"Would you like something absolutely free?"
Mr HG, "Well, how kind. Might it be.....?" hesitates.
Butcher, "It's a lamb's head. For Easter.'
"Now that is astonishingly kind. The brain, particularly, but the eyes too, have always been so sought after."
"I'll wrap it for you then."
"There is the problem of the Signora. Can I, I ask myself, put a lamb's head in the fridge?"
'Ears and everything." urged the butcher helpfully. "Or I could trim it a bit".
'Between you and me, almost nothing could be nicer. But you know how it is. No shocks when the fridge door is opened. I'm going to have to pass. The kitchen is not run as once it was."
"Just wanted to let you have it if you liked it. Severino, You?"
Honestly. If I had opened the fridge door this morning, all geared up to cook Easter day lunch, and found a little lamb's head, ears and everything, I'd have fainted clean away.
3 comments:
I think I might have fainted, too.
Or at least felt as if I might.
But how sqeamish we have become now that we no longer need to eat everything that's edible.
Do they still do "Uccellini" in your part of Italy? Complete with bones and all?
Italians are bright and glittering and so cruel. The light, the heat, the cold, the judgments, the remarks. They walk through life, sword in hand, ever di bella presenza, black curls, rapier ready at all and any turn. But old, so old and wearied of all the things they have seen and done. For them there will never be bright morning again, despite their songs and bravura.
I think they would welcome feeling squeamish, or fainting clean away, but all that is behind them now. They have the t-shirt for every activity under their cruel sun. And yes, not only do they do uccellini bones and all, they say with weary courtesy, 'there is vitellino di latte for the signora ; we know she will be unhappy about the songbirds.' As if I will not be choking on the white veal they have provided for my squeamish tastes.
It's a good thing I received that iron discipline that a Catholic upbringing bestows. On Good Friday there was me and R. trying to explain the awfulness of the 3 hour service to an amazed Italian Catholic audience. The rest of the world has added a Puritan aspect to Roman Catholicism that would never be countenanced here.
Not sure I agree about the awfulness of the three-hour service.
When I was a chorister I found it rather austere and beautiful: the readings, in those marvellous stately phrases that we all loved so much, building to their well-known but still dreadful cunclusion; simple - well, relatively simple - music that we didn't have to work too hard on (many renderings of that chorale tune of Bach's, iirc; purple cloth, shrouded crosses. And nobody except us and the clergy stayed for the whole thing, there was constant quiet footfall of coming and going.
Not awful at all. Aweful, maybe.
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