I bought a house in Italy

with a recipe for Tuscan ragù

A little over a half-century ago, I bought a house in Italy. A stone-walled cottage in an extreme state of disrepair, it sat on a hilltop in the middle of the low mountains, called the montagna cortonese, a spur of the Appenines that rises above the Val di Chiana to form a boundary between Tuscany and Umbria. This house, which we called with cavalier disregard for accuracy “the farm,” came with 10 hectares (that’s about 25 acres) of land, much of which had never been cultivated because of the steep terrain that dropped down to the stream below and did not easily yield to the plow. A small part of the hillside had been terraced long ago but the dry-stone walls had long since tumbled under the onslaught of nettles, wild blackberry vines, and an impenetrable tangle of low-growing heather, gorse, and scrub oak. And for the rest of the terrain, no one had lived here, no one had farmed here, for such a long time that the same macchia of nettles and blackberries grew right up to the front steps of the house and had to be swiped away with a sickle before we could approach it for inspection.

Sangiovese grapes, overgrown, unpruned, untended, still bearing.

Still, there were grapevines, indicating that someone had lived here once, had picked the grapes and stomped them into wine and perhaps enjoyed a glass or two or three on chilly winter nights as they huddled by the fire. Perhaps. They seemed to be sangiovese grapes, the ubiquitous and all-purpose Tuscan variety that has an ancient and dignified history.

I try to remember the house as we found it. It was not unique, far from it. In fact, it was what’s called a casa di contadina, typical of the way people had lived in these remote mountain communities for several centuries, if not longer, possibly going back to Etruscan times. The ground floor was given over to shelter for the animals, with a pig stye at the far end of the house, a chicken coop at the near end, and in between various unconnected storerooms, a cantina for the wine barrels, and stalls for the other animals that were kept here at one time or another—a mule for sure, or maybe a horse, perhaps a cow, and a byre where the sheep congregated at night for protection after daytime grazing in the broad meadow that stretched between the house and the forest.

On the floor above the animal stalls, the first floor in European parlance, was the family living space, one large room with a fireplace that covered an inside wall, and three separate chambers, very small, presumably bedrooms. Then, up a sloping ladder, was the attic, open and airy and probably very cold in winter when the tramontana, the north wind, blew down off the mountain. There in a corner we found a pile of dried thistle heads (or were they artichokes?), presumably kept to coagulate the cheese that would have been made on site from the milk of the sheep and perhaps the cow—although the cow may have been my fantasy.

From planting to harvest, from grape to wine, everything that mattered happened outside, but everything else took place in that one main room. Cooking, eating, socializing, cheese-making, salting pork for curing, preserving tomatoes, drying beans, making up the dough for the weekly bread, keeping warm, drying clothes (and wild mushrooms) by the fire on rainy days, repairing tools, carding wool, all of these activities took place in that one large family room, which, come to think of it, was not that big.

Keep in mind that this house had no electricity and no running water. Everything that was done, was done strictly by hand.

Magic overcame the sense of rustic despair and abandonment

What drew us (I’m speaking of my former husband, the father of my children) to this abandoned and seriously run-down place? There was a magic to it that overcame the sense of rustic despair and abandonment. First of all, the position of the place, which we learned was called Pian d’Arcello—in a valley that began as a tight cut in the mountain wall high to the west and descended eastward in a gradually widening vee that ended, some miles distant in the Upper Tiber valley. Pian d’Arcello, like its near neighbor Toppello, sits on a low hill in the middle of that valley and I came to believe that it had been inhabited most likely since Etruscan times. (I will confess that I once glimpsed an Etruscan at the end of my garden on a June night when the twilight still glowed at 9 o’clock and I had finished a tiring day of setting out and weeding young plants. He was bare-chested and carrying something I took to be a fishing rod as he headed calmly downhill to the stream.)

Why did I think it had been inhabited for such a long time? Because the farmhouse was in an ideal position, easy to defend from all angles, with a good source of water, both fresh spring water from the mountain and a clear stream that runs through the middle of the valley; moreover, the surrounding forest provided wood, especially charcoal, and all kinds of game, plus mushrooms and other wild edibles, while the meadow presents an exemplary spot for cultivating grains and legumes. (I realize I’m switching back and forth between present tense and past because a lot of these activities continued to this day or at least until very recently and most of them, without question, go all the way back to early farmers in these hills.)

Beginning to build the charcoal burn

Charcoal, for instance: When I saw my neighbor Bruno preparing charcoal deep in the forest in the month of May (the ground still sufficiently damp to make a charcoal burn safe) and then followed the process through the days it took to turn oak and chestnut logs into blackened coal that still retained enough of its characteristics that you could tell, from the thoroughly charred bark, exactly what kind of wood you were gazing at—when I followed that, I realized that this was a practice that went back without doubt to the Neolithic period. I had just come from three years of graduate work in ancient Mediterranean history at the American University of Beirut and was well aware that the technique of making charcoal was one of the earliest industries that humans developed, earlier than metal-working, earlier than high-fired pottery, because those later technologies required the intense heat that you get only through charcoal, not through untreated wood.

