CONTENTS

1) The Non- Camillo Books (Introduction)

2) Early Family Stories
- Introduction
.
- "He and She"
- "Age Forty"
- "Venice..."
- "Birthday Cake"
.
- "Travelling..."
- "...Revolution"
- "Prisoner..."
- "Purgatory Cake"

3) Later Family Stories

4) Drawing Room Farces

5) Notes from Prison Camp

The maid asked if she could go to bed.

"Go right away," Margherita told her. "Almost everything's ready."

"What about the cake and the candles?" the Duchess asked. "I want it to be pretty for my friends."

"It will be quite up to specifications," I told her. "I'm going to town early tomorrow morning to buy it."

"You don't have to do that," said Margherita. "I'm going to bake a cake."

It was a serious matter, and the Duchess and Albertino both looked at me in bewilderment.

"Margherita, I don't see any need for your taking so much trouble. You've done too much as it is."

Margherita shook her head.

"It's a mother's duty to make her children's birthday cakes with her own fair hands," she insisted.

Her voice had a very decided note, and both children turned pale.

"If you work too hard over it and then get a headache, you'll make me feel very sorry," said the Duchess.

"I won't complain. A mother must know how to suffer in silence. As soon as we've had our after-dinner coffee, you must go to bed, and I'll start the cake."

"Are you making an angel cake?" Albertino asked cautiously.

"More likely a double-dyed devil-food cake, if you ask me," muttered the Duchess darkly, as she got up from the table.

"Be quiet!" shouted her mother.

"It's always the same way," the Duchess complained. "When it's my birthday, I always get cheated. You bought a cake for Albertino, didn't you?"

"Well, yours is going to be home-made! And you ought to be ashamed to show so little appreciation of my thoughtfulness."

"I'm not eating your thoughtfulness; I'm eating the cake!"  the Duchess shot over her shoulder.

Albertino followed her, without saying a word, but he gave me an anxious look as he went by. Margherita finished her cigarette and got up from her chair.

"I have a recipe for a very special cake," she said. "A cake as soft as cotton-wool and without any of the grease in it that makes most cakes so indigestible. Just eggs, sugar, starch and a pinch of baking soda."

In order to make the cake really digestible, Margherita should have left out the eggs, sugar, starch and baking soda. But I restrained myself and simply asked her what I could do to help.

"Just light the fire and bring the oven up to the proper heat. But first, measure the sugar and starch. You'll find the amounts on this paper."

I measured them carefully, then lit a fire in the stove and watched Margherita. She has an unhesitating and decisive way of doing things, and anyone who has never tasted her cakes would say she has a natural gift for baking. It's not that Margherita's cakes are bad. They're simply horrible. This is because she bakes just the way she reasons, pursuing a logic all her own and arriving at the most logically illogical conclusion you can imagine.

Eggs, starch, sugar. Margherita will start off with the idea of following a recipe and beat the sugar and eggs together. But then she can't resist thinning the mixture with a few drops of sherry. At that point, it's too thin, and she adds some grated ladyfingers to thicken it and passes it through a vegetable strainer. She's the Louis Armstrong of the baking world, if you like, only her "arrangements", unlike Armstrong's music, have to be eaten rather than merely heard.

Margherita worked vigorously for three-quarters of an hour before she handed me a pan filled to the brim with a pale yellow compound and proceeded to give me further instructions.

"Put it in the oven, and check on it every now and then with a toothpick. When you can stick the toothpick in and pull it out again perfectly dry, then it's time to remove it from the oven and let it cool. With a little whipped cream and imagination you can decorate the top; then arrange the candles and put it in the refrigerator."

She went calmly to bed and I sat down near the oven to keep watch over the cake. Every now and then I opened the keep and stuck in a toothpick. The cake remained inert for time, gradually taking on a golden-brown color. Then, thanks to the baking soda, it began to rise very rapidly until it touched the top of the oven. After that, it slowly went back to normal, only instead of stopping at the edge of the pan, where it had begun, it sank lower and lower. The toothpick broke when I stuck it in, because a hard outside crust had formed on the outside. I stuck in a nail, which came out sticky, so I closed the oven door again. Just then the Duchess and Albertino appeared in their nightclothes at the door.

