Misstropolis

Wednesday, July 25, 2007

At Home in Tuscany

by Rebecca Dorr

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It’s my first day at Pamela Sheldon Johns’ crash course in Tuscan food and wine, and Chef Massimiliano is speaking to me in Italian.

I’m standing with my three classmates around an antique table in Sant’Albino di Montepulciano trying to roll pici, fresh Tuscan pasta that is shaped a bit like spaghetti. For a bunch of beginners, I think my classmates and I are doing all right, but Max — we call him Max — bright and cheerful, and also very exacting, is full of tips.

My Italian isn’t great, but Max gestures effectively, so I get the idea, and our translator fills in the gaps. Still, my attempt to find a pici-rolling groove goes in fits and starts. I’m working across from my mom, and when Max tells me I have the same tendency she does to squish the pici prematurely, I scrunch up my nose and scowl. But only a little. Actually, I’m having a blast. We roll and chat and laugh at each other as we make mistakes, and as our pile of pici strands grows, so does my ease with the technique. “You learn quickly,” Max says. I beam.

Looking back on my week at Poggio Etrusco, the 15-acre farm where Johns lives and works with her husband, Johnny (an artist and expert cappuccino maker), and daughter, Alaia (already a mean pici roller), I have to laugh at the school-girlish joy the trip inspired in me. “Camaraderie and healthy cooking and eating make me really happy!” I gushed after a lesson on ribollita, a soup/casserole that uses day-old bread (common in Tuscany, where nothing goes to waste). We visited markets and learned to pick fresh ingredients. We tested cooking techniques passed down from generation to generation. Best of all, when we sat down to eat, it was always for a good long stretch.

Johns, an American, also runs food workshops in Campania, Piemonte and Emilia-Romagna, but her Tuscan classes are the only ones based at the villa she and her husband bought in 2001. She had been a cooking teacher and an Italophile for some time when she started researching real estate in Tuscany. She made her first visits to Italy in the early 1980s and felt a certain connection to the place and its food. After chef’s training in California, she eventually started running foodie tours in Italy. In the end, with a young daughter and many months of her year spent on the road, it made sense for Italy to be the family’s home base. Her more than a dozen cookbooks (with titles like Pasta!, Parmigiano! and Balsamico!) celebrate the food artisans of her adopted country.

She found Poggio Etrusco almost by mistake. In Italy visiting another property that went bunk, Johns looked at Poggio Etrusco as an afterthought. Its charming main house, guest apartments, Etruscan well, olive grove (the farm produces an organic extra-virgin olive oil) and goat’s shed were too good to pass up. When you sit outside, near Poggio Etrusco’s swaths of four-foot-high lavender, you also smell gelsomino (jasmine) and ginestra (Scotch broom). It’s hard not to fall for it.

Johns is warm and gracious and loves sharing stories about Italian food traditions. When conversation turns to the red cows of Parmigiano-Reggiano fame, or the risotto recipe she collected from a Marchesa, she speaks slowly and smiles often. Her courses are well organized and busy, in a Tuscan, Slow Foods sort of way. That is to say: they pack in quite a lot while also honoring Italy’s long-held tradition of taking its time to eat.

During my one-week workshop, I rolled pici with Massimiliano, pieced together ribollita with Massimiliano’s mother Lina (both locals who learned to cook from Lina’s mom), ate fennel salame (finocchiona) with a spunky 90-year-old Contessa and kneaded pizza dough with Pizzaiolo Gaetano.

My classmates and I also had a free pass into the kitchens of some of the region’s best restaurants, including Montepulciano’s La Grotta, where we had a lesson on pappa al pomodoro, a regional tomato soup that, like ribollita, uses day-old bread. The back and forth between neighborhood cooks and practicing chefs became a touchstone for the course — which also left plenty of room for spontaneity. In our downtime, we bought linens from a shopkeeper in nearby Monticchiello and shared an aperitif with a coppersmith we stumbled on in Montepulciano.

Somewhere in the middle of the course, Johns invited my classmates and me onto her patio, a stone’s throw from her outdoor wood-burning pizza oven. She carried a small basket that contained her collection of aceto balsamico. The brown, viscous balsamic vinegar complements many dishes, but also has an extraordinary flavor on its own. We sat at a small iron table, while Johns drizzled specks of the stuff into our spoons and we compared vintages, letting the flavors linger on our tongues like wine. “I’m still pinching myself,” Johns had said earlier in the day about her luck in finding the house and making it home. That afternoon on the patio, a guest passing through, I felt the same.

AGLIONE (Garlic Tomato Sauce)
Serves 6

This is the classic sauce from southern Tuscany, where Johns lives. It is called Aglione, named for a type of wild garlic, similar to green, or immature, garlic. You can substitute mature garlic but use half the amount. Tuscans eat this sauce with a fresh handmade pasta called pici. You can also use your favorite dried pasta.

6 large, very ripe tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and coarsely chopped
1 small head green garlic (approximately 6 immature cloves), sliced
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 or 2 pepperoncini (or dry red chili flakes), to taste
1/4 cup finely chopped flat-leaf parsley
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
1 pound fresh or dried pasta

1. In a large saucepan, combine the tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, pepperoncini, and parsley. Simmer for 30 to 35 minutes over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the garlic is very tender (mature garlic will take longer). Season with salt and pepper to taste. Keep warm.
2. In a large pot of salted boiling water, cook the pasta until al dente.  Drain the pasta and toss with the sauce. Turn into a warmed serving bowl, and serve at once.

Recipe courtesy of Pamela Sheldon Johns, from 50 Great Pasta Sauces (Andrews McMeel, 2006).