A Journal by Cetta

I walked down to the piazza this morning meaning to buy only bread, and came home with a bag of dried chickpeas, a bundle of wild fennel, and a small jar of honey from a man who insisted I taste it before paying. I do not know how these things happen to me. I went for bread. I stood at the stall talking to a woman about her granddaughter’s wedding for fifteen minutes, and by the time I turned around, my basket had grown opinions of its own.

The honey man was the interesting part. He had a scratchy radio playing behind him, and when I asked whether the honey was from this year he said, “Signora, the bees do not lie, but the labels sometimes do.” Then he laughed at his own joke for a long time. I bought the jar mostly for the laugh.

At home I made a big pot of chickpeas with the fennel and a little tomato, the way my mother did when the weather turned cool — soffritto first, then everything else, and patience. While it simmered I sat by the window and watched a bird make three fast passes over the roof tiles across the way, quick as a thrown stone, gone before I could decide what kind it was. Some afternoons the small things are the whole event. I did not read anything useful. I did not fix anything. I ate the chickpeas with bread and felt very well taken care of by my own hands, which is a decent way to end a Wednesday.

I also finally sorted the drawer of seed packets I have been avoiding since spring. Half of them are too old to trust, but I wrote the years on the envelopes anyway, because next spring I will otherwise stand there guessing, and guessing is not a plan.

Recipe: Chickpeas with Wild Fennel

Ingredients

• 300 g dried chickpeas, soaked overnight
• 1 small onion, 1 carrot, 1 celery stalk, finely chopped
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 small bunch wild fennel, chopped (fronds and tender stems)
• 200 g chopped tomatoes (or 2 tablespoons passata)
• Salt, pepper, a pinch of dried chili
• Water or light stock

Preparation

1. Drain the soaked chickpeas. Warm the olive oil in a pot and soften the onion, carrot, and celery over low heat for about 10 minutes.
2. Add the tomatoes and chili, cook 5 minutes, then add the chickpeas and enough water to cover by two fingers.
3. Simmer covered for 45–60 minutes, until the chickpeas are tender, adding the fennel in the last 15 minutes.
4. Season with salt and pepper, rest 10 minutes off the heat, and serve with good bread and a thread of raw olive oil.

Overcast all day, the kind of grey that makes the kitchen feel warmer than it actually is. I spent the afternoon in the little pool of light that moves across the table between two and four o’clock, and I finally dealt with the shirt that has been sitting on the back of the chair for two weeks with one loose button. It wasn’t even a real repair — five minutes, a needle, a length of thread I had to re-thread twice because my eyes are not what they were. But I kept putting it off, and that’s what bothers me about these things. Small undone tasks take up more room in the head than they do on the clock.

The button tin came out for it, which is always a mistake, because then I sat there for twenty minutes sorting through buttons I will never use. There’s one from a coat of my mother’s, dark green, and I always stop on that one. Anyway, the shirt is done and hanging properly, and the tin is back on the shelf where it belongs.

Earlier I had peeled an orange and the whole kitchen smelled like the peel, sharp and bright, and it struck me that this is the best thing about the colder months arriving — the citrus. I dried the peel on the windowsill instead of throwing it out; I’ll drop it into a jar of olive oil in a few days and see how it goes. It’s an experiment. If it turns out badly, it costs me nothing but a little oil.

There’s a basket of tomatoes on the counter I meant to turn into sauce today, and I didn’t. They’ll keep another day. I’m learning to leave one thing undone without deciding it means something. Tomorrow, though. Tranquillo.

Recipe: Orange-Peel Olive Oil

Ingredients

• Peel of 2–3 unwaxed oranges, pith scraped away
• 500 ml good extra-virgin olive oil
• A clean glass jar with a tight lid

Preparation

1. Cut the peel into strips, removing as much white pith as possible — it turns bitter.
2. Let the strips dry on a windowsill or rack for 2–3 days until leathery but still fragrant.
3. Drop the dried peel into the jar and cover completely with the olive oil.
4. Seal and leave in a cool, dark place for 2–3 weeks, shaking the jar every few days.
5. Taste after two weeks; strain out the peel once the flavour is strong enough, then keep the oil in a dark bottle.

The morning started damp and stayed that way, the kind of grey that never commits to rain, and I did the laundry anyway because the line under the eaves stays dry enough if the wind is doing anything at all. It was — a light, steady sort of breeze, the good kind — and I stood at the window with my coffee watching the sheets breathe in and out on the line. There’s a particular sound linen makes when it shifts, a soft flap and then nothing, then the flap again. I left the second load in the basket longer than I meant to, so it came out of the machine smelling faintly of waiting. Not a disaster. Just a reminder that the line wants things promptly.

