Thrud's emails from Italy, resumption
Sep. 29th, 2006 11:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksAs some of you may remember from last year, my housemate Thrud is a very good travel writer who sends weekly updates when she is in Italy working on her doctorate. I am, as I did last year, going to post her Italy emails here, edited to remove identifying features. She has already given her permission and encouragement.
The emails will be friends-locked. If you are not listed on my reading list, either because I am bad at reciprocally adding people and do it at large intervals and in fell swoops or because you are lurking, comment here to be added to the Italy email filter (if you are listed on reading list already, you will be added automatically unless you indicate otherwise). The first one is below and will not be locked so that people can get some idea of what these emails are like. Everything from this point onwards is Thrud.
Friends, I am in Italy again. I am drowning in the finest food, the richest civic history, in art, in architecture, language, and drowning too in my thoughts and opinions, as a student, as an historian, as a writer, as a linguist, as a teacher, as a bit of an epicure and as something of a philosopher, as we all become when left alone. I have no one to tell them to. I do, however, have a laptop, my faithful and portable companion. Last time I stayed in Italy it became my habit to write out the random observations one would normally share in conversation, and to send them home every week or two to those of my friends who would enjoy hearing about history and cars and architecture and funny nuns and mad libraries and, yes, food too. I liked that habit, and I know many of you did too. So here it is, the first of what will be many e-mails about my first full year abroad.
My first thought? It feels strange. Rome is a legendary foreign capital, a place one reads about, or visits for one thrilling, expensive week. It feels strange knowing it casually, as I know Great Barrington, MA, or Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. I took a little time to verify my memory, to make sure my old neighborhood was still as I remembered and the mozzarella really was that good, but everything checked out, even the flavor of the tap water. It has never before felt wrong feeling at home.
Trastevere, where I am staying, is the "trans-Tiber" quarter, across the river, distinguished from the rest of Rome by being a little cheaper, a little artsier, more leftist in its politics, with its own soccer team and its own style. The differences can't really be attributed just to the fact that Trastevere was settled several centuries after the rest of Rome, since it has been a couple thousand years since then, but I felt the same phenomenon in Florence, that there's a palpable barrier formed by the river and the other side has a different character, not separate but distinct, the way afternoon has a different character from evening. Victor Hugo described the same effect in Paris, though I can't testify myself, so I suspect it is a trait common in old, organic cities which have one quarter separated by a river's natural barrier. The exact character of the separate quarter may be different in different cities, or different centuries within the same, but it remains proudly its own.
Did I have a good first day in Italy?
RECEIPT from the STANDA SUPERMARCATI:
Late fresca (much less processed than American milk: this is to our milk as our whole milk is to skim)
Spremuta d'arance (fresh squeezed orange juice)
Rucola (baby arugola)
Insalatini (extremely delicate baby greens)
Olio di Olive Treaimeno Fruttato (extra virgin, ripe-pressed olive oil from extra-fruity trees)
Balsamic Vinegar di Aceto (that's the good stuff, the stuff that costs $20 a bottle in the US - cheap here)
Feta Fresca (fresh feta cheese – I hadn't realized the feta I've been eating all these years wasn't fresh)
Demi-baguette (Rome, not being in Tuscany, escapes the curse of having the only bad bread in Europe)
Procuto crudo (8 slices of tender ham, cured but never cooked, so thin they're translucent)
Filetto di salmone (herb and oil marinated salmon fillet)
Tonno nel olio gr. 200 (oil-marinated sticks of tuna)
Salsice Lucani fresca (fresh local sausages)
Spaghetti (duh)
Tripolini (pasta shaped like tiny, tiny bow ties)
Gnocco (pasta shaped like a Botticelli seashell)
Tagliatelle (fresh pasta, flat like linguini but wider, still wet from the morning's pressing)
Sugo Barilla Arabbiata (like marinara sauce but hot and spicy)
Sugo Barilla Maranara con Pecorino Romano (red sauce, with grains of cheese floating in it like stars)
Pancetta Affumicata a cubetti (specially cured bacon for pasta carbonara)
Pecorino romano (firm but moist – the whole house smells like cheese now)
Uova (farm-fresh brown eggs)
Aglio (garlic, 6 heads for 80 cents – it has to be that cheap since one goes through it so fast here)
Activa yogurt di prugno (prune yogurt)
Yogurt Bianco Muuler, 6 containers (ambrosia)
Mozzarella di buffalo, extra-large bucket (more ambrosia)
Uva Fragola (sour wine-style grapes, like Concord grapes but a bit more intense)
Live basil plant, bushy and green
Toilet paper (you can tell it isn't fiction, since in fiction I wouldn't need this last one...)
Yes, I had a good first day in Italy.
