Something out of Nothing
We don't deserve perfection from our kitchens.
I am writing to you from the underbelly of my oven. I have burnt, nee cremated, a gluten free hazelnut, chocolate and olive oil cake. I speak to you amid the ruins of dessert. A testament to the dietary requirements I am currently catering for. It’s the first of many kitchen based catastrophes that I will experience over the coming weeks. I do not resent them, nor do I fear them - because they are an essential part of the kitchen’s ecosystem. That being said, I am my toughest critic in the face of disaster.
Here, however, I will talk about a triumph. This is a happy tale. At the start of the week Marta’s Mother, Alessandra, asked me to stage an aperetivo for fifty five people. This literally translates to ‘eating before’, it usually looks like meats and cheeses spread out on platters, bread boards stacked high and flowing wine. It’s what they’ll be serving at my funeral and what I’ll be eating in heaven. I set to work planning my menu, drawing small circles onto a table shaped diagram with labels such as beetroot hummus and zucchini salad. After this welcome feast, another eighteen days of lunch and dinner lay ahead. What no one tells you about cooking for the masses, what the messiah didn’t mention in the bible when he fed the five thousand, is that there is an awful lot of maths that goes into menu planning. I do not like maths.
I began to dream of kilograms and litres, waking up the sound of Tito the alpine cat howling into the stairwell before crawling to my sun sunsoaked desk to begin my dinner sums. Whilst my head began to ache, the maths obliged into neat colour coded spreadsheets, ingredients and their quantities stacked on top of one another in a way only I could make sense of, this was my own special flavour of crazy. The anticipation was exhilarating, like awaiting Christmas Day and an impossible exam simultaneously. The eighteen days of feasting, all contained in one document would all come to fruition in a Cathedral the Italians call The Cidac.
They say that trauma can forge bonds, which is why a man called Herman and I have become quite insepperable. Herman was the first person to greet me at the airport, he drove me onwards from Turin to Aosta. We got along very well and were happily reunited for a gruesome morning at The Cidac. How to describe The Cidac? Imagine big Tesco, now, imagine big Tesco in a foreign language. Terrifying. The air-conditioned aisles of The Cidac, whilst overwhelming, are a little different to your regular supermarket. The sheer scale of the building suggests megastore, unfair prices for profit and a disconnected food chain. Wrong. It’s an independently owned business which strives to maintain good working relationships between farmers and buyers, reducing the food miles of many products and bringing the consumer closer to their food. Yes, it all works, on this huge scale and I’m talking vortex scale. A wrong foot, an early turn and Herman and I would become separated indefinitely. The spreadsheets worked and somehow it all made sense, somehow we got it all done. With the exception of thirty cans of chickpeas which Herman then delivered to me in Ollomont at 2 o’clock in the morning along with six Irish musicians. With my pantry stocked and my cupboards packed I’d made a home in my kitchen, planting a basil pot in the window, reorganising my crockery and scrubbing my sheet pans. Show time.
I got an early start, my sourdough pets were bubbly and ready to perform. The coffee was hot and I had the whole day ahead of me to rustle up a feast. At lunch I’d make a quick risotto to feed the incoming artists and send them back to their ateliers before sitting down for tea with my demons. I’d secured local produce from cheese farms and allotments in the area (Don’t you worry, that’s a whole other story) and felt the weight of doing my ingredients justice. Cheese grated, carrots chopped, chickpeas blended; I was flying. People had been coming and going all day, popping in to see that I had not collapsed. Then, in the hour leading up to the event, a gaggle of people came crashing through the door. Suddenly I remembered the rest of Alessandra’s description, ‘If you wouldn’t mind organising a buffet, and a local charity from the area will come to help you, they do amazing work for adults with special needs and they go to events like this to help serve food, it’ll be wonderful.’
