For cooks and tourists alike, Italy is a culinary Eden. A siren calls, and that siren is a rotund nonna who offers traditional cooking secrets while chastising you for not eating enough. I was not immune to her song. In a damp February in Brooklyn, I began dreaming of her. I had secured my first job as a pastry cook after teaching myself to pipe and caramelize from jaunty vloggers on YouTube. But after months of long production days in a windowless basement, I decided to go out on my own, spending the winter hosting pop-up events at restaurants, making hundreds of pastries alone in my galley kitchen. I felt like an overgrown child playacting as a baker, constantly spilling flour and scorching oil, bungling techniques I’d watched chefs online execute with ease. I was rootless and isolated. I wanted to be part of something larger: a tradition. I wanted to go where legions of chefs and traveling gourmands had gone before me, to learn the ways of authentic Tuscan cooking.
Italy would be where I would whisk, mix, and knead my way into an idealized self. If I could get there, I would shed my anxious energy and compulsive need for affirmation, my nasty addiction to the cool-mint vape. I would slow down; I would journal. I would become tan and strong from simple pastas. I would eat intuitively — no more take-out burritos in the middle of the night, no more nubby cheeses scrounged from the bowels of the fridge. If I could find a way to go to Italy, I would become a real baker.
I found an internship through Jeff, a private chef who, in lieu of trailing his clients to their estates in the Hamptons, worked his summer months in Tuscany. Jeff described a family-run cooking school and agriturismo — a rural hotel with an emphasis on sustainability — on the grounds of a charming villa. He mentioned lemon-colored walls and a small village just a thirty-minute walk away. I’d be in charge of breakfast pastries and miscellaneous kitchen tasks. They couldn’t pay me, he said, but I’d be roomed, boarded, and fed. And I would become rich in the secrets of rural Tuscan cooking. Ordinarily, they only took culinary-school graduates, but because of the pandemic, they would make an exception. I said yes before he even made the offer. I imagined this would be exactly the kind of traditional training I needed. “When can I arrive?” I asked, fantasizing about Instagrammable sunflower fields and tiramisu with cream thick and golden from European eggs — the envy it would all inspire.
And oh, the pleasure of having a fantasy actualized! I arrived in Siena early on a bright June morning, to crowds of Italians barking at each other and smoking furiously. A twenty-minute taxi ride, reduced to ten by the Italian cadence, took me through rambling farmland flanked by dramatic rocky mountains. The villa looked exactly like the Google Street View I had spent the past three months lurking on. The building had the stately gravitas of a different century, a historic immaculacy that could only be preserved by a family who had tended it for generations. Ciao, New York, I thought as I lugged my suitcase up the ancient steps. I’ve arrived in a place with Real Culture.
I was shown to my little room above the kitchen, which was spare and monastic. A loquat tree dense with fruit stood outside my window. After a nap, I was given a tour by Matteo, the proprietress’s thirtysomething son and the resident pastry chef. (A family affair! So authentic!) He was handsome and aware of it, striding across the grounds with an air of pompous ease while I tottered alongside him. “Tell me about your kitchen experience,” he said as we passed the stables. Suddenly anxious, I mumbled that I was a novice baker, that I had only worked in two restaurants, that I mainly did pop-ups in Brooklyn, but I would work hard. He nodded impassively as we made our way back toward the kitchen, where Maria, the proprietress and chef herself, was standing in the doorway, watching us approach. She was broad, sixty-five or so, with bottle-blond hair and wide eyes. “This is the intern,” Matteo said to his mother. She looked me up and down as I awkwardly smoothed my equally fake blond hair. Then, in loud, mellifluously accented English, she announced, “You are a skeleton — we will fix this.” Oh, the delight! The nonna fully embodied! The mamma in the kitchen whom I had come all this way for. I hadn’t learned to cook from my own mother; I had grown up on frozen fish sticks and samosas. I resolved that Maria would identify with me as a kind of orphaned daughter, a culturally impoverished Brooklynite in need of a maternal guide and an agriturismo family.
