Seasons in Basilicata (19 page)

So, there they all were, hung up on the line above Giuseppina's terrace. I was at the bar for my morning cappuccino when I noticed a group of octos in the piazza pointing up at my scarlet, bright green, and polka-dot blue personals and having a hearty chuckle at my expense.

I decided not to return home immediately. In fact, it was almost an hour later when I finally scurried back. The sun had slid its way
westward a little and the octos had moved, as they always did, to the sunnier corner of the pizza, well away from my door. And as I'd forgotten to take a book or a magazine to the bar, it had been a long, tedious hour indeed. Certainly enough time for me to empathize fully with Giuseppina's predicament and vow never to write about such things again…and also to buy myself some less flamboyant personals next time I visited Matera's Carrefour hypermarket.

Once I'd explained my predicament, Anne did not object. She just smiled her classic maternal smile and nodded knowingly.

An Impromptu Street Party

Once in a while, a potentially embarrassing incident can lead to an interlude of delightful—and, in this case, decadent—spontaneity.

One afternoon, a couple of weeks after Anne's arrival, I was exploring the lower half of Aliano around the house where Carlo Levi had been kept during his
confino.
Like so many of the older hill towns in the region, this part of the village had grown almost organically out of a soaring vertical-sided butte, making it look as if it had been there since well before Christ's arrival on earth (not that he would have noticed since, according to Carlo Levi, he never got this far). The place felt abandoned. Doors were padlocked and windows shuttered. The alleys, barely wide enough for a donkey, echoed to the sound of my boots and nothing else. I decided that this must be either another Aliano-regeneration project or a complete abandonment, which I was to learn later was not an uncommon occurrence in the region.

Then I heard a door creak open on what sounded like huge and ancient un-oiled hinges. I paused. I could hear someone climbing, painfully slowly, down a series of ancient steps. There were grunts and moans and the clack of a walking stick. And then she appeared: another one of those small, hunched women shrouded in black widow's weeds. She was carrying an empty five-liter bottle on her head (not an uncommon sight in Aliano). She turned and saw me, and for a moment I thought I was going to be the cause of her imme
diate demise because she reared up to her full, unbent four-and-a-half-foot height, and almost fell over backward.

“
Scusi, scusi,
” I said.
“Buon giorno.”

Her face spectrummed through half a dozen conflicting expressions and ended in a grin as she patted her heart and finally wished me a wheezy “
buon giorno,
” too, before scurrying off with her bottle wobbling precariously on her head.

I wandered on and, by coincidence or not, ended up five minutes or so later back in the same alley, approached from the other end, and once again had one of those heart-attack–inducing encounters with the old lady. And again she started laughing and patting her chest.

I noticed that her bottle was now almost full of transparent, crystal-bright liquid. “Aha!” I said. “Aqua? Or grappa?”

Her laughter increased, and between alarmingly short breaths she whispered, “
Grappa…un po…per la famiglia…
”

“Aha,” I said.
“Si, si.”

Then she did a most peculiar thing. From a pocket deep in the folds of her black shroud she pulled out a grubby shot glass and gestured for me to try her grappa.

What could I do? “Of course.
Bene,
” I said.
“Grazie.”

She handed me the glass, poured me out a generous sample of her grappa, and indicated that I should be a man and drink it in one gulp. I would have preferred to sip it, but she was laughingly insistent.
“No, no. Beva, beva!”

So, I drank and I was about to hand the glass back with thanks when the white lightning hit with the force of, well, lightning. “
Whooaahh!
” I think I shouted, or some equally inane exclamation.
“Jeeeez!”

The old woman's laughter increased to the point where I was convinced, in the throes of my agony, that both of us were about to die on the spot.

Doors suddenly opened (so much for my theory that this was an abandoned section of the village) and faces peered down onto the alley from windows as I clutched the lintel post of a doorway and
continued my wheezing, while the old woman collapsed on a set of steps and laughed until her face was awash in tears.

Anyway, to cut to the quick: That silly little incident led to an impromptu street party as people emerged, glasses appeared from nowhere, and everyone lolled about the alley for half an hour or more sipping samples of the still-laughing lady's remarkably potent moonshine.

It turned out to be an unexpectedly pleasurable, and unusually short, afternoon.

An
Accortezza
Interlude

Another unexpected and most pleasurable event occurred a few days later. Anne and I had been invited back to Accettura, an offer we readily accepted, as we were missing our friends there. It began with an offhand remark from Caterina, a feisty young neighbor of the Mingalones, whom I'd met briefly at one of Rosa's long lunches a few weeks back. “My friend Giusella is very
accorta
[very knowing] about the old ways of cooking,” she'd told me. “Very
tradizionale.
”

“I'd love to watch her cook,” I said.

“I will ask. I'm sure it will be all right. She is very proud of her cooking. Many of her dishes she learned from her grandmother a long, long time ago. Before she was married. And now she's about eighty, I think, and she says she has changed nothing.”

“Do you know if she has ever written her recipes down?”

Caterina gave a horsey snort. “I don't think! Maybe, but I don't think. She is a real
quanto basta
cook; ‘when there's enough, there's enough' kind of cooking. Like so many older Basilicatan peoples. Recipes are for…” she scoffed a little, “young girls, new wives, people who don't really know how to cook by feel, by taste, by heart! You understand?”

“Sure. I understand.”

“So, I will try to arrange and telephone you, okay?”

That was fine with me. One of my favorite pastimes, other than
cooking in my own kitchen, was watching other people cook. Particularly the
accorti quanto basta
types.