I have spent two evenings now testing my memory of the city. How much can I find again without a map? I won't get lost, not in a city with a river, since if I can find the river I can find home, but how many highlights of the city can instinct find? The first day I crossed the Tiber, and found everything I sought like clockwork: the Via Argentina cat sanctuary, the four Republican temples, the good bookshop, the spot where Caesar died, the big old church that has a Bernini (unlike the five Bernini-free big old churches on that route), then the Palatine Hill, Marcus Aurelius, Michelangelo's floor, the Etruscan She-wolf, the Forum, the Coliseum, that one water fountain they put in just the right place, and my favorite statue of Julius Caesar – in Rome one has one's pick. I had my laptop and was planning to work on my novel in the Forum, but ran into a party of Constantine scholars from Boston University, so spent an hour trading tidbits with them about which exciting old rock had once been what. First day nun sightings, six: two in all black, two all white, two beige with white headdress, one gray with black headdress, one white with blue sweater vest. The all black nuns were definitely the best order to be in; they were in the grocery store buying the ingredients for spaghetti carbonara.
Perhaps you have heard me mention Müler brand Crema di Yogurt Bianco, "white" yogurt. It is not vanilla but a mild, sweetened yogurt with no flavor besides the yogurt itself, and not enough sweetness to completely cover the rich and bitter tang of sour yogurt. Now, I love milk. Milk is the most comforting of beverages, happy and nutritious and extra-right, like cuddling that one stuffed animal you've had forever, and it smells like you and fits just right under your arm and feels like Mom. Milk has a flaw, though: it's fast, too fast, like water, in your mouth and gone. Maybe whole milk lingers a little bit, but not like meat or fleshy fruit which you can chew and savor over time. Yogurt is slow milk, luxuriously slow. It's like when you've just written a really good paragraph, I mean a good one, and you read it over again, then again, aloud perhaps, tasting the sounds and concepts as they flow slowly across your happy tongue. That's why Yogurt Bianco is best. The Italians know it too, and give it its own area to the side: here is the Yogurt Bianco, there the common yogurt. It's even a gelato flavor, odd as it sounds to have a flavor flavored like a flavor of something. America would not make strawberry-flavored-syrup-flavored-candy, we would just make strawberry-flavored-candy. Then again, we don't have any flavors that are worthy of it.
The second day's exploration I walked up the Tiber, not right along the water, but along the tops of the high embankments which protect the city from the Tiber's flooding and the scent of urine which surrounds the river as if there were no other privy in Rome. The banks are lined with trees, bright green like new grass, which droop over the river, dangling their branches all down one side like a woman letting her fresh-washed hair drip over a basin. My destination was the Mausoleum of Augustus, jokingly referred to as the posthumous I, Claudius cast reunion since everybody who was anybody in the first century AD is buried there. I found it, though I'll confess I got nervous and checked a map once just to make sure my route was right. Since my last visit, they've installed a complete Latin inscription of the Res Gestae of Augustus on the outside wall of the museum next door. For those unfamiliar, the Res Gestae is a short, first-person account by the emperor Augustus of his life and achievements, the entire golden age of Rome spelled out in two pages of clear and easy Latin – a teacher's dream. It was lost for a long time, and only rediscovered recently on the inside walls of a temple in Turkey, I believe, where no classicist had ever bothered to look. The recovery is so fantastic that the Museum of the History of Rome has built a reconstruction of the inside of the temple, so you can step through the rough stone door and peer and feel the discoverers' excitement as rough letters resolve themselves into, "Oh my God! It's the second Triumvirate! Look! Look! And there he's talking about becoming Pontifex Maximus! And the Ara Pacis! He's building the Ara Pacis!" The museum I was at just had the words as we think they appeared on the Mausoleum, without the roughness of the Turkish temple, but it still fired my Latinist blood as a fresh cliff thrills a rock climber, so I had to have a go. A street artist had camped out in front of the Mausoleum, and was fascinated to see me bother to sit down and actually read the Latin. Most of his art was unexciting, but I did enjoy the portraits of Romulus and Remus as two empty bottles of bleach with faces drawn on in Sharpie, the Remus one badly smashed. Sadly, I only managed to read the first third of the Res Gestae – there was a truck parked in the way.
Fresh proof that I love my parents: they called when I was at the front of the line about to buy gelato, and I stopped and left the shop to talk to them.
I took a different route back from the Mausoleum, and forgot it would bring me right to St. Peter's until I turned the corner and, boom!, there it was, sparkling like an establishing shot in a James Bond movie. It was evening, and fairly calm, so I couldn't resist camping out on the steps with my laptop and noveling somewhere so sacred. It is impressive, St. Peter's, even in Rome. You can tell it's the most expensive building ever built by a fair margin, even from the outside where you can't see all the gold and porphyry and saints. There are a lot of saints in St. Peter's, remember, perhaps two or three in every ten foot area (that's more than a lot of countries have) and saints are much more valuable than art and decoration – at least they were back when they were installed. You know how, in museums, the most intricate, most gilded and most bejeweled objects are always reliquaries, since nothing secular could justify being decorated with stones which would normally merit jewel boxes themselves? Think of St. Peter's as a great big reliquary.
