On Writing A Blissful Feast, my Culinary Adventures

A Blissful Feast, Culinary Adventures in Italy’s Piedmont, Maremma, and Le Marche

Pegasus Books, NY

Reflections on the writing process:

“When I set out to write about my culinary adventures in Italy, I knew I would start in the Piedmont region in the northwest, home of my mother’s ancestors. From there I would more on to the dishes, ingredients, and cooks I encountered during my travels throughout the country, though I hadn’t yet decided where those travels would take me. While I didn’t have a full itinerary in mind, and I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for, I knew even that that my grandmother’s cooking prompted the journey. Her recipes sent me on my way.”

These are the opening lines from the introduction to A Blissful Feast, Culinary Adventures in Italy’s Piedmont, Maremma, and Le Marche. As I set out to trace my culinary roots I had no idea how many forms these stories would take–from the history of the dishes to the stories contained in their names, from the geography influencing their origins, to the cooks who prepared them, and my efforts to recreate them in my own kitchen.  

I initially conceived A Blissful Feast as a follow up to my first book, Pass the Polenta, and Other Writings from the Kitchen, which came out several years ago, during what now seems a previous life—before I had children, before I spoke Italian, and while I was still cooking professionally.

That book was a collection of essays drawn from family memories and personal experiences cooking in farm-to-table restaurants in the Pacific Northwest and New England. The new book would be a similar collection, based on traditional Italian home cooking.

I soon found that in order to immerse myself in my grandparents’ native cuisine, I had to learn Italian. I sought out language schools in quiet pockets of the country where few English speakers traveled, knowing I would be forced to use Italian, and I further whittled down my list to places renowned for their local specialties.

That is how I stumbled on to the Maremma in southern Tuscany, and Le Marche in central Italy. I could have continued traveling throughout the country, but these regions kept calling me back, kept offering me their culinary stories. Before I knew it, I had plenty to write about, and I’d become fluent in Italian in the process.

As I wrote, the pieces became increasingly interconnected; by time and place and people, by the succession of dishes that appeared on the table, and my self-contained essay format started to give way. I resisted at first, not wanting to tamper with a form that had served me well. Still, during the process of revision the essays dissolved at the margins, one chapter led to the next, and a narrative emerged.

At least that’s how I remember it now, though the real impetus surely came with the first round of rejections, when the resounding refrain from editors was, “Nobody reads essays these days.” While I hardly think that’s true, or we wouldn’t be reading David Foster Wallace or Davis Sedaris, or Joan Didion or Rebecca Solnit, I’m so grateful now for those early rejections, because they made me write a better book.

I write of preparing bagna cauda with my relatives outside Torino. The Piedmont’s most celebrated dish, bagna cauda is a robust dipping sauce of anchovies, garlic, and olive oil served warm with seasonal vegetables. The name translates to “hot sauce.”

In her seminal Italian Food of 1954, Elizabeth David called it a blissful feast, which gave the book its title. In another Piedmont chapter I recount making hand-stretched grissini at the bakery owned by my cousin and her husband. Italy’s iconic breadstick, grissini were a favorite of the Savoy Dukes, and Napoleon had them delivered to him at the Tuileries in Paris by stagecoach. 

I write of the secrets of whipping up zabaione, which I learned during a month-long stint cooking in a village trattoria. This classic dessert is an ethereal foam made with egg yolks, sugar, and marsala, named for a sixteenth-century friar who went on to become a saint. In the Maremma section I write of my encounter with acquacotta, a rustic stone soup that nourished generations of the area’s shepherds and cowhands.

The name, which means, “cooked water,” referred originally to a meager broth of onions, water, and stale bread, but nineteenth century housewives transformed it into a substantial one-dish meal, rich with garden vegetables, a poached egg, and fruity olive oil. In Le Marche, an eighty-year-old woman taught me the art of hand-rolling pasta with a three-foot rolling pin.

Following all these threads offered me great opportunities for research. As I interviewed cooks, tracked down old cookbooks, or translated recipes I came to understand the historical significance of each dish, as well as my own personal connection to it. This research also gave me something constructive to do during those hours, and there were many, when sitting down to my desk to write felt like putting two north ends of a magnet together.

With all that resistance, I could turn to research and still feel productive. On the days when I delved into the writing, the sensual nature of the task brought its own reward. In writing about food you draw on all the senses. You translate feel, sight, sound and aroma into words—the spatter of onions frying in oil, the perfume emanating from the oven when a cake is almost done, the supple texture of pasta dough when it is ready to roll out. The cooking, the research, the writing, the rejection, the revising: all of it added to my ever-deepening appreciation for the intimate relationship between food, family, and friends that is quintessentially Italian. 

—

Teresa Lust is the author of A Blissful Feast, Culinary Adventures in Italy’s Piedmont, Maremma, and Le Marche, published by Pegasus Books. Her previous book, Pass the Polenta: and Other Writings from the Kitchen, was published by Steerforth Press. She is a graduate of Washington State University and holds a master’s degree from Dartmouth College. Lust currently teaches Italian for the Rassias Center for World Languages at Dartmouth and gives cooking classes. She lives in New Hampshire.

Find out more about her on her website http://teresalust.com/

 

A BLISSFUL FEAST

A delicious journey through Italy and a celebration of the relationship between family and food. 

Moving from the Italian Piedmont to the Maremma and then to Le Marche, chef Teresa Lust interweaves portraits of the people who served as her culinary guides with cultural and natural history in this charming exploration of authentic Italian cuisine.

We learn how to prepare bagna cauda—a robust dipping sauce of anchovies, garlic, and olive oil—with Lust’s relatives outside Torino. We learn about making hand-stretched grissini, Italy’s iconic breadstick, the secrets of whipping up zabaione, a classic dessert of ethereal foam made with egg yolks, sugar, and marsala. Then there is acquacotta, a rustic soup that nourished generations of the area’s shepherds and cowhands. In the town of Camerano, an eighty-year-old woman reveals the art of hand-rolling pasta with a three-foot rolling pin.

Underpinning Lust’s travels is our journey from chef to cook, mirroring the fact that Italians have been masters of home cooking for generations, so they are an obvious source of inspiration. Today, more and more people are rediscovering the pleasures of cooking at home, and Lust’s account—and wonderful recipes—will help readers bring an Italian sensibility to their home tables.

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