Risotto With Nettles by Anna Del Conte

Author:Anna Del Conte
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448114672
Publisher: Random House

OLIVER HAD wanted to do things properly. So, first, he asked me to marry him after a May ball in Oxford, he in dinner jacket, I in an eau-de-Nil empire-line satin dress with puffy sleeves and a row of pearls at my neck. The second task was to go to Italy to ask my father for my hand in marriage, and the third was to do the family round in Italy.

The first two were relatively easy. I was ready to be caught, and my anglophile father – whatever his misgivings – was not going to object. Oliver was a nice young man from a very good family and with an Oxford education – and that was a very good pedigree. But I think he was far less happy than my mother to see his beloved daughter leaving home to live in a another country. Mamma had already made up her mind that I was going to be a zitella – spinster. She and her two sisters were all married by the time they were twenty-one, and she saw my single status at the age of twenty-four as a bad omen. So, since I’d missed what she’d thought was my last chance with Franco, she was determined that I should hold on tightly to this young Englishman.

But the last of Oliver’s tasks, the family round, could have been trickier. One or two of my aunts were stiff, upper-class ladies, who sat on equally stiff upright armchairs, as they examined their ‘prey’ through golden lorgnettes. Oliver had improved his Italian beyond ‘là ci darem la mano’, but his vocabulary was still extremely limited, and not enough to make polite conversation. So he sat there, smiling and my aunts said, ‘Ma che simpatico che è’ – ‘But what a nice man he is’ – and he passed their scrutiny with full honours.

The most demanding test he had to undergo was dinner at Zia Gengia’s house. Zia Gengia, imperious and forbidding, sat on one side of the very large table, with Zio Alfonso opposite her, and the rest of us – their daughter Mariella, me, Oliver and my parents – on either side. The second course was vitello tonnato, the popular summer dish. My mother had cooked that very same dish just days before and Oliver had loved it. So that evening at Zia Gengia’s he started eating and declared, in his best French, ‘Mais, il est bon comme le vitel tonné d’ Ernesta l’autre jour.’ That was indeed a great compliment, as my mother had the reputation among her sisters-in-law of being the best cook. On the way home Mamma, not impressed by the suggestion that my aunt’s cooking skills were on a par with hers, cattily declared that Zia Gengia’s vitello tonnato was probably from the salumeria in Corso Magenta, which often supplied the food for Zia Gengia’s dinner parties.

Our engagement photo.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.