Seasons in Basilicata (43 page)

Dinner at Margherita's

A week or so later, we were guests at another event that, from the very start, never flagged for an instant.

 

“A
ROUND SIX THOUSAND
olive trees, I think,” Margherita said with a mischievous grin on her lean, light-filled face. “Approximately.” That grin, I later realized, was a key to her irrepressible humor and her hands-on, straight-talking approach to life—a life that, for one of Sebastiano's prized teachers and co-owner with her husband, Tori, of a huge olive orchard outside Stigliano, seemed unusually full and active.

“Six thousand!” I gasped in awe. Most of our other small-farmer friends seemed to get by with a few dozen at most. This was obviously an estate of some magnitude for a town like Stigliano. I hadn't realized that when Anne and I arrived, with Sebastiano, Rocchina, and young son, Gianluca. It was dark, so other than an impressive avenue of olive trees, there was nothing to suggest the scale of this little kingdom.

“It was my father's,” Margherita explained. “But he is eighty now, so he gave it to us. Well, to my husband really. Tori.” Still grinning, she stroked Tori's broad shoulders spread beneath a face that was plump and constantly bemused, as if he were sharing jokes with himself and no one else. He and his wife stood together by a huge,
baronial fireplace in the large, whitewashed living room and kitchen, once the barn of the substantial stone farm a couple of miles down the steep hill from Stigliano.

We could see the lights of the town twinkling high above us along the ridge as we pulled into the estate and drove along a bumpy track down that avenue of young olive trees. Apparently Margherita and Tori used the farm for entertaining when their home in town was not large enough to hold parties. A lot of parties.

“We have many good friends, so we like to get together and talk and eat good food,” Margherita told me with that wily smile, almost identical to that of her husband's. “And lots of homemade wine!”

“And what's on the menu for tonight?” I asked as I stood beside them near the roaring fire with olive logs crackling cheerfully.

“Some real simple home cooking,
nostrano,
with lots of
porcini
and
funghi,
” she said.

“Ah, mushrooms. Lovely!”

“Oh, yes.” Margherita smiled.

“And…?”

“And more mushrooms!” She laughed, indicating a huge wicker basket filled to overflowing with at least six different kinds of mushrooms, most of which she'd gathered herself in the nearby oak forests of Montepiano and which included rarer local species such as
boletri
(smooth, round, and white like hardboiled eggs),
quaitelle
(with vibrant red caps), and
biette
(smaller, but with equally bright caps).

“A whole dinner entirely of mushrooms?” I asked, amazed by her gastronomic daring.

“Of course,” she replied, with that playful grin. Tori grinned along with her. They seemed to be a couple custom-made for each other, for whom nudging, winking, and sudden mutual outbursts of ribald laughter were all an endearing part of their nonverbal dialogue.

And that's exactly what happened. A multicourse meal for fourteen friends, with Anne and me as “honored
stranieri,
” conceived
primarily out of mushrooms and with the following sequence of delights:

•   First, a hand-around dish of black olives, their own, baked black and then marinated in olive oil and garlic served with home-baked focaccia.
  
•   Slices of hot, fire-toasted bread (
  crostini
  ) carved from a two-foot-diameter, bronze-crusted loaf from a nearby bakery and dribbled with olive oil
  bruschetta
  style and sprinkled with finely ground sea salt or with a slather of Margherita's magnificent
  bagna calda
  hot dip of blended cream, anchovies, garlic, and olive oil—a
  nostrano
  delight! The cutting of the bread was an odd and seemingly precarious procedure. First you sliced the whole ungainly loaf into two halves and then, holding one of the halves against your chest with your left hand and arm, you sliced from the far end with your right hand directly toward your body, and then veered the loaf and knife away at the last second before doing irreparable damage to very sensitive upper parts of your anatomy. To see large-bosomed women do this as they suckle the half-loaf between their ample protrusions and flailed away with a large and very sharp knife, getting closer and closer to their salient bits, was a rather unnerving sight. However, they claimed that accidents were rare.
  
•   A simple but very aromatic bowl of homemade
  orecchiette
  pasta tossed in a rich sauce of fresh
  porcini,
  butter, cream, black pepper, and parsley and then topped with just-grated hard pecorino cheese (their own, of course). Actually, they'd called it
  stagionato,
  a special name for aged pecorino, which is regarded as a pungent delicacy in these parts.
  
•   Fat, spicy, six-inch-long sausages with a pepperoni kick and chunky pork-meat filling grilled in the fireplace. These were served, as is very common in the countryside, with no garnish except some of those blindingly hot Basilicatan
  peperoncini
  chopped and marinated, along with garlic in olive oil.
  
•   More
  porcini
  mushrooms, this time baked to tongue-tantalizing tenderness with a mix of chopped herbs, garlic, peppers, and cheese and served with a dark
  funghi
  stew laced with chilies and slathered over more fire-toasted
  bruschetta.
  
•   There was supposed to be a salad, but we all agreed that perhaps it was unnecessary, as we could smell the next dish: a kind of finger food savory of crisp, deep-fried, sliced mushrooms (what else?) encased in a very highly seasoned batter of eggs and flour. These exploded with trapped juices à la Chicken Kiev as soon as they hit the palate, and the contrast between the crunchy batter and the rich, moist interior was so enticing that Margherita's overworked brother (who, poor man, was not overly fond of mushrooms, despite the fact that he and a friend had done all the preparation and cooking) had to return to the stove in order to deliver two more bowls of these enticing delights.
  
•   And then just when we thought that it was all over, out came the
  castagne
  (chestnuts), a true autumn delight, to be roasted in the fireplace and served with sliced
  pecorino,
  more
  crostini,
  and rich, creamy, unsalted homemade (of course) butter.
  
•   And then, there was the wine. Endless bottles of unlabeled, home-produced red and white vintages from Margherita's farm and the homes of her friends, each of whom had insisted on making his or her own vintage either from a small family vineyard or with grapes bought from local and “very reliable” vineyard owners. But what was intriguing, and seemingly a custom in these parts, was that in the long period between the arrival of the guests and the start of the dinner, not a single glass of alcohol of any kind had been served. Bottled water was the drink of choice (from Margherita's own spring, of course). Any suggestion on my part—which of course, my being a very go-along kind of guest, was never made—that maybe a little
  aperitivo
  would be a pleasant way to get the evening started, would have been regarded as highly uncivilized. “Alcohol before food reduces
  the ability of your tongue to taste,” Margherita explained a couple of days later. “So we are like, how do you say, religious teetotalers until the food comes—but then with the arrival of the
  crostini,
  just watch those bottles of wine vanish.”