My kingdom for a cheese grater! I have everything, the special bacon, fresh Romano as firm and soft as beef, the eggs, black pepper, Italian spaghetti, the semolina golden as Helen's hair, I even have Mediterranean sea salt for the water, but I cannot make pasta carbonara without a cheese grater! And my pot is pathetic too, barely big enough for one standard Italian portion of pasta. In any other country I would forgive the landlord of a "furnished" apartment for thinking a single girl would not need more, but this is Italy!
I've finally figured out how to describe it! You know when a cop car comes up blaring its siren, and all the other cars jostle and squeeze into nooks and crannies trying to get out of the way? The normal rules of driving get suspended for a minute, so it's okay to press your bumper inches from the next car, or pull onto shoulders and medians, even to go through a red light if no one is coming the other way – anything you can do without hurting something. That's how Roman traffic is all the time. There are rules, but you suspend them at your discretion whenever it would help you move a few feet forward. And you must also imagine motor scooters appearing out of nowhere all the time, as if nature, abhorring a vacuum, conjured them to fill any empty pavement.
My mission: Find the Pantheon, and the seven points of interest around it.
Pantheon: found it.
Café Taza D'Oro: found it.
Column just like Trajan's: found it.
German Bookstore: found it.
Big important obelisk: found it.
Venetian mask shop: found it.
Zara fashion house, main Rome branch: found it.
Finest Gelateria in Rome: Where is it? Where? It has fifty flavors! Fifty! It has Champagne gelato, and grapefruit and five different darknesses of chocolate! It has lemon which makes ordinary lemon gelato seem like a cough drop! Where is it? Where? Nooooooooo!
Mission: FAILED!
I will try again. I MUST try again...
To be honest, the other points of interest are interesting. The Zara fashion house is where Sherlock Holmes would shop if he were a woman. The German Bookstore is not a German language bookstore, but a bookstore run by Germans, which has every obscure monograph on art, art history, history, archaeology, classics, linguistics or philology that you could ever imagine, all in whatever language they happen to have been printed in. As for the Café Taza D'Oro, it peeks out of an alley on your right when you stand in front of the Pantheon. When you are there, buy a bag of their coffee beans (in the back on the left), ground or whole, as you prefer. Even if you don't like coffee, get them anyway. Give them to your parents. Give them to your boss. Give them to your arch-nemesis. Present them to your household gods. Whoever you give them to, if they like coffee even a slightest bit, will love you and shower you with praises and gifts for all time. Honestly, it's really good coffee. Everyone says it's the second-best café in Rome. No one will reveal the location of the best. And the Pantheon itself is, of course, as magnificent as the most important surviving Roman temple ought to be. I popped in just before closing time to say hello to Raphael, when I was stopped short by hearing from behind me, in English, a teacher's dream: "I know this building is important, but I sure wish I knew what it was." I jumped right in, and after three minutes I had the little gang of English-speaking tourists gaping and asking more and more questions about the construction techniques and porphyry floor panels. I even got asked, on pointing out his tomb, "Who exactly is Raphael?" and I could feel Professor Shearman's ghost hovering by and grading me as I did my best to answer in two sentences. They asked if I'd be willing to be their tour guide for the week. I said I'd love to, but had too much Latin to read at the Vatican. Somehow, everyone always accepts that excuse.
There is a dangerous store next to the Ara Pacis. It lures you in to spend first eight Euro, then twenty, more, and well worth it, for I have now achieved the world's most magnificent cheese grater! It sparkles just sitting on the counter, stainless steel, the crank kind you use in restaurants that can reduce a block of parmesan to powder in seconds, no, not powder, elegant tiny spirals, like the vine patterns on old Roman tombs, with air between so the salty-strong aroma can escape and flood the kitchen. And the cheese grater is nothing, a prelude, herald to the true prize: my spaghettiera! It is a pasta pot, more than a pasta pot, a pasta apparatus, a pasta womb, a temple of pasta! Two pots sit nested one inside the other, almost like a steamer, but with barely any gap. The outer pot is flawless stainless steel, while the inner is perforated like a colander, so when the pasta is finished you lift it out, let the boiling water drain right there, no sink required, and you have your perfect, golden pasta, still in its boiling-hot pot, ready for the next step. If you wish, you can even make a second batch of pasta with the still-ready water. Both pots are tall, enough for spaghetti to go straight in, and aren't non-stick because they are so ample, and boil so vigorously that there is no need to fear the pasta sticking. I know I'm mad choosing to lug an enormous pasta pot around with me for a year, but I have no regrets, for with this and the ingredients which were waiting for it like an army for its general, I have achieved a spaghetti carbonara which tastes exactly like it does in the Roman restaurant in which it was invented. This is what eggs and Parmesan and Romano and fresh bacon were born for. I pity you. You're hungry now from reading this, and I'm eating my carbonara, and you're not. As an attempt at apology, I shall attach my recipe to the end of this week's letter.
