Ripe for the Picking by Annie Hawes

Author:Annie Hawes
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141933115
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

Do I detect the hatching of another plan for leaving the restaurant? I certainly do. A whole portfolio of part-time jobs, Ciccio says, so he'll have more spare time to help his father in the campagna. Walls, gardens, removals with Paletta…

But he has already spotted the potatoes draining in their colander, gone and got a bowl and tipped them into it, and started to prod meditatively at them with a fork. The man is positively addicted to cooking. How could he ever abandon his restaurant?

I got those ready for the gnocchi, I say quickly, in case he's forgotten.

What, make gnocchi with these? Of course we can't make gnocchi with them! Peeled, they can easily absorb too much water, and your gnocchi will come out heavy as lead. We'll have to use these for something else.

Great. Thanks for telling me.

Anyway, Ciccio's starving; he and Marco went up to Arentino and got his olive nets ready for laying, seeing the wall job was off, and they just grabbed a sandwich at the bar for lunch. They may as well have a few potatoes now. With some anchovies, maybe.

Sorry, I say. I don't think I've got any anchovies up here.

Of course you have, he says; la mamma's anchovies. They're in the larder.

He may well be right. The longer Ciccio and I stay together, the vaster grows my collection of nameless jars: a collection founded with Anna's engagement present of passata pots, and since then enlarged with many others full of mysterious things created by Francesca. Ciccio brings another couple down every time he's been working up on the campagna, and he alone is able to identify and use them. I hardly dare open one. Even when I can spot, say, mushrooms, I can't tell if they're those pickled kind of mushrooms you use for starters, or the fried-with-garlic kind for a pasta sauce. And you'd only want to open a jar if you were going to use all of it. Because once they're opened, they dribble oil, and collect dust, and mess up the lovely new shelves in my lovely new larder, built on to the cool, north side of the house with my own, and my sister's, hands just before she left for her wanderings among the Slavs. Or else they turn out to be something you have to keep in the fridge once it's been opened, and then there's no room for the milk.

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