What I learned about food and cooking when I was in Italy: better and fewer; more but less.
Most of what little I was capable of learning came from one brilliant, difficult man, Ludovico Muratori.
Better ingredients and fewer of them. More flavor but less sauce. Better meals at home, fewer in restaurants, more trips to the store, and less unprepared food sitting around the house. Better conversations, fewer interruptions to a long meal, more care about good food, but less worry about things seeming fancy.
The overall quantity of food remained impressive, as did the number of dinner parties and regular guests, and the all-important wine-consumed-per-meal-ratio.
I’d come from a sort of Chung-King stir-fry meets Chef Boyardee background. Especially for pasta, I thought the more stuff you could pile on, the better. I gave that a shot once with Vico. The combination of my usually cheerful host hissing Madonna! and then averting his eyes, his body crumpling into a silent, hurt-ballerina posture, broke me of my old habit instantly.
The fact that he was an extremely melodramatic street theater performer who was a master of stilt-dancing, and had a penchant for flamenco, hypochondria, and pretty young men (although he was married), definitely added to the effect. Think Eleonora Duse in Lord of the Dance as played by Paul Lynde on stilts and you’ll be in the right direction.
But the man could cook. Better still, he could eat. It wasn’t so much that he packed it away. No, no, Vico had his figure to take care of. But the sheer joy he radiated at each nibble of good food, in contrast to the deeply tragic look on his face if something on the table was even slightly mediocre, left nothing to the imagination. Of course, since it was another performance, he made sure everyone at the table was keenly aware at every moment just exactly what his delicate senses were absorbing.
That might have been exasperatingly overbearing, if everyone else’s enjoyment had not also been a necessary component of his food-passion. I could imagine Vico enjoying good food by himself, but it would be a stretch. The man lived for everyone enjoying the meal.
And this is the lesson I try to keep with me. The food there was exquisite, but I couldn’t recount a menu or recipe. The wine was heady and the grappa sharp, but half the time their bottles didn’t even have labels. What sticks with me is the deeply respectful romance my host had with act of sharing food, his compulsion to express himself, the value he put on even the simplest ingredient or dish, and how much he cared about his guests. Those qualities will put fine meals within reach in any cuisine or country.
