spare lunch of zucchini, green beans, and chicory. Left out on her Salentino pottery, covered with netting to keep the flies away until we arrived after a long, intensely hot eight-hour motorcycle ride from Rome. We sat in the cool, dark dining room—eating the most delicious, unapologetic, undressed meal of a lifetime—the harsh glare of the white-hot afternoon shuttered out.
Alda cooks mostly vegetarian in the summer as the meat is of notoriously poor quality in the south. She uses only the limited variety of ingredients that are available, but they are like none you could get here, no matter where you shop.
Many are her own. Pine nuts in the shell that fall out of the tree in the courtyard of her youngest son’s summer house—so piney they taste almost mentholated; her own oranges, their juice squeezed over ice crushed in a dish towel with a mallet for a midday snack for the kids; figs that are juicy and cool when picked at ten a.m., warm and jammy at four p.m. Burratta and buffalo mozzarella and giuncata—the fresh cow’s milk cheese that sits in giuncata (rush) baskets that impart its flavor and its name—were brought to the house by the local woman who makes them—still warm!—the first time I tried them.
The eggs yolks are as orange as persimmons—making it clear why the Italian word for egg yolk is rosso di uovo, “the red of the egg.” The zucchini is less porous, less watery, and has smaller seeds than ours. The beans are darker, chewier, and more slender and taste like pure chlorophyll. The eggplant, from vines surrounded by rocky terrain of wild oregano, fennel gone to seed, and sweet garlic, is more flavorful than the eggplant from your local organic farm, grown among clover and corn.
“Poor people’s meat,” she says of the eggplant. The way she makes it though, using more than a dozen eggs, two whole balls of buffalo mozzarella, and easily a liter of extra virgin olive oil makes me wonder what kind of poor people we are talking about. The kind who own their own olive orchards and industrious chickens, I guess.
To start, she slices the eggplant in her hands without using a cutting board or a table. She holds the vegetable in one hand and slices toward her body with the other—using her one dull knife that she’s been using forever, never sharpening it. She salts and drains the eggplant, but then never rinses it. She first flours and bread crumbs each eggplant slice and then dips it in egg before sliding it into hot olive oil to fry. The chef in me longs to sharpen her knife, buy her a new one, use a cutting board to get uniform, perfect eggplant slices and to dip the slices in egg before the bread crumbs. But the daughter-in-law in me follows Alda, who has been making it this way for fifty or more years.
Her pizza rustica comes from a recipe of her own mother-in-law: a thin, enclosed pie of mozzarella with a puff-pastry-like dough. It’s equally simple and uses that very Italian way of measuring for a dough—you go by the quantity of eggs you are starting with to determine how much flour is used. She only ever measures anything for my benefit, so I can write it down and make a recipe, but I’m glad every time to see her dump the car keys and daily mail that sit in the pan of the old balance scale and weigh out flour—from her own wheat!—throwing little brass weights into the other pan.
When she pulls her old sawed-off broom handle out of the kitchen drawer to roll out the dough I sigh happily to be so far away, literally and conceptually, from my stainless steel restaurant kitchen where the freezers all freeze to precise Deparment of Health standards, and there’s a knife for turning, for boning, for filleting; there’s a wet stone, and a dry stone and the need for improvisation arises rarely. I sip my negroni and contemplate my new, unexpected circumstances.
She and I do not speak the same language, and because of that our relationship really thrives. Even my twenty words of Italian—all of them in the present tense—don’t work with her because she speaks formally and sometimes in a Leccese dialect.
So we just hug and cook a lot. Which can seem, at times, like a greater intimacy than the one I have with her son, and a very compelling reason to stay married to him.
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WHEN I