Frances Mayes's Blog, page 11

Auguri e Buon Anno 2011!!!

Auguri e Buon Anno 2011!

From the forecast, I know that snow and ice are bearing down on my North Carolina home right now, but here in Cortona, it's balmy and 55 degrees.  I'm just back from shopping because tomorrow night our neighbors are coming over for dinner and I'm trying out several recipes from the cookbook I'm writing—a Torta della Nonna, a ricotta tart with shavings of chocolate, and apples wrapped in pastry.  Italians are not that excited about desserts so I expect them to take one bite of each.  But they are such natural gourmands that I will be able to tell immediately if the desserts are great or merely okay.  Already in the fridge I have the big veal shank, seasoned and resting.  The rest of the menu I'll decide tomorrow when I go to the frutta e verdure.  I've been loving the red radicchio—grilling it, then chopping it coarsely and mixing in little cubes of fontina.  I pile it on prepared bruschette and then run it under the broiler.  So delicious and easy.

Right after we arrived—after a two day weather delay—we drove up to Cormons in Friuli, picking up our friends Robert and Lara near Venice.  We checked into the serene Castello di Spessa, just outside Cormons in Capriva.

Here are some notes: This superb place, www.castellodispessa.it, is in NO guidebook I have. Why? The castle is spectacular; the rooms are enormous; and the service is just right. The high, carved antique bed in our room looks as though some signora could have birthed a half dozen splendid bambini on its linen sheets.  The view is sweet and Lucia, the manager, just couldn't be nicer. This is a wonderful base for exploring Friuli.  We have stayed at La Subida's chalet-style brand new cottages and we loved staying there, too.  This is our third visit to Friuli. You may remember that I wrote about this exciting region earlier on my blog.

Weeks ago Robert reserved our New Year's Eve table at La Subida, (www.lasubida.it )one of the great restaurants in Italy.  First we visited the wine consortium's enoteca in Cormons, where we met winemaker Mauro Drius and tasted his lyrical Malvasia, which was awarded Tre Bicchiri by Gambero Rosso. For info on the consortium, look at www.vinidocisonzo.it Then we drove out to Venica & Venica, to meet Giampaolo and Chiara, whose wedding I wrote about in June.  He and his family make many of Friuli's great white wines.  www.venica.it Even if you are a confirmed red wine drinker, which both Ed and I used to be—after all, we're in Tuscany—you can't help but fall hard for Friuli's whites. They are as complex as reds. Giampaolo very sweetly loaded a box of his Ronca di Mele (a Tre Bicchieri award winner) wines in our car and we all took off for La Subida.  This is our third dinner there with Robert and we've grown fond of the Sirk family.  A friend of Giampaolo, Matteo Coser, and his girlfriend Marta, joined us. Matteo makes Ronco dei Tassi (Hill of the Badgers!) wines, so soon his lauded Collio Bianco Fosarin–also Tre Bicchieri–was on the table.

Robert and Giampaolo proceeded to order a dizzing array of local wines, each as fine as the next.  The first thing we tasted was frico, melted Montasio cheese, here served like lollipops.

One of the valued tastes in this area is prosciutto, none more revered than D'Osvaldo's, slowly smoked over cherry wood. Other local tastes that we don't find in other parts of Italy: carpaccio di cervo (deer), radicchio e kren (horseradish), sciroppo di fiori di Sambuco (syrup of elderflowers poured over pears and nuts), gnocchi di crescione (watercress gnocchi), and capriolo con scalogni (little deer with shallots).  We tried several pastas, the rabbit, boar, veal shank, the deer, lamb. . .on and on.  At midnight, everyone went outside for fireworks and all around the restaurant rang toasts, auguri, auguri. We were back at the castle by three.

