Adventures in eating, Part 1

Peter, who runs the company that's managing our trip and our citizenship process, is a bit like Figaro in Barber of Seville--he is our factotum and insists he's at our service, but he also ends up pretty much running our lives. Part of the our job during these two weeks is to get to know the area and the people, so Peter arranges all kinds of "experiences" for his clients, from meeting an artisanal knife maker to herding goats.

We told him at the outset that the experiences all five of us (Lina, Max, Danny, me, and Steven, Lina's fiance) were primarily interested in are food-centered. And he has obliged not only with enough festa info and restaurant recommendations to last us for months rather than weeks of dining, but also with several just-for-us events focused on the foods of the region. What we didn't reckon with was the sometimes alarming hospitality of the people here and the sheer athletic challenge of the amount of eating we have let ourselves in for.

On our first two days we did nothing more ambitious than visit a couple of restaurants. But confronted with an Italian menu of antipasti (Italian charcuterie, pickled vegetables, little fried or baked cheesy, meaty morsels, bread), then primi (pastas, often house-made), then secondi (meat dishes, ranging from simple grills to elaborate braises), then contorni (grilled eggplant, cooked string beans, green salad, or other vegetable sides), then dolci (also often house-made), plus wine (usually local), we made the rookie mistake of doing the full five-course catastrophe.

So our stomachs were already well prepared for what came next. On Wednesday, June 14, we had a date with Maurizio Petti, an artisanal gelato-maker and restaurateur in the little Molisan town of Casalciprano. At 10 a.m. the five of us and Michael, another American citizen-wannabe in Montagano, helped Maurizio measure out the ingredients, starting with unpasteurized milk from local cows, for three flavors of gelato. That's me on the right, taking a turn at whisking everything together, while Michael admires my energy, if not my technique.

Each batch was carefully measured (by us, with much anxiety), then put into Maurizio's $50,000 Italian gelato machine, which quickly took the temperature up high enough to pasteurize the mixture, then just as quickly chilled it down below freezing, then moved it into a lower freezing compartment where it was stirred as it froze.

Steven, who worked for years as a chef, so impressed Maurizio that he offered him a job.


On the right, here is Steven flipping the gelato into the container as it comes out of the freezer part of la macchina, as Maurizio explains exactly how it's done. Those voluptuous peaks of ice cream that you see in gelato shops don't happen automatically.

That morning we helped make a headily aromatic mandorla (almond), spiked with amaretto liqueur and crumbled amaretti cookies; a rich nociola (hazelnut); and the "Pope's torrone," celebrating Pope Francis's visit to Molise three years ago, which was gelato flavored with burnt-sugar caramel and pine nuts. At the end we all got just a little taste. We were promised more once the flavors had rested and matured for a few hours.

Lina took this and most of the other good photos on this page.

The reward for our hard work was an aperitivo of prosecco on the terrace, where we all admired the sensational view.

Then came a sumptuous lunch upstairs in Maurizio's sumptuous restaurant, the Terrazze Miranda. There were all kinds of antipasti--fried eggplant rolled around prosciutto and cheese, little nuggets of fried greens, fresh-tomato bruschetta, little tarts of some kind of ham.

These were followed by two wonderful pastas, cavatelli in tomato sauce and tagliarini with a kind of zucchini pesto, one of the best primis we've had on this trip.

Knowing that the gelato still lay ahead, we begged off on any secondi. We were already dangerously full.

In hopes of creating some space for the gelato, we took a guided tour around Maurizio's restaurant, once a noble family's villa and now a quite fantastic restaurant and inn, with rooms decorated to a faretheewell. I think they do a big honeymoon business. It would be a sensational place for a wedding.

The whole place is like this. 

The goddess of rosticceria?

Next came a tour of Casalcipriano, which seems to be ahead of other towns in the area in planning for tourism. There are murals all around the old center part of town, depicting the hard life of the locals a century or more ago, and a very engaging little museum with waxwork figures illustrating more of the same. Apparently there was a lot of anxiety about witches, and lots of untimely death. The loss of so many friends and family when they emigrated to America and elsewhere was another hardship to those who remained--an aspect of the immigrant story that we don't usually give much thought to.

Then it was time for gelato, served up in Maurizio's gelateria down on the terrace. It was sensational.


If we had just gone home and had clear soup for dinner, we would have been fine. But that night was also the second night of the festa in Montagano, and we ended up having that big feast with our friends Fernando and Rita and a dozen or more other people. We're not going to let ourselves eat like that again, we told ourselves.

Ha!