Linked by culture, blood, tradition, compassion, empathy and love, four rural women compose the Thursday Night Umbrian Supper Club. Their ages ranging from fifty-two to somewhere beyond eighty, they gather each week in a derelict stone house in the hills above Orvieto to cook, to eat, to drink and to talk. In another epoch – less distant in these parts than one might imagine – they would have been the women who gathered by a river to scrub clothes on stones or sat among meadow weeds to mend them, waiting for the weekly bread to bake in a communal oven. The four are linked, too, by their work, each one having earned her bread by making it. More specifically, the four are or were professional cooks who practise – or practised in the past – genuine Umbrian culinary traditions.
Inclined to things practical which, in their hands, somehow become also things romantic, the women say that gathering together by the fire and around the table is where one finds antidotes to life’s caprice. A good supper, they are convinced, restores to us the small delights that the day ransacks. Through crisis and catastrophe and rare moments of uninterrupted joy, it’s this round, clean and imperishable wisdom that sustains them: cook well, eat well and talk well with people who are significant to your life.
Long after I’d come to live in Orvieto and been befriended by the club’s matriarch, she risked making room for me at the Thursday table. The only ‘stranger’ among them, it wanted only time before I became of them, foraging, harvesting, making do, listening, watching, learning, enacting a few of my own ways and means upon them.
The narrative has a dual thrust: in exuberant detail it recounts what we cooked and ate and drank and, in at least as exuberant detail, it tells the stories of the women’s lives: fidelity, aging, men and aging, sexuality, aging men and sexuality, aging women and sexuality, children, abandonment, destiny, death, the Mafia and Mother Church being among the subjects explored.
‘Vivi per sempre, live forever,’ we’d say, as we set to work on the preparations for a meal. ‘Live forever,’ we’d say again, holding each other’s hands around the table, passing around loaves of still-warm, wood-baked bread, pouring out jug after jug of our own chewy, teeth-staining red, benevolence setting the scene for dining but, as much, for storytelling, invigorating memory, soothing rancour and even, once in a while, illuminating a fear long stuck in the heart tight as the stone in an unripe plum.
Spoken by Miranda one evening, maybe it’s these lines that can best introduce you to the Thursday Night Umbrian Supper Club:
I don’t know how much more I could have learned about the point of life had I wandered farther away than the eight kilometres from where I was born and have lived for all my life to where I’m sitting right now. I think that wherever I might have gone I would have found you. Souls like you. We are magnificently the same. Not only us, all of us. Without pain, without fear, who would any one of us have become, what would we have to show for having lived? Any five women, wherever, whomever, put them together at supper around a fire and, ecco, ci saremo, there we’ll be. The point of life is to do what we’re doing right now. What we did yesterday, what we’ll do with what’s left of our time. Surely we are not barren of fantasy or dreams and yet none of us seem to be swanking about, reaching for great things or, worse, perceiving ourselves to be doing great things. There are no great things. After the myth of security, the second greatest myth ever inflicted on humans is the myth that we were meant to triumph. How wonderful it is to be content with holding hands around this mangled old table, with some nice bread, some wine, a candle and a fire. A blessed sleep waiting.
The narrative is set in the years 2004 through 2008.