A Thousand Days in Tuscany
A Thousand Days in Tuscany
ALSO BY MARLENA DE BLASI
Regional Foods of Northern Italy
Regional Foods of Southern Italy
A Thousand Days in Venice
A Thousand Days in Tuscany
A BITTERSWEET ADVENTURE
• • •
by Marlena de Blasi
Published by
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225
a division of
Workman Publishing
708 Broadway
New York, New York 10003
© 2004 by Marlena de Blasi. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited. Design by Anne Winslow.
Quotation on page 224 from A Thousand Days in Venice, © 2002 by Marlena de Blasi, published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
To protect the privacy of friends and neighbors, names and, sometimes, chronology have been changed, while certain characters embrace more than a single person.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
de Blasi, Marlena.
A thousand days in Tuscany; by Marlena de Blasi.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-56512-392-1
1. Cookery, Italian—Tuscan sytle. 2. Food—Italy—Tuscany. 3. Tuscany (Italy)—Social life and customs. I. Title.
TX723.2.T86D36 2004
641.5945'5—dc22 2004051589
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
FOR JILL FOULSTON,
A BEAUTY WHO, LIKE ABRAHAM’S ANGELS, STOPPED BY
ONE EVENING AND, BEING HERE, CHANGED THINGS,
ENOBLED THEM FOREVER.
Because being here is much, and because all this that’s here, so fleeting, seems to require us and strangely concerns us.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
Contents
PROLOGUE
Summer
1 The Gorgeous Things They’re Cooking Are Zucchini Blossoms
2 Figs and Apples Threaded on Strings
3 The Valley Is Safe, and We Will Bake Bread
4 Are You Making a Mattress Stuffed with Rosemary?
5 Sit the Chicken in a Roasting Pan on a Pretty Bed of Turnips and Potatoes and Onions, Leeks and Carrots
Fall
6 Vendemmiamo—Let’s Pick Those Grapes
7 Dolce e Salata, Sweet and Salty—Because That’s How Life Tastes to Me
8 Now These Are Chestnut Trees
9 Do Tuscans Drink Wine at Every Meal?
Winter
10 Perhaps, as a Genus, Olives Know Too Much
11 December Has Come to Live in the Stable
12 Supper Made from Almost Nothing
13 Fasting Was How We Were Living Anyway
Spring
14 Virtuous Drenches
15 Florì and I Are Shelling Peas
16 The First of the Zucchini Blossoms Are Up
Recipes
Deep-Fried Flowers, Vegetables, and Herbs
28
The Holy Ghost’s Cherries
62
Schiacciata Toscana, Tuscan Flatbread (or “Squashed” Breads)
79
Winemaker’s Sausages Roasted with Grapes
120
Fagioli al Fiasco sotto le Cenere, Beans Braised in a Bottle under the Cinders
122
Braised Pork to Taste Like Wild Boar
147
Castagnaccio
192
The One and Only True Bruschetta: (brew-sket’-ah) What It Is and How to Pronounce It
247
A Tasting of Pecorino Cheeses with Chestnut Honey
301
Prologue
Ce l’abbiamo fatta, Chou-Chou, we did it,” he says, using the name he gave to me, clutching the steering wheel of the old BMW with both hands, elbows out straight like wings, shoulders hunched in glee, wheezing up a conspiratorial laugh.
“Yes. We did it,” I say, with only a crinkle of disdain riding on the “we.” I look away from him and out the window to the lights of the Ponte della Libertà. The day still sleeps. Creamy shimmers of a waking sun curl about the fading moon, lowering now in the damp, dark blue of the lagoon sky. His child’s joy and the whirring of the road beneath us make the only tracks on the silence. The weeping begins, tears pouring hot and fast no matter my will to hold them back. I don’t want to go away from Venice. Still, I smile at the aptness of the bridge’s name. Liberty. What better road for an escape? But this is his escape, his new beginning. Oh, I know it’s mine as well. Ours. And much of me is rejoicing in this prospect of setting up house in the exquisite Tuscan countryside. Besides, we’ll be a morning’s drive away from Venice. We’ll go back and forth. I know we will. But for now I must call on the enduring vagabond in me and hope she will oblige.
