Writing, like with cooking, involves improvising, adapting and responding to environments to which you never expected to become acclimatised
The produce on offer at a local market in Rome. Pic Courtesy/Rosalyn D'Mello
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This column is an interlude. Something I've paused to write as the two whole chickens I bought are absorbing a marinade I'm deceptively calling secret because I cannot successfully recall its constituting ingredients. There is in there the juice of an overripe orange, and instead of red wine vinegar, I've used wine leftover from a Chianti I'd bought in Firenze.
There are stalks of rosemary that I plucked like a thief from a luscious shrub growing by the wayside near the Lanserhaus Museum, where the exhibition of works made by artists from the residency at Eau & Gaz is still showing. And there is butter that was soft, but not melted, which served as a definite advantage, allowing the marinade to really rub against the skin. After I will have finished writing this, I will put both chickens in the oven and, as they roast, will experiment with making a Campanata, a Sicilian salad comprising fried aubergines with a sweet-sour tomato sauce, garlic, olive oil and capers. It's an attempt to recreate what became for me the dominant flavour of Palermo.
I'd like to say this column is being written in real time, with the small delay that usually accompanies such live narration. I had to pause my composing of it to quicken my slack pace in the kitchen. There were two hungry residents who returned to the apartment who looked like they would have liked to be fed. I knew I wouldn't have finished cooking the meal I had planned, so I asked of them to make do with yesterday's leftovers; an Indo-Italian chole, with rice, and a fresh tomato-mozzarella salad.
Meanwhile, the chicken was placed into the oven, and I began to prepare the campanata, which is now stewing, and Masatoshi and I have just made an executive decision to add some bits of pancetta over it after it is done, keeping of course an unadulterated portion for the sole vegetarian artist. In about 30 minutes, we expect Elif to have returned from the Lanserhaus, where she was taking a journalist on a tour of her work. She hasn't eaten since last night. She's too muddled up with her work and is also going through the extremities of emotion that comes from knowing that one's departure is imminent. She will hire a car and drive to Berlin on Saturday, leaving behind a gaping hole in my heart, for sure. Who knows when we'll see each other again? In one week I will leave too, and I wonder if anyone here in Eppan, besides Sarah and Kathrin who've been my gracious hosts, will remember that I was ever here.
Writing is a way of bread-crumbing one's way through space and time; a method of leaving traces of one's self, a means of registering all that one shed and all that one absorbed in the process of journeying. Like with cooking, so much of it involves continuous improvising, ingenious adapting to circumstances you didn't foresee or couldn't possibly predict, responding to environments to which you never expected to become acclimatised. It is also a technique of hoarding one's thoughts for future filtering.
My notebook has been abuzz with stray revelations, observations, recordings of passages from writers I've been encountering through my research, speckled occasionally with moments of whimsy and recipes of dishes constructed through a series of unexpected encounters, like the lamb curry I made for Kaushik and Pia, my hosts in Rome, whom I'd never met before until I landed at their doorstep. What we had in common was our mutual friend, Janice Pariat, but Kaushik and Pia adopted me as if they'd known me forever, even agreeing to let me cook them a meal so I could express my gratitude. They took me to a rather spectacularly diverse market to meet their Bangladeshi butcher who gave us the choicest bits of the leg of lamb.
I adapted my green masala to suit our limitations: the absence of a mixer, for instance, substituting desiccated coconut for the freshly grated kind; adding in cherry tomatoes instead of a grated pulp, and was both surprised and overwhelmed by how beautifully the dish turned out. We devoured it, with rice and a beetroot raita, and finished off our meal with a peach melba that I'd made because I'd been missing my mother. This dessert of peaches poached in sugar syrup topped with vanilla ice cream was bequeathed to me by her.
The night I returned to Eppan after my two-week travel through Napoli, Rome, Palermo and Assisi I felt compelled to try my hand at Risotto not knowing its method of preparation would become a metaphor for my Italian sojourn. For a Risotto is all about the Arborio rice absorbing into its being the wine and broth it is lovingly fed so it eventually begins to ooze its hoarded starch, allowing for a nuanced creaminess to enter the mix, completing the cooking process. The result of this surrender is sublimity itself.
Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
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