A Thousand Days in Tuscany (7 page)

To finish, there is
ricotta di pecora,
ewe’s milk ricotta, served in tea cups. Pupa goes around the table pouring espresso over the ricotta from a little pot she’s just brewed. She sets down a sugar bowl and a shaker of cocoa. We watch as Barlozzo mixes in a little of this and some of that, stirring the potion in his cup and eating it like pudding. We do the same, and I want to ask for more, but I fear Pupa will think me gluttonous. Soon enough she’ll know it’s true.

While we dine, the room fills with several other small parties. I
notice how Pupa has been fretting over them, apologizing that there’s nothing much left in the kitchen at this hour but bread and
salame
and prosciutto, some cheese and honey, a little salad. Of course none of them seems to mind—one couple with Florentine accents, which can sound almost Castilian as they say certain words, and another couple, decidedly English in their smart, perfectly wrinkled linens. Each couple has a child: the Florentines a daughter, probably not yet four, the English, a boy of six or seven. The handsome blond boy seems to have caught the eye of
la fiorentina.
Walking sideways across the room toward the English table, hands stuffed deep into the pockets of her white dress for courage, she stops in front of the blond boy’s chair.
“Come ti chami? Io mi chiamo Stella.”

Sufficiently embarrassed by her brazen presence, the boy is doubly befuddled, since he hasn’t understood her. His dad rescues by saying, “She wants to know your name. She’s called Stella. Answer her in English.”

“My name is Joe,” he says without enthusiasm.

Now it’s Stella’s turn not to understand. Or is it? In any case, I think it’s difficult to perplex a Florentine. Dispensing with all other preliminaries, she says,
“Allora, baciami. Dai, baciami, Joe. Forza. Un bacetto piccolo.
Well then, kiss me. Come on, kiss me, Joe. Try. Just a small kiss.” Stella has learned young to ask for what she wants.

The Holy Ghost’s Cherries

Choose fruit that is glossy, ripe but not overripe. A mix of cherry varieties also works nicely—those that are dark and sweet as well as those that are scarlet and sour.

Two pounds cherries, unpitted, rinsed, and dried with paper towels; stems trimmed or left long

1 quart of kirschwasser (cherry-flavored eau-de-vie) or a fine-quality grappa (one from Nonino in the Friuli, for example, which is widely exported to the United States)

1¼ cups granulated sugar

Wash, rinse, and thoroughly dry two 1-quart jars. Place half the prepared cherries in each jar. Mix the kirschwasser or grappa with the sugar, stirring well to dissolve the sugar. Pour half the mixture into each jar, over the cherries. Cover the jars tightly and store in a pantry or a dark, cool place. Shake the jars vigorously once a day for two weeks and then let them rest, undisturbed, for another two weeks. At this point the fruit can be stored for as long as a year before using, but once the jars are opened, store the remaining fruit in the refrigerator.

The same procedure can be used with other small stone fruits,
such as apricots and plums. Raspberries, blueberries, and gooseberries are delicious preserved in this way. Experiment with other flavors of eau-de-vie, such as framboise with raspberries, or
mirabelle
with plums.

Wonderful as these are when used as a garnish for gelato or any creamy dessert, they are astonishingly good served with roasted or grilled meats. My favorite use of them is to accompany fresh or pungent cheeses. In this last case, serve a tiny glass of the preserving liquors alongside.

3
The Valley Is Safe, and We Will Bake Bread

A ten o’clock breeze is sending up the greenish scents of new wheat and Fernando croons out over the meadows,
“Ogni giorno la vita è una grande corrida, ma la notte, no.
Every day life is a grand battle, but the night, ah, the night.” I swear the sheep listen to him, so still are they during his morning Neopolitan concerts. I listen, too. And I sing with him.
“Già il mattino è un po grigio se non c’è il dentifricio, ma la notte, no.
Already the morning is a bit gray if there’s no toothpaste but, the night, ah, the night.”

