Cooking in Tuscany, in Villa Maddalena
Marcia Gamble Hadley, 2006
The Villa kitchen, breakfast room, dining room and terraces have been designed by someone who loves to cook and to entertain ~ me. Enjoy the experience of cooking with fresh Tuscan ingredients, sipping local wine and savoring our wonderful local olive oil. Create memorable feasts with locally raised meats, locally made cheeses, and traditional unsalted Tuscan bread from the village bakery. Even simple foods, enjoyed in the garden at dusk, will connect you to the character of the place. Memories of the smallest daily pleasures may remain with you for years. I hope so.
The Villa is a family home; there are no mints on the pillows, and no video check-out. But we love our house and our village and the life that occurs here. Settle in, and you will begin to hear the rhythms of the house, of the village, and the ancient countryside, lived in since long before the Roman Empire.
The wood grill in the kitchen works beautifully with either charcoal (carbone) from the Coop or wood, which is stored in the cantina at the end of the kitchen. Bruschetta, vegetables, meats, even special soft cheeses made for grilling take on a special character when you have built the fire and waited for the coals to become ‘just right.’ Or make a small fire on a cool spring or fall morning, just to give a warm greeting to everyone as they come down for their coffee. By spring of 2007, the fireplace in the breakfast room will be working and your morning fire can be made here. In the fall evenings, you’ll be able to roast chestnuts and sip grappa.
There are tea candles, votives and tapers, together with 5 sizes of glasses to enjoy the wines, liqueurs and grappas of Italy. There are also enclosed lanterns to use in the garden. I keep these in the glass-fronted cabinet in the dining room. Extra dishes are in this cabinet, too. Table cloths and placemats are in the wide drawers in the kitchen. There are hand-painted Deruta serving bowls and platters to enliven the table setting.
Every herb I can think of that can be grown in Tuscany is growing in the garden for your use. Most are thriving, but the two kinds of parsley are not happy, for some reason. If you have an especially green thumb, talk to the parsley, please!
Though the garden plot – ‘orto’ – is small, throughout the summer there are tomatoes, zucchini, zucchini flowers for stuffing (try it!), artichokes, beans, cucumbers, lettuces, whatever the garden plan for the year dictates and the weather permits. Help yourself. If you use a lettuce, buy a 6-pak at the Coop or one of the village markets and put a few back!! The garden has all of its original fruit trees and most of its original grape vines, belladonna lilies and tea roses. I’ve added some new table grapes which will begin to produce in a year or so. During the summer and early fall you will find abundant golden plums, apricots and black figs. The purple plums seem suited for baking and stewing only, but they are beautiful to look at. Enjoy!!
Over the years I have brought favorite cook books from my stateside library. There is a list below of books that are in the Villa—please feel free to enjoy them.. Many of them are out of print. Some I have had for many years, others I’ve found through on-line used book stores.* I even bought one from Australia. I try to keep these all in the little bookcase in the room I call “Bibliotecca,” the one with the large round table and pillow-filled day beds, a kind of get-away reading room, on the second floor. This is my office when I am home. In case your interests are not entirely restricted to food, there are also guide books, books on Italian gardens, art design, olive oil, and assorted light reading and novels, some gifts from guests. I keep local maps in the top right drawer of the credenza in this room.
Use the little tettoia, or garden pavilion in the corner of the garden, overlooking the valley to greet the day with espresso or for sampling cheeses and sipping wine at twilight. The wide edges of the planters serve nicely as buffets ~there’s room for a few candles, a table cloth and an array of wonderful antipasti. Add music from the CD player, and just melt in place. Depending on the temperature, enjoy lovely candlelit dinners in the dining room or on the terrace. At the end of the evening, take your dessert or vin santo on the little upper terrace. Look out over the valley, and listen.
Have fun and enjoy The Villa!!!
The Culinary Library
“A Table in Tuscany,” Leslie Forbes
“Cooking the Roman Way,” David Downie
“More Classic Italian Cooking,” Marcella Hazan
“Marcella Says,” Marcella Hazan
“Marcella’s Italian Kitchen,” Marcella Hazan
“Foods of Tuscany,” Giuliano Bugialli
“Foods of Italy,” Giuliano Bugialli
“The Food of ITALY,” Murdoch Books
“Flavors of Tuscany,” Nancy Harmon Jenkins
“Tuscan Food and Folklore,” Jeni Wright
“The Italian Country Table,” Lynee Rossetto Kasper
“The Il Fornaio Baking Book,” Franco Galli
“Cucina Siciliana,” Clarrisa Hyman
For those who have always wanted to read Elizabeth David, but have never had the time to sit quietly and savor.
“Summer Cooking"
“Italian Food”
“A Book of Mediterranean Food”
“Is There Nutmeg in the House”
“An Omelette and a Glass of Wine”
“French Provincial Cooking”
To experiment with vegetarian menus using the amazing ingredients and flavors of Tuscany
“The Greens Cookbook,” Deborah Madison
“Fields of Greens,” Anne Somerville