This Venetian husband of mine has unstitched every tie to his city. Having resigned from his work and sold our home, he is tearing up the remains of his past like a punishing letter, strewing the pieces out to a swallowing sea. This willful reformation he performed—plodding, sometimes, other times galloping—over these last thousand days since we met. His ending sealed, his says that now he can begin to be a beginner. Though inclined to melancholy, Fernando believes that beginnings, by nature, are joyful and flower-strewn passages, forbidden to pain. He thinks old ghosts won’t find their way to Tuscany.
As we hit terra firma and wend through Marghera to the autostrada, he flashes blueberry eyes at me, caressing my tears with the back of his hand. Ancient, faraway eyes made of sadness, made of mischief. It was the eyes I loved first. The eyes and the shy Peter Sellers grin. Unexpected they called it, this story of ours, unexpected, improbable, the stuff of fables. He—no longer young—sits across the tiny room of a wine bar on a stormy Venetian Tuesday and sees a woman—no longer young—who changes something in him, everything in him. This, only days before he begins to change everything in her. A chef, a writer, a journalist paid to trek through Italy and France in search of a perfect thing to eat, to drink, she gathers what she can of her quite lovely, quite lonely life, hugs her two grown and thriving children and goes to live with this stranger on the fringes of the Adriatic Sea. Midst flames of a hundred white candles and musky plumes of frankincense, they marry in a small stone church that looks to the lagoon. They ride the night train to Paris and eat ham sandwiches and chocolate cake in an upper berth. They live this love. They fight and they laugh. They try to learn each other’s language, each other’s ways, but soon realize there’ll never be enough time to know all they want to know, one about the other. There never is.
Summer
1
The Gorgeous Things They’re Cooking Are Zucchini Blossoms
The scent of them is enough to send up a short, sharp thrill in a hungry person. Seething hot beauties, they repose in a great unruly pile on the white linen. The yellow of the naked blossoms shows through the gilt sheaths of their crackling skin. Skin thin as Venetian glass, I think. But I’m far away from Venice. We live in Tuscany, now. As of this morning, we live in Tuscany. I say it breezily to myself as though it was all in a day’s work. Yesterday, Venice. Today, San Casciano dei Bagni. And six hours after arrival, here I am already in a kitchen: in the small, steamy kitchen of the local bar, watching two white-hatted, blue-smocked cooks preparing antipasti for what seems to have become a village festival.
The gorgeous things they’re cooking are zucchini blossoms, fat and velvety, almost as wide and long as lilies. And the frying dance is precise: drag a blossom quickly through the nearly liquid batter, let the excess drain back into the
bowl, lay the blossom gently in the wide, low-hipped pot of hot, very hot shimmering oil. Another blossom and another. Twelve at a time in each of four pots. The blossoms are so light that, as a crust forms on one side, they bob about in the oil and turn themselves over and over until a skimmer is slid in to rescue them, to lay them for a moment on thick brown paper. The paper is then used as a sling to transport the blossoms to a linen-lined tray. One of the cooks fills a red glass bottle with warm sea-salted water. She fits a metal sprayer onto the bottle and, holding it at arm’s length, spritzes the gold blossoms with the salty water. The hot skins hiss and the perfume of them is whipped up and out into the moist June breeze.
Pan-to-hand-to-mouth food, these are sustenance for the twelve-minute interval before supper, and so when the first hundred are ready, the cook, the one called Bice, hands me the tray and says, “ Vai, go,” without looking up. A kitchen directive from one colleague to another, from one chef to another, she says it with familiarity, as though we’ve worked together for years. But tonight I’m not the chef. I think I’m a guest—or am I the hostess? I’m not at all sure how this festival got started, but I’m happy it did.
