Monday, October 23,

Italian American's Eyes Tear Up Finding Grandmother's Red Sauce in Orvieto, Italy

The ANNOTICO Report

Yes, EVERYONE loves to write about their Trips to Italy, and My How they  Love the Cuisine, and the Hospitality. OK, I'll give you that it is a little difficult to describe the Plethora of Cultural Masterpieces.:)

And I get a Vicarious Charge every time I read one, and some are worth Repeating. This is one of them.

 

ITALY'S CUISINE IS A SAVORY HOMECOMING

Every meal confirms all the stories about food

 

Deseret News - Salt Lake City, UT

PittsburghPostGazette

ByDougOster                                                                                                                                                          

Sunday, October 22, 2006

 

      Italy holds culinary secrets that can never be duplicated here.
      That's what my wife, Cindy, and I learned on a recent trip to the country. It was no surprise, of course, since anyone who has ever visited will tell you the same thing.
      We spent six months planning the visit for our 25th anniversary. She dreamed of discovering her family roots, and it offered us a chance to find each other again.
      Her features betray her ancestry, brown eyes and dark skin that deepened each day under the intense Italian sun. She could walk into the market and be mistaken for a local. I, on the other hand, would never be mistaken for anything but a tourist. My fair complexion and huge Irish head stuck out like a sore thumb. My skin slowly changed from red, to a little redder.
      It was our first meal in the country that would confirm all the stories we'd hear! d about Italian cuisine. We stumbled onto a little trattoria on the 25-minute walk from the Vatican to our hotel.
      The trattoria was family-run, with two sisters waiting tables. We sat outside waiting for our antipasti and a bottle of the house red wine. We thought it was 6 euros (equivalent to $7.60) a glass, but our waitress shook her head as she explained in broken English that that was the price for the bottle.
      When that first antipasti arrived, we finally understood why visitors raved. Cured meats and soft buffalo mozzarella melted in our mouths, grilled eggplant and greens rewarded our palates with their simple, fresh delights.
      Then it was pasta: I'd never enjoyed gnocchi more. The texture and taste was superb and the mushroom sauce, divine. We ordered what we thought were scallops, which turned out to be veal scallopine.
      "What kind of scallops are these?" I asked my wife, and ! then, after a few bites, figured it out.
      Free from the responsibility of children, home and work, we indulged in a second bottle of wine, then promptly proceeded to get lost on the walk back to the hotel. It's easy to slip out of your comfort zone while wandering the residential streets of Italy at 11 p.m. An hour later we found the hotel, the wonder of Italy filling our minds and stomachs as we drifted off to sleep.
      After a few days in Rome and another wonderful meal at our favorite trattoria, we headed south on a five-hour train ride, where we discovered that even the sandwiches on board were wonderful. A panini with fresh meat and cheese, topped off with a wonderful herb bread, tided us over during the trip.
      We were headed for the small towns of Castiglione Marittimo and Falerna, where Cindy's deceased grandmother lived until the 1900s.
      Cindy's cousin Giovanni (Johnny) arranged t! o meet us at our hotel that night. We had last seen him 26 years ago, when he visited the States. From the moment he picked us up, he took care of us in every way, introducing us to family and showing us the spectacular views Cindy's grandmother enjoyed as a child.
      Johnny's grandmother and Cindy's were sisters, and he treated us like the long-lost family we were.
      We used our broken Italian to communicate, and the family used their broken English. Phrase books and Johnny's huge Italian-American dictionary bridged the gap until by the end of our visit we really knew each other.
      The first day, we walked through his olive orchard and then came upon some fig trees. I now understand why so many Italian-Americans go to such lengths to grow them in our climate. Peeling and eating sweet warm figs while overlooking the sky-blue shallows of the Mediterranean is something I'll never forget....
   &nb! sp;       We really thought the food couldn't get any better on this trip, but Johnny's wife, Maria, proved us wrong. Still filled with figs,.. we were about to learn how families eat in Italy.
      Pasta in a fresh red sauce was followed by salad and bread. Johnny's olive oil, pressed from the harvest of last year's orchard, gave everything a wonderful flavor. The aroma of fried veal filled the kitchen, and it was both tender and tasty.
      Just when we were falling into a food coma, the cheeses came out, along with grapes harvested from the couple's vines. We had never tasted a Parmigiano-Reggiano like it: pungent, with an occasional almost-crunchy texture that I long to find in the States.
      But it was a day later that Maria created perfection. After our pasta, salad and bread came the best eggplant Parmesan we'd ever tasted. It was soft, fresh, dripping with cheese and had a crunchy ! layer, too. The combination was pure heaven.
      At the end of our visit, Johnny insisted on taking us to the train station, even getting us in our proper seats. He started to tear up a bit when we said our goodbyes.
      We left with our most treasured gift of the trip, a bottle of his homemade olive oil. We hope that someday we can return the hospitality we received there.
      After returning to Rome, we headed to Orvieto, a little town perched on a cliff about 60 minutes away. That's where we found magic.
      We stayed there for a week and found a restaurant we loved. When we went to visit on our last day, it was closed. We walked down the street to Tipica Trattoria Etrusca, a restaurant that came highly recommended. The wait staff was eating in the dining room and we asked if they were "aperto" (open). They nodded and in about three minutes they cleaned up their table and were back in the kitche! n.
      The waiter was hilarious. It's one of the incredible things about Italy, communicating without many words. As long as you try, Italians are happy to try back. We split the antipasti, and he divided both dishes on a rolling cart in front of the table, even cutting one slice of a carrot in half, just for fun.
      Cindy's first course was a simple red pasta dish. She took one bite and was astounded. She fed me a little.
      "It's the exact recipe of my grandmother's sauce," she said.
      I agreed. We hadn't tasted that perfect mix of spices and pork for more than 20 years.
      As she savored the next bite, she began to weep and continued crying as she finished every bit of the dish, soaking up the sauce with hard-crusted Italian bread.
      Everything had caught up to her: experiencing the views her grandmother once enjoyed, walking in her footsteps along ! the stone streets of Falerna and seeing the ancient cemetery where Johnny's mother and grandmother were buried.
      I tried to explain to the waiter in my bad Italian and using ridiculous hand gestures that there wasn't a problem, that it was one of our most wonderful moments: This woman is crying because of the emotions your red sauce is evoking.
      All it did was confuse him. He never returned to the table, sending another waiter to finish the job.
      I wanted so badly to explain to the owner how special the moment had been, and to get the recipe for Cindy's grandmother's sauce, but it wasn't meant to be.
      As we stepped back onto the cobblestone streets of Orvieto, the irony was not lost on either of us.
      We came 4,000 miles to get a taste of home.

E-mail: doster@post-gazette.com

 

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