Food of Love
Luca Amore thinks he knows how the next eight days will unfold, give or take a few minor variations. Things have a habit of going the way he plans them.
Right now he is making sure everything in his kitchen is arranged exactly how it should be. The first day’s menu is chalked up on the blackboard and there are four clean aprons hanging on the hooks beside it. Plates are stacked; cutlery and saucepans are shining. He has scrubbed the wooden boards where dough is kneaded and rolled; laid out a tray of almond cakes as a welcome; thrown open the shutters to show off the view.
Generations of Luca’s family have cooked in this kitchen in the house at the top of Favio’s steepest flight of steps. The view from its windows has barely changed in all that time. Pink and gold buildings climb a rocky spur, the cathedral at their centre. Drying laundry flutters on terraces. Date palms reach for the sky.
Since he was a boy, this view has been Luca’s to enjoy. His grandparents lived in the house and often his mother brought him here, stopping on the steps to catch her breath, complaining every time.
Now his grandparents are gone and the place is his. At first Luca thought he might live here instead of in his mother’s house. He began to renovate, replacing cracked tiles, freshen- ing walls with a new coat of paint.
It was the kitchen that brought him up short. With each small thing he changed, he felt he lost a little more of the Amore women who had been there before. The modern six- burner stove, the long granite counter, even the dining table he stripped and restored; all these things pleased him yet somehow undid his connection with the past.
His nonna, countless great-aunts and distant cousins: some of his best memories were of seeing them gathered here, working dough with cool, capable hands; noisy, wide-bodied women, always bickering over something, the best recipe for a pasta al forno, or some half-forgotten slight. They filled this kitchen completely.
To the very last, his nonna loved to cook, bent and old but still conjuring the flavours from food. Luca missed her and the others. As he modernised the room, replacing and reshap- ing all that was familiar, he searched for a way to brighten his memories of them.
For over ten years now, Luca has run the Food of Love Cookery School. His guests come from all over the world to make his nonna’s dishes, spiced with saffron and cinnamon or flavoured with the chocolate that Favio is famous for. Luca teaches them all the most important things: how to tell good olive oil from bad; how to know fake gelato from the real thing.
In early summer he takes them to collect capers from the flower-covered bushes that grow wild from the town’s rock walls. They taste the local Nero d’Avola wine and caciocavallo cheese. They shop for sardines or sweet Pachino tomatoes at the market in the morning, and sleep each night in the Amore family’s beautiful old house.
Season to season the schedule may vary, but for the most part every course is the same. People come together, food is cooked and friendships are formed. On warm evenings they sit out on the terrace sharing limoncello and life stories. There are good times; there is laughter.
Then, on the final day, suitcases are packed, farewell mes- sages written in the visitors’ book and promises made to keep in touch. A week or so later, a flurry of thank-you cards arrive; often e-mails too, with photographs of the dishes they have re-created at home. But the messages soon stop coming and Luca is too busy with his next group of guests to mind.
Over the years, so many of them have faded from his memory. He can’t put names to faces in his photo album. The ones that do stick tend to be the complainers, or the guests whose food intolerances make menu-planning a mission. Those who have squabbles and dramas; who lose handbags and hats; or suffer heart flutters that turn out to be severe attacks of indigestion.
Luca loves his job. Cooking is a joy and he is always in- terested to meet new people. But it is also a pleasure when everyone is gone and he is left alone. He enjoys mornings like this one, with the house empty and his. Once he has restored order, if there is enough time, he likes to make a few cavatelli just for himself, feeling the dough beneath his fingers; deftly pressing it into pasta seashells on the wooden board the way his grandmother taught him.
Today there is no chance for that. The new guests aren’t far away – four of them, all women. Luca checks his notes and memorises their names. From England there is Moll, who says she is passionate about food, and Tricia, who works as a lawyer. From America, Valerie, who is the eldest. And all the way from Australia, Poppy, who says she has never visited Italy before and will eat anything but offal.
Luca assumes this new group will be much like all the rest. Still, he is aware there are things he cannot tell from the forms they have filled in. He doesn’t know exactly how much experience each has had in a kitchen; if they will understand how to knead dough with the heels of their hands until it is firm enough; if they will have healthy appetites or worry about their waistlines; if they will drink just one glass of wine or a whole bottle at dinnertime.
There are other, more important things about this group, but Luca doesn’t realise it yet. Right at this moment, all four are standing by a baggage carousel at Catania airport. Moll, Tricia, Valerie and Poppy. This is what Luca doesn’t know about them.
One is hiding a secret. Another is hoping to find love again. One is desperate to escape her life; one has already managed it.
As he sets out mineral water, a bottle of Prosecco and five glasses, Luca has no idea how different this cookery course will be to any that has gone before … Mr how it will change his life entirely.
Welcome to the Food of Love Cookery School in the lovely baroque town of Favio in southern Sicily. Here is your apron, your cavatelli board, your maps and itinerary. Don’t worry, there is no need to take notes; the recipes will be given to you at the end. Just relax and have a good time. Your holiday is beginning …
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Extract reproduced from The Food of Love Cookery School by Nicky Pellegrino ($37.99 RRP) with the permission of Hachette NZ.