My first morning in the prep kitchen, immaculate and outfitted entirely with KitchenAid appliances, I walked in with my knives sharpened and my apron starched. Jeff, the jovial native New Yorker who had secured my position here, gave me the rundown. Each Sunday, a group of guests would arrive. They would stay at the agriturismo for a week and learn traditional cooking techniques. They would take classes in the morning and go on excursions in the afternoon, but dining was the real focus. Each lunch would be four courses and each dinner would be six. My main responsibility would be to spend meals with the guests, most of whom were American. Beforehand, I would sweep away the wisteria blossoms that fell, set the long table, and serve the guests each course. Then, I would sit with them. I was to make polite conversation, refill water glasses, clear plates. But most importantly, I was to eat, in front of them, alongside them — to enjoy the fruits of our kitchen labor, the bounty we were creating. “We want them to see you have a nice time,” he said. “It should feel like they’re part of a big Italian family.”
I was used to nibbling the burnt bits at the end of a shift or devouring a surly power bar before a pop-up, so a mandate to sit at the table seemed to me an extension of paradise incarnate. I wondered if dining with guests was a traditional part of culinary training in Italy; I had thought I’d be part of the kitchen family, that we would share communal meals and conspiratorial camaraderie. I didn’t love the idea of always eating on display, but getting multicourse meals multiple times a day was an undeniable luxury.
Jeff told me to spend some time familiarizing myself with the kitchen layout, so I wandered around trying to look purposeful, examining the bins of equipment as if I could possibly memorize their contents. At 11:00 a.m., Matteo announced that a van ferrying the guests from the airport was on its way to the villa. It would be arriving at noon on the dot. My first task was to set the table with heavy, gold-rimmed china. I placed myself at the tail end, closest to the kitchen.
The van pulled up to the entrance of the building, and behemoth suitcases, large floppy hats, and bottles of Smartwater sailed out of the trunk. Here were the guests, and I felt tenderly toward them, these side characters in my epicurean safari. Would they be gourmets, like me, with sophisticated palates and an air of cosmopolitanism, eager to immerse themselves fully in this ancestral land of bounty and beauty? In Brooklyn, I had met my closest friends at dinner parties, where making and consuming food together was a path to intimacy. I wondered if this would feel the same.
The kitchen crew stood in a line to greet them, shaking their hands and offering introductions. All of that luggage belonged to only two of them: a former film executive with violet-ringed eyes who told me, in a thick New York accent, that he was Italian by way of his grandmother but couldn’t find the documents to get his citizenship; and his wife, who barely spoke above a whisper. The other pair were two gaunt sixtysomething women who had taken four flights to arrive. The airline had lost their bags. The louder one, Judy, announced, “I’m thirteen years sober, and the suitcases aren’t going to change that,” but there was a threat in her stare. It was her twelfth time visiting the agriturismo, which I took to be a promising sign. If a guest would return that frequently to the same tiny place in all of Italy, it had to be exceptional.
Straightaway, we went to the table for lunch, my very first at the villa. Maria had cooked an appetizer of risotto with prosciutto and peas and an entrée of eggplant parmigiana. I carried the plates, one by one, from the kitchen, feeling like I was part of a ceremony as the guests gazed on with reverence. As I sat down, I prepared myself to be awestruck by the rice, which had come straight from its ancient source, from the hands of the nonna herself. I took a bite. It was creamy and rich and slightly too salty. In Brooklyn, I was notorious among friends for decrying popular dishes, but here, I willed my criticism away. I decided that all the food here would have more salt than I was used to but that it was the correct amount: this was the Platonic ideal of pasta.
The afternoon passed swiftly, a whirlwind of folding napkins, gathering heavy plates, and scrubbing the kitchen while the guests recovered from their travels. Then we were back at the table again, as if no time had passed. Jeff had told me that drinking was generally abundant, but at dinner there were no wineglasses. Judy refused to have them in her presence, as if the slightest provocation would do her in. I didn’t miss it; I was working, cramming down each course as quickly as possible so that I might be ready to serve the next. While the guests waited, I bounded between the table and the kitchen, helping Matteo carry out dish after elegant dish. “For our third course” — Matteo paused theatrically — “a simple bruschetta of tomatoes and bell pepper with local extra-virgin olive oil and salt and pepper.”
“What kind of peppers are they?” Judy asked, her mouth full.
“Bell,” Matteo said.
“Ahhhh,” she sighed, as if this were a stunning epiphany.
“And what kind of oil is this?” the former film executive asked. “It’s so different.”