Robert and Lara had to leave the next day but Ed and I lingered in the castello, chatting with Lucia, who makes everyone feel especially welcome. In the afternoon we drove to Aquileia. That we never had heard of amazing Aquileia just shows how endlessly rich Italy is. We always will be at the beginning of our travels!  Others have known of Aquileia since 181 B. C. It is a green little town with Roman villas, a Forum, strange funeral casks, Roman roads, port ruins, oratories, and a Roman bridge.  All that and a basilica built in the third century B.C., destroyed by Attila, and reconstructed in 1031. The building preserves a visual history of the town because along the way everyone added, subtracted, multiplied and divided this complex structure.  An astonishing floor of mosaics from the original church was uncovered in the early twentieth century, having secretly slept under other pavings for so many centuries. We walked into the basilica and looked at each other: are we dreaming? Portraits, decorative panels, symbols, wildlife, birds, flowers, daily activities, offerings, harvest—so vast and varied are these mosaics that you could spend days wondering over them. I especially loved the narrative of Jonah, shown being swallowed by a fanciful, curly sea creature, more dragon than whale. The hundreds of fish, urchins, octopi, sting ray, lobsters—all swimming in tesserae, are a joy to behold. These mosaicists knew their ichthyology. Jonah is finally seen reposing naked under a pergola.  He appears to be levitating over his striped cushion. In the crypt are eleventh- century frescoes and more mosaics. Dazzling and–the joy of travel: totally unexpected.

Because it was New Year's Day, much in the town was closed, including the archeology museum. We will go again. We drove on to the coastal town of Grado. By then, it was late afternoon and the entire populace, bundled in coats, was out, strolling along the canals, stopping for cream-topped hot chocolate in cafes, and greeting their neighbors with auguri and buon anno.  Their presepio, manger scene, floated on the water, with the three wise men approaching in a row boat. This is a popular Adriatic beach town and as we walked I was superimposing a summer crowd in shorts eating gelato and buying tanning lotion. Another place for a return visit.

We dined at L'Hosteria, the restaurant near the castello. After last night's excesses, I was happy with a mushroom risotto but Ed opted for the good-luck-in-the-new- year dish of stuffed pigs' foot, cabbage and lentils, severed over polenta.

We're enamored with the hearty food in this area—the mix of Austrian and Slovenian influences blending into the Italian traditional country food. Does Friuli have any bad restaurants?

The castello serves a family-style breakfast in the kitchen.  I'm would love to tie aprons on three friends and start cooking here.

Most of the inns have yellow Vespas, retro-Fellini style, for guests' use.  I wish we could jump on one and wind around in these lovely vine-covered hills today, but we are moving onward this morning to Venice, Venezia in winter.

Back in Touch

When we arrived almost two weeks ago, our Internet was down, down, down and has remained down.  We just got it back today, after erecting a tower on the end of our land which receives a signal from Umbria.  Italy!  Will be back soon with some lovely news about Venice in winter, and New Year's Eve feasting in Friuli.  We are having spring-like days here and it feels like a true escape from winter's blasts.  A presto!!

I'll Take That As A Yes

Not going anywhere, not today or tomorrow.  The airline kindly called at 5 a.m. to say our two flights are canceled.  When light came, we saw this from the back door:

We are ready to go to Italy!  Bags packed, passport ready, Euros located.  But the Snow Gods sent a strong message.  Stay home!  And, it's odd, home never looks so cosy as it does when there's a winter wonderland outside. Why is that?  Maybe because all the color is near you, inside the rooms, while outside has transformed and abstracted to black and white.  From the kitchen:

Maybe we're metabolically disturbed by the subtraction of color from our view of the world and feel like wrapping our rooms around ourselves.  Just a theory on a snowy day.  I always think we're more primitive than we know.

The two days stolen from our trip give me a chance to order my desk, answer over-due letters, and eat mysterious things from the freezer, since we cleared the fridge after Christmas dinner.  Also a moment of calm–and there's been precious little of that lately.  Looking at the cherry tree, I recalled A. E. Housman's "Loveliest of Trees."   He writes of the spring-blooms as "hung with blossom along the bough," and of "wearing white for Eastertide."  At the end he compares the profligate blossoms to snow, and yes, the two cherries outside my sunroom are in full cold bloom:

Nowhere to go, a lovely quiet, and sculptural views of snow-capped flower pots and white-weighted evergreens, even a cardinal in the snow.  So, I'll take this as a yes.