Happy and still unwashed from the morning’s journey, from the afternoon’s work, I’m salty as the blossoms I offer to people, who take them without ceremony. The same familiarity is at work here as each one smiles or pats me on the shoulder, says, “Grazie, bella, thank you, beauty,” as if I’d been passing them hot, crisp flowers all my life. I like this. For one moment it occurs that I might run with the basket to some dim corner of the piazza to devour the remaining blossoms myself, eyes half closed in a lusty swoon among the shadows. But I don’t. Some can’t wait until I reach them but come to me, take a flower while sipping wine or talking over their shoulders. People are collecting about me now, rooks swooping in for the things until nothing is left save errant crumbles, crunchy and still warm, which I press onto my finger and suck.
I move toward the edge of a small group that is complimenting the farmer from whose patch the lovelies were harvested this morning. He’s saying he’ll have more tomorrow, that he’ll drop a bushelful off at Sergio’s by seven if anyone desires a few. Here ensue three separate and simultaneous discourses on the best way to cook squash blossoms. To stuff or not to stuff them? To stuff them with mozzarella and a salt anchovy, to stuff them with a tiny slice of ricotta salata, to stuff them with fresh ricotta and a few leaves of basil, to blend the batter with beer or white wine, to add olive oil to the batter, to leave the oil out? And the biggest question of all—to fry the blossoms in peanut oil or extra virgin? Distracted by these contentions, I don’t hear my name called out from across the short expanse of the piazza.
“Chou-Chou,” says Bice, stamping her left foot exasperatedly in the doorway of the bar, her arms stretched out with another tray.
This time, careening through the crowd more nimbly, I dispatch the scorching flowers in record time. Though I’ve neither actually met nor been introduced to most of these people, all of them seem to know that Fernando and I have just moved into the Lucci place down the hill. This intelligence is but a first whiff of the mastery of the intravillage broadcasting system, activated, no doubt, by the small battalion of San Cascianesi who gathered in our driveway to welcome us earlier in the day. And one thing led to another, but still, how did a thank-you aperitivo turn into a supper party, and why am I holding so tightly to this empty tray?
WE HAD LEFT Venice behind in the pale purply hour of first light and followed four Albanians, variously piled into and piloting the big blue Gonrand truck that ported our every material asset. We’re moving to Tuscany. Eleven kilometers from our destination, a team of spiffy, high-booted, automatic weapon–toting carabinieri invited our meager convoy to halt on the cusp of Route 321. We were detained and interrogated and searched for nearly two hours. Two of the four Albanians were arrested, aliens without papers. We told the military police that we were intending to move into one of the Luccis’ farmhouses and that we needed all of the collected muscle and manpower to do so. They settled themselves in their van and talked on their radio. They stayed a very long time. They got out of the van and parleyed again, roadside.
Some say the carabinieri are selected for their physical beauty, that they represent the glory of the Italian state. Surely these do it honor, their dark brows and pale eyes an aesthetic diversion during the wait. At last one of the booted gentlemen said, “Fine, but it’s our duty to accompany you.” A much grander colonnade now, we inspired intrigue in the trickle of farm traffic we passed along the way until the big blue truck and the police van came to rest behind our old BMW in the back garden of the house. Let’s get to work.
There had been a well-defined agreement with Signora Lucci that the house would be clean and that it would be empty. Neither is the case. As the clandestine Albanians begin to carry in our goods, I requisition the carabinieri to help me carry out the signora’s tokens of welcome, all in the form of irrefutable junk. There are armoires with crushed-in doors and tables and chairs that, in order to stay upright, are cunningly leaned up against each other. There are six sets of bunk beds. We heave it all into the barn. In our bedroom, I’m dusting a handsome print of a cypress-lined lane framed in hammered copper. It swings on its wire hanger and behind it I find a wall safe. This house, this barely restored stable of a house, which has no central heating and no telephone and electrical wiring sufficient for a blind hermit, has a safe. Not the little hotel-room sort of safe, this is a grand, official-looking thing with two levels of knobs and a clock, and I call Fernando to come look at it.