“Extra-virgin olive oil from the farm in town.”
As we tucked into the third course, I tried to make conversation with the guests, but they were so lost in their culinary reveries that my comments only seemed to register when they were about the food. “I want the intern’s opinion,” said Judy over pureed cod piped into a spicy fried pepper. “It’s very balanced,” I said, even though I thought it was a strange combination. “I love the interplay of textures,” I added, a phrase I had learned from Top Chef.
By the fourth course — pesto genovese with cloudlike dollops of sheep’s-milk ricotta — I was completely full. But when I glanced at Maria, our host at the head of the table, I saw that she was staring at my pasta, eyes narrowed. I forged ahead. I would lick my plate and hold it up in triumph if that was how I might win her approval. After cleanup in the kitchen, I lurched back to my room, feeling heavy and vaguely uneasy. But then I looked up and noticed the specks of light on the mountain, the small towns descending into fields, the dusky foreign sky. Italia.
The weeks were governed by a brisk and orderly schedule. Each day, the staff would provide cooking demonstrations in the morning, followed by a hands-on pasta-making tutorial for the guests. Thursdays and Fridays were for group trips: truffle hunting, a visit to a local olive oil factory. On the last evening there would be a final dinner and graduation ceremony for the students, who paid four thousand euros per person for a certificate declaring their proficiency in Tuscan cuisine, designed by Maria and printed in the office.
I began the mornings by serving American-style pastries to the guests, who arrived at the table with an air of entitled bliss and urgent entreaties for cappuccino. I had asked Matteo if he had any traditional Italian specialties he’d like me to make, expecting to be bestowed with a tattered book of wisdom, but he instructed me to make banana bread and carrot cake from my own recipes. I worried that I was giving off a desperate she-made-a-lot-of-banana-bread-during-COVID vibe and that the true Italian cooking was only to be done by the Italians, but I resolved that my time for cannoli would come. Jeff, I had discovered, did not cook the meals; instead, he accompanied guests on their afternoon outings and provided the demonstrations for crème brûlée (a mysterious French addition to the Tuscan tutorials). When breakfast was over, I ferried the coffee cups to the sink, swept away crumbs, and then corralled the guests into the teaching kitchen. They crowded around the demonstration and whipped out their iPhones to film Matteo as he showed off his gelato technique: vigorously whisking fior di latte custard and wriggling his mustache in time with their groans of delight.
While the guests took a midmorning break to drink espresso and laze in the sun, I set up each of their “workstations” with a pasta maker and a perfect round of flour and yolks. The class returned quietly, as if readying for church, and waited for Maria to enter. “First I was born,” she began, “and then I learned tagliatelle.” As she demonstrated how to properly form the long strands and then various stuffed pastas, she said things like “The dough will talk to you” and “This pasta is your mother.” I lurked in the back of the classroom watching. Her righteous maternalism seemed at odds with the commercial setting and the guests’ garb — garish red aprons emblazoned with “Sponsored by De Cecco.” Still, the movement of her fingers was nearly holy. Hers were the hands of someone with centuries of knowledge, a nonna who had learned from her own nonna how to knead and roll and fold. The guests, meanwhile, looked like unruly toddlers with Play-Doh, presenting their lumpy shapes to Maria and waiting for their participation stars.
When the lesson was over, I finished shaping the pasta to serve for lunch, cursing my clumsy, American hands and the thick tagliatelle that they churned out. Then I frantically made place settings, scraped flour from the workroom floor, and grabbed sparkling water and olive oil, then brought them to the table, wiping my sweat on the fine linen napkin as I assumed my place. A soft farmer cheese and raw tuna belly to start, then tagliatelle as appetizer, pork loin as entrée, an apricot sorbet course, and finally a panna cotta. I tried to eat as much as I could, to put on a good show, even as I dreaded feeling slow and heavy at work in the kitchen after.
“There are three full cups of olive oil in our pasta sauce,” Maria, at the head of the table, said proudly, holding up a platter of gnocchi swimming in tomato. The guests gazed at the pasta as if it were one of the world’s wonders. “These are high-quality fats. Very healthy. It’s not like in the US.” Judy, with a tone of mystical delight, piped up to say that she normally would never eat gluten, but here in Italy, it didn’t hurt her “tummy.” I, on the other hand, was starting to wonder about the wisdom of Italian ingredients. I had been told that it was tradition in Tuscany to make bread without salt, and in homage to this history, Matteo refused it in his recipe. I chewed the tasteless bread like cud.
