In Manchester we ate our lunch in a Carluccio’s restaurant, in the banking and commercial district of Manchester called Spinningfields. A special on the menu was Lenticchie e Cotechino, which was subtitled in English a traditional Italian winter dish of Umbrian lentils and Italian sausage. I was a bit unsure about it, as the finest lentils come from the plain of Castelluccio, which is indeed in Umbria, though not the part of Umbria that people tend to go to on their hols. It is a rather particular place, a bleak plain high in the mountains which gets very harsh weather; the people who live there look more like Cumbrian farmers than Italians, all permanently ruddy-cheeked from exposure to the biting winds, and many of the front doors in Castelluccio town – which sits on a steep mound at one end of the plain – have reinforced metal shutters to try and keep the weather at bay a bit. We take visitors there sometimes when they stay at our house in Italy, you drive up and up beyond the tree line and then over a ridge and down into this plain, which is probably still above the tree line – there certainly aren’t any trees there. In the summer the lentils are harvested by what look like gangs of itinerant workers, possibly gypsy. It can be very hot and exposed there in the summer. So just describing the lentils as Umbrian sounded a bit doubtful.
And also cotechino. That is not really a sausage, it is the bits of the pig left over when the village has feasted on all the meatier parts; it is the ears, noses and willies and trotters. If you buy cotechino in a supermarket in Italy it has a picture of a pig’s trotter on the box. It comes as a sort of soft sausage about three inches in diameter and you slice sections off to eat it.
I was delighted to find, having decided to take a risk on the lenticchie e cotechino, that it was Castelluccio lentils (brown lentils that stay firm with cooking) and it was cotechino of the type you see in supermarkets, typically gelatinous, and in among the lentils were some sliced leaves of cavolo nero: black cabbage, which is actually dark green. But I thought: no doubt they can’t describe the dish as Castelluccio lentils with pig’s-trotter pâté and black cabbage as no one will have heard of the lentils and cabbage and they’ll say ooh, I can’t be eating pigs’ trotters, so they wouldn’t order it. They’ve heard of or been to Umbria, and Italian sausage sounds innocuous. These bloody Brits! Knowing what it was and having had it before in Italy, though never with cabbage, I found it very good.
I wondered what the nationality was of the waiter. At first I guessed French because of his somewhat sour countenance and offhand manner, but his accent did not sound French. I puzzled over it during lunch and then it came to me. When the waiter brought the bill I said ‘I’d like to guess at your accent is that OK?’ He looked a bit resigned and uninterested so before he got a chance to refuse I said, ‘I think you’re from Hungary’.
‘Yes!’, he exclaimed, ‘How did you know that?’ He was delighted. Apparently I am the first person ever to have got it right. People ask him if he Slovakian, Austrian, German; all manner of things but no one before has correctly identified his country of birth first time. Suddenly he was very excited and wanted to know how I knew, ‘Do you speak Hungarian? Do you have Hungarian friends?’ I just said that I was as delighted as he was as it’s always nice to be proved right. How could I tell him the real reason? That it was a process of elimination, someone with all the French characteristics of stroppiness and disconnection, but without a French accent. How could I tell him that it was because he was so characteristically humourless?
Hungarians have good reason to be dour; as good if not better reasons than any other nation in Europe. I wished him good fortune and gave him a moderately good tip.
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