A Thousand Days in Tuscany

by Marlena de Blasi

  We can’t wait, we tell him. And as we’re jumping down from the truck, Fernando says, “Tutti al bar per gli aperitivi alla sette mezza, va bene? Everyone at the bar for aperitivi at seven-thirty, OK?” Even though the ritual of aperitivi is sacred, one of us always reminds the others.

  THE HARVEST SUPPER is staged in a vineyard we’d picked a few days before. It is the smallest one we worked but I think the most beautiful, sitting in a pine-hemmed field and sharing its estate with an olive grove. Long and slender tables, built of boards laid over barrels, are covered with starched white linens and set among the stripped vines. Makeshift benches flank either side of them. All the light is fire. Torches have been pummeled into the red earth. In a space enclosed by a low wall of piled stones, a great wood fire burns. Candles are set down the whole the length of the tables, and yet more candles in paper sacks mark the pathways up to the farmhouse. Scents of new bread and new wine intoxicate the twilight and a dawdling piece of moon climbs the sky.

  I want to help in some way, but our thirty-person picking troops have burgeoned into a sixty, perhaps seventy. And so I watch. Our supper site is the home of my older picking partner Federico, who comes to greet me. He steers me up to the widely flung doors of the kitchen, where his wife and daughters direct the spectacle. I count nine women, but they all move so swiftly there are probably more. They sing as they cook, naturally separated into sopranos who ask lyrical questions of the altos, who answer the sopranos and then ask questions of their own. An operetta among the flour and the steam.

  At one table women are stretching bread dough into flat rounds, laying them with grapes. They tell me the story of their bread, that the first cluster of grapes cut by the vinaiolo from each family’s vineyard are taken together in a basket to the church to be blessed by the priest. The grapes are then placed in a bowl to loll about in extra virgin oil perfumed with rosemary and crushed wild fennel. The bathed grapes are then laid, one by one or in tiny bunches, over the dough. The women heave fistfuls of sugar—white and dark brown mixed together—over the grapes and grind on pepper with a violent hand. They slide the breads, then, into the wood oven at the back of the cavernous kitchen.

  “Schiacciate con l’uva. Grape flatbreads,” says one of the women as Federico appears again, hoisting a large reproduction Etruscan urn. He runs his finger over its decoration and points out the disclike objects held high by the women parading round the curves of it. “Vedi. Sicuramente anche gli Etruschi hanno fatto le schiacciate durante la vendemmia. Questo pane è una cosa antichissima. See. Surely the Etruscans also made this bread during the harvest. It’s an ancient thing,” he says.

  The breads bake in no time and soon Federico recoups them from the oven, setting them on a battered wooden door perched on the kitchen table. When all of the breads are baked, four kerchiefed, pinafored women, each with a hand on her hip, their faces flushed as brides’, raise up the door and carry it out and down the candlelit path into the vineyard. People make way for them, shout “brave, bravissime,” and, in poses and movements eerily like those of the Etruscan priestesses on Federico’s urn, they pass the sugar-crusted beauties, two or three to each table. The crowd applauds.

  Federico hurries me on to the next glory. Under the ashes of last evening’s fire in a hearth wide and deep as a small room, he’d set fat white beans to braise in bulbous-bottomed wine bottles, most of them remnants from his grandfather’s winemaking days, he says. He’d mixed the beans with water, sage, garlic and rosemary, sea salt, just-cracked pepper and a dose of extra virgin oil. He’d stopped the bottles with pieces of wet flannel so the steam would hiss away without exploding the glass and left the beans to cook all night long. Fagioli al fiasco sotto le cenere, beans in a flask braised under ash. Now he’s pouring the cooled, herb-scented beans from all the flasks into a huge white bowl, drizzling on more oil and tossing them. When everyone is seated he and his wife will carry the bowl together, passing the creamy-fleshed beans table to table, person to person, just like his grandparents used to do.

  There’s so much happening at once, so many people trying to show me something, I’m twirling about from oven to table to fireplace, forkfuls and spoonfuls of one thing or another offered, urged, imposed, whipping my hunger for more. More.

  One of the women is crushing a bowlful of grapes with a potato masher, saying she’ll press them over her face and leave them to dry overnight, says the facial refines the grain of her skin, leaves her pink, glowing. She’s not more than twenty-five; I decide she’s likely to be pink and glowing in any case, but I thank her for the advice.

  There are yet more grapes, just washed and being plucked from their stems and nestled on top of and between fat sausages in a thick, huge copper pan. A thread of oil is dropped by one woman, another’s hands move under it, massaging the grapes and the sausages to a shine. Another copper and then another is prepared for the oven in the same way. All three of them onto the oven floor, the metal door slammed shut.

  “Quaranta minuti e saremo pronti, ma adesso venite tutti per il battesimo. Forty minutes and we’ll be ready, but now everyone come for the baptism,” says Federico. The crowd has moved to stand near the fence of a kitchen garden, fallow save great orange pumpkins snarled in their vines. The leaping fire in the stone ring backlights the pageant. A young, blond man in jeans and pink T-shirt is holding a very tiny baby, his son, barely evident among the soft folds of a white blanket. There is a wooden tub sitting on a small table, also draped in white. The thrall is thick as the jasmined night. A woman comes forth, adjusting the father’s arm to better cradle the baby’s head; another one, surely the baby’s mother, presses her hands to her cheeks in a gesture both anguished and thrilled. An intake of breath. The hush. The father says a prayer of thanksgiving for the harvest, for the health and the well-being the wine will provide, for the love and friendship of his neighbors, for the birth of his beautiful baby boy who is called Filippone, Big Philip. A quick flourish, the blanket is unfurled, dropped to the ground and, holding the baby’s head in one hand, his other hand supporting the baby’s back, the father immerses Big Philip, just-born scion of this tribe bound by the land, into a tub of just-born wine. The symmetry of this impresses me. The bath lasts a flicker and the father holds up his placid, naked, grape-washed, six-day-old baby high over his head to the shouts of the crowd, “Eviva Filippone, Eviva Filippone, long life to Big Philip.’ ”

  A tiny son of Bacchus. In a few days, he’ll be taken to church and washed clean of original sin. Heathen rites, Christian rites. Big Philip will be unassailable on all fronts.

  Everyone settles in at table then, passing platters and trays and baskets. There is the inevitable pouring of wine. And no supper truly Tuscan begins without the thin slices of cured meats, the crostini of chicken livers, the roasted bread smeared in oil. This night will be no exception. Federico’s white beans and the sausages, charred now and crisped, spooned out with the thick, winey juices of the heat-swollen grapes, are eaten with the schiacciate and chunks of black-blistered, roasted pumpkin, the flesh caramelized to sweetness, their only condiment a whispering of salt. The harmony of these foods taken on this night and among these people is one of the most delicious of my life.

  Just as the supper seems to be ending, the last of the plates cleared, the cloths brushed clean of crumbs, the kitchen troupe appears with yet more baskets, this time overflowing with biscotti or piled with crostate. Bottles of vin santo are passed down the table and everyone sets to the work of softening the brittle cookies in the wine, eating them between sips of the ambered stuff while the jam tarts are broken, pieces of them eaten out of hand.

  “Aspettate, aspettate, ragazzi, c’è anche la saba. Wait, wait, kids, there’s also saba,” warns Federico, trailing the perpetually bowl-toting women. La saba is the fresh must, the unfermented juice of wine grapes, distilled over a quiet flame into a haunting, tawny syrup, sensual as a smoky old Port. Ancient as winemaking is this sweet, and bottles of saba are hoarded in the dispensa, guarde
d like relics. Tonight, threads of saba have been folded into tubs of mascarpone. Offered in espresso cups with small spoons, la saba is the festival’s cold and silky good night, and yet no one moves from his place. We are all quiet, though, each one of us gone back into himself. Fernando seems to have nodded off, his head heavy on my shoulder. Everything having been said for the night, tales told, laughter laughed, there is only a sweet peace under the milky radiance of the shrinking moon, smudged, now and then, by the racing of a cloud. Fireflies ricochet off the sheared vines, someone caresses the strings of a mandolin. My husband’s snuffling is sibilant on the breeze. And Big Philip is somewhere near, suckling.

  Winemaker’s Sausages Roasted with Grapes

  Serves 6

  cup extra virgin olive oil

  2 tablespoons fresh rosemary leaves, finely minced

  2 teaspoons anise seed

  2 teaspoons fennel seed

  pepper from the mill

  2 pounds artisanal pork sausages made without garlic or chile (Aidelle’s pork, duck, or rabbit sausage are a good choice)

  A mix of 2 pounds red and white and black table grapes, rinsed, dried, and relieved of their stems

  1 cup red wine

  In a small saucepan over a low flame, heat the oil—taking care to not let it reach the boil—and add the herbs, seeds, and generous grindings of pepper. Stir and cover the pan, permitting the oil to infuse for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, pierce the sausages with the tip of a knife, one or two pricks each, place them in a large kettle, and barely cover them with cold water. Bring the kettle just to the simmer; cover it, leaving the lid askew, and poach the sausages for five minutes. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 400°.

  Drain the poached sausages and place them in an ovenproof roasting pan. Pour the infused oil over the sausages, add the grapes, and toss everything together, coating the sausages and the grapes with the perfumed oil. Place the pan in the preheated oven and roast the sausages and grapes for 25 minutes, turning them so the sausages will crust and the grapes become plump, their skins bursting with juices. With a slotted spoon, remove the sausages and grapes from the roasting pan and keep them warm.

  Add the red wine to the pan and stir over a medium flame, scraping up any bits and pieces that cling to the pan. Raise the flame to high and let the wine reduce almost to a syrup. Pour the reduced wine over the reserved sausages and grapes and spoon them quickly onto warmed plates. A purée of potatoes and leeks or a ladleful of polenta makes a wonderful sop for the juicy sausages and grapes. Alternatively or in addition, pass chunks of crusty bread.

  Fagioli al Fiasco sotto le Cenere

  Beans Braised in a Bottle under the Cinders

  So passionate are Tuscans about their beans, Italians from other regions often refer to them as mangiafagioli, bean eaters. The most ancient, most succulent method of cooking beans is al fiasco, in a bulbous-bottomed wine bottle. The parboiled white beans are mixed with water or wine, olive oil, a branch of rosemary, a few cloves of garlic, and a handful of sage leaves and poured into the bottle. The neck of the bottle is gently stoppered with a moistened cloth, set loosely enough to permit steam to escape, and then the whole is buried under the ash of a dying fire. The beans cook through the night and are ready next morning (or afternoon or evening) to pour out into deep bowls over crusts of yesterday’s bread, the lush juices drenching and softening the bread. A final thread of oil, a few turns of the pepper grinder, a flask of red wine nearby, and a Tuscan is safe for another day.

  Serves 8-10 (or 4 Tuscans)

  1 pound of dried white cannellini beans, soaked overnight

  2 teaspoons coarse sea salt

  1 cup extra virgin olive oil

  1½ cups water

  1½ cups dry white wine

  1 large branch of rosemary

  3 or 4 fat cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed

  a good handful of sage leaves

  2 teaspoons fine sea salt

  Drain the soaked beans and place them in a kettle, covering them with cold water. Add the coarse sea salt and bring the beans to the boil over a high flame. Lower the flame and cook the beans for an hour. Drain them and pour them into a round-bottomed 2-liter Chianti bottle or some similarly shaped vessel. Add the oil, water, wine, rosemary, garlic, sage, and fine sea salt. Shake the bottle to distribute the ingredients. Stop the bottle with a strip of wet cloth, bury the bottle in the ashes of the fireplace, and go to bed. Alternatively, to cook the beans on top of the stove, braise them over a quiet flame in a heavy kettle for two hours, or until they are creamy but not collapsing.

  7

  Dolce e Salata, Sweet and Salty—Because That’s How Life Tastes to Me

  Because things are different now, that’s why,” Floriana fairly snarls at me over the crashing timbres of October.

  “It’s been twenty years or more since I’ve bothered with all that. Do you know how many tons of peaches and plums and tomatoes and green beans and red peppers I’ve picked and cleaned and jarred and boiled and put away in my lifetime? And now you want me to do it all over again?

  “Neanche per sogno. Not even in a dream,” she says as we collect the last of the black plums from the trees in my yard, racing with the tempest threatening at our backs.

  “Well, what I’d had in mind was only to save these,” I tell her, sweeping my hands across the crop piled into baskets all around us. “We can’t possibly eat them all before they rot, and then I went and bought two bushels of tomatoes in Cetona this morning and I thought we could just spend a few hours together so you could show me how to handle them. Then I could do the rest by myself. All I need is a start,” I say, knowing I’ve asked too much.

  As we walk back up toward the house, she says, “It never works that way. Canning is like kissing. One thing leads to another, and before you know it we’ll be surrounded by hundreds of jars and bottles with no place to put them and, in my case, no one to eat all the beautiful stuff that’s inside them. Like so many other things we used to do to survive, canning just doesn’t make all that much sense now.”

  I stay quiet, just looking up at her from the seat I’ve taken on the terrace steps, thinking how little I still know of her. How little she’s willing to have me know and yet how it seems enough. She’s been a widow for more than twenty years, she has no children, she’s a housekeeper and a cook, working four days a week for a family in Città della Pieve. Her home is a small and handsome apartment—una mansarda, a rooftop space—in a small palazzo near the church. Born, bred, and having lived all her life right here in the village, she is warm and indulgent with her neighbors, yet often seems apart from them, a red-haired stranger embraced in sympathy by a benevolent flock. A Rafaello madonna, she is perhaps the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. An oval of moonstone for a face, the skin of her is translucent as a butterfly’s, blushing easily in deep patches of scarlet that make her seem a girl. From the bantering I’ve heard between her and Barlozzo, she must be nearly ten years younger than he, perhaps somewhere in her sixties. He always refers to her as una ragazzina, a little girl, and she calls him vecio mio, dialect for, my old one.

  From the first day we arrived, when Floriana stood here in the garden with her hands on her hips, offering to help us move in, there’s been something lovely between us. Something made of contentment. I think often to that piece of a July evening we spent with our feet in the thermal springs, eating biscotti by moonlight. Since then, on some of her days off she comes to visit in the late morning, giving me a hand with whatever I’m cooking or baking, or she stays outdoors to help Fernando rake or sweep. She must always be doing something. Earning her way through life, moment by moment. While Fernando and I are puttering about with one thing or another, sometimes she sits upstairs in the small room off the front hall and does her mending by the window. There, against one wall, is a large table filled with dozens of photos of my children, our wedding, our travels. She says she’d like to know my children and always looks at their photos for a long time, picking up one, th
en another and another, smiling and clucking. She says Lisa looks like Audrey Hepburn, that she should forget the university and just go to Hollywood. She loves Erich’s eyes, says, “lui é troppo tenero da vivere tra i volpi. He’s too tender to live among the foxes.” Fernando says that’s her way of saying he looks kind. She is particularly fond of one of our wedding photos, one in which my back is to the camera as Fernando helps me step up from a gondola onto a landing stage. She takes it over to the window where she can see the detail better. She always looks at that photo for a very long time.

  Florì never stays very long, an hour or so, and won’t hear of sitting down to lunch with us or eating or drinking a thing. I think she just wants to be here. Once in a while we walk together in the early evening, meeting by calculated chance more than design along the road to Celle. Not a talker, Florì is comforted more by smiles than words, by linking her arm through mine as we walk. We put our faces to the weather, both of us liking it in all its forms. One evening, I’ll have a sack of licorice drops, two ripe pears, or an orange, but most often Florì has her sweater pockets filled with tiny chocolates wrapped in blue foil. We divvy them like diamonds. I take on her ways, not feeling much of a need for words myself. If we never knew anything more about each other than what we’d gleaned from that first day, I think we would still be friends. Yet both of us can be politely curious about the other, and sometimes we ask questions freely enough. She wants to know about America, specifically about San Francisco, where I worked for many years, says she wants to walk along the Golden Gate Bridge one day and to ride the ferry to Sausalito, to stand outside on the deck in the fogs as she saw an actress do in a film.