For all the lip service to tradition, the food here was not so different from what I had eaten at family-run joints in the suburbs of New Jersey as a child. Lasagna soaked with béchamel, eggplant parmigiana, pizza margherita, gnocchi genovese. It was fashioned to look like Michelin-style service but for the tourist’s palate. Tweezered salmon roe perched on spaghetti; mountains of shaved black truffle sat on carbonara. The meals, as a whole, oozed indulgence but often didn’t make sense. An appetizer of croquettes, pasta with wild boar, and then turkey-stuffed omelets with roasted potatoes. It was like that scene in Big Night where a useless American diner requests a side of pasta with their risotto, but now it was being served willingly and with a zippy “Buon appetito!” by an Italian family kitchen.
“Mangia, mangia, mangia,” Maria said when she saw me slowing down.
When I went to bed at the end of the day, my stomach often hurt, and I had vivid nightmares: in one, wild boars ransacked my room; in another, a monstrous strand of spaghetti colonized my liver. Maria waltzed into the kitchen one morning, a cloud of perfume settling around us, and declared that I looked exhausted. “I’ve been sleeping weirdly,” I said, embarrassed. “Very vivid dreams.” She laughed and told me this was natural. My body was just adjusting to the quantities of food.
Week two. I bopped up and down between courses, clearing and re-clearing the table six times, trying to glean what knowledge I could from the kitchen in the brief intervals I had. I was finding it increasingly uncomfortable to be working both upstairs and downstairs, moving from back of house to front: to see the food made and then to participate in the way it was consumed. One guest had a penchant for hot sauce, and he had brought his own bottle of Frank’s RedHot from New Jersey, dousing each course in a sickening dribble. Another guest always waited until everyone else had finished their plates before beginning on her own, as if the highest pleasure were to have what others did not. Matteo’s desserts were elaborate deconstructions of Italian classics: a cage of meringue suspended over a panna cotta, joconde and cream in high supply. I found them elegant but pretentious, like someone reaching for an ornate word when a smaller, simpler one would do. Still, they were wolfed down in seconds.
I had not given up on Maria. Between lessons, I sidled up to her hoping that she might take some interest in me, that she had noticed my frenzied efficiency and would say something like, “Your hearty appetite and refined palate reminds me of myself when I was young.” But every time I started a conversation, she parlayed it into an opportunity for a photo op for her booming social media account, instructing me to take pictures of her while she stirred a sauce and to make her look “blond, slender, and young.”
My own Instagram account was experiencing an enormous uptick in activity. The sunflower fields were blooming, and I looked forward to retreating to my room each evening to share pictures. My journal sat untouched next to my bed. Instead, I posted photos of the food, the wobbling panna cotta, the focaccia studded with onion, wondering if my followers would assume I was the one responsible.
In reality, I was almost always overstuffed and becoming increasingly ornery. Week two and the villa hosted twelve people, from Houston, Cleveland, Westchester, and the suburbs of Salt Lake City. With more Americans to observe, I was arriving at the unpleasant conclusion that what I found most distasteful about them — their simpering idealism and penchant for exaggerated displays of delight — were my own qualities, the ones that had instigated the trip. I was stuck with the guests from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. each day, trapped on what was essentially a stationary tour bus, in charge of distributing caviar every twenty minutes so that the travelers didn’t get feisty. But during meals, I began lingering in the kitchen to seek refuge with the Italians and to listen to the stories of Bruno, the dishwasher, who wore a bandanna with an anarchist flag on it and was missing nearly all his teeth. I hovered around his station as he told me about his time as a cook on a cruise ship, about the fiancée who had left him at the altar. I hungered for his tales, and for the grit of a true Italian kitchen.