Ex Urbe.
(Latin short hand for "Writing to you from the City." In the Renaissance, everyone knew without question which city you meant.)
-[Thrud]
RECIPE for Thrud-style PASTA CARBONARA (or as close as one can achieve in America:)
1 lb. Spaghetti
salt
1/2 lb. bacon (necessary for traditional version)
6 eggs (you can make do with fewer, but lots make it richer)
black pepper
a couple tablespoons of olive oil
1/2 to 1 full lb. grated cheese (quantity varies with quality of cheese. Ideally you want 50% Parmesean, 50% Romano, but one will do)
optional: 1/2 to 1 lb. sausage (supplements the bacon in the meat lovers' version)
optional: 1 yellow bell pepper (substitutes for bacon in vegetarian version)
(only if you are a vicious heretic: 1/4 cup cream)
1) Put water on to boil to cook the pasta, adding salt and olive oil to the water.
2) Cut up bacon and/or sausage into little bits and fry it. You want them to be fully cooked by about the time the pasta is put in the water, maybe a little later. For the vegetarian version, cut up the bell pepper into tiny squares and fry it in oil at this time. If you want both bell pepper and meat, cook the meat first, then cook the bell pepper in the left-over grease.
3) Separate the eggs, so one bowl contains the yolks of six eggs and the whites of one, while a second bowl contains the whites of the other five. Don’t worry if you get a little extra white in the yolks or a little yolk in the whites – that doesn’t matter. Stir both mixtures. Add black pepper to the yolk mixture. (If you want to do the heretical cream version, use only 4 eggs, and add 1/4 cup of cream to the yolk mixture instead. Only heathens do this, and it’s forbidden to admit that it’s also really yummy.)
4) Grate lots and lots of cheese.
About this time the pasta water should come to a boil. Add the pasta, stirring occasionally.
5) THRUD VARIANT (not authentic): When the sausage (and/or bacon & bell pepper) are done cooking, take them out of the pan with a slotted spoon or fork, leaving the grease in the hot pan. Take the egg white mixture (not the yolks) and cook it in the grease, like scrambled eggs. It will be done very quickly – take it out and set it aside.
You should now have one bowl of raw egg yolk mixture, one bowl containing bacon, sausage and/or bell pepper, and one bowl of cooked egg whites. The pasta should be about done cooking.
7) When the pasta finishes cooking, drain it, then IMMEDIATELY (while it’s still steaming) put it back in the hot pot, setting the pot on a hot pad on the counter (not on the burner).
8) A little at a time, pour the egg yolk mixture onto the hot noodles and stir. It’s best if two people do this, one pouring while the other stirs, but you can pour a little and then stir if you’re doing it by yourself. Continue until all the yolk is used up and the pasta is covered with an egg coating.
9) Slowly, as with the egg yolk, mix in the grated cheese a little at a time, and stir it in so it melts and covers the noodles. Stir in about half of it, taste the pasta to see if it tastes good, then add more. Keep that up until it reaches the desired degree of saltyness.
10) Dump in the bacon, sausage and bell pepper, and the egg whites if you're doing the Thrud variant, though an Italian would leave them out. Stir. Add more black pepper to taste.
Done!
BEFORE YOU SIT DOWN TO EAT remember to take the pot and the dishes which contained the egg mixture, put them in the sink and fill them with water, to keep the egg stuff from solidifying and turning into glue. This will make it much easier to clean up afterwards. Running water into the pan that the sausage and bacon fried in is also wise.
Recommended side dishes: salad or other light vegetables – nothing heavy since carbonara is VERY filling. My preferred salad for this dish is simple baby greens with oil, balsamic vinegar, feta and olives.
Recommended beverages: milk, wine, sparkling cider, mix of seltzer with cranberry or grape juice.
Recommended dessert: gelato, fruit salad, fresh clementines, anything with dark chocolate.
Carbonara keeps well in the fridge for up to a week and is good cold or reheated.
Ed. note from RTS: I have had this, as she makes it at home. It is twice as good as it sounds. Also, when she says the egg will turn into glue if you don't run water into the pot straightaway? This is LITERALLY TRUE. I have a glue recipe from a bookbinding class that is essentially egg and oil and some protein, like tempera without the color. Be aware.
The emails will be friends-locked. If you are not listed on my reading list, either because I am bad at reciprocally adding people and do it at large intervals and in fell swoops or because you are lurking, comment here to be added to the Italy email filter (if you are listed on reading list already, you will be added automatically unless you indicate otherwise). The first one is below and will not be locked so that people can get some idea of what these emails are like. Everything from this point onwards is Thrud.