Exhibit in St. Petersburg

We went down to St. Petersburg for the opening of my husband Ed's and our friend Alberto Alfonso's show at the Morean Art Center . If you're near St. Pete this month, stop in at 719 Central Avenue and see what these two men have been up to for a year.  They have had an intense collaboration.  Ed writes a poem every day (or almost) and sends it off to Alberto, who responds with a watercolor.  The sustained project has been brilliant to watch and inspiring as well.  The mutual spark propelled both artists to expand and the ideas sparked many a brush fire.  Fifty of the paintings and poems are on view at the Morean, as well as Albert's four large-scale oil paintings Earth, Air, Fire, Water with the poems for those incised in the paint.  The project continues.

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Alberto, left, and Ed at the show:

This is the Morean exhibit:

The red writing you can see are words in the poem that connect directly to the paintings.  The events of the opening were enhanced by Albert (Secondo) Hurley's guitar compositions for each of the elements.  And by the great staff at the Morean.

Alberto Alfonso lives above us in Cortona but in real life he's an architect in Tampa.  If you land in the Southwest Terminal there, that's his design–an astonishing airport space that soars with light and rewards the eye with aesthetic detail and art.  A building that says travelling here symbolizes the beauty of your journey. The main terminal was designed years ago by Alberto's father, the modernist Cuban architect Carlos Alfonso, who fled Castro's Cuba with his family and managed to prevail in America. If you look closely, you see Alberto's homages to his father in his own terminal.  

Alberto recently designed the Chihuly Collection (also a Morean project) in St. Petersburg and it is stunning.  The glass artist, Dale Chihuly got really, really lucky when he selected Alberto for the project.  The materials and design of the space are  as impressive as the glass art. Here's Chihuly's boat full of glass balls.  You wish you could row out to sea and toss them into the waves for the beauty of their floating!

St. Pete now is a thriving arts community and has night life like a mini-South Beach.  We stayed at the 20's Vinoy Hotel and there are wonderful water walks all around and proximity to a charming neighborhood of old Florida houses amid moss-hung oaks.  The air was balmy and sweet. The beach at Pass-a-Grille lured us for another long walk in white-white sand.  Just north in Clearwater is Carmel, a wine restaurant that Alberto designed.  You begin to recognize his touch.  That's his long, long painting along the wall.

There may be such a sustained and fruitful collaboration between artists in the long history of art, but I don't know of one.  This experience has been a life-highllight for all of us involved and makes me excited, as the new year approaches, to think of other ways that life can expand if we are diligent enough to recognize the electric charge to the synapses that a book or painting or piece of music or sculpture offers.  After a deep encounter with art, so Rilke tells us in his "Archaic Torso of Apollo" poem, you must change your life.

So Much To Say as the Solstice Approaches. . .

The nights are ever longer for another week, then the subtle turn toward the light.  This always feels like the most profound time of year. Can't you almost feel that swing toward the sun? And the looming of the bright new year?

I am aiming my sights toward Italy—departing the day after Christmas for three weeks there in the full of winter. How lovely it is, the barren landscape and the bars full of people drinking hot chocolate in their big coats and scarves.  I am hoping for several secluded days at our stone cottage in the chestnut forest, with friends coming over at night for ossobuco, skillet fried potatoes, and chestnuts roasted in the fireplace.  Ah, some big meditative wines such as Amarone.

The Christmas season in Italy is all about friends and feasting.  Fortunately, Italy still is not a consumer society so the whole gift mania is lacking.  Instead, we give and receive a basket of clementines, a bottle of vin santo, just-made ricotta, a jar of preserved cherries or quince jam.  So much easier than the dash to the Le Cruset outlet I made today, and the search through my stash of wrappings for red and green ribbon. Here are two photos of what's to come.  The first, a typical scene of feasting at a local wine dinner.  That's Marco Molesini of Enoteca Molesini on the left.  The second photo shows a festive setting all done with paper in an ancient palazzo.  Bravi Marco, Paola, Elena and Paolo!

We are excited about rejoining the constant round of friends at the table.