At the market I spent a ridiculous amount of time at the olive stall comparing two crates of the same olives. One was glossy and uniform, all the same size, the sort that photographs well. The other was smaller, a bit bruised, a few stems mixed in. I took the second one, and the man selling them looked at me like I’d done something sensible, which I had. The perfect-looking ones are grown to look perfect and often taste of nothing. The ugly ones are the ones that were left alone and got bitter and sweet on their own schedule. He told me they were for preserving rather than eating straight off the tree, which I knew, but it’s nice to be told things. I’ve got them soaking now, changing the water every day, and in a fortnight I’ll brine them with a little fennel and orange peel.

While I was at it I pulled the string of peppers off the door to see how they were doing, and they’re holding up — dry, no soft spots, exactly what I wanted. The other useful thing this week has been a small habit I’ve been trying to make stick: I’ve been bad at knots for years, properly bad, and it costs me every time I tie something to the roof rack or lash the bin lid. So I’ve been practicing the one knot that does most of the work — a bowline, the one that won’t slip and won’t jam, a loop that holds. Twenty times a day for a week and my hands are starting to know it without my thinking about it. A modest skill, nothing impressive, but the sort of thing that makes the difference between a day that goes smoothly and one where you’re standing in the rain fighting a piece of rope.

The olives are in their bowl on the counter, the sheets are in, and the house smells of clean cotton and damp stone. I’m going to sit down and do absolutely nothing useful for the rest of the evening, which is also a skill worth practicing.

Rain all day, the sort that doesn’t fall so much as hang in the air and wait for you to step into it. I went out for bread anyway — there’s a bakery two streets down, but I took the long way, up past the old wall and down the back lane where the stone is worn smooth and dark. Everything smelled of wet rock and wet leaves, that cold mineral smell that’s better than most things I cook. By the time I got to the door my coat was heavy and the paper bag was going soft in my hand, which is the correct price for taking the long way, and I’d pay it again tomorrow.

The neighbour caught me on the step on the way back, wanting to know whether I’d heard the roof argument has finally been settled or finally been abandoned — nobody can tell the difference, least of all her. We stood under the little overhang for ten minutes while the gutter emptied onto the path beside us. She’s decided she’s against umbrellas in principle now, on the grounds that they’re the only thing you buy, carry, and lose in the same afternoon. I said that’s not a principle, that’s a grievance. She said it’s both, and went home.

The bread was wet on one corner and I wasn’t going to waste it, so supper was a pot of mushrooms — the dried ones from the back of the shelf, soaked and cooked slowly with garlic and a little chili, and the soaking water strained and used to finish the pasta in the pan. It’s a trick worth having: the grit sinks and stays behind, and what you pour off tastes like something that took hours instead of twenty minutes. I ate it with the bread, which had dried out enough by then to be useful for the job.

Here’s the small thought I’ve been carrying since the lane. I’ve been calling my umbrella broken for a month because one of the ribs doesn’t snap flat. It isn’t broken, it’s just a rib that needs to be pushed back by hand before it closes. I only found that out by actually opening it and looking, which took nine seconds and which I’d avoided for four weeks because I’d already decided what was wrong. I do this constantly, in kitchens and on computers alike: the diagnosis feels finished long before the evidence is in. Ask the thing to show you. It usually will.

Recipe: Pasta ai Funghi Secchi

Ingredients

• 30 g dried porcini, or mixed dried mushrooms
• 300 g pasta (tagliatelle, or a short shape)
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic, lightly crushed
• 1 small dried chili (optional)
• a handful of flat-leaf parsley, chopped
• salt and black pepper
• grated parmesan or pecorino, to serve

Preparation

1. Soak the mushrooms in 300 ml warm water for 20 minutes. Lift them out, squeeze gently, and chop. Strain the soaking water through a fine sieve or a paper filter and keep it — that’s where the flavour is, and the grit stays behind.
2. Warm the oil in a wide pan with the garlic and chili and cook gently for a minute, then take the garlic out while it still smells sweet.
3. Add the chopped mushrooms and cook 5 minutes, then pour in the strained soaking water and simmer about 10 minutes, until it has reduced a little. Season.
4. Cook the pasta in salted water until al dente, drain it, keeping a cup of the water, and toss it in the pan with the mushrooms, adding pasta water as needed so the sauce coats every strand.
5. Stir in the parsley, grind in pepper, and serve with grated cheese.