Week three. At 8:00 a.m., I baked oat scones for breakfast, using recipes that I’d already had in my repertoire when I arrived. Beside me, Maria presided over a boiling pomodoro sauce and bantered with Jeff, who was always hovering around her. Every afternoon and evening, the long table was laid, then unmade, crusts and crumbs and wine stains everywhere, pasta an appetizer, then always the meat, and then the night quiet as we scrubbed out the remains so that the guests could start anew in the morning. Even the Italians weren’t appealing anymore. Inexplicably, Bruno had started calling me his “little dog,” patting my head and chanting “good girl” when I brought him my clean plate from the table. “Eat,” he said. “It’s good when you eat.” A nagging refrain. “Good girl, good girl.” I began avoiding him, too, and returned as early as I could to my room, where I posted images of sfogliatella I hadn’t made (“buonissimo”) and devoured the comments of delight late into the evening.
By week four, the guests were blurring together into a generic mass of pasta-hungry, khaki-wearing tropes. Each of them had a son in college studying computer science, or a second home with a kitchen undergoing a gut renovation. They all gazed at the pecorino with wonder. I took pleasure in loathing them. At the ceremony each Friday night, the guests chortled with pleasure as Maria and Matteo handed out their certificates, posing for photos one by one with looks of surprised delight, like actors who didn’t expect to win Oscars.
An Elf Bar had just happened to find its way into my suitcase, and so I took to escaping the dinner table and vaping furiously in the bathroom, praying that it might help with the constipation. I pictured my squatting, smoking form broadcast to all my Instagram followers and then to my mother, as I am wont to do in times of shame. My body felt fleshy and foreign, like it wasn’t my own.
I began to think of the table as a choreographed show, an interactive immersive performance, like Sleep No More but with more carbs and less blood. I wondered who I was in this imagining. An unpaying audience member, with an unobstructed view of the family production? Or an unpaid actor who also swept up crumbs after the performance?
One day, I was finally given a chance at the stage. It was one of the guests’ birthdays, and seeing as I was an American familiar with the garish rituals of celebration, Maria asked me to make a cake. I labored over it for hours, inquiring about the guest’s favorite fruits and spending my break time whisking custard and compote. It was towering, three tiers high, with soft rosettes of frosting — one of the most beautiful things I’d ever made. The passion fruit seeped into the raspberries, and the olive oil sponge was a bit soft, but it was homey in its imperfection, and the custard was yolk yellow from the Italian eggs. After I served and cleared the first five courses, buzzing with anticipation and nicotine, I plated the slices of cake, finishing each with an edible flower from the garden. When I arrived back at the table, I saw that Matteo had already brought out a full dessert course; picked-over tiramisu sat in front of each guest. No one could manage a single bite of the cake. Maria thanked me for making it and then surreptitiously threw her slice in the trash. “I’m trying to eat less sugar,” she said when she saw my face drawn tight.
And still, it continued. I served trays of sausage lasagna dusted in fennel pollen. I watched Maria make a vat of the rich béchamel, a pound of butter melting into the milk. I saw Jeff packing focaccias with cured meats to bring along on excursions, in case the guests got peckish. When you think about food too much, it becomes grotesque: meat in pools of its own juices, tangled spaghetti with clams like small scabs. I hadn’t felt hunger in weeks, but it was my obligation to eat. I felt heavy moving between kitchen and table as the guests got drunker and drunker, as they slumped in their seats but egged each other on to finish the crémeux. I watched Maria lowering a fat chunk of glistening steak into the dog’s mouth. The dog barely even registered the meat, just ate it dutifully. He was inured to it; every night he was pumped full of veal and velouté.
Of course, the guests were also worried about the constant indulgence. They liked to look horrified as I brought out each new course, but really they were enthralled. They were paying for pleasure. They didn’t need to finish their plates or worry about what failing to do might signal to the kitchen. At night, I pinched at my stomach, its shape changed by Maria. I wondered if she actually thought I would become a better cook by eating and serving, serving and eating. And I wondered if she cared. Each mealtime, Bruno and Maria watched me more closely, urged another slice of lardo pizza on me, responded to my hesitancy with reproach. I wondered if they were testing the authenticity of my commitment, or if this was just another form of control, the kind of power many superiors relish, but here, instead of deadlines, I was given ten courses a day.