We love Christmas here, it must be said, because we have a rising nine-year old boy to please and dazzle.  Our tradition here reflects busy lives.  On Christmas Eve, we always have fondue and salad.  We sit around the fire afterwards, with a scrumptious dessert, this year lemon and almond pie. Everyone is allowed to open one present.  My daughter will read The Night before Christmas aloud, as she has for all of Willie's life and as she has heard on this night for all of her life.  (I once heard a nasty version and am sorry to say that it always overlays the experience!)

Christmas dinner is another story.  This year we're making a chestnut soup, big beef tenderloin, potatoes fried in new olive oil, baby brussel sprouts with pancetta, smothered root vegetables, and a salad of fennel and orange.  Dessert?  Desert the table.  Leftover pie from Christmas Eve.  Or a handful of walnuts and some aged pecorino.  A few tangerines, the peels tossed in the fire for the pungent smell.

I imagine like most of you, a walk is in order on the somehow long Christmas afternoon.  Gifts?  I want a small chain saw, which I probably am not going to get because Ed looks at me incredulously when I mention it. Ed insists he wants nothing, though he will get a stack of books and a couple of shirts.  Italy, as always, is our constant gift to each other.  I'm hoping for snow and  will post some photos from Bramasole, if we are lucky to have a dusting. This is of the stone roof at the mountain house.  It's cosy inside!

And here's the road in:

Meanwhile, 15 more days. We are finishing the cookbook.  12-14 hour days, which is why I have not been faithful here.  This is the hardest thing I've ever written because of the 10,000 details.  The tedium of details is in direct contrast to the joy of the cooking and thinking, styling, photographing, and writing recipe notes and intros for the chapters.  The Italian grams—we went so wrong by not adopting the metric system! But the end is in sight and I am dreaming of turning my attention toward a new book. And how divine to have all our recipes in one place.  Steven Rothfeld's photos are just stupendous. This book has been twenty years in the making. . .

I've been writing "See You in the Piazza" for a year now and the comments from readers has been such a joy.  It's an odd sensation to feel a real connection to someone you don't know.  But that's the joy, really, of the written word.  I've loved the comments and feel that if we did meet for coffee somewhere, somehow, that we would be friends.  So, many good wishes to you and I hope the end of the year draws closely around you with quiet joys, solid pleasures, abiding loves, and feasting at the table.

Flowers at the Wedding

Now I'm a convert to the small home wedding!  Only nineteen guests for the 6:30 ceremony in front of the fireplace, then champagne and toasts, then a splendid dinner.  Catered by our friend Franca Dotti's Chapel Hill Catering Company.  Ashley and Peter chose a rustic Tuscan menu:  fried zucchini and artichokes, Tuscan ribs, platters of grilled vegetables, and polenta with funghi porcini.  For dessert, a southern touch: coconut cake surrounded by tiny roses.  Ed managed to import a D'Allesandro Cortona syrah all the way from New York!

I thought my daughter looked regal and gorgeous and she and the groom were so happy that the rays spread to everyone.  I was in charge of the flowers. It was fun to back up the car at the florist's door and fill it with lilies, stock, roses, hydrangeas, and carnations–all white plus a bunch of lavender stock for an accent.  Ashley wanted it to look romantic and I thought a little asymmetry was a good way to go on the wide mantle:

Looking at these tonight, I almost can smell the fragrances.  If you're contemplating a wedding, small is beautiful!  The next night the bride and groom had a party for all their friends and some of ours too.  At the end of the weekend no one was tired at all, simply exhilarated and ready to move on to Thanksgiving.  The candles below looked holy.  This was Ashley's idea: a silver tray and some tendrils of ivy and candles of different sizes. This may appear on our Christmas night table.  I'm falling in love with simplicity.

November Ablaze

November Ablaze

I take a back road to my daughter's house, through pasture land and farms, wishing I were riding a horse a hundred years ago.  But I'm in my hybrid Toyota, speeding through a smear of rioting autumn colors—golden groves and fallow fields.  This road is becoming as familiar as the line in the palm of my hand.  I pass the meadow that surrounds a family cemetery. Four graves and a rusted iron fence.  In another field, two sleek horses with burnished copper coats.  Then the pond, reflecting orange and yellow trees, a brilliant scum of chartreuse algae along the edge.  There's Laura's yellow house, visible now that the kudzu is dying back.  A school bus lets off a boy who slings his backpack over his shoulder and slowly walks toward a sorry trailer.  I'm home.  Maybe it's full of love and I hope so.

