Dream Travel: Florence with Emiko Davies

The world has unrecognizably changed in the year and half that separate this blog post from the previous one. The one about my journey in Norway the previous year, to which I added the finishing touches when I was in Puglia for the summer. It now sounds bizarre to name these distant locations, one after another, from a time when movement was a liquid material, even gas-like. Simply because I had decided to be in those places, it had happened. It was easy, unsurprising and ordinary. Or so we believed. 

I returned to Rome from my last trip (a double cooking class in Milan) in the first days of February 2020, just before it all began. (Actually, I came back from Milan with a rather nasy flu, and a cough that took weeks to disappear. And only weeks later did it occur to me that it might have been Covid, yet it was not easy to get tested back then, but that’s a story for another day). I have been here in Rome ever since, in this apartment, barely leaving at all, in a world where movement is now solid, dense, impenetrable. Almost impossible.

I don’t think about this stillness much, nor how bizarrely and perpetually solitary it is all the time. It might be because I have lost my mind to a degree that I no longer recognize my distress as such. Maybe I have just unlearned the social norms and the basic needs to hang out with other human beings, and have found comfort in numbness, gone feral. A hibernation transformed into a lifestyle. Or maybe, I have just been too busy, both in the kitchen and at this computer, working on my cookbook. It is probably the latter, at least it’s what I’d like to tell myself, and so far there’s no way to know otherwise. 

Florentine, The True Cuisine of Florence

This, — the not thinking about it all — was true until a few weeks ago, when I received a copy of the new edition of the cookbook Florentine, The True Cuisine of Florence by my friend Emiko Davies. Florentine was Emiko’s first book, published in early 2016, and as the name suggests is full to the brim with all things Florence; little corners, markets, streets and of course food, oh glorious Florentine food. 

My burgeoning and rather rich cookbook collection is mostly made of those perfect for armchair travel; from Eastern Europe to Central Asia, to the Middle East and the Mediterrean, with a bit from Japan, and of course a lot about Italy. But Florence! I know Florence! I have been there more than I can count, always for trips way too short (why didn’t I ever stay for more than 4 days?), on day trips for work, on days trips with tourists based in Rome, on day trips for a fair, or a talk, on day trips to catch up with friends, on day trips only to quench a thirst for a lampredotto panino, the famously Florentine “stomach” sandwich (for which Emiko has a recipe in this book). I once risked missing my train back to Rome, just to get a lampredotto panino from the Sergio Pollini cart in Sant’Ambrogio square, near the church, accompanied by Emiko and a then-baby Luna. I know those angles beautifully photographed in Florentine, I have walked in those streets often enough to remember some of the shops and restaurants. On once-frequent work trips to Milan, I’d often look out from the windows to find the Duomo during the few minutes the train would stop at Santa Maria Novella station. Once, it was accessible, Florence, with all of its renaissance marvels, so dramatically and wonderfully different from Rome, and yet just a one hour train ride away.

Leafing through Emiko’s gorgeous Florentine, I felt a great loss. Then almost immediately, a sense of gratitude for recognizing these angles and these dishes, for the privilege of having been there. Then a longing, a dream, to get back there, hopefully soon, and with peace of mind. In the end, it’s not with every luscious travel cookbook one can feel this sense of affinity and recognition. Gratitude must triumph over nostalgia. Our world has been transformed, and it’s already hard enough without the rancore for the past.

Florence Food & Wine Workshop, a blurry memory from the “before”

I was lucky enough to get a real taste (pun intended) of Florence with Emiko and her sommelier husband Marco around the same time I published my last blog post here. It was September 2019, time for vineyard harvest, and still mercilessly hot. In those joyful and gluttonous days of our Florence Food and Wine Workshop, Emiko took us to her favorite corners, markets, cafes and trattoria, and Marco had us drinking so many varieties of delicious local wines I wonder whether we were ever completely sober. All the pictures in this post are from that workshop. Most of our small party was based at Settignano Homes, in a hill-top neighborhood in the northeast of Florence, which although part of a city, feels like a little town of its own. 

I wouldn’t remember many details from what we ate and drank, honestly, if it wasn’t for the pictures that stand testimony to our feast. Rather a blaze, of mushrooms, and truffles and saffron and concord grapes, and a huge bistecca, and pork roast and pork fat and pork sausages (which I spread raw on a toasted slice of bread, as Marco taught me), and beans and cheese and pears and figs. I think it’d only be fair to attribute some of this haziness to the constant flow of wine, rather than my poor memory (I have a reputation for an annoyingly accurate and photographic one, truth be told). 

What I have forgotten or missed about all things food and wine of Florence however, can be found in Florentine. This new edition comes with a little city guide in the end where Emiko shares her (not so) secret favorite angles, trattorias, pastry shops and markets, complete with not only an address book, but tips on how to eat the Florentine way and what to order.

There are many recipes from Florentine that I’d like to try, although my kitchen is almost under siege by the recipes I’m testing for my cookbook (I am on a diet of leftovers, consumed at improbable hours). Some of the dishes that have caught my eyes are Carabaccia, — an onion soup with a cracked egg that reminds of the Iranian Eshkeneh, a quite similar dish. Carciofi Ritti, whole braised artichokes which are kind of similar to Roman style artichokes but not quite, hopefully easier (I have never been able to make carciofi alla romana like they do in restaurants). And of course Schiacciata all’Uva, an outrageously out of season grape bread that is an ode to the wine harvest, ever present in bakeries of Florence from September to October, and nowhere else (out of Tuscany). The memory of bursting pockets of acidity and sweetness of the grapes into the oily bread still reaches me through that inebriated blur of that hot September last in Tuscany. 

The book is like a postcard of Florence that lasts for a couple of hundred pages, capturing the essence of the city. In these times when we don’t know when we can get back to Florence, the city that was once flooded with tourists to the breaking point, Florentine is the armchair travel we need to take us to the city safely, and hopefully to the kitchen as well. 

You can purchase Florentine, The True Cuisine of Florence wherever books are sold.