the woods are a few kilometres away

The tagliatella is wide, thick, roughly cut in the right way, the kind where a hand clearly pulled it and not a machine. It's al dente, it holds, I feel all of it under my teeth. On top, the mushrooms in big pieces, not minced, left whole enough to tell they were firm before they hit the pan.

The first bite is the mushroom. Meaty, springy, it resists for a moment and then gives, releasing a flavour that isn't the one of mushrooms bought in a tray. It's darker, fuller, it tastes of wet earth and undergrowth, of something foraged and not produced. They're in their month, November, when here the mushroom isn't an ingredient but a season.

The pasta stands up to the mushroom, it doesn't surrender under the sauce. It's full of flavour, with a taste of real wheat all its own, and instead of vanishing it carries it. The tomato is little, just a point of acidity that now and then cleans things and lets you start again.

And here's the thing that stays on me. A plate like this can't be shipped. It can't be remade in Milan or Rome with mushrooms arriving in crates from who knows where. It exists because the woods are right there, a few kilometres from where I'm sitting, on the flanks of Etna above Maletto, and because someone went up there this morning. The distance between where it grows and where I eat it is measured in kilometres, not in days on a truck. It's something that, to be what it is, has to stay here, and moving it even a little stops it being so.