, slow, Chekhovian acts—from the yogurt and peaches, into the cheese, prosciutto, tomatoes and
panini
, into the biscotti dipped in chestnut honey, all washed down with tea. By the time they're done with that, it's time to get ready to meet JoJo at the hardware store, where we'll spend ten minutes buying a screwdriver and then all go off to a three-hour lunch, feeling like we'd had a very productive morning. And if we're planning on having any dinner at all, forget it; that's the day.

But one morning we got focused. We had a little breakfast meeting and decided we had to do something about the language problem—
il problema con la lingua
.

We were coming along too slowly, we decided. We had studied in California before we left, which helped Jill and I
remember some of what we had learned twenty-five years earlier. And Caroline was fluent in French and German, which helped her
understand
people much better than we could, but she couldn't actually
speak
much Italian. And she refused to study with us because she thought we were further along and she didn't want to feel left behind. I felt I was the strongest at this point, almost fluent in restaurants—as long as no one spoke back to me. In short, we needed work.

We got a recommendation from Bruce, who is in the language business, about a fellow he knows in Spoleto who is supposed to be very good, and we called him and left a message. But since we still can't read the instructions for our Italian answering machine, we never did get in touch with him.

Then Karen, Martin's wife, told us about another teacher whom she thought we would love. Her name is Paola, she's local and she's married to an Australian architect named Ken. We called her and booked our first class. Caroline, of course, demurred. She mumbled something about having to learn in her own way and disappeared the moment Paola's car came up the driveway.

Unlike other Italian teachers, Paola was mostly interested in showing off her English, which she insisted she spoke without accent.

“Today”—which rhymes with “g'day” from the Aussie beer commercials—“we will larn to spik alla de words for when first you grit each other.”

And we were off. Eventually, we got her to speak in Italian, which she does beautifully though with, admittedly, a regional quirk—a “sh” for “s” that gives her speech a kind of marbles-in-the-dust sound, each word rolling easily into and over the next, connected by little swishy sounds. Not at all unpleasant.

Each class had a theme. One day, we'd talk about the garden and learn all that vocabulary; another, we'd talk about our families and where we grew up. It was all conversation, and we were starting to get into the rhythm of it, but Caroline always stayed hidden upstairs, secretly listening through the window. Until the day the mortadella came up.

I think I brought it up first because we had bought some gorgeous mortadella in a pork store in Norcia the day before and I brought it out to show Paola, and as she started to hold forth on the glories of Italian cured meats, Caroline burst through the kitchen door.

“Buon giorno, Paola, come stai?”

The power of deli.

“Don't ever buy in Norcia,” lectured Paola to the three of us. “Norcia is a rip-off.”

It sounded like “reepov.”

“Even for Italians. If you don't have the local accent, you will pay
il doppio
[double].”

“But they have good mortadella,” I put in.

“Who can eat when you pay so much?” We were learning that Paola can be very, very bossy when it comes to food.

“I will take you to find the best mortadella.”

“When?”

“We will shop together. It will be a lesson. And then we will cook together.”

“Scusi, Paola
. . . .” Caroline, suddenly fluent.

“Dové la mortadella migliore?”
She was asking which store had the best cold cuts.

“The best—
il migliore
—is from my childhood.”

The three of us sat down quietly under the pergola and gave her the stage.

“In the morning, before I go to school, my mama
would go to the local
fornalo
(baker) to buy the
pane cotto a legna.”

This is the local unsalted bread freshly baked in the traditional wood oven.

“You can buy
un kilo”
—she shows with her hands—“or
mezzo kilo”
—she shows half as much.

“She would buy the mortadella—
trasparente
[very thinly sliced]—and put it between the slices of bread, which were still warm from the oven. Then she would wrap it tightly in paper and I would take it to school. Then at eleven o'clock—the hour of the
merenda
—all the children would take their
panini
out of the paper and by then, the mortadella and the bread had grown together into each other, and the taste. . . .”

She shook her head from side to side in a reverie; her cheeks were pink and her eyes brimmed with tears as she remembered this moment of childhood bliss.

“A little butter on the bread?” I whispered.

“Burro
, NO!” Suddenly the soft moment vanished; her eyes were steely blue.

“Burro
, NO!” Again. If anything, stronger, hinting violence.

“So no butt—”

“NIENTE. Pane
, cooked in the wood; mortadella, sliced
trasparente. Basta cosi
. You Americans have always to add things. Mayonnaise—to cover up the taste of your bad meat.”

So, no butter.

Two days later, we went shopping with a plan to cook together that evening. We'd have Ken, Paola's husband, and Jane and Freddy, our English friends that we met in Puglia at the McAlpines. We picked Paola up at the Fonti di Clitunno
down on the Flaminia at around ten and all started off to Spoleto. The first stop was the
ferramenta
(hardware store) where we bought a
girarrosto
, a gizmo that you set up in your fireplace to cook chickens on a turning spit. Something no Italian home should be without. We also picked up some other essentials, like a sign that said “Beware of the dog” in Italian which we would take back to the States. Then, we were off to the
macelleria
—Paola's favorite in Spoleto—to get meat for dinner.