Fall comes late in North Carolina, giving you plenty of time to accept the end of summer.  I've always liked the term "Indian Summer," which in Italy is "estate di San Martino," summer of Saint Martin, whose day is 11 November, usually the last edge of sunlit days of burnished light falling through the linden trees.  San Martino means nothing to me but "Indian summer" bring quick, calm sensations of long rays of light raking across the lawn, speckled corn hanging on a blue door, a whiff of dry husks, early mist rising from the land, and the first morning the dog's bark turns into a cloud.

I'm going over to help bring inside the mandevilla vine, the datura, and the Key Lime tree I hauled back from Key West.  Five lime are forming and I don't want the first hard freeze to zap them since we've babied it along for two years.  We muscle the pots to the terrace, clean them of dead leaves and rinse them of dust.  I cut circles of aluminum foil to go under their saucers and place them on the stone floor of the sunroom, then we hoist them inside.  Suddenly the sunroom looks like where you'd want to sit on a winter morning when a rime of frost covers the grass.

I bring in the Christmas cactus, too, and see that it is covered with buds, ready to perform on time.  My daughter and I walk out to the rose garden and clip a few pink and white ones, then over to the vegetable garden for an armful of the zinnias that are still burgeoning and spilling their fiesta colors all over the walkways. Enough for her table, enough for mine.  We wrap the stems in wet paper towels then foil for the trip home.

Driving back, the western sky is behind me and I see in the mirrors that the blue is streaking with lavender and pink.  A sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins comes to me:

Summer ends now; now, barbarous in beauty, the stooks arise

Around; up above, what wind-walks! What lovely behaviour

Of sild-sack clouds! Has wilder, willful-wavier

Meal-drift moulded ever and melted across skies?

I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes,

Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;

And eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a

Rapturous love's greeting of realer, of rounder replies?

And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder

Majestic—as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!—

These things, these things were here and but the beholder

Wanting; which two when they once meet,

The heart rears wings bold and bolder

And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.

What a wild man. All of Hopkin's poems are super-charged with a love of the earth which he, a Jesuit, channels directly to God.  I love his passion that rinses and wrings the language. "Barbarous in beauty"–oh, yes!

14 November, the hinge of the month.  Much is rising up to greet us—the slide into winter, Thanksgiving with its gifts, festive December when we deck the halls.  And for my family, a very special event.

My daughter will marry next Friday, at her home, in front of the fireplace.  She has found a soul mate and we all are very happy and excited.  She and her fiancé arranged the feast and the service.  I'm in charge of the flowers.  All morning on Friday I will be preparing the house with white: roses, lilies, carnations, hydrangeas, stock.  Mantles, chandelier, tables—flowers everywhere.  Ed will try to write a wedding poem. He already has stocked the garage fridge with champagne and has selected a Cortona syrah for the wine.  My grandson, eight, has a new dark suit and wants to wear his high-top tennis shoes with it.  Why not?  The long ivory dress hangs on the bedroom door.  My principessa!  She will wear her hair up and the pearls we gave her when she was eighteen.

I'm going to read a little more Hopkins today and bake cantucci and cheese wafers to have on hand.  As I turn in my driveway, I startle seven deer.  They're poised to run but don't.  I roll down my window, say "Buona sera," good evening.  They raise their white tails and flee.

New Olive Oil

How to describe the distinct, polyphonic, greeny, assertive, fresh, piquant, sublime taste of just-pressed olive oil?  We tried first tastes here in North Carolina this weekend and again marveled at the punch it delivers.  I toasted bread then gave it a quick soak in the new oil.  The oil from 2009 is on the right; the new oil on the left.  Look at the color difference!!  At this stage just-pressed oil is bursting with health-improving properties, as well as the indescribable taste.  The 2009 oil is still excellent.  It mellows over time.

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Green as it looks, the photo still doesn't capture the depth of color.