Barlozzo is late for work, but after less than a week of his patient instruction, Fernando is sailing through the cement mixing—spreading-troweling-leveling—brick laying maneuvers of building up the wall that will eventually enclose the wood-burning oven. Some days, he doesn’t come at all, and it’s clear that his absence is calculated, that
he senses Fernando’s possessiveness about this, the first truly artisinal project of his life. Proof: I’m hardly welcome on the building site, my participation having been relegated to fetching and hostessing while my husband discovers his hands and how beautifully they can create. Lovely for him, I think, but I grow weary of standing or crouching, waiting for the next command for lemonade or paper towels. And so I gift myself these hours each day to spend on my own.

First thing I’ll do is to shed my Tuscan uniform. Since we’d arrived, I’ve worn nothing but work boots, khaki shorts, and my daughter’s abandoned Cocteau Twins T-shirts. Though I am flourishing in this country life, it’s not country clothes that suit me. I am Private Benjamin longing for sandals and a lunch date. Better, I want my bustier and a skirt that rustles. My summer closet looks like Mimi’s wardrobe for
La Boheme.
Taffeta and lace and tulle, crinolines, a blue linen jacket with a peplum, the same one done in chocolate silk, hats to pull down tight over my too-thick hair. A romantic collection mostly from Romeo Gigli, the delicateness of these things is balanced by some forties-style vintage pieces from Norma Kamali. My few token civilian dresses I choose to overlook. Venice animates all appetites, not the least an impulse for costume. It felt right there to wander through a shadowy
calle
in a ruffled lace skirt, its baroque fullness tempered by a skinny, high-necked sweater, my hair tamed
into a tight chignon and pinned low on the nape of my neck. And on the deck of a boat, plunging the starlit waters of a midnight, past marble palaces sprung, tottering, from a lagoon, a woman can feel delicious in a velvet cloak with a hood that flutters in a cold black wind. Shimmying up to the bar here at the Centrale in that same velvet cloak could only rouse scandal and feel like Halloween. Yet the straight, polyester, just-below-the-knee skirt, square overblouse and sling-back pumps of my feminine neighbors is not a
mise
I can adopt. Nor will I spend my country life safely packed into jeans, accommodating other people’s comfort.

From my closet, I choose a thin silk dress, a little print thing scribbled all over in orange and pink roses. Bias-cut, clinging gently to the derrière, its skirt widens below the knees and stops midcalf. I like how it moves as I do, as though it’s part of my body. I decide I’ll wear it with the old work boots, mostly because I desire to preserve my ankle bones on these hills but also because I like contrast. In the mornings, I’ll grab a cardigan and a big straw hat, my old Chanel dark glasses. Later on I’ll wrap myself in a long white apron for cooking and baking. In the evening, I’ll tie up my hair, add a necklace and Opium. And before getting ready for bed, I’ll slip the dress over my head, liking the smell of the sun and how it mixes with my own, and toss it in the bathroom sink, rinsing it like lingerie, in a drop of musk-scented bath soap, pressing the water from it and
draping it on the last of my satin hangers. It will always be dry by morning. I like the idea of not having to think about what I’ll wear, knowing that the dress with the roses is the best dress of all for me during these summer days.

The next entry on my private agenda asks for a work plan. As much as we want to bolt the stable door on such imperatives and mandates as those which tortured Fernando’s life as a banker, I must submit to some sort of discipline. It’s my turn to work now for a while so that he can luxuriate in his fresh status as a pensioner. My first book, written in Venice, is a volume of memoirs and recipes, scenes from my travels through ten of Italy’s northern regions. Since it’s buried in the production process, due to be published in late autumn, there’s nothing more I can do to help it along right now. Meanwhile I have a contract to write a second book, this one with much the same format but focusing on eight regions of Italy’s south. The eighteen months I’ve been given to research and write seem to stretch out like forever before me, yet I know what a trickster time is. It’s now that I must begin writing outlines, planning the journeys.

I look forward to the whole process, yet, at least for this moment, I’d rather tuck it all under the yellow wooden bed and just live this Tuscan life. But I can’t. Even though I want to be true to our rebellion against structure, there are also several monthly assignments from clients still clinging from the states—a newsletter for a small
group of California restaurants, some menu and recipe development for another, and, most recently, concept and development for a start-up project in Los Angeles. The deeper-down truth is that I luxuriate in all this, am grateful for these opportunities that will sustain us, keep our hands out of our own thin pockets.

