Prospero’s Feast

It is seldom that perfect hosts have the heart, the imagination to be also the perfect guests. Don Andrea Giovene and the lady Adeline arrived one summer afternoon at Spigolizzi, bearing in hand and covered with a cloth an enormous baking tin containing a crostata, a rustic cake baked in Ugento that morning, made with golden yeast pastry into which a good many eggs and some vanilla sugar had vanished, crowned with dense pear jam (la perata,. 306) and pastry cross-hatching. So gladly we sat down at the table under the vine to do it justice, with a delicious bottle of Ugentine muscat wine they had brought with them.