“It’s obviously new, something the Luccis installed during the renovation. I don’t think it’s meant for our use,” says Fernando.
“But why would they need a safe here? Wouldn’t one in their villa suffice? I think it must be for tenant use. Let’s see if we can open it.”
We fiddle with it, twirl and push at the knobs, until Fernando says, “It’s locked, and without the combination, we’d never gain access. If we want to use it, we’ll have to ask for the coordinates. Besides, what would we possibly put in it?” We each think for half a minute and begin laughing at our dearth of riches: documents tucked inside a whiskey-colored leather portfolio, a rosary that belonged to Fernando’s grandmother, his father’s pocket watch, my son’s and daughter’s birth bracelets, a few jewels.
“I’d put chocolate in it. Not just any kind of chocolate, but my stash of ninety-percent cacao. And my fifty-year-old balsamic vinegar,” I say, but my plan is interrupted by one of the Albanians, the one who keeps moving boxes from room to room, seemingly at will. Once again, I tell him about the numbering system and then go back downstairs to see how the rest of the crew is faring. One of the carabinieri seems to be without a job, so I ask him to help me move an undesired sofa out to the barn. Fernando shoots me evil looks that say you can’t just tell an Italian military policeman to hoist up one end of a molding brown velvet sofa that weighs two hundred kilos and pull it backward down a narrow, curving staircase while you push the other end with all your might, causing him to totter and lurch on the heels of his shiny black boots.
I remember my first sight of Fernando’s apartment on the Lido. Scoured of all vanities, it was the lair of an ascetic, the mean hut of an acolyte. Savonarola could have lived there, all of it bespeaking reverence for a medieval patina, undisturbed by the passing of time or someone’s riffling about with a dust cloth. This is already much easier.
By now, a small, trawling knot of townspeople has gathered in the garden, hands behind their backs or folded across their chests. After greeting them and introducing myself, saying how happy we are to be new San Cascianesi, I approach the only woman with hands on her hips. She looks ready to pitch in. I ask if she might recommend someone who would have time today to give us a hand. “Buongiorno, signora. Sono molto lieta di conoscerla. Good day, madam. I’m very honored to know you,” I say, extending my hand to her.
“Il piacere è mio. Mi ch
iamo Floriana. The pleasure is mine. My name is Floriana.”
“Ci serve un pò di aiuto. We could use a little help.”
“Ci mancherebbe altro. It’s the least we can do,” she says, as though helping us was already her plan.
We have two new brooms, a plastic bucket, a squeeze mop, and at least one specimen of every gel and foam and spray and wax that promises pine-scented refuge from household dirt. This is a pittance. Our neighbors disappear and soon return with their own arms. Liter-size plastic bottles of pink alcohol, plastic bags full of what seem to be filthy rags, industrial-size mops and brooms.
Soon there are three window washers, a sweeper on each floor, with moppers at the ready. The restoration of the house had been completed less than a month before and the disorder is mostly cosmetic. In less than four hours, things have definitely improved. Windows sparkle, floors are somewhat cleaner, appliances are scrubbed, walls dusted, bathrooms shine. The carefully numbered boxes are piled in their correct rooms. Floriana snaps fresh, lace-trimmed burgundy sheets into place on our pale yellow wooden baldacchino, lately assembled by Fernando and the two carabinieri. And all the squad has had to sustain it were paper cups of warm Ferrarelle, imported from Venice.
Fernando and I conference and, since it’s nearly six, we invite the crew to join us in the village at Bar Centrale for aperitivi. By this time, the policemen are in it for the long haul, demonstrating not a whit of rush to depart. Only the Albanians seem furtive, signaling escape routes with their eyes. The now-mellowed policemen let this play out, having already decided they’ll be looking the other way when the crew drives off. We trudge up the hill into town, some of us walking, some of us riding, all of us exhausted and satisfied, each in his own way. We’ve had a barn raising, a quilting bee, and we’ve all earned our thirst and hunger.