One more party before we go

Having been repeatedly fed and feted by the folks in Montagano, early on we'd started talking about perhaps inviting a few of them over and feeding them for a change. Steven is a great cook and worked for years as a professional chef, so when he declared himself ready and able to put together some kind of feast, the rest of us were enthusiastic about helping.

After much back and forth--at one point it seemed possible we'd be cooking for literally the whole town--we settled on dinner on Friday the 23rd, the last night we'd all be in town, for a select group of friends (our hosts Rita and Fernando and their kids, and Maria and Claudio, and Pino the mayor and Paolo the chief of police, and Michael and Laura, the other American citizenship hopefuls, and their companions and hosts, and a few others). The venue would be the Circolo Unione, the social club that Rita and Fernando run and where we'd been hanging out for some portion of almost every day.

The date settled, we had to figure out the menu. Someone--was it Lina?--suggested that Steven make his famous haggis, since it would be an exotically Scottish offering but similar enough to some of the more offal-centric Italian salumi that the Italians might be willing to at least taste it. (Italy Italians are notoriously reluctant to eat anything but Italian food, which is one reason the food in Italy is so traditional and so good.)

When we told some of our Italian friends about the haggis plan, their reaction was incredulous laughter. To them haggis ranked right up there with the stories about people in Cambodia eating dogs and crickets, more evidence of the barbarity of the non-Italian world. Yet one of the local dishes they're proudest of is torcinelli, skewers of lamb liver and other organs wrapped in intestine and roasted. I kept hoping to find it on a restaurant menu, but apparently you have to have someone make it for you at home. Maybe when we come back...

Undeterred by the locals' scoffing, we went ahead with the haggis plan. Peter, our guide to all things Molise and ever resourceful, came up with some key ingredients Steven needed, an adult sheep's stomach, tongue, liver, and heart, while Steven hunted down the porridge oats and onions that make up the rest of the recipe. To complete this Scottish antipasto we had the two Scottish cheddars that Steven's mom, Janice, had brought when she came to visit.

We also had all kinds of other little vegetable antipasti that we'd bought and not gotten around to eating--asparagus in oil, olives, artichoke cream to spread on rusks--so we added them to the table.

Lina and I wanted to make a green salad. Italian salads seem pretty one-dimensional to us--just various greens, and maybe a little tomato, served with oil and vinegar. Salad dressing and other embellishments are rarely seen. So, inspired by an article in the New York Times about an old-school Italian restaurant in Queens, we concocted an Italian-American salad of mostly iceberg lettuce garnished with tomatoes, marinated artichokes, and slivers of provolone and salame, topped with the best approximation of a vinaigrette I could come up with in the absence of either mustard or ketchup.

Danny contributed a platter of his delicious chocolate-dipped biscotti. Michael, our fellow citizenship applicant from New York, announced he was making pasta in tomato sauce. And Claudio, who's a retired baker, demanded to make pizza, which we were happy to let him do. So we had a plan, one that would maintain the level of gluttony that we'd been adhering to the whole visit.

By the time we came back from the fountain tour that evening, Steven had assembled the haggis, boiled it, and roasted it in the oven. Lina and I threw our salad together and everyone arranged the other dishes. Then we carried all of it downstairs and down the street to the Circolo, where Rita and Fernando had arranged the furniture into one long banquet table.

Claudio had made five kinds of pizza--onion, anchovy, mushroom, tomato, and tomato and cheese. There was enough for twice as many people as were there. He cut the slices with scissors. All five kinds were all great, but the onion disappeared the fastest.

From left to right: Scottish cheddar, Claudio's pizza, our salad, beer, water, some asparagus sott'olio. Don't you wish you could have been there?

Here's Steven slicing up the haggis. I was thrilled to get to taste this, after hearing about it for so many years. It was delicious, with a lot of onion and pepper balancing out the liver. Despite their trepidations, the Montaganesi liked it, too.

 Here's Claudio, who was one of the big scoffers, having seconds. Maria wasn't quite as enthusiastic, but maybe it was because she'd already eaten dinner by the time the party got underway.

That black pot was full of Michael's pasta before we ate it all. The salad and the biscotti were hits, too. The fact was, everything was really good.

In addition to the pizza, Claudio made "bones" out of pizza dough sprinkled with sugar. He was obviously worried there might not be enough to eat.

By this point even Steven was starting to feel uncomfortably full.

Then with much fanfare, Fernando et al. unveiled a big, gooey cake with "Arrivederci a Montagano" and the town's crest beautifully inscribed in icing. We could hardly refuse to have some, and so have some we did.


















The town has some gifts for us, too--"I heart Montagano" T-shirts for all the visitors. That called for more photographs.

Paolo took these two and put them up on Facebook. Here are "gli americani"...

...and here's the whole gang. I'm not sure who a few of the people are, but they are Circolo regulars and/or family of someone or other. That's Fernando in the green shirt between Max and Steven, and his wife, Rita, in front of him, and their son, Francesco, kneeling in front of her (in the pink shirt); his girlfriend, Sophia, is on his left. His sister, Luciana, is to the left of Jorge. To the right of Jorge is Marco, Claudio and Maria's youngest son, who runs the little market two doors down from the Circolo. Francesca, the vice-mayor, is to the left of Luciana. 

We were also presented with personal membership cards for the Circolo Unione, which means whenever we are in town we can breeze right past the "Forbidden to non-members" sign and hang out as long as we want.

The party finally broke up and we staggered home, carrying bags of leftover pizza that Maria kept insisting would be perfect travel food. 

The whole occasion was very bittersweet. We'd had such a great time in Montagano, and we'd been treated like family by all these people who hadn't ever heard of us until we landed in their midst, and now we were all leaving, for a long time and maybe for good. "We'll see you next year," our Montaganesi friends kept saying. "Next year." I certainly hope so.