I spent the first hour of the day mending the old basket, which I should have done a month ago. It’s the flat one with the two rope handles that I use for the market, and one of them had started to fray right where it meets the rim — a few strands gone, the rest holding on out of politeness. My first instinct was to replace the handle entirely, but that would have meant unweaving half the rim, so instead I unwound the loose strands, soaked a length of thin cord, and wound it back over the break, tight and even, working from the middle outward so the tension went both ways. It’s not invisible, but it’s strong, and the basket has another few years in it. The other handle I did as well, while I had the cord out, because the second one was only a matter of time. Sometimes the repair you came for is smaller than the repair you should make.

In the afternoon the neighbor sent over a sack of chestnuts from her brother’s tree, and I spent a good while at the table with the paring knife. Peeling chestnuts is one of those jobs that punishes hurry — score the shell across the curve, roast or boil them, and then wait for them to cool just enough to handle, because a hot chestnut fights you and a cold one goes rubbery. I do them in small batches so nothing sits and gets stubborn. It took an hour for two cups of nutmeats, which is a ridiculous return on paper and a perfectly good hour in practice. I’ve been thinking about that all week — the tasks that get worse when you rush them. Chestnuts. Pastry. Sharpening. The list of things that reward patience and punish speed is longer than the list of things that don’t.

While the pot was going I had the laptop open and finally fixed a problem that had been nagging me for a fortnight: I keep two copies of the same folder of notes, one on the machine and one on the drive I carry, and I’d been copying the whole thing back and forth like an idiot. rsync -av --delete ~/notes/ /Volumes/backup/notes/ does the comparison for me — it copies only what changed and removes what I deleted, so the two stay identical without my thinking about it. The -n flag first, dry run, shows me what it would do before it does anything. I’ve made that a habit: look before you move.

I used some of the chestnuts in a soup with a little pancetta and rosemary, and there’s a jar of the rest in the cupboard for the cold. The basket is by the door with its two good handles, and the soup is better tomorrow than today, which is the other thing patience buys you.

Recipe: Zuppa di Castagne

Ingredients

• 300 g peeled chestnuts (fresh roasted and shelled, or vacuum-packed)
• 100 g pancetta or unsmoked bacon, diced
• 1 onion, finely chopped
• 1 small carrot and 1 celery stalk, finely chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1 sprig rosemary, needles chopped
• 1 litre light stock or water
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• salt and black pepper
• a spoon of olive oil or a little cream to finish, optional

Preparation

1. Warm the olive oil in a heavy pot and cook the pancetta until the fat renders and it just starts to colour, about 5 minutes.
2. Add the onion, carrot, and celery, and cook gently 10 minutes until soft. Add the garlic and rosemary and cook 1 minute more.
3. Add the chestnuts and the stock. Simmer gently 25–30 minutes, until the chestnuts are completely tender and beginning to break down.
4. Mash some of the chestnuts against the side of the pot to thicken the soup, leaving the rest whole for texture. Taste and season.
5. Serve hot with a thread of raw olive oil, black pepper, and bread. Better the next day, and it thickens as it stands.

It was properly cold this morning for the first time — five degrees at dawn, and I got the good coat out without arguing with myself about it. Then the day turned bright and mild and I forgave it everything.

The small event of the day was a card. I was after a different book and pulled down the old cookery one with the broken spine, the one that holds more than recipes, and a card slid out of the back and landed face down on the floor. Pencil, in a hand I recognise and can’t quite name, gone soft and grey with the years. It took me the better part of an hour at the table with the lamp pulled close. Sugar, I’m fairly sure. Flour, definitely. There’s a word near the top I read four ways before settling on the fifth, because the two words after it only make sense one way — which is how you read old handwriting. You don’t. You read around the hole until the hole closes. I didn’t cook it. I wrote it out clean in a notebook, and that was the afternoon’s work, and I’d happily do it again tomorrow.

It’s the same with a search, when a single line doesn’t tell me what I’m looking at. I keep a plain text file of the recipes I’ve transcribed, and when I want to find where something appears without reading the whole thing, I ask for the neighbours: grep -C 2 "sugo" quaderno.txt prints the line I matched and two lines on either side of it. A word alone is a fact; a word with its neighbours is a meaning. That card was nothing but context for an hour.

The cards themselves live in an old tin — rectangular, dented at one corner, printed with something that’s worn off entirely. I got to wondering why that tin has outlasted three nicer ones. It isn’t clever and it isn’t pretty. It has no hinge to fail and no clasp to jam, and the lid fits because it was made to fit and nobody ever came along to improve it. Most of the things still working in this kitchen are like that.

Anyway. The light was gone by five and the house is cold enough now for the extra blanket, so I’m going to finish writing the card out properly and then go to bed.

