Cooking in Calcinaia

Tessa Capponi Borawska lives in Warsaw with her husband and four children. She teaches italian history at the Warsaw university and is  a free-lance food and wine journalist for several Polish magazines. In 1994 she published a book in Polish "My basil scented kitchen" memories of growing up in Tuscany and living in the US and Poland, the book contains many traditional Tuscan recipes. Here she presents a series of seasonal menus for spring, summer, autumn and winter with dishes reflecting not only the tastes of the Chianti, but also the best seasonal ingredients. She writes: "The landscape of my childhood memories, with fields "a promiscuo" and dirt-roads, has been replaced by vast spreads of vineyards, dotting, chess-board style, the hill-sides. We are in the land which produces one of the greatest wines in Italy: Chianti Classico. For those who know the road it is no mystery that just before the town of Greve there is a long cypress-lined drive which leads up to the Villa Calcinaia. It is one of the many drives which form part of this landscape; but passing throught it, after a long or short period of absence, gives me a feeling of peace like no other place in the world does. To those who ask me what Calcinaia means for the Capponis, I answer that the house is our heart, as we are her's. A heart which is renewed generation after generation, giving new energy to the stones of the house, and new life to the fields and woods which surround it. No better example of this can be found than in the wine, which each year is a source of hopes, worries, pride and care. A wine which is the truest expression of a work in which each member of the family participates. Chianti Classico Villa Calcinaia is all this: love for our land, respect for our traditions, and the rightful pride of bearing the name of Capponi."