Il Forno E-Book

alastair macleod

• Herausgeber: BookRix
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

 A young pizzeria owner feels the heat of his ovens and the pressure from his parents to get married.

Love swirls around him in the beautiful town of Tropea. Which girl  will win out?

Leseprobe

Alastair Macleod

Il Forno

To the power of love and the girls of Calabria. The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this story are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.BookRix GmbH & Co. KG81371 Munich

Il Forno

Stefano Panarello, “il forno”, is a young man of the rock, that is a native of Tropea. Unbending in his routine, each evening he is to be found in the simple kitchen of the Pizzeria Rusticana in the glare of two domed stone based brick ovens heated by brush wood. Behind him at a long scrubbed wooden table, his father Domenico and mother Donata prep the ingredients; the mozzarella, tomatoes and basil for the margheritas, for the others, as required, the peppers, the anchovies, capers, oregano, garlic, mushrooms, sweet red onion, the pepperoni. For the Marinara there were the shrimps, mussels, tuna, calamari, as fresh as could be. A bottle of the best local olive oil stands nearby.

Each request is cooked to order.

To use a wood oven is a high skill. You need to get the temperature just right. To cook all night in a wood oven is stressful, sometimes adding a little brushwood, watching the pizzas all the time in case they are overdone. The heat from the proximity of the ovens is intense. He worked with his shirt off, his hairy chest glistening as he stretched with the wooden paddle to extract a pizza or move it further in.

Stefano’s pizzas varied with his mood and with the brushwood collected from the nearby hillsides with his donkey.

If you came early to the outside tables your pizza might be a little soft on the underside, if you came near closing time when the ovens were very hot you risked a burnt crust and a dried up topping.

The young waitress Thekla Barillaro would hand in a chit, Stefano’s father would call out the order, Mama would prepare the topping for the pizza, position it ready for Stefano to whisk it away on his paddle - bear in mind he had just extracted a cooked pizza to deposit on a plate for the waitress to pick up.

On a busy night the forno resembled a blacksmith’s, Stefano “the smith”, lit up by his ovens, his skin glistening. The noise, the heat.

“Una pizza Marinara, una Viennese, una Funghi,” shouted Stefano flipping the cooked pizzas onto their plates.

His mother shouted back “Una Cappricciosa, una Quattro Stagioni, una Margherita, una Pugliese, una Vegetariana.”

Thekla watched him stripped to the waist working in front of the ovens, expertly thrusting the wooden pattle with the pizza on its tip into the hot red mouth. She gazed on his lean masculine torso and the hair on his chest. His stubble beard at these moments only enhanced his attractive face.

Situated in the Largo Marco Fillipi, most of the simple cloth covered tables were placed in the square and the alley, almost blocking it. Ancient crumbling buildings provided the backdrop. Low street lights lit the scene. The waitress came and went into the forno situated on one side of the Largo. By day the entrance was a garage door, by night it lay open and the diners could see the glow of the ovens.

The restaurant opened from 7 until 11pm and in the height of summer could be crowded with tourists seeking the authentic taste, the whiff of wood smoke.

During the day Stefano went to collect the all important brushwood from the hills above Tropea. His donkey Nonna carried the load in baskets slung either side of her saddle.

After he had done collecting, Stefano went for a swim at the Spiaggia Lido Azzuro, just below the Chiesa di Santa Maria dell’ Isola.