She is harder core than I am. I remember once, of a leisurely autumnal evening's passeggiato in Siena--I had just moved into a shared-living villa in the valley between the old city backgate and l'Osservanze (the Franciscan church of a Franciscan monastery, up on a kind of bluff, o'erlooking us), and, knowing that my landlord (a majestic, for-real Syracusan Sicilian aristocrat, who considered himself something of an expatriate in Tuscany) lived on a farm a few kilometers away, I was somewhat surprised to find him participating in the local traditional townspeople's Evening Stroll. So chatting with him, and describing myself, I said humbly that I was a contadino (peasant), which he would not allow. "How far is the barn and cowshed from the house you lived in on the farm you grew up on?" And I had to admit that they were several hundred feet apart. "Adesso," he said, "sei Agricoltore, no Contadino."
"Well," said I, emboldened, "how do people get so they can live that close to cowshit?"
And he said, in Italian, what is possibly the funniest thing anybody has ever said to me: "There are stinks which kill, but cowshit isn't one of them."
So anyway, I've just watched Gina Pettiti artfully prepare and artlessly, when it was done, partially consume, a (traditional on Christmas Eve) dried-cod Italian soup, whose ingredients include three large eels (about as much eel, chopped up, as rehydrated and desalinated codfish, likewise chopped); taking big bites of eel (fully cooked, to be sure).
My first instinctual reactions were to vomit or to faint, but I did neither. Instead, I made myself a mug of strong, good tea, and I reflected on what my aristocratic Sicilian landlord told me once long ago, about how we get used to things. I think that Mrs. Pettiti is a Farmwife.