Friends, I am in Italy again. I am drowning in the finest food, the richest civic history, in art, in architecture, language, and drowning too in my thoughts and opinions, as a student, as an historian, as a writer, as a linguist, as a teacher, as a bit of an epicure and as something of a philosopher, as we all become when left alone. I have no one to tell them to. I do, however, have a laptop, my faithful and portable companion. Last time I stayed in Italy it became my habit to write out the random observations one would normally share in conversation, and to send them home every week or two to those of my friends who would enjoy hearing about history and cars and architecture and funny nuns and mad libraries and, yes, food too. I liked that habit, and I know many of you did too. So here it is, the first of what will be many e-mails about my first full year abroad.
My first thought? It feels strange. Rome is a legendary foreign capital, a place one reads about, or visits for one thrilling, expensive week. It feels strange knowing it casually, as I know Great Barrington, MA, or Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. I took a little time to verify my memory, to make sure my old neighborhood was still as I remembered and the mozzarella really was that good, but everything checked out, even the flavor of the tap water. It has never before felt wrong feeling at home.
Trastevere, where I am staying, is the "trans-Tiber" quarter, across the river, distinguished from the rest of Rome by being a little cheaper, a little artsier, more leftist in its politics, with its own soccer team and its own style. The differences can't really be attributed just to the fact that Trastevere was settled several centuries after the rest of Rome, since it has been a couple thousand years since then, but I felt the same phenomenon in Florence, that there's a palpable barrier formed by the river and the other side has a different character, not separate but distinct, the way afternoon has a different character from evening. Victor Hugo described the same effect in Paris, though I can't testify myself, so I suspect it is a trait common in old, organic cities which have one quarter separated by a river's natural barrier. The exact character of the separate quarter may be different in different cities, or different centuries within the same, but it remains proudly its own.
Did I have a good first day in Italy?
RECEIPT from the STANDA SUPERMARCATI:
Late fresca (much less processed than American milk: this is to our milk as our whole milk is to skim)
Spremuta d'arance (fresh squeezed orange juice)
Rucola (baby arugola)
Insalatini (extremely delicate baby greens)
Olio di Olive Treaimeno Fruttato (extra virgin, ripe-pressed olive oil from extra-fruity trees)
Balsamic Vinegar di Aceto (that's the good stuff, the stuff that costs $20 a bottle in the US - cheap here)
Feta Fresca (fresh feta cheese – I hadn't realized the feta I've been eating all these years wasn't fresh)
Demi-baguette (Rome, not being in Tuscany, escapes the curse of having the only bad bread in Europe)
Procuto crudo (8 slices of tender ham, cured but never cooked, so thin they're translucent)
Filetto di salmone (herb and oil marinated salmon fillet)
Tonno nel olio gr. 200 (oil-marinated sticks of tuna)
Salsice Lucani fresca (fresh local sausages)
Spaghetti (duh)
Tripolini (pasta shaped like tiny, tiny bow ties)
Gnocco (pasta shaped like a Botticelli seashell)
Tagliatelle (fresh pasta, flat like linguini but wider, still wet from the morning's pressing)
Sugo Barilla Arabbiata (like marinara sauce but hot and spicy)
Sugo Barilla Maranara con Pecorino Romano (red sauce, with grains of cheese floating in it like stars)
Pancetta Affumicata a cubetti (specially cured bacon for pasta carbonara)
Pecorino romano (firm but moist – the whole house smells like cheese now)
Uova (farm-fresh brown eggs)
Aglio (garlic, 6 heads for 80 cents – it has to be that cheap since one goes through it so fast here)
Activa yogurt di prugno (prune yogurt)
Yogurt Bianco Muuler, 6 containers (ambrosia)
Mozzarella di buffalo, extra-large bucket (more ambrosia)
Uva Fragola (sour wine-style grapes, like Concord grapes but a bit more intense)
Live basil plant, bushy and green
Toilet paper (you can tell it isn't fiction, since in fiction I wouldn't need this last one...)
Yes, I had a good first day in Italy.
I have spent two evenings now testing my memory of the city. How much can I find again without a map? I won't get lost, not in a city with a river, since if I can find the river I can find home, but how many highlights of the city can instinct find? The first day I crossed the Tiber, and found everything I sought like clockwork: the Via Argentina cat sanctuary, the four Republican temples, the good bookshop, the spot where Caesar died, the big old church that has a Bernini (unlike the five Bernini-free big old churches on that route), then the Palatine Hill, Marcus Aurelius, Michelangelo's floor, the Etruscan She-wolf, the Forum, the Coliseum, that one water fountain they put in just the right place, and my favorite statue of Julius Caesar – in Rome one has one's pick. I had my laptop and was planning to work on my novel in the Forum, but ran into a party of Constantine scholars from Boston University, so spent an hour trading tidbits with them about which exciting old rock had once been what. First day nun sightings, six: two in all black, two all white, two beige with white headdress, one gray with black headdress, one white with blue sweater vest. The all black nuns were definitely the best order to be in; they were in the grocery store buying the ingredients for spaghetti carbonara.
