Laws are like sausages. It is best not to see them being made.
— Otto von Bismarck
With all due respect to the Iron Chancellor we couldn’t disagree more. Maybe he’s correct with respect to law making, but certainly not with respect to sausage making. It is better to make them yourself.
It is January, the beginning of the New Year, when thoughts turn to resolutions, diets and exercise. It is also the time of year, for the past five years, that we welcome back chef Simone Proietti-Pesci for his annual US visit. Yesterday marked the beginning of his return, a three week tour and tour de force that begins in the Napa Valley of California and will take him (and us) to Washington, DC, New York, South Florida, Boston and the Cayman Islands. We’ll chronicle Chef Simone’s daily activities here on Dolce Vita for those of you who cannot get together with him in person.
Our first activity, just hours after connecting with Simone at SFO (he having flown from Rome, we having taking the shorter trip from Washington) was to set up camp at our friend Pete’s in Napa Valley where Simone (and his able assistant Austin) will prepare an Umbrian dinner party this evening. With nothing formal on the day’s schedule (other than dinner at Bouchon) Pete suggested that we organize a sausage fest, relying on our expert Umbrian sausage maker to help make Umbrian sausage and Pete’s family recipe from his Sicilian aunt.
Much weighing of ingredients and calculations of salt percentages were made by Pete and Simone and the ingredients mixed and massaged by hand. Help was enlisted from Pete’s parents and the rest of our assembled group and then magically, from a mass of ground meat and simple spices emerged from the LEM not Neil Armstrong, but an unending array of dirigible shaped delicousness.
Including (if not especially) Wednesday, the day we started Simone’s three week US adventure.
Ci vediamo!
Bill and Suzy
“You are people that want to learn about other cultures, that enjoy meeting people and getting to know about them and where they come from, who are curious to see more than what you can see from a tour bus.”
That’s how we started our day on the morning after the Fourth of July. The previous evening, la Festa dell’Indipendenza, had seen us manufacture an American-style fireworks show, complete with Whitney Houston belting out our national anthem. So the following morning our plans called for serving an American breakfast to an assortment of our friends and neighbors. What we hadn’t planned for was the pounding headache that resulted from the previous evening’s celebration. Nonetheless, when the alarm rang at 7:30 there was no delaying the inevitable. An hour and a half later our guests would be arriving and there was much to prepare.
The first order of business was to whip up a batch of batter for waffles. Waffles, pancakes and the like are pretty much unheard of in Italy but fortunately for us, Marco and Chiara happen to own a waffle iron, perhaps the only one in Umbria. Marco had dropped it off the previous day and when I took a look at it it was a bit of a shock. I am used to a large Proctor Silex model with a large griddle that makes four waffles. This round waffle maker made six or so triangular or heart shaped waffles, each about the size of the thin wafers you serve with ice cream. Nonetheless, I mixed up a quadruple portion of batter, starting with Italian flour that we buy in industrial sized portions for pizza night and the like. And fortunately we had planned ahead for cooking American recipes and had on hand U.S. measuring cups and spoons. Converting ounces to grams and teaspoons to kilometers on the fly is a recipe. For disaster.
The batter was well under way when Lodovico and Anna arrived, a basket of eggs and some fresh pancetta in tow. The eggs were from Lodovico’s chickens and he proudly told us how fresh they were, “straight from the chicken’s . . .” Lodovico broke the ten eggs (maybe it was eight eggs I et?) and watched as I scrambled them, moving confidently around the kitchen and explaining to the awed Lodovico that it is a birthright of American men, particularly fathers, to be able to make breakfast. We may not be able to do many things right, but breakfast is something most of us have mastered.
postcard perfect. I fried up dozens of strips of pancetta, the uncured cousin to American bacon, and broader strips of guanciale or barbozza that give bacon a run for its money. In typical Italian fashion Lodovico asked if I put olive oil in the pan before cooking the bacon. Only in Italy.
It’s nice to extend a hand of friendship between people of different cultures. When that hand is sticky with maple syrup it’s even nicer.
The Menard boys’ fireworks show was always a highlight of the summer for our children and for Suzy and me. The sight of my older brothers running around with Bic lighters setting of twenty foot strings of firecrackers that exploded non stop for two or three minutes (covering the grass in tons of shredded paper), choreographing multiple bottle rocket launches and, in later years, launching individual mortars from giant tubes, appealed to our inner pyromaniac. A few beers were usually drunk as well. There’s a reason it’s called the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
The Fourth of July is not, unsurprisingly, a major holiday in Italy. We try, however, to celebrate it and do our part of supporting the tradition, even if the Italians fail to put on a fireworks show for us. They seem to know that we celebrate something on July 4, but more often ask us if it is la Festa del Ringraziamento – Thanksgiving. They seem convinced that we eat turkey on the Fourth and seem confused when we tell them that we eat wurstel (hot dogs) instead.
Until this year we have never really done much in the way of fireworks on the Fourth but yesterday when we were out running some errands with Marco he told us of a large store that sells fuochi artificiali – fireworks – and so we decided to check it out. When we arrived at Zeus the special fireworks annex next door to the main store was closed for lunch. Imagine, a fireworks store closed on the Fourth of July! A sign announced, however that from the day after Christmas until New Years day it was open 24 hours a day. New Years is the Italians’ biggest opportunity to get in touch with their inner pyromaniac and according to Marco they do just that, lining up for their opportunity to buy packs of ordinance to impress the neighbors and scare their dogs. You know something is very, very important to Italians if they will actually get in a line and wait for it.
