Nine recent moments in the life of our school:
an update
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
June 2004

Nobody told me there'd be days like these
•Number 9:How old is Sue.

We were visiting a sleepy seaside town on the brilliant-blue Adriatic when a pack of school kids passed and heard us speaking English. Puglia isn't Tuscany: it's still a rarity to see foreign travellers here, and the small-town locals really love it. Curious and happy to meet foreigners, the students formed a group around us and took turns asking questions. 'Vhere dar you frum?'. 'You come from England?'. 'Is nice Italy?' They gravitated towards Sue from Colorado perhaps because she is tall and blonde, perhaps because of her warm and generous smile. 'How old are you', one student asked, but before I could jump in and tell him in Italian that that is not a nice question to ask any woman with grandchildren, she answered. Out came a sea of little chrome cameras, one per person, and each student had his or her picture taken with Sue. 'What is your name', each would ask. 'How old are you?', and someone would snap a picture. Each student asked the same two questions, and each time Sue would answer as if it were fresh material. The students loved the encounter. It was something a bit deeper for Sue I think, who beamed for the rest of the afternoon.

8) Ham and cheese

Patricia works on cruise ships so she'd picked up a little patchy Italian over the years. She also had friends in Lecce, so she'd fit in appointments here and there during the lessons, always returning to the school with giant blocks of cheese and fat stacks of prosciutto crudo, often as thick as big-city phone books. I was always appreciative but confused, as food is not something we ever lack at the school. The day before she left, she generously filled my tiny refrigerator with enough meat and cheese to start my own deli: all the metal shelves of my fridge were actually propped up above their little pegs. Somewhere near my third day of sandwiches, during the week between classes, it occured to me that maybe all the ham and cheese represented the fact that while Patricia had clearly mastered the word for 'kilo', (chilo, in Italian, 2.1 pounds) she had never learned the word for 'etto', (one hundred grams). On the fifth day, I altered my stance and came to see her act as one of a simple food lover, and that maybe she just lost herself in the flamboyant and over-the-top thrill of ordering viking- sized portions of meat, lulled by the lovely hum and rhythemic sway of the shiny slicer. Patricia swears in emails that she'll be back and when she does, I'm sending her out for the wine.

7)From bangs to bangers.

Only two weeks into our second season, we had our first return student, something many other schools never see in years of classes (even those that pack theirs two or three times tighter than ours). Shelly cut hair for twenty years. She had always given great dinner parties, so when she started to think about a career change, moving into food seemed like the right choice. She enrolled in culinary school, did the hardcore internships in real restaurant kitchens, graduated and then decided to treat herself to a little vacation, which was when she came to see us. The big difference between her visit last year and this, is that Shelly now runs her own very successful cooking school in Colorado (www.bellabistro.com), teaching more than a few things she learned here last year. And this year, she also brought her best students with her. They'd ask, 'are these like Shelly's dita degli apostoli' or 'do you make them just like Shelly makes her fresh sausage',' to which Shelly would flash me an embarrassed grimace. It's the same one I plan to employ if my mother, grandmother or any of the older ladies that taught me how to cook ever drop in on a class. For her students' husbands and children that may be reading, I'd like to confirm that the ladies were remarkably well-behaved during the week and neither did they spend entire evenings working their shiny new dirty Italian words into conversations, nor did they encourage my assistant la Lilli into downing uncountable shots of the fresh limoncello that we made together. I believe she actually had the flu. The six-hour strain. (Shelly at a wine tasting in the hippest wine bar in town, listening to Michele Falvo discussing the merits of the dream grape, negroamaro. One of the first people I ever met in Puglia, Michele left his family's world-famous estate (Avignonesi) near Montepulciano (Toscana) to come to Lecce, just to make Salice Salentino. If you're still in doubt about the quality of Pugliese wines, soberly consider that fact.)

6) Having our favourite church back

They took down the scaffolding on Santa Croce, perhaps the most stunningly beautiful building, of any artistic epoch, that you're likely to ever see. Another woman who works at the school, Virginia, who is born and bred Leccese, did her doctorate on the building and reveals new details each time she discusses it, things that I've never seen in hours passed standing in front of the building. Having Santa Croce back again just feels really nice.

5) Simon and Garfunkel said it best.

As with many weeks, we grill up a lot of vegetables the night before, then assemble massive sandwiches (soaked with an excellent, garlicky vinaigrette, on the best bread you'll ever eat) and head to the nearby city of Otranto, to eat them on the beach. Only a few weeks ago, we had just set up our table clothes, opened the wine and started to tuck in, when the sky ripped open hard enough to drowned out our voices. We regrouped under a nearby stone bridge without missing a beat, the whole thing as choreographed as if we had done it a thousand times. The rain finished just as the Salice Salentino did, and in fact dessert, handmade gelati, was enjoyed under a radiant sun, the sea once again as smooth as blue glass. (Here is Bobby, reaching for the wine, just moments before she lost her ability to say, truthfully, 'Well I for one have never eaten under a bridge').