Perhaps you have heard me mention Müler brand Crema di Yogurt Bianco, "white" yogurt. It is not vanilla but a mild, sweetened yogurt with no flavor besides the yogurt itself, and not enough sweetness to completely cover the rich and bitter tang of sour yogurt. Now, I love milk. Milk is the most comforting of beverages, happy and nutritious and extra-right, like cuddling that one stuffed animal you've had forever, and it smells like you and fits just right under your arm and feels like Mom. Milk has a flaw, though: it's fast, too fast, like water, in your mouth and gone. Maybe whole milk lingers a little bit, but not like meat or fleshy fruit which you can chew and savor over time. Yogurt is slow milk, luxuriously slow. It's like when you've just written a really good paragraph, I mean a good one, and you read it over again, then again, aloud perhaps, tasting the sounds and concepts as they flow slowly across your happy tongue. That's why Yogurt Bianco is best. The Italians know it too, and give it its own area to the side: here is the Yogurt Bianco, there the common yogurt. It's even a gelato flavor, odd as it sounds to have a flavor flavored like a flavor of something. America would not make strawberry-flavored-syrup-flavored-candy, we would just make strawberry-flavored-candy. Then again, we don't have any flavors that are worthy of it.
The second day's exploration I walked up the Tiber, not right along the water, but along the tops of the high embankments which protect the city from the Tiber's flooding and the scent of urine which surrounds the river as if there were no other privy in Rome. The banks are lined with trees, bright green like new grass, which droop over the river, dangling their branches all down one side like a woman letting her fresh-washed hair drip over a basin. My destination was the Mausoleum of Augustus, jokingly referred to as the posthumous I, Claudius cast reunion since everybody who was anybody in the first century AD is buried there. I found it, though I'll confess I got nervous and checked a map once just to make sure my route was right. Since my last visit, they've installed a complete Latin inscription of the Res Gestae of Augustus on the outside wall of the museum next door. For those unfamiliar, the Res Gestae is a short, first-person account by the emperor Augustus of his life and achievements, the entire golden age of Rome spelled out in two pages of clear and easy Latin – a teacher's dream. It was lost for a long time, and only rediscovered recently on the inside walls of a temple in Turkey, I believe, where no classicist had ever bothered to look. The recovery is so fantastic that the Museum of the History of Rome has built a reconstruction of the inside of the temple, so you can step through the rough stone door and peer and feel the discoverers' excitement as rough letters resolve themselves into, "Oh my God! It's the second Triumvirate! Look! Look! And there he's talking about becoming Pontifex Maximus! And the Ara Pacis! He's building the Ara Pacis!" The museum I was at just had the words as we think they appeared on the Mausoleum, without the roughness of the Turkish temple, but it still fired my Latinist blood as a fresh cliff thrills a rock climber, so I had to have a go. A street artist had camped out in front of the Mausoleum, and was fascinated to see me bother to sit down and actually read the Latin. Most of his art was unexciting, but I did enjoy the portraits of Romulus and Remus as two empty bottles of bleach with faces drawn on in Sharpie, the Remus one badly smashed. Sadly, I only managed to read the first third of the Res Gestae – there was a truck parked in the way.
Fresh proof that I love my parents: they called when I was at the front of the line about to buy gelato, and I stopped and left the shop to talk to them.
I took a different route back from the Mausoleum, and forgot it would bring me right to St. Peter's until I turned the corner and, boom!, there it was, sparkling like an establishing shot in a James Bond movie. It was evening, and fairly calm, so I couldn't resist camping out on the steps with my laptop and noveling somewhere so sacred. It is impressive, St. Peter's, even in Rome. You can tell it's the most expensive building ever built by a fair margin, even from the outside where you can't see all the gold and porphyry and saints. There are a lot of saints in St. Peter's, remember, perhaps two or three in every ten foot area (that's more than a lot of countries have) and saints are much more valuable than art and decoration – at least they were back when they were installed. You know how, in museums, the most intricate, most gilded and most bejeweled objects are always reliquaries, since nothing secular could justify being decorated with stones which would normally merit jewel boxes themselves? Think of St. Peter's as a great big reliquary.
My kingdom for a cheese grater! I have everything, the special bacon, fresh Romano as firm and soft as beef, the eggs, black pepper, Italian spaghetti, the semolina golden as Helen's hair, I even have Mediterranean sea salt for the water, but I cannot make pasta carbonara without a cheese grater! And my pot is pathetic too, barely big enough for one standard Italian portion of pasta. In any other country I would forgive the landlord of a "furnished" apartment for thinking a single girl would not need more, but this is Italy!