The butcher shop is on the road that leads down to the railway station in Spoleto. It's spotlessly clean, has no sign of any kind outside and is, like everything else that's good in Italy, a family operation. Lauro, owner, father, husband, butcher
straordinario
, runs the show—flirting and teasing with the customers, strict and precise with his wife and daughters, who fill the orders and ring up the sales. He's a big presence. But Paola is ready for him.

“Un pollo, pulito.”
A chicken, cleaned. That means head, neck, feet and feathers removed. Lauro disappears into the back for a moment and returns with a beautiful chicken—about three and a half pounds, to my eye—with most but not all of the feathers removed.

“Anche il cuore, il fegato, e lardo.”
Paola requests the heart and the liver of our bird along with a healthy portion of
lardo
, which is . . . well,
lardo
. But not the soaplike, hydrogenated, supermarket lard we have in the States; this is pristine, white, fresh pork fat from under the ribs of Umbrian pigs, the best in the world. He gave us what looked like a bit more than a quarter pound.

“From these we will make our
battuto,”
says Paola. “We chop very finely the heart, the liver, the
lardo
along with
una testa di aglio”
—a head of garlic.

“E un po' di rosmarino,”
adds Lauro.

“Si, certo, rosmarino. Anche sale, anche pepe,”

Rosemary; also salt; also pepper.

“So we chop all this up together, right? A whole head of garlic?”

“What means, ‘head'?”

“That means the whole garlic.” I show her with my hand.

“NO!
TROPPO!
Only one little head.” She shows me with her thumb and forefinger.

Okay; clove.

“We chop together and . . .
come si dice?”
Paola makes a violent gesture with her fist.

“Pound?”

“Si
, pound. Until it is a very nice paste. This we will rub inside and outside our
pollo.”

Then we asked Lauro for some
costine di maiale
—pork ribs—cut into two-rib sections that we would grill over the fireplace while our chicken was resting after its rotisserie spin. Paola and Lauro insisted that the ribs should take no more than ten to fifteen minutes over the hot coals.

Then we bought some thick-cut strips of pancetta—about six or seven of them, to be diced for the pasta. That was it for dinner, but Caroline wanted some mortadella, which Lauro sliced
trasparente
according to Paola's instructions. Then he showed us some of his house-made
coralina
, which is like salami, but better. We got a half pound of that (250
grammi)
.

Caroline now had that gleam in her eye that signals a major shopping binge, and Jill was trying to gently pull her out the door when Lauro started carving thick slices from a whole roast pork that he had stashed below the counter.

“Assaggiate un pochino.”
Taste this.

We tried to indicate that we didn't really need any more lunch meat, but Lauro, as I said, is a very powerful presence. We tasted. And it was stunning. The pork literally melted in our mouths. Not poetically; it actually melted. Perfectly seasoned, delicately roasted, remarkably fresh—that's the real secret—it transcended any previously held concept I had about pig.

Lauro

We wrenched Caroline away from the
macelleria
and headed back north to Campello, where we'd do the rest of the shopping—salad, onion, garlic, pasta and wine. I thought we'd do that with Paola and then I'd drop her back at her car. But when I turned on the Flaminia toward the
alimentari
, she commanded from the backseat,

“Mike [also rhymes with “g'day”], STOP!”

She said this with such a sense of urgency that I felt I had to do something immediately—even though I was on a highway, with large trucks coming in both directions.

“STOP, MIKE!”

I managed a left turn between the oncoming trucks, into a small parking lot and turned to the backseat to deal with what I was sure was a severe medical emergency.

“I have to get home to cook lunch for Ken. It's almost one o'clock.”

Paola came over to the house around five-thirty to help us with the prep for the feast. I had already made the
battuto
, chopping, then pounding, the innards, the
lardo
, the garlic and rosemary, the salt and pepper into a paste. We had also put the ribs into a bath of olive oil, garlic, rosemary, salt and pepper (sound familiar?). Then Paola instructed Caroline, who had never before had her hand inside a chicken, to take charge of the bird.

“First, we wash in
vino bianco
—inside and out. Then dry very carefully. Then we take the
battuto
and rub it into the skin of the chicken; also inside—all over.”

Caroline closed her eyes, scrunched up her face and dipped her hand into the larded chicken guts while Jill stood by with a camera, documenting the insertion. After the chicken was coated with the
battuto
, Paola instructed Caroline to poke four holes into the bird's meatiest parts and, using a rosemary twig, to push the
battuto
down into the holes, leaving the rosemary sticking out. Then Jill, who sews, stepped in to truss the chicken so that it didn't flop around on the rotisserie.