4)Like no other place in the world.

We opened for the year and as luck would have it, our first week back was all women (a first). We had a little of Ireland, a little New Zealand wine country and several of the prettier American states, a fact that registered in proud faces and appreciative glances.

It was the week leading up to Easter and even though it's not part of the Salento, we drove to Taranto (click through to see a map of the South of Italy) to take part in the Good Friday parade, one of the most famous in all of Christendom.

Barefoot believers, hooded and cloaked from head to ankle take three exquisitely slow steps forward for every two back, slowly swaying and eerily marking time to dark and brassy dirges. They carry statues, charging the onlookers with that black-blood cocktail of fear, pride, remorse and the awe of the unspoken, unique to the brand of old world Christianity here in Southern Italy.

In an hour the mourners had progressed only a meter and many of the once-a-year musicians had already lost their embasure, causing the music to sound loose and blousy and somehow even sadder, music as performed by the sobbing.

Maybe two thousand years of history had passed on the calendar, but fresh tears streamed down cheeks and lower lips vibrated, all throughout the crowd. It was the first time in my life that Good Friday actually seemed like a funeral, you expected a body any minute. Children studied their parents' faces to gauge how they themselves should feel, just as their parents had as children. It's not something you ever forget, and it perfectly set the tone for the week: if you're going to celebrate something, really mean it.

3)Though shall know thy vendors.

I've been working on a series of newsletters about my trusted local vendors here in Lecce, and the response has been great. What I hadn't figured on, was that our students would arrive with such a strong sense that they already know these people. We'll enter the market the first day and there are cheek kisses for Simone, my greengrocer and friend (he changes colour). We'll head to the butcher and Sandro will do a double- take when someone calls him by name, first day. And here are the students during their first visit to meet Romana, my fishmonger. 'The only people I ever kiss anymore are your students and my husband, and lately, it's a lot more your students....the bum', Romana says, howling. Meeting the people that supply us our food is paramount at the school. As a student, you play an active part, right from day one.

2)Immigrants first had to emigrate.

Last week, Georgia and Leslie came, two soft-spoken and highly-intelligent, Italian-American sisters from the East Coast of America. I knew that they were enjoying themselves during the week, but it wasn't until they had been gone a few days, did I really notice to what extent. I was walking down my stone street, through the historic centre of Lecce, back from the photo lab, riffling through the pictures because I'm never patient enough to wait. There in the stack was beaming Carol from New Zealand, laughing and pitting olives. Julianne from Oregon too, giggling as she turns the crank on the sausage stuffer. But the photos afterward featured two sober Italian women making perfect pasta, as if the last 80 years of emigration had never happened, their dignified and beautiful maternal features, perfectly rendered in timeless black and white. Everyone that comes to Lecce has a lot fun, but it's those that seek something deeper that really prosper at our school. That we can play a part in that makes me very,very proud.

1) My new assistant.

It happens everyday, so much that I barely notice it anymore. I'll ask la Lilli if she knows how to make this cake or that type of cookie or a certain type of local pasta and she'll insist that she does. We'll go to work in the stable kitchen, and even with my back turned, I now know to listen for tonal difference in her voice. There will be a pause, then a subtle shift from questions to me in proper Italian, from 'Silvey, are you certain you need chestnut flour' or 'do I really need to boil the octopus first', to 'how much flour do I add', or 'are you sure it needs that long in the oven', into her cell phone, in the dialect of San Vito Dei Normanni, Lilli's hometown. It's where both her mother and grandmother live, where the take the frequent incoming calls. I now know these three generations of beautiful and generous women, I've cooked alongside them, eaten with them, often late into the afternoons and long into nights. Now that la Lilli has them on speed dial when cardoons come into season, or when I'm blindly fumbling with marzipan lambs for Easter or the figuring out how long to grill entire mackerels, my cooking has become more honest, more an expression of this part of Italy, the part I love most.

Reader, I hope that these stories have caused you to imagine yourself here as well, cooking and eating alongside us, here in Lecce, Italy. We just added a week, June 12th, through the 18th. We hope you come.

Would you like to be on our Mail List? Mail List Sign Up

Located in an 18th century aristocratic palace in the historic center of the South of Italy's prettiest city, The Awaiting Table offers Day, Weekend and Week-long courses, based on small classes of hands-on cooking and individual attention. If you'd like to see a different part of Italy, and see it in a different way, now you have an alternative.
To sign up for future newsletters, click here - Mail List Sign Up

Back to top - Previous Page