And here they were. All six of them, smiling and full of excitement whilst behind me all four stove tops were bubbling away. Numerous chopping boards with specifically assigned herbs, garlic cloves ready to be crushed and food to be staged. This was not in the spreadsheet. The organiser began speaking to me in Italian, a shining woman with hair that framed her face and her smile perfectly. All I could do was blink. Two things happen when I start going into melt down. The first is repeated blinking with an open mouth. The second, more, bothersome effect is that my heart starts beating rather fast causing me to act quite irrationally. Neither of these side effects should occur near a naked flame nor a sharp object. She continued desperately in Italian, I woke up and replied “Io sono spiacente, Io sono Inglese” - “I am sorry, I am English”. This is a phrase all English tourists should adopt when travelling, because I think we have a lot to be sorry for.
I never thought my panic attacks were contagious until this very moment. Here we were, two women who share a common goal of feeding the hungry and yet the one thing we do not share is a language. After her quick assessment of the situation she concluded, “Wait - Simone”. I assumed this meant, a man named Simone will come, a man name Simone who speaks English and Italian will come and all will be well. In the midst of commotion I managed to retrieve a bilingual body to make one urgent and simple request - “The chef would like twenty minutes alone in the kitchen.”
I had the choreography all down, now what was required was a little bit of free styling. In those twenty minutes I did some deep breathing, I yelled two expletives which is quite modest for my temperament and more importantly I pulled myself together. I cracked open a window, drank a big glass of water and rounded up the serving trays. I added the final touches and relaxed my shoulders before opening the door, “A tavola!”, which could only mean please come on in and help me set the table, I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot I’m just under a lot of pressure right now and don’t cope very well with stress. A woman, Francesca, embraced me and remained by my side whilst I pointed at plates and nodded in different directions to everyone else. A man called Luca pointed his phone at me, using an app designed to tell him how old the the person standing in front of him was. I scored a thirty two, talk about kicking a girl when she’s down.
The table steadily transformed into a banquet and with the arrival of Simone we began swapping our languages. We still had some time, so instead of waiting about for the guests to descend the hill in front of us I ran back to the fridge. I pulled out six balls of mozzarella, two packs of apricots, a bunch of mint and placed them onto a chopping board. As I made my way to the end of the table everyone gathered round. They curiously inspected the ingredients, ‘momento’ I told them and scuttled into the kitchen for a spare silver platter. I took a knife and made a thin slice of mozzarella and placed it down onto the plate. I split open the apricot, removed the pit and replaced it with a leaf of mint before placing the fruit on top of the cheese. As I watched them decorate the plate with the arrangement I felt my heart slow.
The guests arrived to eat and were met by smiling faces, even the exhausted cook who had put on a nice dress and her martini earrings couldn’t help beam. The kitchen nightmare faded from view and what remained was a gathering of people in the name of dinner. They lined up with their plates and were served by the Cooperative Social C’era l’Acca in matching aprons and aquamarine T shirts. Steadily I became surrounded by people eating food I had made, the fagioli (runner beans) from Lo Courti de la Santi, the Rye bread from Aosta and the Cheese from Chez Duclos. When the plates were empty and mopped with bread crusts, people approached me with compliments and questions. A food blogger who wanted me to teach her how to make bread, where as I felt I was still learning. A nonna who needed to know how I had cooked the zucchini, the mother of a friend that wanted to know what I had dressed the fagioli with. I’d sautéed the zucchini in rosemary and smothered the beans in garlic butter. The line continued to grow and before I knew it Simone beckoned me over to say that we needed more food. There was left over risotto in the fridge so we warmed it on the stove and dressed it up with Basil leaves. It wasn’t perfect, but perfect did not matter anymore. This was better.
It’s been a week since I last sat down to write. Sometimes there is just no time. I’ve found my feet in the kitchen, my table has shrunk and grown and at the request of the acrobats and actors who need to keep moving all day I’ve stocked up on more proteins. I do it all happily because to be a cook is to enter into a relationship with the people you invite to your table. You cannot fit that into a spreadsheet. And when things do go wrong, when the cake burns and the sauce is over salted I remember something my partner said to me whilst I sat opposite him sulking over a bland nettle soup - “You made something out of nothing, that’s amazing.”
