Impelled to the kitchen. I feel deep hungers

for star-shaped cookies and tangerine ices

and caramel cakes, things I never think of during the rest of the year. Even when I have vowed to keep it simple, I have found

myself making the deadly Martha Washing-

ton Jetties my mother made every year on

the cold back porch. You have to make

them in the cold because the sinful cream, sugar, and pecan fondant balls are dipped by

toothpick into chocolate and held up to set

before being placed on the chilled wax-

papered tray. The chocolate dip, of course,

constantly turns hard and must be taken into

the kitchen and heated. My mother made

Jetties endlessly because her friends ex-

pected them. We professed to find them too

rich but ate them until our teeth ached. I 210

U N D E R

T H E

T U S C A N

S U N

still have the cut-glass candy jar they spent their brief ten-ures in.

The other absolute was roasted pecans. Nuts roasted in butter and salt; the arteries tense even to read this—we ate them by the pound. I cannot get through a Christmas without them, although now I usually give most to friends and save only a small tin for the house. For guests, of course.

This year, no Jetties. But our almond crop must be used so roasted almonds seem inevitable. This weather demands the red soup pot. In preparation for Ashley and Jess’s arrival, I’m making the big pot of ribollita, a soup for ending a day of fieldwork, or, as I think of it, for arriving from New York. Reboiled is the unappetizing translation and, naturally, it is, like so many peasant dishes, a soup of necessity: beans, vegetables, and hunks of bread.

Winter food makes me understand Tuscan cooking at a deeper level. French cooking, my first love, seems light years away: the evolution of a bourgeois tradition as opposed to the evolution of a peasant tradition. A local cookbook talks about la cucina povera, the poor kitchen, as the source of the now-abundant Tuscan cuisine.

Tortelloni in brodo, a Christmas tradition here, seems like a sophisticated concept. Three half moons of stuffed pasta steaming in a bowl of clear broth—but, really, what is more frugal than to combine a few leftover tortelloni with extra broth? More than pasta, bread is the basic ingredient of the repertoire. Bread soups, bread salads, which seem rich and imaginative in California restaurants, were simply someone’s good use of leftovers, possibly when there was little in the house except a little stock or oil to work with. The clearest example of the poor kitchen must be acquacotta, cooked water—probably a cousin of stone soup. This varies all over Tuscany but always involves invention around a base of water and bread. Fortunately, wild edibles always abound along the roadsides. A handful of mint, mushrooms, a little sweet bur-net, or various greens might flavor cooked water. If an egg was handy, it was broken into the soup at the last moment. That F L O A T I N G W O R L D : A W I N T E R

S E A S O N

211

Tuscan cooking has remained so simple is a long tribute to the abilities of those peasant women who cooked so well that no one, even now, wants to veer into new directions.

a s h l e y a n d j e s s a r r i v e w i t h i n a n h o u r o f e a c h o t h e r , a miracle of scheduling since she is coming to Chiusi from the Rome train and he is coming into Camucia from Pisa and Florence after landing from London. We pick her up, then speed the forty minutes back and arrive just as he steps off the train.

The people one’s children bring home are problematic. One came to visit when we were renting a house in the Mugello, north of Florence. He was deeply into Thomas Wolfe and sat in the backseat engrossed in Look Homeward Angel. We madly drove all over Tuscany to show them (both artists) the Piero della Francescas but he only turned pages and sighed now and then. Once he looked up and saw the round gold bales of hay in the lovely fields and said, ‘‘Cool, those look like Richard Serra sculptures.’’

We never were sure anything else penetrated. A young woman Ashley brought over suffered from dire toothache except when shopping was mentioned. She miraculously recovered long enough to buy everything in sight—she had an excellent eye for design—then relapsed in her room, requiring meals on trays.

Nothing was wrong with her appetite. When she returned to New York, she had to have extensive root canal work on three teeth, so her forays into the shops were remarkable mental triumphs over pain. Another never paid me for his round-trip New York-Rome ticket, which was charged to my AmEx because Ashley picked up their tickets. Naturally, we have been wondering about the person who will be spending a couple of weeks.