I finally wrapped the parcel that’s been sitting at the end of the table for a week — a small thing for a friend down in Cosenza, nothing anyone would call a gift if you saw it, just a jar of the grape jam from September and a note. What mattered was the paper. I keep a folder behind the door with the flat, clean sheets off deliveries, and this one came off a box that held jars, so it still had a soft crease down the middle. I smoothed it under a book for an hour, folded it so the creases fell where the corners wanted them, and tied the whole thing with the string off last month’s pastry box, which was exactly long enough, which never happens. There’s a certain satisfaction in sending something out wrapped in something that was already here — nothing new bought for it. The jar is on its way and the folder is thinner by two sheets.

Then I walked it down and posted it, and took the long way back to look at things. Small observation of the week: the chestnut tree at the bend is bare. Last week it was still half-dressed, olive and yellow, and now it’s black branches against grey, and the ground under it is a mess of leaves and burrs. Same tree, same walk, one week apart. I don’t usually notice the between-states, only the before and the after, which is a shame, because the between is where the tree actually does its work.

That got me thinking about the laptop, since I wanted to know which of my own notes had changed since last week. Rather than opening files one at a time and squinting at them, I asked the machine: find ~/notes -mtime -7 lists everything in that folder modified in the last seven days, and nothing else. A week’s worth of my own thinking, pulled out of the pile by time instead of by name. I’ve started running it on a Friday just to see what I actually did, which is either useful or a way of keeping score. Probably both.

Supper was nothing to write about, and that’s fine — bread, oil, the last of the pecorino, and one of the roasted peppers out of the jar from last week. Warm kitchen, parcel gone, tree bare. I’ll take the evening as it comes.

The day stayed overcast and mild, with no wind at all — that flat white light that makes the street look unfinished. The coffee was what started it. For a week the moka had been behaving badly: the water coming up in a sputter instead of a steady thread, half of it left behind in the base, and what did arrive tasting burnt and thin at the same time. I’d been blaming the coffee, then the flame, which is what you do when you don’t want to take the thing apart. This morning I took it apart.

The gasket had gone hard and flat, black and shiny, no longer sitting proud of its groove, and the filter plate was furred with old grounds. So: a new gasket from the drawer where I keep two, the filter scraped with a pin, everything rinsed but not soaped, because soap goes into aluminium and stays there. The first pot afterwards came up slow and even and tasted like coffee again. It’s a part that costs almost nothing and fails so gradually you never catch it failing, so I’ve stopped pretending otherwise — I’ll change it every year whether it looks tired or not. Same lesson as the laptop, which had been quietly filling up while I blamed the backup program: df -h prints how much room is genuinely left on each volume, in units a person can read, and it took four seconds to see the answer. Check the boring thing first. It’s usually the boring thing.

In the afternoon I carried the two geranium pots in off the step, wiped the saucers, and set them on the kitchen sill where the light still reaches. They’ve been out there since April and they’ve earned a window. I’d been meaning to do it all week, waiting for a proper frost warning, and then I thought — what am I waiting for? The nights are cold now and the plants don’t read the calendar. Some things are worth carrying in before winter, and they’re rarely the things you’d put on a list.

Supper was a wedge of zucca from the market, cooked down with onion, vinegar, and a little sugar until it went dark and glossy, with mint torn over at the end. I ate it warm with bread, standing at the counter, and it was better than it had any right to be for the trouble. The house smells of vinegar and mint, the geraniums are on the sill, and the moka is back in service.

Recipe: Zucca in Agrodolce

Ingredients

• 800 g firm pumpkin or squash, peeled and cut into thick slices
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 small onion, thinly sliced
• 4 tablespoons white wine vinegar
• 1–2 teaspoons sugar
• a handful of mint leaves
• a pinch of dried chili
• salt
• optional: a tablespoon of raisins and a few pine nuts

Preparation

1. Warm the oil in a wide pan and cook the onion gently until soft and pale, about 6 minutes.
2. Add the pumpkin in a single layer, season with salt, and cook covered over low heat 15–20 minutes, turning once or twice, until tender but not collapsing.
3. Stir the vinegar and sugar together and pour it over. Raise the heat and let it bubble 2–3 minutes, until the liquid has reduced to a glaze rather than a sauce.
4. Add the chili, the raisins and pine nuts if using, and most of the mint. Cook one minute more.
5. Take it off the heat and let it sit at least 15 minutes — it’s better warm than hot. Scatter the rest of the mint over. Keeps several days in the fridge.

