Tuscan holiday – The Truth About Tuscany

Ognissanti

Last Friday, schools and businesses were closed here in Italy to celebrate All Saints Day, which marks the start of a holiday season that will end in January with Epiphany on the 6^th. From now until then, meals take on even more than their usual importance.

When I first came to live in Italy, and the holidays came around, I couldn’t wait to use the damask tablecloth, to get the Ginori out of the china closet, to dust off the Murano glasses. I thumbed through recipes for what I considered the most elegant dishes—watercress soup, roasts of ham, goose or beef, stuffings, gravies and creamed vegetables, trifles, multi-layer cakes and holiday punch. But I needn’t have gone to the trouble.

First, I wasn’t going to be entrusted with any cooking. (On my third Christmas here, I got to boil potatoes for a purée.) And second, holiday meals here are made up of dishes that are eaten at the family table throughout the season—pasta with ragù, roast beef, winter vegetables—and the table is set just as it always is with a faded but ironed tablecloth, plain china, two stemless glasses per person and the scratched but sturdy old silver. The attention to procuring the best ingredients is par for the course: each woman (because here it is still very much the women in the house that plan the holidays) knows a butcher who gives her the tenderest cuts and a farmer who will save her the freshest bunch of spinach. And the cooking is as rigorous as ever, the pasta exactly al dente, the sauce simmered and corrected all afternoon, the roast delicately crisped on the outside, al sangue within and sliced as thin as a wafer. Wine is served–here in Tuscany, it’s the light, tangy, unadulterated local Sangioveses that so effortlessly accompany the hearty cuisine. Desserts are tied to the holiday: pan coi santi (a nutty raisin bread) on All Saints’ Day, Panettone or Pandoro on Christmas and clementines and chestnuts throughout the winter.

Each child can ask for a present and husbands and wives buy one another a sweater or a scarf, but gifts are hardly the focus. The main meal on any of these holidays is often lunch rather than dinner, and afterwards, it’s customary to go for walk. Then, cards are played and naps are taken, until suppertime, when the fire is rekindled, someone pulls out the leftovers and the table is set again.

I miss my family and our traditions keenly during the holiday season—my dad playing the Messiah CD around the clock for a month, my mom’s homemade cranberry sauce and succulent roast goose, watching football on Thanksgiving and opening presents in our pyjamas on Christmas morning. But, after twenty four years, the Italian traditions–especially simple, savory food and pure, refreshing wine—are becoming mine, too.

Ringraziamento

By now, the persimmon trees have lost their leaves, so the branches, covered in hundreds of round, orange-red fruits, stand out against the often-grey sky. The grapes and olives are harvested, but it’s too early to start pruning vines or trees. Leeks and fennel grow, without much attention, in the vegetable garden. We’ve eaten, for the time being, enough grilled mushrooms, mushroom pasta and mushroom risotto. It has started to rain, and it is the time of year when the thick-walled farmhouses feel colder than the scirrocco-driven dampness outside, so we come in, light the fire, drink tea and play briscola.

On weekend mornings, we hear the dogs and gunshots of the hunters in the fields and woods around us. A friend brings me a piece of boar, which another friend makes into sausage and salami for us to hang in the cellar and eat this winter. Someone else brings chestnuts to a dinner party, and we sit up late around the fire with a good excuse to drink lots of wine. The ash of the fires and the dogs’ now always-muddy feet are reason enough to ease the housekeeping standards. Continue reading Ringraziamento

Bambina at the Beach

The Italian constitution establishes work as the right of every citizen, but it could almost make the same claim for an annual beach vacation, since the way those are talked of here is as of a duty or a need. “Lo faccio fare del mare”—I’m having him do time at the shore, the parents and grandparents boast to one another of the children’s summer plans. From the plumber to the banker, every one seems to have a “casa al mare,” which I discovered early in my life in Italy means a cramped, sparsely furnished, 1960s- or ‘70s-built apartment and not the Martha’s Vineyard homesteads atop swaths of pristine private beach I had imagined.

Going to the seaside for vacation is a post-war phenomenon in Italy. Before the 1950s, the mountains were the destination of choice for anyone of means, and wisely so. They are still the only place to escape the brutal heat of summers on the peninsula. But these days, when the English and Germans and Americans rush in to occupy the Tuscan countryside in August, the Italians flee to the beach, to days that proceed as follows:

Continue reading Bambina at the Beach

Agriturismo Galore

Table, fireplace — One of the apartments in the early 1990s.

“Put it in the tourist apartments!” was the solution when any ugly, cheap, useless piece of furniture or décor was found in the tower or barn or basement at Poggiarello. It was the early 1990s, and agriturismo was a new vacation idea, devised mostly by the English, who wanted to spend time on a working farm, joining in planting or pruning or harvesting and cooking for themselves, while enjoying Italian country life at the fraction of the cost of a hotel. We were a long way from the designer-decorated, Jacuzzi-outfitted, air-conditioned standards of a typical Tuscan house rental today. At the time, the Italian government offered funding to property owners who would restore buildings and open an agriturismo. Needless to say, anyone with an empty chicken coop found a way to access the money, and within a few years, guest houses opened all over the region. Continue reading Agriturismo Galore