I've finally figured out how to describe it! You know when a cop car comes up blaring its siren, and all the other cars jostle and squeeze into nooks and crannies trying to get out of the way? The normal rules of driving get suspended for a minute, so it's okay to press your bumper inches from the next car, or pull onto shoulders and medians, even to go through a red light if no one is coming the other way – anything you can do without hurting something. That's how Roman traffic is all the time. There are rules, but you suspend them at your discretion whenever it would help you move a few feet forward. And you must also imagine motor scooters appearing out of nowhere all the time, as if nature, abhorring a vacuum, conjured them to fill any empty pavement.
My mission: Find the Pantheon, and the seven points of interest around it.
Pantheon: found it.
Café Taza D'Oro: found it.
Column just like Trajan's: found it.
German Bookstore: found it.
Big important obelisk: found it.
Venetian mask shop: found it.
Zara fashion house, main Rome branch: found it.
Finest Gelateria in Rome: Where is it? Where? It has fifty flavors! Fifty! It has Champagne gelato, and grapefruit and five different darknesses of chocolate! It has lemon which makes ordinary lemon gelato seem like a cough drop! Where is it? Where? Nooooooooo!
Mission: FAILED!
I will try again. I MUST try again...
To be honest, the other points of interest are interesting. The Zara fashion house is where Sherlock Holmes would shop if he were a woman. The German Bookstore is not a German language bookstore, but a bookstore run by Germans, which has every obscure monograph on art, art history, history, archaeology, classics, linguistics or philology that you could ever imagine, all in whatever language they happen to have been printed in. As for the Café Taza D'Oro, it peeks out of an alley on your right when you stand in front of the Pantheon. When you are there, buy a bag of their coffee beans (in the back on the left), ground or whole, as you prefer. Even if you don't like coffee, get them anyway. Give them to your parents. Give them to your boss. Give them to your arch-nemesis. Present them to your household gods. Whoever you give them to, if they like coffee even a slightest bit, will love you and shower you with praises and gifts for all time. Honestly, it's really good coffee. Everyone says it's the second-best café in Rome. No one will reveal the location of the best. And the Pantheon itself is, of course, as magnificent as the most important surviving Roman temple ought to be. I popped in just before closing time to say hello to Raphael, when I was stopped short by hearing from behind me, in English, a teacher's dream: "I know this building is important, but I sure wish I knew what it was." I jumped right in, and after three minutes I had the little gang of English-speaking tourists gaping and asking more and more questions about the construction techniques and porphyry floor panels. I even got asked, on pointing out his tomb, "Who exactly is Raphael?" and I could feel Professor Shearman's ghost hovering by and grading me as I did my best to answer in two sentences. They asked if I'd be willing to be their tour guide for the week. I said I'd love to, but had too much Latin to read at the Vatican. Somehow, everyone always accepts that excuse.
There is a dangerous store next to the Ara Pacis. It lures you in to spend first eight Euro, then twenty, more, and well worth it, for I have now achieved the world's most magnificent cheese grater! It sparkles just sitting on the counter, stainless steel, the crank kind you use in restaurants that can reduce a block of parmesan to powder in seconds, no, not powder, elegant tiny spirals, like the vine patterns on old Roman tombs, with air between so the salty-strong aroma can escape and flood the kitchen. And the cheese grater is nothing, a prelude, herald to the true prize: my spaghettiera! It is a pasta pot, more than a pasta pot, a pasta apparatus, a pasta womb, a temple of pasta! Two pots sit nested one inside the other, almost like a steamer, but with barely any gap. The outer pot is flawless stainless steel, while the inner is perforated like a colander, so when the pasta is finished you lift it out, let the boiling water drain right there, no sink required, and you have your perfect, golden pasta, still in its boiling-hot pot, ready for the next step. If you wish, you can even make a second batch of pasta with the still-ready water. Both pots are tall, enough for spaghetti to go straight in, and aren't non-stick because they are so ample, and boil so vigorously that there is no need to fear the pasta sticking. I know I'm mad choosing to lug an enormous pasta pot around with me for a year, but I have no regrets, for with this and the ingredients which were waiting for it like an army for its general, I have achieved a spaghetti carbonara which tastes exactly like it does in the Roman restaurant in which it was invented. This is what eggs and Parmesan and Romano and fresh bacon were born for. I pity you. You're hungry now from reading this, and I'm eating my carbonara, and you're not. As an attempt at apology, I shall attach my recipe to the end of this week's letter.
Ex Urbe.
(Latin short hand for "Writing to you from the City." In the Renaissance, everyone knew without question which city you meant.)
-[Thrud]
RECIPE for Thrud-style PASTA CARBONARA (or as close as one can achieve in America:)
1 lb. Spaghetti
salt
1/2 lb. bacon (necessary for traditional version)
6 eggs (you can make do with fewer, but lots make it richer)
black pepper
a couple tablespoons of olive oil
1/2 to 1 full lb. grated cheese (quantity varies with quality of cheese. Ideally you want 50% Parmesean, 50% Romano, but one will do)
optional: 1/2 to 1 lb. sausage (supplements the bacon in the meat lovers' version)
optional: 1 yellow bell pepper (substitutes for bacon in vegetarian version)
(only if you are a vicious heretic: 1/4 cup cream)
1) Put water on to boil to cook the pasta, adding salt and olive oil to the water.
