Pears, Pollo, Positano

Pears. That’s all I have to say.


They fall in the middle of the night with a thunderous crash, sounding like someone’s head being bashed open. The tree in our courtyard is laden with summer fruit: inedible pears that show years of botanical neglect. The orange and lime and lemon trees are in equal disrepair. Rick, the professor-botanist-arborist, would be mortified, clucking his tongue and muttering the Latin names of the sooty mold and scale and various other diseases wracking these poor trees. All night long we listen to the rotten fruit crash down through the canopy… a great whacking crash and then a gory splitting sound. Since we haven’t been sleeping very well on account of Clare Mae’s seemingly endless jetlag, we just lay and listen all night. (I’m sure that last sentence isn’t grammatically correct, but I don’t have Strunk and White with me, and honestly, after that last bottle of Pinot Grigio, I don’t rightly care! Sorry, Gary.)

So, as Tom said, we had the most blissful meal ever, after a harrowing hunt for poultry this morning. We scaled the cliff, looking for an alimentari open on a Monday (for some reason, not so much) and finally found one with meat set out for sale. After puzzling over what could have been turkey and what could have been the largest chicken I’ve ever seen (and the only whole chicken offered for sale) we simply pointed and said “questo pollo, tutto”. Which basically means, I’m a fat American, hand over that humongous bird.

I wasn’t really looking when the butcher smiled and wrapped it up, but when we got home and I started to prepare it, I was slightly aghast. The poor thing had only recently met its fate, and there were still feathers attached. Its legs were lopped off just before its dinosaur feet and it looked rather… well, chickenish. Now, I just finished Michael Pollan’s book “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” which follows four meals through the food chain to trace our culinary, economical, and biological attachment to our meals, and trust me, I know where this chicken had last been. At first I was dismayed, plucking out feathers and quills left over from the wash, but as I prepared it I thought: this is probably going to be the chickeniest chicken I have ever had. And you know what: it was. The butcher had stuffed its cavity with rosemary and all it did was throw sea salt, pepper, and lemon into it and roast it hot. That, along with potatoes, fennel, and baby onions made this Glorified Grotto into a Gastronomia. I never eat chicken skin, and I was filching off the last shreds as Tom laid designs on it. I dipped my unsalted bread in the juices. I ran my fingers through the roasted lemons and licked. MAMA MIA. I’m never comin’ home to slimy chicken and shrink wrapped beef again!! No wonder Italy was the birthplace of the slow food movement. No wonder we long for the “ideal” Italian. Trust me, nothing you’ve ever tasted at home equates. It can’t. Italian food holds the tilth of the soil, the taste of the salt air, and the simple state of mind of the farmer that killed the animal. No factory farmed American food can compare. Ever.