Your cooking skills quadruple when you cook with the freshest oil available.  In stores, do look at the expiration date and the harvest date.  The farther away the expiration date, the better, although well-stored oil lasts a long time.  It just loses it's pep slowly. On the other hand, badly stored oil goes south quickly.  A week in a sunny window and it's lost.  Look on the label for a specific place of origin.  If it says "Product of Italy," or product of anywhere, that probably means it's a blend of olive oil (from who knows where) that was bottled in Italy.  Many inexpensive oils sold in American discount stores are blends of oils that did not sell in their first year.  If an extra virgin oil from Italy is cheap, I'm 99% sure that something is amiss.  We get one liter PER TREE!!!  When you know that, you understand that  first-quality oil has to be much more costly.  I get incensed when I look through the olive oils and balsamic vinegars in the grocery stores here.  So much misleading information!  All you can read on the two subjects will arm you against buying a dreary product–oily stale olive oil or balsamic with caramel added.

Since Ed only had a carry-on bag, he brought back medicine bottles holding less than three ounces so we could share an immediate taste.  Not very appetizing to see but a joy to behold anyway. Looks like ear drops. We're loving it, drop by drop, until the five-liter cans arrive in a week.

Missing Tuscany

Late fall is full of spectacular color, the pleasures of the olive harvest and many occasions to feast. I am at home in North Carolina, while Ed remains in Cortona.  He took his three sisters to Gdansk, Poland and the Kashubia area where their ancestors came from several generations back.  These four descendents know only four words from their grandparents and were surprised to learn that Poles didn't recognize the words at all.   In Kashubia, however, their friend and guide  recognized the words as Kashubian dialect.  They all loved Poland, as Ed and I did last year when we went for a couple of weeks to Krakow, Torun, and the Gdansk area.  All three cities are magnificent and profound.

Now they're all back in Cortona and in the middle of the olive harvest.  Ed reports that they have picked two tons in three days.  That's a LOT of olives! For the first time ever, Pierino and Armando are not on the team.  They're both in their mid-eighties now and Pierino's family protested.  No more ladders in the wind.  So Armando stayed away too.  Ed wants them to come out to the grove for lunch and a little grappa, like old times.  He has young and handsome Roberto, our very dear Albano, Fabio who helps us with the garden at Bramasole, and his friend Gigi.  And the three sisters, who love the harvest and so enjoy the fresh oil they take home. For more harvest photos and olive oil info, look at www.thetuscansun.com

I miss all the excitement of loading the crates and taking them to the mill, standing around for that first taste on a piece of grilled bread.

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Just as much as the harvest, I miss chestnut season.  Ed sent me this photo, taken last night at our neighbor's fireplace.

Besides the roasting chestnuts–I almost can smell them–there are a couple of interesting things about this photo.  See the tall black box on the right, with the brass handle.  That's a wind-up spit.  The iron skewer is threaded with meat, pigeons, and guinea hen, and the other end of the skewer rests on that black iron notched piece opposite on the left.  (I think the skewer is leaning against the fireplace tools on the right.) The rack where the fire is was designed by Placido, our neighbor.  He builds a fire in it, then rakes down the coals under the grill.  That way he can keep the fire going and use the coals as he needs them.  He can maintain the kind of temperature he wants for a long time.

We have dozens of old chestnuts at our mountain house.  Some are the prized kind that give us marrons, the big meaty chestnuts used to make marron glacé, or simply to roast and feel that, yes, fall is here.

Under the Tuscan Sun Engagement Calendar

Several people have inquired about my agenda that I do every year with photographer Steven Rothfeld.  Yes, it's alive and well and available at bookstores. If they don't have it, they easily can order it.  It's on Amazon and the other big sites as well.

I like keeping track of my days this way, rather than on a computer.  It just seems to put them into a context I prefer.  I've asked my neighbor in Italy to use hers to keep track of everything she cooks this year.  That will be an astounding document!  I like agendas like this for a garden journal, for good thoughts, for books I read and for travel notes.  Here's what it looks like inside–photographs, quotes from my books, nice space for writing, even a few recipes: