Heretofore I have lit the stove only to brew coffee. I discover that the burner I’d been using is the only one that functions, the others wooshing out mostly air. The single window is sealed shut, and the twelve square inches of floor space invite only a discreet sort of swaying from the waist up. Except one for prepping grapefruit, there are no knives, and it seems mine fell among the goods given away at the airport. I think about the hundreds of cooking classes I’ve taught, my bantering on the subject of a well-equipped home kitchen. I hear my sassy self telling the students, “Adequate space, fine tools, and equipment are fundamental. But if one is really a cook, one can cook in a tin can with a wooden spoon.” I was wrong. I need more than a tin can, and much more than this tin-can-of-a-space. And dammit, I need more than a wooden spoon.
Still, I make a batter for enormous golden squash blossoms and stuffing for a veal breast with pistachios and pancetta and Parmesan and sage. Plumped and tied up in cotton string, I braised the veal in butter and white wine and I let it rest and cool in its pan juices. There will be an iced soup of roasted yellow tomatoes adorned with a pair of anise-grilled prawns to begin, a wedge of Taleggio—ripe, runny—white figs, and meringues from Maggion at the finish. We dine slowly. Fernando is curious about each dish, wanting to know components and methods. He asks how long it has taken me to prepare the supper, and I tell him it took three times longer to shop than to cook.
“You mustn’t think I expect you to set a table like this each evening,” he says. I wonder if he is saying, You mustn’t expect me to eat like this each evening. Sure enough he continues, “I prefer simplicity. Besides,” he continues, “you have so much to do, a wedding to plan, the renovation to oversee, a language to learn.” I understand. There is a detour on the way to his heart that totally evades his stomach.
“But I’m a cook. You can’t just tell me not to cook,” I wail.
“I’m not telling you not to cook,” he tells me through his teeth. “What I’m saying is that your idea of everyday cooking is my idea of festival cooking,” he says, as though festival cooking is profane.
Why is it so peculiar that I want to cook, really cook, every day? He thinks that once, perhaps, twice a week seems more correct. Other nights we could eat a simple pasta asciutta or a salad and some cheese, prosciutto e melone, mozzarella e pomodoro. We could go to eat pizza. He persists. The kitchen is so small, so unprepared for serious cooking, he says. It is he who is unprepared for serious eating, I think. That I would bake bread terrifies him more than it did the baker’s wife.
“No one bakes bread or desserts or makes pasta at home,” he says. “Even grandmothers and maiden aunts queue in the shops rather than cook and bake.” We are a modern culture, he tells me over and over again. On the Lido this means that women have been liberated from the kitchen into the salotto to watch television and play canasta, I think. “We have some of the finest artigiani in all Italy who make these things so we don’t have to make them,” he says. Next he’s going to tell me on which days the Bo-Frost truck passes by the bunker, that icy provider of the beach ladies’ lunch, the ever ready purveyor of perfectly rectangular foods. I wince, but he does not propose the Bo-Frost solution.
Throughout these discourses I know he means well, that he wants only to help me adjust to the new realities. There are no longer forty hungry guests who would come to supper each evening as they had at the café. There are no children, no extended family to sit at our table. And Fernando has already told me that here friends and neighbors eat at their own tables. I feel like the Little Red Hen in menopause. This will all pass, as soon as the wedding is over, the apartment properly renovated, the weather cooler. The stranger will be hungry and, from somewhere, I would collect a few takers for supper once in a while. I’ll get a job in a restaurant. I’ll open my own restaurant. If I’d had my knives, I would have thrown them down. Fernando pulls me up from my silent anger by tartly announcing, “Tomorrow evening, I’ll cook for you.” I can’t wait, I think sourly. Later, in bed, I plot how to better present my culinary self to the stranger.
I had spent nearly twenty years working with food, dreaming about it, writing about it, teaching other people how to work with it, chasing it over far-flung continents, paying the rent for a well-lived life with the often considerable spoils gleaned from a career based on it, a career he thinks to have been a jobette, a very nice sort of paid hobby. I’d been the trusted architect of others’ as well as my own gastronomically fired dreams. More than once I’d bet the farm and kept it, relying on what I knew and felt about food. I will say all this quietly and over time. I will even pull out my scruffy briefcase full of printed testimony, saved over the years from magazines and newspapers. But when I do, all the stranger has to offer is, “Now that you are ‘without language,’ you think the way to communicate is with food.” Prattle.
For me, food is far beyond the metaphors for love and sentiment and “communication.” I do not demonstrate affection with food. Less noble than that, I cook because I love to cook, because I love to eat, and if someone is near who also loves to eat, all the better. The truth is I have always cooked for crowds, even when there were no crowds—for the crowds I, always and still, wished there to be. My children say I once made a pumpkin soup, that I roasted a surfeit of jack-o’-lanterns into caramelized softness, mixed the flesh with cognac and cream and a few scrapings of nutmeg. There were gallons of it, they say. After a week’s worth of suppers, they watched me add shreds of Emmenthaler and just-cracked white pepper and egg yolks to what was left. They say I folded in whites whipped to stiffness and turned the mass into buttered, crumbed molds, three very large molds, they say. Voilà, savory pudding. I remember that it was wonderful, even on the second and third nights. Lisa will tell you it was then that her skin began to turn orange. In the end I scooped what was left of the pudding into a work bowl with some ricotta and a few tablespoonsful of grated Parmesan and made gnocchi: pumpkin gnocchi with sage butter and roasted pumpkin seeds is how their story ends, though I remember one more night in the great pumpkin episode. Yes, I’m sure we had those gnocchi, at least once, au gratin with cream and tiny dollops of Gorgonzola. Plenty from spoils. It is naive, perhaps, but all this suits me, this pull toward domestication. This is the oldest thing I know about myself, the first thing, really. Except for the loneliness.
The next evening the stranger stands by the stove like the duke of Montefeltro, in purple silk boxers. Bringing out a balance, he measures 125 grams of pasta, for each of us. I am going to marry a Venetian J. Alfred Prufrock who measures out his supper in grams! He pours tomato puree into a small, thin, beat-up old pan rather than one of my little copper beauties. He adds salt and big pinches of dried herbs that he kept in a tin on top of the stove. “Aglio, peperoncino, e prezzemolo. Garlic, chili, and parsley,” he says, as though he believes it. The pasta is good, and I tell him so, but I am still hungry.
Three hours later I am hollow with that hunger and so, when Fernando falls asleep, I creep out of bed and cook a whole pound of fat, thick spaghetti. I drench it with butter scented with a few drops of the twenty-five-year-old balsamic vinegar that I’d carried, coddled like a Fabergé egg, from Spilamberto to Saint Louis to Venice. I grate a wedge of Parmesan over the pasta until my hand gets tired and then ornament the silky, steamy mass with long grindings of pepper. I raise the shutters in the dining room to let in moonlight and midnight breezes, light a candle, and pour wine. Serving myself over and over again, I devour the pasta, I absorb it, smelling, tasting, chewing, feeling the comfort of it explode again and again. Revenge flutters, and so I twirl it rebelliously, round and round on my fork exactly the way Fernando told me not to twirl it. Finally Lucullus has dined with Lucullus.
I sit there, exhausted, one hunger sated, the next hunger bristling. Fernando can eat like Prufrock till the end of time if that pleases him, but I’m going to cook and I’m going to eat like me. What was it he called me, pomposa? Just look at who’s being pompous? I’ve sat still for more �
�suggestions,” counsel, and downright direction during this past month than I had during my whole life. He doesn’t like my clothes, he doesn’t like my modo d’essere, my style of being, he doesn’t like my cooking. My skin is too white, my mouth too large. Maybe he did fall in love with a profile instead of with me. I feel like I’ve drunk the potion from the wrong little vial. Fernando is diminishing me, erasing me. And I have indulged him.
Smiling through the process, I have been trying to honor the old pact I’d made with myself about understanding his need to lead. But I never made a pact about even the softest form of tyranny. I know he believes he is helping me. Perhaps he even sees himself as my Svengali, a kind of savior. Have I been so agreeable because I fear discord will turn him away? The fresh, just unrolled space of this new life, am I trying to color it in too perfectly? Am I trying to compensate for what I’m still holding onto as sentimental failures so he won’t leave me, too? There is so much that is beautiful about loving Fernando and being loved by him, but I miss myself. I loved me so much more as a woman than I do as a withering moppet in demure surrender. I will not stay on this island nor in this house, courting the local unconsciousness. Culinary or otherwise, I tell myself, patting my happy, turgid belly. I prefer to link up with the fugitives who ride over the water to Venice each morning than to stay napping with the anchorites. I clear away all traces of my sins and slip back into bed. The stranger never hears my crying.
9
Have You Understood that These Are the Earth’s Most Beautiful Tomatoes?
Next morning I am resolved to wake up the sleeping voluptuary in me. After packing the stranger off to the bank with the empty briefcase he insists on carrying everywhere, I race about the apartment scraping candle wax and plumping pillows, perform an abbreviated toilette, pay a visit to Maggion and one to the sea, and then fairly run the half-mile to the boat landing to catch the vaporetto at nine o’clock. I am going to market.
The Rialto, literally “high river,” is the place, some are convinced, where the first Venetian settlement grew up. It was there that from ancient times the world’s merchants came to trade and, still now, it remains the bawdy heart of Venetian commerce. The sentimental symbol of the Rialto is a peaked bridge, stretching its familiar colonnades and arches over the canal, every pilgrim’s point of reference. And ploughing toward it through sunstruck summer light or the cold smoke of a February fog on the prow of a slow boat, eyes squeezed to the past, one finds old Shylock, cloaked, plumed, brooding.
I’d always found time to stroll the markets at the Rialto during past visits to Venice, thinking it charming if not quite as splendid as other of Italy’s mercati. Now, though, it is my own, and I want to know it as an intimate. The first thing to discover is how to enter the marketplace from its backstreets rather than from the bridge and its avenue of silver and jewelry shops, kiosks hung with cheap masks and cheaper T-shirts and wagons that lure tourists with waxed apples and Chilean strawberries and cracked coconuts bathing in plastic fountains. It is further down the row that wagonsful of fruits and vegetables announce the market’s genuine seductions. And hidden behind these sits the handsome edifice of the sixteenth-century tribunal of Venice.
I remembered seeing the pretori, judges, gowns flying, liberated from their benches for a quick coffee or a Campari, edging through heaped-up eggplants and cabbages, dodging ropes of garlic and chili peppers, to settle back again behind the solid doors of the tribunal and resume the cause of Venetian justice. Once I saw a priest and a judge, their skirts billowed up behind them, bending over a vegetable cart, Church and state, tête-à-tête, picking through the string beans. Even such folkloric scenes, though, would not draw me up and down through the bridge’s daily carnival. I try debarking from the vaporetto one stop before the Rialto at San Silvestro. I walk under a tunnel and out into the ruga, stepping directly into the dazzle of the market.
I hear it, feel it, the shivery pull of the Casbah, another call of the wild. I walk faster, faster yet, tilting left past a cheese shop and the pasta lady, finally braking in front of a table so sumptuously laid as to be awaiting Caravaggio. I move slowly, touching when I dare, trying a smile now and then, knowing neither where nor how to begin. I walk to the pescheria, fish market, a clamorous hall full of the stinging, dizzying perfumes of sea salt and fish blood where every writhing, slithering, slinking, swimming, crawling, sea-breathing, jewel-eyed creature that would be hauled up from the Adriatic glitters on thick marble pallets. I look in on the macellerie, butchers, who are cutting nearly transparent steaks behind their macabre curtains of rabbits, wild and tame, hung from their hind legs, with tufts of fur left clinging at their haunches to serve as proof that they are not feline.
Perhaps the most Venetian of all the botteghe in the Rialto is Drogheria Mascari, a shop still trafficking in spices. An ounce of cloves, a fistful of pepe di Giamaica, allspice berries, nutmegs big as apricots, foot-long sticks of cinnamon bark with a hot-sweet perfume, black chestnut honey from the Friuli, teas, coffees, chocolates, fruits, candied or drowned in liqueurs. I longed to pull paper and coins from the small black purse hung across my chest and place the money into the merchants’ rough hard hands. More horrible than it was when I had no money to buy these things, this is another sort of hunger. I want everything, but, for now, I am alone with a baroque appetite. I buy peaches, ripely blushing, small bouquets of maroon-veined white lettuces, a melon whose perfect muskiness totters on the edge of mold.
The shoppers are mostly women, housewives of all ages, all physical proportions, and a rather universal voice pitched somewhere beyond a scream. They propel carrelli, market carts, lined in large plastic bags, and one is convinced, fast and well, to stay clear of them. There are clusters of old men engaged in—among other things—the sober trade of arugula and dandelion greens and other bouquets of wild grasses tied up with cotton string. The farmers are sublime hucksters, rude, sweet, mocking. They are showmen taunting in slippery dialect and theirs is a whole other language for me to learn. “Ciapa sti pomi, che xe così bei.” What’s he saying? He is offering me a slice of apple? “Tasta, tasta bea mora; i costa solo che do schei. Taste, taste, pretty black-haired lady; they cost so little.”
Not so many mornings pass before smiles are swapped, before I can ask one or another of them to bring me some mint or marjoram the next day, to save a quart of blackberries. There is Michele with a fluff of blond curls and a flushed face to set off his thick golden chains, and Luciano, architect of the Caravaggio table, and the ginger lady with her long cracked nails and the green woolen cap I would see her wear in summer and winter. They are all of a seductive society, collaborators in a crack theater troupe. One holds out a single, silky pea pod or a fat purple fig with honeyed juices trickling out from its heat-broken skin, another whacks open a small, round watermelon called anguria and offers a sliver of its icy red flesh from the point of a knife. To upstage the watermelon man, another cuts through the pale green skin of a cantaloupe, holding out a salmon-pink wedge of it cradled on a brown paper sack. And yet another one shouts, “The pulp of this peach is white as your skin.”
One morning, while waiting for two veal chops at the macellaio, I hear a woman say, “Puoi darmi un orecchio? Can you give me an ear?” How nice, I think. She wants a conference with her butcher. Perhaps she wants him to save scraps for her cats, to procure a fat capon for next Saturday. Sebastiano descends from his sawdusted stage and his lemon-oiled wooden block, disappears into the sanctum of his cold room and returns holding up high a great rosy flounce of translucent flesh. “Questo può andar bene, signora? Will this be okay, ma’am?” She approves with pursed lips and half-closed eyes. Sold. One pig’s ear. “Per insaporire i fagioli. To flavor the beans,” she justifies to no one in particular.
Perhaps my favorite market visit is with the egg lady, who always sets up her table in a different position, her shiftings dependent, I come to understand, on which way the wind is blowing. She seeks to protect her hens. Hers is a fascinating act.
Each morning from her farm on the island of Sant’Erasmo she transports five or six old biddies inside a cotton flour sack. Once at market, she nestles the sack of fluttering hens under her table, bends down low and begins warbling in dialect. “Dai, dai me putei, faseme dei bei vovi. Come on my little babies, make beautiful eggs for me.” Every once in a while she opens the sack for a quick search. On her table is a pile of old newspapers torn into neat squares and a reed basket with a high-arched handle in which she places each new egg with the gentleness, one imagines, of a Bellini Madonna. On the days when she brings two, even three sacks of hens, the basket is almost always full. Other mornings see it with only a few. As they are sold, she wraps each egg in newspaper, twisting both ends so that the confection looks like a rustic prize for a child’s party. If one wants six eggs, one waits while she fashions the six prizes. When the old reed basket is empty and a customer comes forward, she asks him to be patient, to wait only a moment, as she bends to her covey in whispery cheer. Damp, then, with the triumph of a midwife, she presents the warm, creamy-shelled treasures.
An ancient named Lidia brings fruit to sell. Always swaddled in layers of shawls and sweaters, an all-season costume that seemed to suffocate her spare self in summer and leave her in shivers in the winter, she has apples and pears in autumn, peaches, plums, apricots, cherries, and figs in summer, and in the interim, Lidia plies her bounty sun-dried. I loved to go to her in the thick of the Adriatic winter when, in a hugger-mugger of fogs, the market seemed a tiny kingdom in the sky. It was then that she would tend a quiet fire in an old coal scuttle, keeping it close enough to comfort her legs and feet, every once in a while roasting her hands back into circulation. Lidia buried apples deep in the heaps of smoldering ash. And just when the hot flesh sent perfumes of solace up through the mists, she’d take a long fork and pull one forth, blackened, burst, soft as pudding. Carefully peeling away its cindery crust, she would eat the pale, wine-smelling flesh with a small wood-handled spoon. One day I tell her about a lady I know in the market in Palmanova up in the Friuli. I tell her that she, too, roasts apples in her foot-warming fire, each red beauty cuddled up in a leaf of savoy cabbage. When the apples are soft, she discards the charred leaf that keeps fruit from ash and eats them between elegant nips from her rum flask. Lidia thinks this fillip with the cabbage leaf a travesty. As for the rum chaser, only the Friuliani, she says, could suffer so brutish a concoction. A rustic aesthete in a beaver vest, she asks who but they could abide the stench of burning cabbage. “I Friuliani sono praticamente slavi, sai. The Friuliani are practically Slavs, you know,” she confides.
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