Minimalist Gossip Magazine Cover (49).pdf (23) - Flipbook - Page 25
NONNA
by CG Casci
I’m in the kitchen cooking when the telephone rings. Onions are
sweating, spinach defrosting and the meat is ready to go in.
Ignore it. A sales call. Puccini is on at full volume as he often
is when I cook and the family is out. The telephone keeps
ringing, Renata Scotto keeps singing and I keep cooking. Someone
must win. But it could be family, run out of money, cancelled
trains, school problems.
‘What are you doing?’ a woman’s voice on the other end.
‘What?’ I say. ‘Is this double glazing, appliance insurance or
full on scam?’
‘Don’t burn the onions,’ she says. I hang up. They always call
at dinner time.
The minced pork and beef are now cooking with the onions,
garlic, and dry herbs. I will use half for the smalto (stuffing)
with spinach, breadcrumbs, egg and pecorino, and half for the
sauce with tomatoes, red wine, a little stock and a parmesan
rind. I check the hand written recipe for timings, Tosca realises
God has abandoned her to a terrible fate, and the telephone rings
again.
‘Don’t forget to use the best olive oil in the pasta - cold
pressed and Italian.’
‘I know, but who is this? Is that you Morag? It doesn’t sound
like you,’ I say.
‘No, stronzo, it’s Nonna!’
‘Go away!’ and I hang up again. I don’t recognise the voice:
it was accent-less, ageless, but definitely not my 20 years dead
Tuscan grandmother who had an accent as thick as Pasta e Fagioli
on its third day. It was she who wrote recipes for the
grandchildren when I was too young to remember. The recipes came
from her mother and her mother’s mother back into time, when they
couldn’t read and write and learned everything at the wood stove
high up in the Garfagnana, above olives and vines, with a view of
the Carrara Mountains in winter snow. She married my grandfather
from the village across the valley, a route of marriage long
trodden by donkeys, and they came to Britain to avoid crop
failures, dying vineyards and the malnutrition that took her
brother. In the 1960s, with money from their fish and chip shop,
they bought a farm in an Italy that remained stubbornly poor,
built a farm house with electricity,and planted new vines and
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