The kitchen window over the sink has been rattling since the middle of the month — but only sometimes, and only when the wind came from one particular direction. That meant I’d hear it from the other room, come in with my hands still wet, and find the thing sitting there looking innocent. Intermittent faults are the worst kind, because you can’t fix what won’t misbehave while you’re watching it. This morning it was at it properly, so I stood on a chair with the little screwdriver and had a look. The brass catch was not broken. The two screws holding it had worked loose — wood moves with the seasons, and brass follows it — so the whole fitting sat a hair proud and the tongue only half-engaged. Loosen, nudge the plate back into line, tighten both, done. The noise stopped as though I’d turned it off. I’d been calling it “the window” for three weeks and it was never the window.

Two things worth keeping from that, since I’ve chewed on it all day. Use the screwdriver that actually fills the slot; a driver that’s too small chews the head to pieces, and then you’ve traded a rattle for a ruined screw. And when something only goes wrong while you’re out of the room, stop standing in the room waiting for it. The Mac keeps a diary of exactly this: log show --last 15m prints what happened in the last quarter of an hour, including everything that happened while you were making coffee, and adding --predicate 'process == "..."' narrows it to the one thing you’re chasing. Same trick, different window.

While the screwdriver was out I cleared the sill, where two jugs have been standing for longer than I’d like to admit. One is chipped and one is perfect. The perfect one came from somewhere I no longer remember and my hand has never once reached for it. The chipped one I use constantly — the chip is precisely where my thumb goes. So the chipped one stayed and the perfect one is going across the road, where the neighbour will find it a kitchen that will actually use it. Kept because it’s used, released because it isn’t. That’s the entire test, and I’ve been making it complicated for years.

The house is very quiet now, which is oddly harder to sleep through than the ticking was. The light goes at five these days. Va bene — early night.

The fog came down overnight and by morning the far end of the street had simply gone. Not dimmed — gone, as though someone had folded the town up and put it away for the day. I went out early with no particular errand, just to be in it, and about halfway along the wall a voice reached me before its owner did. The woman from the house with the green door, somewhere ahead and completely invisible, saying good morning to the grey. I said it back to the grey. Sound does that in fog: it arrives before the person does, which is either charming or unsettling depending on your mood, and this morning I found it charming.

At the market there was a crate of quinces at the end of a table, knobbly and hard as little wooden clubs, the colour of old ivory. I bought two kilos without having planned to buy anything, because quinces wait for nobody — they come and go in three weeks and then they’re gone until next year.

So the afternoon went to cotognata. Peel, core, chop, simmer with a splash of water until they collapse, then push the whole lot through a sieve, which is the part that costs you your wrists and your good opinion of yourself. Then back into the pan with sugar, roughly the same weight as the pulp, and stir. That is genuinely the whole recipe: stir. Forty minutes, maybe more, until it darkens to amber and pulls clean away from the sides. I’d decided earlier in the week to keep one hour a day for exactly one thing and nothing else, so the radio stayed off and I just stood there with a wooden spoon, which turned out to be the nicest hour I’ve had in a while.

While it cooked down I had a long job running on the Mac — nothing dramatic, a big folder being compressed — and I didn’t want the machine dozing off in the middle of it. caffeinate -i <command> keeps it awake for that command and then lets it sleep normally afterwards, so you don’t have to go into the settings and change anything permanent. Small thing. Saves an hour of wondering why the job stopped at eleven per cent.

The paste is in a shallow dish on the shelf now, under a cloth, and it has to sit two or three days before I can cut it into squares and roll them in sugar. The fog lifted around four, all at once, the way it does, and the far end of the street came back exactly where I’d left it.

Recipe: Cotognata

Ingredients

• 2 kg quinces, washed
• sugar, about the same weight as the sieved pulp (roughly 1 kg)
• a squeeze of lemon juice
• extra caster sugar, for rolling

Preparation

1. Peel, core, and roughly chop the quinces, keeping the seeds out. Put them in a heavy pan with a few tablespoons of water and cook gently, covered, until completely soft, 30–40 minutes.
2. Push the pulp through a fine sieve or a food mill. Weigh it, then return it to the clean pan with an equal weight of sugar and the lemon juice.
3. Cook over low heat, stirring almost constantly with a wooden spoon, for 40 minutes or more, until the mixture is thick, glossy, and pulls cleanly away from the sides of the pan. It should hold a line drawn through it.
4. Spread about 2 cm thick in a shallow dish or on a tray lined with baking paper. Smooth the top and leave in a dry, airy place for 2–3 days until firm and sliceable.
5. Cut into squares or diamonds, roll each in caster sugar, and keep in a tin between sheets of paper. It lasts for months.