A Taste of Tuscany

Risotto with squid ink and beets, anyone?

“This is a serious dish,” the serious foodie Frances Mayes was saying. “Anyone up for this?”

Not nous. Being out and about as we are, it is imperative to surround ourselves with things that are attractive.

Tentacles do not qualify.

Neither does their ink.

Of course, we’re sure they’re fabulous (for more on fabulous, keep reading for Colin Cowie).

Ink sounded icky even to Mayes, who ought to know. Her recipe-peppered memoir, “Under the Tuscan Sun”

(Broadway Books), has spent 17 tasty weeks on the New York Times nonfiction paperback bestseller list, where it’s idling at No. 2. And now, with the Tuscan food queen, we’re checking out the local Tuscan food scene at Toscana in Brentwood.

Success is sweet, and the unassuming poet / professor at San Francisco State University was happily stunned to find herself northern Italy’s answer to Provence-booster Peter Mayle.

“I’ve written five books of poetry, which came out in editions of 2,000, so when I wrote this book, I had no idea that this was going to happen, that it would be a bestseller, not only here but also in Australia and New Zealand,” says Mayes, who doesn’t just eat Italian--she dresses it in a smart Ungaro pantsuit.

Oh, yes. She’s also horrified to find herself the next Peter Mayle. Tuscany is getting Mayle-ified, which is to say the tourists are coming, the tourists are coming--600,000 Americans alone every year.

“I’m not that thrilled when people come knocking on my door at 11 o’clock at night.”

You’ve got to figure that when the sedate Mayes began restoring a Cortona farmhouse in 1990, she wasn’t planning on switching gears quite that drastically--to living the life of a rock star, that is. With groupies.

“I was just drawn there,” she says dreamily. “They say bees have magnets in their heads that lead them back to their hive. I felt I had some magnet in my head that led me to Italy.”

Unfortunately for Mayes, tourists have maps in their cars. People in town sometimes tell them where she lives. Someone landed in Mayes’ ground zero one day when her companion, Ed Kleinschmidt, an English professor at Santa Clara University, was having an Italian lesson downstairs.

“I was in bed upstairs with an allergy. Ed was in the living room with his tutor. He heard something and walked into the hall. A man was standing there with his camcorder filming the inside of the house.”

Where was he from?

“He was American.”

Natch.

“He was very sweet. He was just kind of innocently thinking . . . I don’t know what he was thinking. Ed started talking to him and ended up having a glass of wine with him, and I could have killed him.”

Ah, the fruits of success.

Anyway, Mayes is guiding us away from squid ink and toward the lovely, toasty and tomatoey bruschetta. There’s a huge bowl of raw veggies on the table, which is typically Tuscan except for the size, which betrays their California roots--this being the home of nuclear cukes.

We feast on scampi e fagioli (shrimp with white beans), ravioli with radicchio and risotto with porcini mushrooms. The scampi is the only seafood, but everything else was swimming.

“The use of sauce is very, very light in Italy,” Mayes says. “It’s more the pasta that they’re after. Here, it’s good to me, but it’s drowned in cream sauce.”

Maybe the Italians are better at looking after their girlish figures, but that isn’t such a shock when you consider the Tuscan idea of high heaven--chestnut cake.

“It’s a much-loved dessert there because, I guess, when there was absolutely nothing else to eat, you could always find some chestnuts on the ground. There’s always a little rosemary. There’s always a little olive oil. There’s no sugar. It’s really dreadful.”

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Indie Inspiration: It was nice of Premiere magazine to invite us to its party for “The Apostle” auteur Robert Duvall in New York last week, but the carfare would have been a wee bit steep. Thus, we were out but not about. Still, we bring you telephonic tidings from Hachette Filipacchi-land, which entertained revelers with the announcement of a new magazine focusing on independent film.

The Paris-based publisher expects to name its first editor tomorrow for Indie, which will launch in May. It’s the brainchild of David Pecker, Hachette Filipacchi Magazines president and CEO and executive producer of the 1993 Isaac Mizrahi documentary “Unzipped.”

Pecker says Indie was inspired by his brush with independent filmmaking and the winding corridors at the Sundance Film Festival, where “Unzipped” won the audience award.

“I saw what I personally had to go through as the head of a large publishing company [which financed the film], but I was like any other independent film producer,” Pecker says. “I had to fill out the application, and we had to cut and edit it to show to all the distributors. When we won Sundance, I thought, ‘I don’t know how all these kids in the industry do this.’ ”

Read all about it. Indie will appear 10 times a year and will initially be sent free to 250,000 avid independent filmgoers culled from museum and festival lists. None of them subscribe to Premiere, the company’s glossy mainstream movie mag. Indie will examine producers, writers, actors involved with films costing up to $10 million. Bigger budgets will have to compete with Tom Cruise for column space elsewhere.

Indie will be based in New York, but will probably open an L.A. office within the year.

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Caviar Days: For Robert Shapiro’s next wedding, he says he’s using Colin Cowie.

Just kidding, Mrs. Shapiro.

The high-profile attorney, not one to pass up a well-turned caviar spoon, joined the hungry throng wishing Cowie well recently at a party celebrating his new book, “Colin Cowie Weddings” (Little, Brown). Caviar hounds came from near and far to celebrate his latest entry in his how-to-entertain-fabulously series at the Bel Air Hotel, where Cowie client actress Holly Robinson was in attendance.

Indeed, the bicoastal Cowie’s quest for global domination of domestic goddessdom continues apace. Not for nothing was Cowie taken for the party-planning Martin Short character in “Father of the Bride.” Against a glistening backdrop of giant platters of jumbo shrimp, the wedding planner to the stars happily signed books that offer advice at a mere $65 a pop.

That’s a little less than the $25,000 tab for hiring the man himself. Of course, if you are planning a Cowie-like wedding instead of an actual Cowie wedding, it still doesn’t hurt to wear Mary McFadden, serve Emeril Lagasse’s smothered barbecue beef salad in chili profiterole and hire Kenny G to perform. Don’t forget where Cowie’s bread is spread with caviar.

“I set out to inspire the bride to create every type of wedding--from the daytime wedding to the nighttime wedding, from the wedding in the hotel, the wedding in the country club, the wedding in your backyard. And then I literally hold her by the hand and I guide her step by step in the planning of the wedding and the orchestration of a fabulous reception.”

Being fabulous generally involves being more adventurous with color. Be more like “Frasier” groom Kelsey Grammer, who hired Cowie for his recent Malibu nuptials. Go chartreuse.

“They like the color lavender and lavender on its own would be boring.”

Meanwhile, Cowie’s race against You Know Who to create his own galaxy of gracious living products continues with the March launch of his Lenox china line in the not-boring colors of cocoa, persimmon and ivory.

“I’m not replacing her; I’m just creating a new customer,” says the InStyle magazine contributing editor. “The book is fresh. It’s new. It’s inviting. It’s invigorating. It’s time to create new trends, new traditions, new rituals.”