I begin setting up an office of sorts in a space across from the fireplace in the stable. And like a hound on the scent of a hare, Barlozzo angles his bony self halfway inside the door. “
Ti serve un mano?
Do you need a hand?” he wants to know, looking at the great snarl of computer wires in my hands. The duke already understands I submit to only the smallest doses of the twenty-first century. “I thought you’d be writing your books and stories with a quill on sheepskin,” he tells me as he takes over.

“I use the computer as a word processor.
Only
a word processor. Its more complex wiles, I leave to Fernando. But how do you know so much about such things?” I ask.

“I’m not so sure I do, but I must know more than you do,” he says. “Besides, all the instructions are in Italian and I do read. You just go on with your work as a
tappezziera,
upholsterer. There must be something left in the house that’s not yet been draped or swaddled.”

Why must he stick fast to this sham scoundrel’s behavior? Shaking my head and muffling a laugh at his nearly constant need to hide his
kindness behind that Tartar face and voice of his, I pull curtains out of a trunk. Of heavy yellow brocade, they’d once hung in some theater or chapel, according to the merchant from whom I’d bought them at the fair in Arezzo. I push them onto the black iron rod with the wooden filials carved like pineapples that fits across the top of the stable doors. The fabric glides into place. Three panels, each about six feet wide, twice again as long, the lush length of them pours down into great buttery puddles over the stone floor. I fix one panel off to the side with a long piece of red satin cord, tying it into a perfect Savoy knot. The thick cloth restrains the sun but still the sun exalts its color, drenching the little room in gold. The duke hasn’t said a word through all this, and even now, sitting back on his haunches looking at the effect, only his smile tells me he thinks it’s lovely.

A
S THE CONSTRUCTION
of it proceeds, there is much daily pacing round and round the oven site by the village men. There are mutterings and whistles, some saying it’s
formidabile.
The ones who pull their hair and screech
“madonnina”
say we’ll blow up the whole damn valley the first time we light the thing. As Fernando nears the finish—rallied now by technical contingents both official and voluntary—people from nearby villages drive by in the evenings, leave their cars roadside and come to visit the oven like a shrine. Our wayward humor prompts us to call it Santa Giovanna, St. Joan. Nearly
everyone who comes wants to talk about the oven of their childhood, what auntie roasted on Sundays, what never-to-be-forgotten loaves mama baked. Part baptismal font, part beehive, it’s so large I won’t be able to heave anything into its chamber without standing on the wooden box Barlozzo has fortified with a slate top for the purpose of elevating me.

In his neolithic way, Barlozzo has made our tools by hand. He slowly sands a meter-and-a-half length of oak into a handle, attaches it to a metal sheet he’s pounded into thinness with a rock. This is our peel. An oven broom he makes from a clutch of dried olive twigs tied in a braid of weed stems. With an evil instrument that might have been some form of Neanderthal-ish pincers, he evenly pierces two other sheets of metal, stacking them, separating them with cuts from the oak handle. Our cooling rack.

Fernando and I discuss what bread we’ll make first. “Something with cornmeal or buckwheat? Or flatbreads with fistfuls of rosemary?”

Fernando wants dried black olives and roasted walnuts and nothing with buckwheat.

The duke has yet to look up from his metal piercing. He knows our talk is idle. He knows the first loaves—and if we’re wise as he hopes, every loaf we’ll bake thereafter—will be pure Tuscan saltless loaves with thick hard crusts and a chewy, sour crumb. We make a
new
biga
—a pinch of yeast, a handful of flour, some water, all mixed together, then left to roil and gather force—to add to the one we brought from Venice. This will be a cross-cultural starter to build a Tuscan bread with Venetian memories.

It’s on a Sunday that the oven is finished, and we make a pact that the first bake will be on the next Saturday morning, the last one of this July. After the bread, we’ll braise a
coscia di maiale al chianti.
Maybe two haunches if enough people want to join us. We leave invitations at the bar, tell everyone we see about the inauguration supper, tell them they’re welcome to bring up their bread dough in the morning and bake with us if they’d like.

“Senz’altro, ci vediamo, ci sentiamo prima.
Without fail, we’ll see you, we’ll talk before,” said so many of them.