W
OMAN IN
“L
OWER
” A
LIANO

 

T
HAT'S HOW
I came to be sitting at a thick and much-used oak table in a small, simply equipped kitchen in a tiny stone cottage on the southern edge of Accettura, up near the cemetery. Giusella had given the nod to Caterina, and I had arrived at her house one morning to watch her prepare one of her favorite dishes for a family gathering to take place in a couple of days. Anne had been invited too, but she had decided that as I was the cook in the family, her time would be better spent catching up on the latest village sagas with Rosa.

Caterina had warned me: “Giusella is very nice old lady, but she does not speak English. Actually, she doesn't speak much to anybody, not even her husband, Toni. Or me! And I'm one of her best friends.”

“That's okay,” I said. “I'll just sit quietly and watch and take notes. I'll learn all I need from just watching, I hope.”

Note-taking turned out to be a little difficult, because Giusella asked me if I'd like to help and I, of course, said yes. So, rather than scribbling in my pad, I found myself dicing carrots, celery, and onions. Giusella watched me out of the corner of one of her wrinkled eyes. The other eye was watching something else. She had a pronounced squint, which, along with a thin, small figure barely five feet high and an old furrowed face, gave her a rather witchy appearance.

The dish she was preparing was something very
classico Basilicata—stufato di cinghiale
(wild boar stew). The boar came courtesy of her son, who had a local reputation as a fine (legal) hunter, and the vegetables—in fact, all the other ingredients, including her homemade vinegar and grappa—came from her small garden or her cellar of stored wonders.

Already I was reminded of something Rosa had once told me about the essence of good
casareccio
(home kitchen) food. “Most of the best dishes here come out of our poverty. They are usually quite simple to prepare and inexpensive. What makes them special is the unusual mix of ingredients compared with other parts of Italy, like Abruzzo, Lombardy, Campania, and the Veneto. Oh, and the freshness and homemade goodness of everything and of course all that slow cooking and the stirring and the tasting.”

Giusella had already marinated about two pounds of cubed pieces of shoulder boar—usually essential, as boar is tasty but tough meat—in an aromatic mix of homemade extra-virgin olive oil, lemon juice, thyme, parsley, garlic, and savory. She said that one day of marinating was essential, but two or three were better, to make the meat “tender like butter.”

Soon we were ready for the stove. Giusella worked without meas
uring devices, demonstrating a true
quanto basta
flair, sauteing my diced carrots, celery, and onions in olive oil, then adding the pieces of marinated boar to brown before pouring in about a half cup of her own red-wine vinegar and a cup of her homemade tomato sauce—canning homemade sauce was a major event in September for most families—and letting everything reduce down to a thick, almost caramelized consistency. Then in went a couple of cups of Toni's homemade Montepulciano grape wine (bold, feisty, and almost black in color); about half a cup of the marinade mix (Why not?…it's got all those lovely meat juices in it); a fistful of fresh thyme, parsley, and savory; a hefty dose of that Basilicatan hot
peperoncini
mix made from her own peppers; and a couple of large bay leaves. And for the moment, that seemed to be that. She adjusted the heat to a slow simmer, gave the stew a good stir, then covered the pan partially and sat down with a sigh and a slight smile of satisfaction.

And then she was up again, back at the stove to set a large pot of water to boil. I wondered if this was part of the recipe, but it soon became apparent that she had other delights in mind.

Like lunch.

I hadn't expected it, but there she was, boiling her homemade, thumb-pressed “little ears” (
orecchiette
) pasta, slowly simmering a mysterious concoction she had pulled out of the fridge, and slicing great chunks of golden bread off an enormous domed loaf.

In minutes we were sitting together devouring one of the most delicious pasta dishes I'd had so far in Basilicata:
orecchiette al dente
tossed in a hot sauce of olive oil, garlic, chopped anchovies, salted capers, small pieces of black olives, and homemade unsalted tomato sauce with basil and parsley. And, as a little finesse, sprinklings of fresh, pan-roasted bread crumbs piqued with her own crushed and very spicy
peperoncini
concoction and sprinkled with grated parmesan cheese.

Caterina had been right: Giusella wasn't much of a conversationalist, but what the lunch lacked in dialogue was certainly made up for with her redolent Basilicatan specialty washed down with tumblers of Toni's strong red wine.

 

T
HE
STUFATO
WAS
still slow-cooking when I stepped outside to enjoy a cigar in the sunshine on a raised terrace overlooking Giusella's tiny garden.

Finally, after a gentle simmer for two hours or so, Giusella declared the dish almost ready and called me in for the final touches. And unusual ones they were. She tested the sauce for seasoning, as she had been doing constantly, and nodded with satisfaction. Then she pulled from the cupboard a big bottle of grappa and poured in a good half cup of that fiery liquor along with the juice of a whole squeezed lemon and a few drops of sweet, nutty
vin santo,
a popular after-dinner tipple.

Ten minutes later, after a final simmer to blend these two new and unexpected flavors, reduce the sauce, and take one last lip-smacking taste of the thick aromatic stew—now a deep, rich bronze color—Giusella scooped up a ladle of the
stufato
and poured it into a soup dish for me. “That's your
secondo
for lunch,” she said with a crackling laugh (her first since my arrival, which gave her witchy face quite a girlish glimmer).

I won't belabor this little tale with more exuberant adjectives and exclamations of excellence. Suffice to say, I left Giusella's little house convinced, once again, that the process of cooking is indeed a minor miracle. And that people like Giusella are the true miracle-makers, worthy of culinary sainthood in
cucina di casa
paradise.