There’s No Place Better than Italy, and No Italian Spot Better than Abruzzo

An infectious joy was in the air at Abruzzo Cibus, the Italian cooking school I just attended in the small hillside village of Carunchio in the Abruzzo region east of Rome.

Our host Massimo was a vibrant personality, as skilled in telling a story as in running a hotel and cooking school.  And he certainly has a clear and strong view about all sorts of things. The same was equally true of his chef/instructor Dino Paganelli. Together, they kept our group of sixteen students quite entertained.

It didn’t take us long to await with amusement the potential outrage over an innocent question about how American think of Italian cuisine: We learned an Italian dies every time an American adds sugar to tomato sauce. Only use extra virgin olive oil; you might as well use motor oil as use ordinary olive oil. Garlic is only rarely used. Why bother with a white wine? Don’t trust wine blends; don’t use an aerator; and shudder at the thought of a twist-off metal cap.

Chef Dino instructing Mary, one of our fellow students from Cambria

Then there are the bests. The best saffron in the world comes from Abruzzo where it gets picked under a full moon; only then do its flowers open up fully to the light, thus making the stamens easy to pluck. Truffles from Abruzzo are the best because they are sniffed out by dogs, and not by dirty French pigs whose snout snot surely contaminates such a delicacy. There’s also nothing like a Montepulciano wine from Abruzzo. Forget about those chianti blends from Tuscany (see above about blends). And French baguettes carried under dirty armpits . . . well, you get the idea.

But amid the cultural fun, we did learn a lot. We all made our respective batches of ricotta gnocchi and shaped it using the wooden rigagnocchi tool. Then we got to eat it covered with a sauce quickly made from fresh tomatoes.

We rolled the freshest of peppery wild arugula with thin slices of pecorino and prosciutto and dressed it with a lemony dressing for a delightful salad that you could eat with your hand.

We always got to eat our own creations.

We learned to form polpettine cacio e uova (cheese and egg dumplings), fry them, and then finish their cooking in a pepper and tomato sauce. And we learned both to make our pizza dough and form it – without a rolling pin or any tossing skyward, relying just on the use of our knuckles and thumbs.

Our class of sixteen ate what we cooked each day for lunch, usually outdoors at picnic tables, and always with wine. We were blessed with lovely weather and lovely views.

We made side excursions to check out historic fishing houses, olive oil presses, and cheese factories. By the end of the week, we truly had a taste of the Abruzzo region in every imaginable way.

As a group, we had bonded into a ring of friendship that will surely always remember Abuzzo Cibus as a magical week of our lives. Anyone ready for Abuzzo 2.0?

Our class of fellow Americans, all learning how to cook in Abruzzo

Please check out all my novels in either paperback or Kindle format, including The Long Table Dinner. All titles are available to read for free to Amazon Prime subscribers. 

www.amazon.com/author/dennisfrahmann

A Weekend in the Country . . . and more

Sometime around 4 am, I awoke in Italy with the opening lines of A Weekend in the Country repeating as an annoying ear worm in my jet-lagged mind.

No, I wasn’t about to act in a Stephen Sondheim musical. Rather, it was my first night at a hilltop palazzo in the Abruzzo countryside, and I was about to begin a week-long cooking class. But it was already beginning to feel a bit like paying a visit to the retreat of an extremely accommodating host.

All sixteen in the class were picked up in Rome and then bussed to the Palazzo Tour D’Eau—a hundreds-of-years-old restored palace situated at the top of a small village. As our bus literally backed up a steep, curving narrow street, we had beautiful views of the green countryside. Then the bus stopped in front of the doors of the palazzo where our host and several of the staff stood ready to welcome us with an aperitif.

Our class assembled at Abruzzo Cibus on the terrace of the Palazzo Tour D’Eau

I knew I was going to like this place. And the feeling seemed shared by all of the assembled guests. We introduced ourselves and were eventually guided to our well-appointed rooms, feeling every bit as though we were in a gracious family home. Our host Massimo was extremely friendly and quite amusing. (What else could he be, since he went to college in Wisconsin not far from where I grew up?)

In the sleepless hours of the early morning, my mind turned to reflecting on my fellow guests. I felt as though we had assembled a cast for a Noel Coward drawing comedy or maybe an Agatha Christie mystery. My novelist’s mind couldn’t help itself from transforming the briefest of introductions and conversations into an assembly of characters.

(It’s a funny thing. Often, people in my novels have been inspired by a whiff of a feature or behavior in a person I just met. But no character has ever been modeled on someone who is a friend or relative. I guess if I actually know someone well, then I can no longer imagine them in whatever machinations my plots might require.)

So, back to the new faces in my life. In this week ahead, we will have two sisters and their husbands. What secrets might they share besides a love of tennis? And perhaps I could change the quick-witted, twelve-year-younger husband of one of those sisters into an even younger, more virile boy toy. That could be fun.

And while I’m at it, let’s consider the retired industrialist and his younger wife just married a year ago. Maybe he should be older and she could be even younger. Might that open up all sorts of plot developments?

Then there’s Eddie—a 75-year-old restaurant worker originally from Flushing. He’s enthusiastic, talkative, curiously naïve, but always friendly and fun. I think I need to leave him just the way he is for wherever the story might wander.

As for Robert and our six friends from Cambria who are also on this trip . . . well, as I explained, they are who they are. Which leaves only me. Could I be the clever detective for some yet-to-happen mystery? Or could I pull off being the sophisticated bon vivant. Can I be the hero of this new story that’s keeping me awake?

But then I think. I’m wide-awake hours before the sun rises. I’m making up stories about people I don’t know, while also worrying about inconsequential details of the week ahead. To my dismay, I realize I am already occupying the character of the narrator Teddy from my last novel, The Long Table Dinner—and he wasn’t a very likable character.

I better get to sleep before I convince myself that Teddy could reappear in a sequel that’s set in Italy and reunites all the weird characters from that earlier novel . . . who, as I think about it, already bear too much of a resemblance to my reimagined classmates here in Abruzzo.  Since readers weren’t even that interested in the original book, there is certainly no call for a sequel.

So back to sleep I go. I will report on the real cooking classes in an upcoming blog.

Please check out all my novels in either paperback or Kindle format, including The Long Table Dinner. All titles are available to read for free to Amazon Prime subscribers. www.amazon.com/author/dennisfrahmann