Chapter 6
Two weeks after my arrival in Italy, Gia finally lets me make a batch of pasta alongside her. She insists that there’s no pressure because she’s not going to sell it to anyone. I’m determined to change her mind.
We start with strozzapreti and cavatelli, because Gia says those are the least likely for me to mess up.
I’ve never watched a person so precise and yet so free all at once.
She makes everything from memory, so I follow her around surreptitiously with a scale.
When her back is turned, I weigh the flour and semolina and eggs to try and get a real grip on the recipe, even though I know that’s not the point.
Everything for her is feel. She moves dough across the ridged pasta board with the agility of a violinist streaking their bow across their instrument.
It’s an extension of her hand. She eyes me, unimpressed, as we go along, silent except in the moments when she redirects my hands ever so slightly to fix something she deems incorrect.
It’s an unlearning of sorts for me. Everywhere I staged in my career was an excess of technique.
It was cutting edge; it was tweezers; it was pushing the boundaries.
The technique here is all in the rustic precision.
The pasta is perfect because Gia knows exactly what the dough should feel like, no matter the humidity outside today or the elevation of where she’s making it.
She knows what the salinity of the water should be.
She knows the exact moment when undercooked turns into al dente and the amount it will keep cooking from the moment it leaves the pot until you pick up your fork to taste it.
It’s sensory repetition. Measurement can only take you so far.
I’m surprised by how much joy I’m taking in the simplicity of it all.
It’s not that I’d grown stagnant at home exactly—I truly love my restaurant and look forward to going in every day—but I hadn’t realized how much I’d stopped learning by being the person in charge, by always pushing forward.
I’m supposed to have the ideas, but I never travel or take time to observe others.
And being here with Gia is making me admit that perhaps I should get out more.
I don’t want this forever, but there’s a soothing perfection to watching this old lady’s hands work dough the way she has for thousands of days before.
Obviously I haven’t shared this part with Anita. She would roast me in an instant. Every day, her texts are the same.
Anita: Are you fully obsessed with Italian food yet?
Kit: I’m obsessed with figuring out why the fuck everything is called Pecorino here.
Anita: yeah, Americans really muck that one up. Any sheep’s milk cheese is a pecorino. Not just the Parmesan alternative you guys make it into.
Kit: “you guys.” Like I created the American culinary linguistic choices.
Anita: I just hope that now you become as grumpy about Pecorino labeling as I am.
Kit: Probably not my highest priority when I come back.
Anita: Stop thinking about coming back and enjoy the moment!
Kit: I’m enjoying the moment.
Anita: probably because you and my nonna love to work too much.
Kit: I plead the fifth on anything that could incriminate Gia.
I don’t want to admit to her yet that I’m begrudgingly enjoying it much more than I expected.
I don’t want to explain that every morning I climb up to the top of the stone steps in the middle of town that look out over the square, and I stare into the distance beyond the town and the olive groves all the way to the ocean, silver and hazy against the sky.
There’s a poem carved in marble next to the bench I sit at, and it says Ti Amo Maremma.
Fin Dove al Mar Ti Sposi e Ti Vesti di Tramonti.
I try to translate it, but beyond loving Maremma, it says something about marrying the sea and wearing sunsets, so the poetry has been lost along the Google Translate road.
Still, I can’t help but be somewhat charmed by a place that has stone ramparts clothed in poetry.
I haven’t shared any of that with Anita.
I’m also glad that Anita and I never talk about desserts because then I’d also have to admit that the best pastries I’ve ever had are apparently Italian.
I’ve swung by for tea and breakfast a few times at Belpagna.
When I’ve walked through the door, Emilia’s skeptical resting face immediately turns into a knowing smirk, set off by whatever colorful topknotted bandana she’s always wearing.
After the first few visits, she’s now started to pour a cup of tea before I even walk over.
She hasn’t yet let me pick which pastry I’m getting.
But I appreciate that that forced decision also has allowed us to go off on the kind of chef-obsessive tangents about technique or produce or supply chains that I’m already missing from home.
I’ve tried not to overstay my welcome, even though I know it’s a place where others seem to hang around for hours. This town isn’t a place where I need to plant roots; as a reality show contestant might say, I’m not here to make friends.
But it’s nice to have someone to talk about cooking with.
A lot of days Nico pops in, too, and he’ll join whatever ingredient-focused conversation Emilia and I have going.
The more I get to know him—the more his booming laugh and his food science tangents start molding into familiarity—the more I’m able to shake off whatever attraction I feel and start to enjoy the company.
I’m surprised by how much seems normal, even if I’m still hesitant of the whole situation.
I would’ve expected to have a crash at some point—from losing John, the restaurant, and my routines all in the span of a day.
It hasn’t come, though. Instead, I can tentatively admit that I’ve started to relax slightly into the grooves of this place, like a new pair of shoes you haven’t quite broken in but feel are on the way there.
I don’t need Anita finding more reasons to gleefully tell me she told me so.
Besides, I have Gia busting my chops enough already.
“You need to stop mincing the garlic so much,” Gia says, standing over my shoulder today.
“This is just regular mincing,” I reply.
She responds by shooing me over and starts slicing the garlic with her knife, as exact as a mandoline.
“When you mince it to death, it releases all the sulfur. You’re altering the flavor. Slicing it and then chopping finely keeps it intact.”
“I would’ve thought you’d want more garlic,” I poke, since she seems to add a hefty amount to everything.
“The Roman poet Horace said that garlic is the essence of vulgarity. And I think he was right—we can all stand to be a little bit vulgar, but at some point it’s too much.”
