Heat by Bill Buford Read Free Book Online Page A

the young Albert Finney, where “passions and appetites” blur and Mrs. Waters’s soft sighs commingle with Tom’s energetic consumption of a vast piece of roast beef. Food has always had erotic associations, and I suspect that cooking with love is an inversion of a different principle: cooking to
be
loved. The premise of a romantic meal is that by stimulating and satisfying one appetite another will be analogously stimulated as well. How exactly does Tom Jones’s appetite for a rib medium rare stimulate a craving for Mrs. Waters? Fresh pasta cooked in butter, Mario once told me, illustrating how these things seem to conjoin, “swells like a woman aroused.” Marjoram, he said on another occasion, has the oily perfume of a woman’s body: “It is the sexiest of the herbs.” Lidia, Joe Bastianich’s mother, was more explicit. “What else do you put in another person’s body?” she asked me rhetorically when I met her for lunch one day. “Do you understand?”
     

 

    4

    P ORRETTA TERME, 1989. The small restaurant of La Volta was perched high above the town of Porretta Terme, on a hill overlooking a mountainous valley between Bologna and Florence. Mario arrived by train on a Monday afternoon in November, bearing golf clubs, even though there was no golf course for a hundred miles, and an electric guitar with a small boom-box amplifier (“total fuzz at volume three”), in the hope that when he ran low on money he could cover his expenses by busking. He was wearing pajama-like pantaloons and red clogs. But there was no one to meet him (“I arrived alone at the train station of bumfuck”). He didn’t know how to use the phones and couldn’t speak Italian. When Roberto and Gianni Valdiserri finally tracked him down, they were astonished by what they saw. He did not look like the highest-paid sous-chef from the Four Seasons; he looked like an Albanian peasant, Roberto told me when I visited during a break from my time at Babbo.
    The “terme” in Porretta Terme means “baths” and refers to the local sulfur springs. On my first morning there, I was woken by an instructor on a loudspeaker leading an exercise class of overweight senior citizens in one of the pools. Italians are entitled to two annual visits, paid for by the government, and can have a number of irrigations (nasal, rectal, vaginal) to deal with bowel troubles, infertility, hot flashes, and creaky knees. In an older part of town, the buildings are from the eighteenth century, when affluent Bolognese families used to come here on summer holidays to escape the heat of the plains: grand rooms, high ceilings, tall windows with wooden shutters painted an orange-yellow evocative of Hapsburg Vienna. Many are abandoned; so, too, is the old rail station, built in an imperial style, carved into the side of a mountain. For nearly two centuries, the train, the best way of crossing the Appennines, stopped in Porretta (a “Porretta box” was sold on the platform—a prosciutto
panino,
a piece of fruit, a chunk of parmigiano, and a half bottle of Lambrusco). Now tourists arrive on charter buses, wearing bathing caps. I couldn’t find Porretta in any travel guides, although I located a first edition of Faith Willinger’s
Eating in Italy,
published the year Mario arrived. There was nothing about the town, but La Volta, in the nearby village of Borgo Capanne, was cited as “the rising star on the road known as the Porrettana” (the old highway at the bottom of the valley). “Giovanni Valdisseri presides in the rustic dining room, and his wife and sister-in-law work together in the kitchen,” Willinger wrote. “The salumi are local, and the pasta is hand rolled, freshly made, not to be skipped.”
    Borgo Capanne is six miles above Porretta. You reach it on a zigzaggy road of ferocious ascent. The first mile is nothing but sheerness until you come upon a church just before a village called Pieve.
Pieve
is old Italian for “country church.” After another