a belated festivus post

So, if you're here reading this, chances are you know about my deep and abiding love for Italy. I went on a whim, instead of transferring, to stay in a castle and study poetry. Luckily my German classes paid off, since the castle was in the northern part of the country, up in the Alps in a land that was - like me - more Germanic than Italian. I was the translator for our group; my German got a practical work-out talking to shop owners and buying bread at the Saturday market.


The twelve of us studied with the offspring of Ezra Pound, and during the week our breakfasts and lunches were taken care of (and dinner, on workdays). As I've mentioned before, being polite has always trumped my pickiness, and because of this I tried all sorts of things that I would not have otherwise. Like wild boar.

Spätzle became my favorite food there, one I sought out in restaurants and hoped B. (who made our lunches and work-day dinners) would make again. I found it in the supermarket back in Greensboro, when I got back to the States, but something about buying it from the store like that seemed wrong. I knew it wouldn't live up.


This food has been on my mind for almost four years. (Also, jeez, how has that much time passed?) Once I got The Joy of Cooking, I darted back to the index to see if they had a spätzle recipe. And of course, they did. I still didn't make it. I'm not sure what I was waiting for, but I needed an occasion to make it. A colander, too, since traditionally you push the dough through the colander; unfortunately the holes on my colander were too small. Alas and alack.

Finally, the time was right. I hosted last year's (!) Festivus party, sating both my desire to make spätzle and my desire to have a dinner party. My spätzle turned out more misshapen than I remembered them in Europe, but it didn't really matter as none of my guests had heard of the dish before. (I also wasn't able to get any pictures of the process since I was more concerned with getting everything ready at the same time, but this way you get that goofy picture of me four years ago!)

Plus, if I may say so, it was pretty delicious! Food was served and everyone went silent, except for the occasional mmmms.


Spätzle
adapted from Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home

This dish is somewhere between dumplings and noodles. It's a fantastic dish for winter, because it's fairly hearty and filling, and it'll warm you up. Trust me, those Alpine folk know how to keep you warm. And well-fed.

1 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp salt
pinch of nutmeg
pinch of black pepper
2 large eggs
1/2 cup milk
pat of butter

Combine flour, salt, nutmeg, pepper, eggs, and milk in a medium bowl, mixing well. The dough is going to be pretty sticky. Bring some water to a boil. This is the point where, if you have a colander with large enough holes, you could push the dough through them. If you don't, however, you can just drop the dough into the water with a small spoon.

Simmer and cook for about five minutes. Use a slotted spoon to transfer the spätzle to a serving dish. As you're doing so, add butter every now and then to melt in the dish.

working with your hands

I flew across the Atlantic at age 19, eager and anxious to start my life in Italy. Everything seemed perfect - poetry, medieval history, set in a background of the Italian Alps - except one thing: workday. The students at Brunnenburg were required to put in one day of labor a week in the vineyards or elsewhere in the castle. I thought I would hate it. My experiences with working with my hands were few and far between, mostly consisting of pulling stinging nettles out of rose bush beds at our old house in Florida.

But Italy transformed me, helped me grow up - in many different ways and especially in this one, in taking joy working with my hands. It wasn't immediate: the first few workdays the girls were set to pruning pear trees - the fruit used for schnapps - while the boys did some heavy lifting. We bundled up against the Alpine winter, snug in my Carhartt overalls, waking up for a quick breakfast (usually bread smeared with Nutella and a glass of milk) before heading out to collect our assignments. After weeks of Nik (the youngest of the castle family, around our age) telling us to prune pear tree after pear tree, we were ready to throw him off the side of the mountain.


On workday, the family fed us all day: the aforementioned breakfast, a yogurt break on the mountainside, lunch, and dinner accompanied by a bottle per table of the wine made at the castle, a Vernatch. It's possible that this bribery helped me to like workday more and more, but it was also the feeling of exhausted satisfaction, the muscle-soreness, that comes with a day of doing physical labor. The feeling only increased once it began getting minutely warmer and we started working on the vineyards themselves. They wound up being my favorite place to work; we also wound up sweeping the entire castle, which also functions as an agricultural museum.

Three and a half years after that first transatlantic flight, working with my hands interests me more than ever. I never thought I would miss workday, but - like I said - Italy changed me. It was there that a tiny spark started - there that I started cooking (albeit in minor ways), there that I, uh, learned to love cleaning. (Let me explain: some of our cohabitators did not exactly shine in the areas of doing their own dishes or properly sorting their trash, despite the signs clearly designating trash, recycling, compost, etc. So it fell to a few of us to make sure our kitchen remained liveable.) A large part of my problem with anxiety comes from overthinking things, but slowing down and doing something physical - making scones or cookies, cleaning my apartment - usually forces me to quit worrying, at least for a little bit.


(I also got a baby Holga over the weekend, for $5, and I am just thrilled. I can't wait to finish up my test roll and get them developed. Expect more on this!)

Surprising salvation

Sometimes I miss Italy more than I can stand. Sometimes I get sick with nostalgia; it's not that it was easy to be in Italy but it was safe. (Of course I reconstruct the past. We have to.)

I wasn't supposed to end up in Italy. I had no ties there. After a somewhat-awful first year at college, I figured I needed to transfer - until I found the Brunnenburg program. Students lived in the castle croft, were taught by Ezra Pound's daughter and grandson, and worked on the castle vinyard. I was sold. The following fall, I applied, but the whole process seemed like a joke to me; I was going to Italy, and I knew it more than I had really known anything before. I remember arriving at the castle, dead of night after a day of waiting in the Flughafen München, turned around after having traveled by bus to Dorf Tirol, then walking down the road to Schloss Brunnenburg itself. I remember sitting in the living room against the wall, feeling exhausted and that peculiar kind of claustrophobia engendered by sky-touching mountains. More than that, I felt home.

My little croft room remains one of my favorite places I've lived, and it seemed to me like I could go on living there forever, or at least longer than the semester I was there. All I wanted was to hole up, write poetry (and work on my German), and take long walks exploring the Alpine villages. I wanted to read the Cantos and the Odyssey until they became part of me. Our first full day there, we toured the castle and the two English majors on the trip - Anna and myself - nearly swooned over the walls and walls of bookshelves. We were taught the Cantos by Ezra Pound's daughter, who tried (and succeeded, in a few instances) to instill a love for them in us; her son taught us about agro-archeology and medieval literature; and finally, our faculty leader taught us wilderness medicine.

--

I wrote most of that last week sometime, and while I am usually in a state of missing Italy, it's not always as strong as that. It has been a little over three years since I flew back over the Atlantic, reading The Passion by Jeanette Winterson and missing Venice (and the rest of it) with everything I had. I've lost the thread of that earlier post and now it's hard for me to write about Italy, because there is so much to say. Italy was my growing up, in some ways, and it was certainly my salvation. You'll hear more about Italy, I'm sure, but for now, enjoy Schloss Brunnenburg:



What thou lovest well remains,
the rest is dross
What thou lov'st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov'st well is thy true heritage

(thanks to Ezra Pound, for all of it, but especially the above passage from the Cantos)