"How's it going?" the Duchess asked.

"It's baking," I answered.

"What does it look like ?" asked Albertino.

"I can't say. It hasn't yet taken its definitive shape." We waited for ten minutes and then peered in. The cake had sunk lower still, and the nail could hardly penetrate the outer shell. But this time it came out perfectly dry. The cake was done. I took out the pan and set it on the kitchen table.

"It looks like congealed scrambled eggs," Albertino observed cautiously.

The Duchess tried to pierce it with the nail, but in vain.

"You'll need a cylindrical saw to put in the candles," she mumbled.

"They can always be stuck on top with rubber cement," said Albertino.

"I don't think any of that will be necessary," I told them. "Once it's been decorated with whipped cream, it will look very handsome, and the candles will go on without any trouble."

We put the cake in the refrigerator and very soon it was cool. Then we took it out and turned the pan upside-down over the kitchen table. The cake detached itself from the pan and fell with a wooden sound. It looked like a sort of hard, yellow bun, about one inch high, but with a little fingering it stretched to something like its former height, for it possessed considerable elasticity. We stared in silence at what was supposed to be the softest and most digestible birthday cake in the world.

"Poor Mother!" the Duchess said with a sigh, and tears came into her eyes.

"There's no use dramatizing the situation," I said. "Let's stage a counter-attack right away. And remember we're fighting not for a mere cake, but for your mother's honor as well!"

I put the cake back in the oven and let it bake until it was dry as a biscuit. Then, I forced it through the meatgrinder and mixed the resultant powder with some sweet dessert wine. The result was a most unpromising soupy mixture. I added flour, sugar and eggs, which yielded me a paste, but one which remained gritty even after I had rolled it out on the board, because the powder had brought lumps with it through the grinder.

"We might make a sort of puff-paste and press it with the electric, iron," the Red Duchess suggested.

This gave me a brilliant idea. I cut my present mixture of dough into pieces and put them through the machine for making spaghetti. It emerged from this in flat strips, which I rolled up together into a compact and homogeneous block. But it was very hard, and the Red Duchess observed:

"If we bake it that way, it will be like a brick."

"And it can't rise, either," added Albertino.

"Right you are !" I admitted. "The dough has been unnerved by the brutal treatment it got in the machine, and we must revive it."

We dried the block in the oven and then grated it. Then we added more sweet wine, milk and yeast and kneaded it into a comparatively soft substance. After that, we buttered the pan, poured in the new mixture and put it in the oven. When the cake seemed to be baked we took the pan out of the oven and let it cool. Then we removed the cover and used a pair of scissors to trim the dough that had worked its way into the gap between the cover and the pan.

"We should have soldered it with a blow-torch," the Red Duchess observed.

The cake was cooked, all right, but it was a sad sight, because the top layer had stuck to the cover.

"This is where the iron comes in," said the Red Duchess, who is a woman that always sticks to her guns.

I elaborated on her idea by sprinkling chestnut flour over the surface to fill in the holes. Then I ran the iron over it and obtained a uniform, shiny crust. On top of this we sprinkled confectioner's sugar. Then we removed the cake from the pan. It wasn't quite as soft as it should have been but at this point nothing could daunt us. Albertino took the spray from my drawing-table and we watered it with white wine. Whipped cream, nuts, ground sugared almonds and candled fruit went on next as decoration. Three experienced pastrycooks, such as the Duchess, Albertino and myself, could hardly help creating a masterpiece from a decorative point of view. We stuck in the nine candles and consigned the cake to the refrigerator. Dawn was at hand, and weariness weighed down our shoulders. But Margherita's honor had been saved.

~~~~~

Towards the end of dinner the cake was brought to the table and scored an enormous success. But when each one of us had a slice on the plate before him, we looked at one another in some perplexity. Who was going to take the first bite?

The brave and generous Duchess was ready to immolate herself and swallowed a big mouthful.

"It's perfectly wonderful!" she exclaimed.

It was indeed a wonderful cake, and Margherita received all sorts of compliments about it.

"Just a routine matter," she responded indifferently. "I can do much better."