Heat by Bill Buford Read Free Book Online Page B

mile, the land flattens out briefly, and you enter a village surrounded by small vegetable plots. This is Orti. An
orto
is a small vegetable farm. Poggio is next, resting atop a hill.
Poggio
means “hilltop.” Finally you reach Borgo Capanne. A
capanna
is a mountain hut; a
borgo
is a village: village of mountain huts. And if you climb the hill just above it you discover, predictably enough, stone ruins of the first habitations, sheltered in the woods. The modern part of the village has a wide view of the valley and the mountains (with volcanic cartoon peaks, like pyramids, covered by dense woods). Borgo Capanne is a cluster of interconnecting houses, everything adjoined honeycomb style, as though for protection—from the wild, from wolves, from whatever unknown thing might come up the road. To enter the honeycomb, you pass under a stone arch. In Italian, an arch is a
volta.
This is where you find the restaurant. Above the restaurant is an apartment: this was Mario’s new home.
    La Volta was closed the day Mario arrived, but a seasonal supper was prepared for him (“I am, like, holy fucking shit, family meal, and we’re having white truffles!”), and everyone introduced themselves. Roberto was the expediter, after he finished his day job (he was an engineer at a factory that had been making airplane parts since World War II, when Mussolini came up with the idea of hiding the manufacturing of his air force in the mountains nearby). Roberto’s brother Gianni managed the place. His wife, Betta, was the cook. Her father, Quintiglio (“Quintiglio Canario, the fifth son of the canary, a beautiful name for a beautiful man”), was the forest forager, truffle scavenger, and mystic gardener, and he and Mario struck up an instant rapport: “So tickled to have an American in the village.”
    The next morning, Mario reported for duty. Betta didn’t show up for two more hours and then rolled out a giant sheet of pasta by hand. “It was the first food I saw,” Mario recalls, although he wouldn’t be allowed to touch the dough for two weeks. He took notes and embarked on a six-month apprenticeship in what he calls the “ladies’ trick of handmade pasta.” Betta went on to make stricchetti, small bow ties, served with porcini mushrooms and little red onions cooked in olive oil. She made a different pasta the next day and a different ragù, one made from guinea-hen legs, roasted until the bones fell out and the meat dissolved into a sauce. It was a month before anyone prepared a Bolognese, the traditional meat sauce of Emilia-Romagna. “They’d gotten bored of it,” Mario said, “but then they taught me how to make it, and that became my weekly task: veal, pork, beef, and pancetta, cooked slowly with olive oil and butter. Just browning and browning, although it never turns brown because of the fat that seeps out of the meat—which you leave there, it’s part of the dish—and add white wine and milk, and, at the end, a little tomato paste, so that it’s pink-brown.”
    He accompanied Quintiglio (“a salt-of-the-earth dude with big feet, strong hands, a deep voice, floppy Italian ears, and a buttoned-up shirt and jacket”) when he went looking for berries and mushrooms. He had rules about porcini and picked only the ones near oak and chestnut trees—the ones under the pines and poplars were inferior. His real talent was for finding truffles. When Armandino visited Mario the following year, he said, “It was as though God had arrived in town just before me—truffles were on everything.”
    In time, Mario and Quintiglio fell into a habit of having breakfast together: a glass of red wine and an egg baked in olive oil with a slice of fontina cheese. For Christmas lunch, Quintiglio showed Mario how to make a classic
brodo,
the holiday broth served with tortellini. It required an old chicken (one no longer producing eggs), some beef bones, a bone left over from a prosciutto, an onion, and a carrot—the vegetables left