2) Cut up bacon and/or sausage into little bits and fry it. You want them to be fully cooked by about the time the pasta is put in the water, maybe a little later. For the vegetarian version, cut up the bell pepper into tiny squares and fry it in oil at this time. If you want both bell pepper and meat, cook the meat first, then cook the bell pepper in the left-over grease.
3) Separate the eggs, so one bowl contains the yolks of six eggs and the whites of one, while a second bowl contains the whites of the other five. Don’t worry if you get a little extra white in the yolks or a little yolk in the whites – that doesn’t matter. Stir both mixtures. Add black pepper to the yolk mixture. (If you want to do the heretical cream version, use only 4 eggs, and add 1/4 cup of cream to the yolk mixture instead. Only heathens do this, and it’s forbidden to admit that it’s also really yummy.)
4) Grate lots and lots of cheese.
About this time the pasta water should come to a boil. Add the pasta, stirring occasionally.
5) THRUD VARIANT (not authentic): When the sausage (and/or bacon & bell pepper) are done cooking, take them out of the pan with a slotted spoon or fork, leaving the grease in the hot pan. Take the egg white mixture (not the yolks) and cook it in the grease, like scrambled eggs. It will be done very quickly – take it out and set it aside.
You should now have one bowl of raw egg yolk mixture, one bowl containing bacon, sausage and/or bell pepper, and one bowl of cooked egg whites. The pasta should be about done cooking.
7) When the pasta finishes cooking, drain it, then IMMEDIATELY (while it’s still steaming) put it back in the hot pot, setting the pot on a hot pad on the counter (not on the burner).
8) A little at a time, pour the egg yolk mixture onto the hot noodles and stir. It’s best if two people do this, one pouring while the other stirs, but you can pour a little and then stir if you’re doing it by yourself. Continue until all the yolk is used up and the pasta is covered with an egg coating.
9) Slowly, as with the egg yolk, mix in the grated cheese a little at a time, and stir it in so it melts and covers the noodles. Stir in about half of it, taste the pasta to see if it tastes good, then add more. Keep that up until it reaches the desired degree of saltyness.
10) Dump in the bacon, sausage and bell pepper, and the egg whites if you're doing the Thrud variant, though an Italian would leave them out. Stir. Add more black pepper to taste.
Done!
BEFORE YOU SIT DOWN TO EAT remember to take the pot and the dishes which contained the egg mixture, put them in the sink and fill them with water, to keep the egg stuff from solidifying and turning into glue. This will make it much easier to clean up afterwards. Running water into the pan that the sausage and bacon fried in is also wise.
Recommended side dishes: salad or other light vegetables – nothing heavy since carbonara is VERY filling. My preferred salad for this dish is simple baby greens with oil, balsamic vinegar, feta and olives.
Recommended beverages: milk, wine, sparkling cider, mix of seltzer with cranberry or grape juice.
Recommended dessert: gelato, fruit salad, fresh clementines, anything with dark chocolate.
Carbonara keeps well in the fridge for up to a week and is good cold or reheated.
Ed. note from RTS: I have had this, as she makes it at home. It is twice as good as it sounds. Also, when she says the egg will turn into glue if you don't run water into the pot straightaway? This is LITERALLY TRUE. I have a glue recipe from a bookbinding class that is essentially egg and oil and some protein, like tempera without the color. Be aware.
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no subject
Date: 2006-09-30 06:00 am (UTC)This is marvelous writing.
Nine
no subject
Date: 2006-09-30 06:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-30 06:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-30 08:12 am (UTC)Please may I hear it too?
no subject
Date: 2006-09-30 11:42 am (UTC)I think she should try to have these published in the Sunday Times or the Independent or otherwise broadsheet British Sunday papers that publish things just like this only not as good. I think she should send them this one and promise them one a week, and then at the end publish the whole thing as a travel book.
no subject
Date: 2006-09-30 01:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-30 12:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-30 05:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-30 11:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-30 11:46 pm (UTC)None of my friends are around tonight, and it's too late to start cooking anyway, and I could weep from my desire for a plate of spaghetti carbonara. I may have to go sit alone in a restaurant somewhere and order a plate of it all by myself.
Post-dinner report.
Date: 2006-09-30 11:46 pm (UTC)Thank you!
Re: Post-dinner report.
Date: 2006-10-01 12:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-01 04:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-10-01 08:06 am (UTC)The photos from my trip are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/beryllos/sets/72057594097747766/
no subject
Date: 2006-10-03 06:15 am (UTC)late request for Thrud's emails
Date: 2006-10-08 06:48 pm (UTC)