It took me a while to work out why my aunt Ilse spent an hour getting ready for her daily trip to the grocer’s. Even in Rome it seemed unlikely that the cheesemonger insisted on Chanel tweeds and Miss Dior. Then I realised she lived for company and gossip, and this was the nearest she got to either. But at least she was alive.
When my dad fled Nazi Germany for England, Ilse went to Rome. There she met a handsome lawyer (good) and got pregnant (not so good). He should have handed her in for deportation. Instead, he found a priest to marry them, and hid her in a convent till the baby arrived. After that, she couldn’t really complain about his gambling and drinking; he had saved her life. So she stayed, even after he had a stroke and decided that, if he was going to be housebound, she would be too. No more parties or trips back to Germany; the gilded cage was locked shut.
My uncle Elio had been the brilliant eldest son of a large Sardinian family; when he went to Rome they expected him to return with a Tuscan princess on his arm, not a penniless, pregnant Jewish refugee. For the rest of her life, her job was to keep up with his ambition, the gracious châtelaine of his home.
By the time I visited, it was a grand villa on the outskirts of Rome. Like most Italian houses, it was defeated by the extremes of the climate; the big, tiled salon was cool in summer, but freezing for half the year, and mostly used as a passageway between warmer spots. Elio spent his time in bed, reading the paper, shouting down the phone and praying. Ilse joined him in the afternoons, lugging a formidable old Remington typewriter on which she bashed out her life-saving spiderweb of contact with the outside world. But at precisely 1pm every day, everyone was summoned by a petulant little bell to take their place at the dining table and eat a four-course meal.
The kitchen had a rickety old stove, a pile of pans and a metal-topped table, which didn’t stop Maria the Kitchen from making the best food I had ever eaten. At about noon, the flowery PVC cloth would be spread on this table, and the pasta rolled out until the flowers were clearly visible, then cut with the speed of daily practice into perfect strips.
There’s a reason why Italian housewives are so much less stressed than English ones. Over here, we’re still suffering the legacy of the 19th century, when the middle-class wife had to go and stand on a pedestal labelled Angel of the House. Meanwhile, her place in the kitchen was taken by a wretched 14-year-old, deracinated from traditional country cooking and forced, without training or experience, to take the makings of a perfectly good Full English and mangle them into Oeufs en gelée and Rognons turbigo.
Ever since then we’ve been trying to figure out what we should be cooking and why, which is how Yotam Ottolenghi gets otherwise rational people to seek out ras el hanout (north African spices) in Sainsbury’s, but most of us still eat takeouts four times a week. Meanwhile, the Italians have serenely cooked the same two dozen dishes for centuries and, not surprisingly, got quite good at them.
But Elio’s attitude was much closer to the Victorians’. So every day the housekeeper’s son pulled on a white jacket that Buttons might have envied to serve the same prosciutto, tagliatelle al pomodoro, scallopini with bietola, and finally – fearsomely – the fruit. You might not think of eating a succulent white peach as a life-threatening ordeal, but then you might never have tried to do it with a weeny pearl-handled knife and fork. Long after everybody else had finished, with Elio making ever more irascible noises as his afternoon in bed with the wife was interminably delayed, I’d be flaying the last sliver of skin from the fruit slithering round its porcelain plate.
After two weeks of this, I left with mixed feelings. I was definitely going to miss those tagliatelle. But I’d take my mother’s strawberries, wormy but picked with love, over a perfect peach poisoned with pretension.