I snicker. Gia clearly isn’t easy for everyone to get along with, but she’s a known quantity for me. She’s a chef to the nth degree. That is, until she decides she wants to pry.
“Are you the youngest in your family?” she asks, now rolling out dough without even looking at it.
“Why?” I ask suspiciously.
“You have a chip on your shoulder,” she states matter-of-factly.
“So do you,” I retort, like the teenage contrarian I secretly still am inside.
“Right. I’m a youngest child. I had everything to prove.”
She’s daring me to argue and clearly never going to let anything go. I’m destemming thyme, so at least I have the bandwidth for a conversation.
“My sister is the oldest, then my brother, then me,” I say, taking the bait because I want to prove her wrong.
“We’re all only eighteen months apart, so we were always compared.
But they’re both pretty soft, like our mom.
My sister was athletic and didn’t want to pursue it, and my brother had no interest in anything competitive.
So I didn’t need to prove anything to them because I was always pushing myself.
And my dad found me easier to deal with—he’s competitive, too, so he was always at my crew races and helping me plan what was next.
If anything, I think it made me more driven and sure of myself. That’s the opposite of a chip.”
“If you say so,” Gia snorts, and I hate that she thinks she’s got me figured out somehow. It makes me bite my already-short nails even shorter. A nervous habit I should most certainly break.
“What do you have to prove at this point?” I finally ask, giving it back and seeing if she can take it.
“Oh, I’ve proved it all. My father preferred my brothers, always. Then I lost my first love young. And then I had a really boring, pointless marriage until he died when I was in my forties. So I get to do things my own way now,” she volleys back.
She doesn’t seem to want to elaborate on any of those bombshells that she threw out casually, so I respond with, “I do things my own way too.”
“Clearly,” she scoffs, with a hint of amusement in her voice.
I know prying more isn’t going to lead anywhere, but I am finding that I like talking instead of our usual silence. “Why is your English so good?” I ask, changing the subject.
“I really loved reruns of The Golden Girls,” she says without a hint of irony, which makes me laugh. “What other simple questions have you got?”
“Why are there so many stray cats?” It really has been a big question on my mind. They seem to be everywhere. And ever since Nico and Luce, I can’t stop noticing how many animals are around. Not that I’m thinking about that duo specifically.
“They breed like rabbits,” she says bluntly, “and people are too generous with their table scraps. Don’t feed one, or you’ll be stuck with it forever.”
“Duly noted,” I say with a smile.
“I mean it—women getting over breakups always want to cling on to some animal. Don’t be a cliché and take in a cat.”
Well, that makes me look up. “How do you know I’m going through a breakup?” I ask.
“Your friend Anita isn’t exactly a vault.”
I snort out a laugh, because she’s absolutely right. She starts stamping out circles for ravioli, and I love watching her like this.
“You know,” she says, eyes on the pasta but her demeanor relaxed, “I get the sense you think you’re fine because you weren’t madly in love with the guy anyway—”
“Who said that?”
“Please, Anita talks my ear off. It’s like she thinks she can make up for not being here by boring me to death with everyone in her life’s little inane dramas.
Anyway, I was going to say just because the man was kind of worthless doesn’t mean you’re fine.
You need to wait before you pick yourself off the ground. Healing’s important.”
I huff, mostly because I hate how much she’s trying to negate everything I thought I was doing so well at. “No offense to your bullshit town where everyone seems to know what each other had for breakfast, but this isn’t going to be a place where I’m dating.”
Gia shrugs and starts filling the ravioli with their stuffings, little jewels of ground pork and herbs. “Yes, by all means, ignore what I’m actually saying.”
“Work heals me,” I throw out. I’ve moved on from mincing garlic to chopping onions, and the repetitive motions actually are soothing.
“I’ve always thought that, but maybe I’m not the best example,” she says nonchalantly.
“Oh, we’re admitting I shouldn’t see you as my next life role model?”
She snorts, and it’s almost a laugh. I can’t help but feel pleased whenever I even get close to amusing Gia. “Maybe not. But in pasta, absolutely yes.”
Even with this conversation, she’s still laser focused on the ravioli, impenetrable, and as much as she wants to downplay things, her life choices look pretty great in my book.
She’s determinedly herself. She’s herself and content without a relationship.
Maybe I can learn from her mistakes and skip over the losing a first love and enduring a pointless marriage and simply get to the good part where I cook all day, have friends, and enjoy my tranquility.
I don’t need more than that. I’m lucky to not need or want more than that.
Yet like always, Gia’s here to burst my bubble. “Just don’t be like Nico and leave it too long,” she says, finally looking up and pointing at me. “His wife is gone, and he’s taking too much time to get over it.”
I wish Nico’s face wouldn’t come so fully to my mind at the sound of his name.
But I push the thought aside. If she’s leaving it, why can’t I?
Hell, if her husband died in his forties, it sounds like she’s left it for the entire second half of her life.
And she seems perfectly happy with that choice.
“When did you become the town relationship expert?” I toss back.
“Please,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Everyone would be better off if they let me make their food and give them advice about how to run their lives.”
I laugh because she truly seems to mean it. In her mind, everything could be solved if we all listened to Gia more often—do as she says, not as she does.
I think about all the old people in this town sitting outside all the little shops on their plastic chairs, gossiping, but also trading what they view as their hard-fought wisdom. It’s no wonder so many of the young people leave, when they feel that burden of attention.
“Just don’t take in a cat,” she says again, pointing a rolling pin at me like there’s nothing more serious. But in a second, she’s changing the subject again. “Do you know how to debone a fish?”
“I’m a fucking Michelin-starred chef. I know how to debone a fish,” I mutter, grabbing the fish she’s proffered to me before setting back to work.