Early 5th c. BCE, bronze statuette, Etruscan boy with a pig, Metropolitan Museum of Art

And the pigs—as essential to ancient Etruscans as they had been to the farmers who once lived in this valley, and to those who still lived here, pork, mostly preserved, was the backbone of ancient and modern diets alike. Even now, more pork fat than olive oil is consumed by the people around us.

So, as it turned out, although our new neighbors were in an economic and social situation far beyond the impoverished peasantry who had deserted our “farm” a decade or more earlier, they still retained many of the habits and attitudes, especially ways of growing, preparing, cooking, and storing their food, that had been traditional here for generations. They still grew their own wheat and other grains, made their own wine and salumi, dried their legumes (fava beans, lentils, chickpeas, and New World beans), baked bread in the outside oven every week or ten days, and kept a flock of chickens, a whatever-you-call-it (a bevy?) of rabbits, and a substantial herd of pigs. No sheep, hence no dairying, and I’m not sure why they gave up sheep, perhaps it was just too much work.

But the pigs still provided the mainstay of the kitchen and the table. Every afternoon without fail, Mita, Bruno’s wife and at that point the youngest woman in the family, took her herd of seven or eight pigs on a ramble down through the forest below our house, there to graze on acorns and the roots they grubbed from the forest floor. As she strolled, she spun out wool onto a spindle. (But where did that hank of wool come from? I never asked, I’m sorry to say and now Mita is long gone.)

Owning this place, rebuilding the farmhouse (at the time we bought it, it was so dilapidated that it would have been perilous just to spend the night), learning from our neighbors who would become beloved friends, I found my life turned around, changed for the better because of the lessons I was to learn from those people and that place.

Some of the lessons were as simple as recognizing the strong, almost unyielding connection between what we eat and where we are in the world, a connection that has been broken in much of the place I come from, although there are laudable attempts to restore it. And some of the lessons were more complex, like Mita’s recipe for a ragù to go with the Sunday carbohydrate, which could be boxed pasta if someone was coming from town, or the potato gnocchi that she was so skilled at producing, or even cornmeal polenta although Bruno disliked polenta saying it reminded him too strongly of la miseria, the period of hunger between the wars when the Fascist government failed to provide a sufficiency.

Penne rigate con ragù toscano

Mita’s recipe for Sunday ragù:

No need to buy tomato puree or passato di pomodoro. You can make it yourself just by running a can of pelati, Italian canned plum tomatoes, through a food processor or using a stick blender to break them down. A favorite brand of canned San Marzano tomatoes is Gusta Rosso, available from gustiamo.com.

• 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

• 1 medium carrot, scraped and finely chopped

• 1 medium onion, finely chopped

• 1 stalk celery, preferably dark-green, finely chopped

• 1 plump garlic clove, finely chopped

• 1 sweet Italian sausage

• 1 pound lean ground beef or veal

• 1 1/2 cups tomato puree

• 2 cups whole canned tomatoes, with their liquid

• Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

• 2 bay leaves

• To garnish:

• freshly chopped flat-leaf parsley

• freshly grated parmigiano-reggiano or pecorino toscano cheese

• extra-virgin olive oil

Add the olive oil to a saucepan that will hold all the ingredients and set over medium-low heat.

Chop together the chopped carrot, onion, and celery and add to the hot olive oil. Turn the heat down if necessary and cook the vegetables gently, until they are soft but not beginning to brown. While the vegetables are cooking, open up the sausage, discarding the skin, and break up the meat with a fork.

When the vegetables are soft, add the chopped garlic and stir it in. Then add the sausage meat, further breaking it up so that it’s pretty evenly distributed throughout. Continue cooking and stirring until the sausage meat has lost its pink color, then add the ground meat and, again, break it up and distribute it evenly throughout the vegetables.

When all the meat is browned, stir in the tomato puree. Add the canned tomatoes, pulling them apart in your hands, along with all their juice. Add salt, pepper, and the bayleaves. Bring to a simmer, lower the heat to medium-low, and cook at a steady, even, but not vigorous bubble for about half an hour, or until the tomatoes have cooked down to a thick sauce. If the sauce gets too thick, stir in a few tablespoons of water or of a red Tuscan wine, sangiovese if you have it. If the sauce doesn’t thicken sufficiently, raise the heat to medium and continue cooking, uncovered, until it reaches the consistency you want.

You can use the sauce immediately, first removing the bay leaves, but you can also make the ragù well in advance and refrigerate or even freeze it. When you do serve it, be sure to garnish with chopped parsley and a good dollop of your best extra-virgin, and pass a bowl of grated cheese to be added at the table.

Polenta con ragù toscano