I resented the guests, their late-night belches and easy laughter, their appetites ruling us all. Two of them liked to play rummy late into the night, and each evening I sat in the kitchen waiting for them to finish so that I could clean the table after they had tired. One night, they asked if I wanted to play. Touched, I sat down. Perhaps I had been wrong to villainize them. Their names were Sam and Anthony, and they were a couple from Phoenix. They seemed kind. Maybe they could be my allies. Didn’t the Italians think we were all the same — greedy Americans in search of our personal paradise? Why fight it? Crickets buzzed as we played, and I felt a peaceful sense of camaraderie as we each discarded and drew cards, quietly taking turns. The next morning, as I laid out the banana bread, Jeff pulled me aside and told me that I was not allowed to play card games. “You aren’t one of the guests,” he whispered.
Week five and I was at war with the dining table. I spent entire days thinking about filling it, relishing my freedom away from it, missing it and abhorring it and worrying about finishing the courses. I was serving food, or thinking about food, all day; the serenity of the landscape provided no relief. I had become my most obsessive, embittered self. The fantasy of an easeful, intuitive cook receded.
“Tuscan bliss,” I captioned an Instagram story of a pond on the property while squeezing my wan skin and suckling the Elf Bar. Idyllic Tuscany was a trick of the eye; the Italy my friends at home imagined did not exist. Where was the biodynamic cheesemaker in a dilapidated estate? Why wasn’t I being sent out to pick basil, getting to stroll to the local markets? The only groceries I’d picked up were from a massive Carrefour. The farmers market by my Brooklyn apartment had fresher produce.
I cursed Elizabeth Gilbert, cursed Under the Tuscan Sun and La Dolce Vita, cursed these people who spent their entire lives eating and called it “authentic.” I resolved to never consume Italian food again. I wanted to break the illusion of pristine food in paradise, and I wanted to take everyone down with me.
I returned my plates to the kitchen still piled high, eliciting sneers from Bruno. “Eat,” he said, again and again. Instead, I skipped full courses, breaking the pact. I sat there in stony silence, watching the gluttons, wanting them to feel my gaze as they gorged. My three knives, three forks, and two dessert spoons sat untouched as I visualized my last day, which was fast approaching. I was frantic to go home, frantic to hear anything other than the sound I now associated with Tuscany: a chorus of mastication, of guests’ jaws and my own in unison. I packed up my room in a frenzy three days early, as if my preparation would hasten the end.
On the final morning, I woke with a ballooning sense of relief. My boyfriend was traveling from Brooklyn to join me. I would have a companion for the final ritual, someone to delight with as I sat at the table as a proper patron, not an intern, for the first and only time. I would be a guest at the feast, a gracious participant with no job to execute. As I cleaned up the plates from breakfast, buoyant for the first time in days, Maria came over and handed me a piece of paper. I wondered if she had written me a note; maybe it was a recipe or a letter of gratitude. My hands trembled as I turned it over. It was the certificate given to all the guests, a simple piece of paper, eight and a half by eleven, no heavier than a normal sheet from the printer. In Gothic print, my initials were spelled out under the words “Student of Tuscan Cuisine.” “Keep in touch,” she said. I felt nauseous, then furious. I was nothing to her; I was just a guest who had traded my way, and the transaction was complete. The Elf Bar had finally died that morning, and after finishing the cleanup, I folded the paper and buried it alongside my plastic pacifier in the recycling bin.
I was outside scrolling on my phone when I heard a commotion. Bruno was speaking to Maria in rapid Italian, and I turned to see that he was holding scraps of paper: the certificate, which he had torn to pieces. He pointed at me. “She did it.” Maria looked at me, shock curdling into disgust, and then back at the certificate. We stared at each other for a moment, maybe the longest time we had really looked at each other. “You aren’t welcome at dinner,” she said. I nodded mutely, then stumbled to my room, feeling that dizzying sense of a world before and a world after, when a decision has been made and you can never go back. I called my boyfriend in tears, as if I were a beleaguered heroine. “I’ve been banished,” I said. “Pick me up as soon as you can.”
Back in my galley kitchen in New York, I return to this scene again and again. When I make tomato sauce for pasta, when I watch oil glugging into the pan, I see flashes of Maria and her pomodoro, her face twisted with revulsion. Sometimes I imagine writing her a letter of apology. I imagine telling her that I’m sorry, that the fantasy of Italy overtook me, that I lost control of myself there. I think about sending her a message on Instagram, showing her pictures of the maritozzi I’ve made since, asking her for the recipes that I never learned. Then, the vision subsides, and I serve myself a heaping plate. I eat only as much of it as I’d like.