AND CONSTANT AS are true Centrale’s pleasures, so, too, is Barlozzo’s desire to provide delight. Or his idea of it. A giver, he is. A giver from far away, most often. He leaves things by the door or, yet more removed, piles up his gifts on our habitual path through the woods—a purple-stained sack of blackberries propped up with an armload of white flowers, a small, neat stack of split wood tied up in a weed. When we thank him he says he knows nothing at all about wildflowers or a wood stack. Hoof-up, wiry black hairs standing stiff and straight and stuffed in a plastic sack, the haunch of a beast is one morning’s gift. Screaming, slamming the door shut on the piece of a beast, the fracas brings a naked, half-sleeping Fernando running down the stairs. “Cosa c’è? What is it?”
My back tight against the door, I tell him with my eyes and a slight lean of my head that something evil lurks behind me.
He takes on the silent mode of communication now, mouthing his questions. “Che cosa è sucesso, chi è? What happened, who is it?”
“Guarda. You look,” I dare him.
Barely cracking the door, placing an eye to the light, he whispers, “Non c’è nessuno. There’s no one.”
“Guarda in giù. Look down.”
“Cristo. È solo una coscia di chingiale. It’s only the leg of a boar,” he says, opening the door wide, his slender boy’s body bending to retrieve it. What does my Venetian know of wild boar, I wonder as he ports it across to the kitchen, laying it in the sink, removing its wrappings. Another Cristo is whispered before a long, slow exhale. “Caspita che grande. How huge,” he says, hoisting it up by its ankle, turning it, twisting it to inspect it from all angles. “It must weight fifteen kilos or more.”
I don’t much care how many kilos it weighs. I just don’t want it in my kitchen. Adrenalin coursing, I’m about to rush Fernando, to take the thing and heave it somewhere outside, anywhere away from me, when the duke thrusts his grinning face inside the door. “Buongiorno, ragazzi. È una giornata stupenda, no? Ah, bene, avete trovato quel bel giovane mostro. Good morning, kids. It’s a wonderful day, no? Good, you’ve found that beautiful young monster.”
I notice he is careful to look only at our faces, politely avoiding Fernando’s costumelessness yet unastonished by it. “Permesso,” he says, walking through the door, turning to shut it, ostensibly giving Fernando time to head for the stairs and his trousers. But my husband, who concentrates best on only a single thought at a time, has forgotten himself in lieu of the boar. “Come si pulisce? How do we clean it?” he’s asking.
Hard and fast, I pinch his bum. “Ah, mi scusi,” he says, loathing to interrupt the moment.
Still zipping and buckling, he’s back before I’ve had a chance to castigate the duke for the fright he’s caused. I just stand there watching them spread newspapers on the terrace, collect knives and the haunch and set to scraping at it. Barlozzo is saying that the boar had been stalked and taken by hunters in Piazze three weeks ago, that the two-year-old male had been cleaned then hung in the village postman’s cantina before being butchered and sold off this morning. Long connected to the routings of this group, the duke had put in his bid for the left hind leg. . . . “È la parte migliore da stufare in vino rosso. It’s the best part to stew in red wine,” I hear him telling Fernando while I’m dumping flour into the bread bowl.
Their handiwork complete, they reenter with a much more anonymous mass of flesh and bones. Barlozzo asks me for the largest cooking vessel in my kitchen battery. My old copper sauteuse does not satisfy him. “Torno subito. I’ll be back quickly,” he says, and when he returns it’s with arms full of wine bottles and a terracotta pot bigger than Pittsburgh. Herbs with their roots and dirt hang from his back pocket. He asks me to heat three bottles of the wine while he lays the herbs on the bottom of the pot, piles in the pieces of boar, salts them, grinds on pepper. He pours over the warm wine, covers the pot and places it out on the terrace. He places three bricks over the cover and says to let it rest for three, four, maybe five days, disturbing it only to turn the flesh once each day. Every morning I watch as Fernando performs the flesh-turning rite with two large forks, fastidiously raising each piece from the bath then submerging it again, pushing it securely into the red depths. He covers the pot, replaces the bricks and stands back, staring at it as if expecting it to move or speak. As dutiful to the cause as is Fernando, Barlozzo comes each afternoon to remove the bricks and the cover, to poke at the flesh, bending his head close to it for a whiff. “Non ancora. Not yet,” he says on six consecutive afternoons. On the seventh, he says it’s ready to cook.
Detemined to begin cooking no matter what the duke said, Fernando had already lit a fire in the outdoor ring after lunch. Now it’s burned to nearly the right mix of red and white ash to suit the duke. But first he asks me to bring the boar and its wine to the simmer on the stove. This seems to take forever and, like mechanical toys, we approach and retreat from the kitchen. Finally the first bubbles appear and Barlozzo takes the pot out to the ring. Having banked the ash into a hill, he nestles the pot in it so that the terra-cotta is thickly insulated all around and nearly covered up to its lid. He then lifts the lid, reverses it over the pot, and fills the hollow with more ash. His final instructions are to do nothing until he arrives tomorrow morning. This seems too passive a duty for Fernando, who stands watch over the thing, evening out the ash, sprinkling more of it over the lid, coming back into the stable, making a full turn around the sofa before going back out again to see if there’s been some change. I fear the night will be long for him.
When the duke comes to lift the lid next morning, we see that the flesh has braised to a deep mahogany brown, the wine and herbs and juices have concentrated. Its perfumes cause us to swallow hard with longing for it. “Now it has to rest until tomorrow,” he says. We’re both incredulous that the production is still not finished. Obeisance has its limits. As soon as Barlozzo leaves we spoon the stuff into soup plates, pour wine and, with some of yesterday’s bread, sit down to a different kind of breakfast. So tender, we could eat the flesh with a spoon, its flavor both sweeter and more assertive than pork, it leaves a faint taste of hazelnuts on the palate. I pour out some of the copious sauce from the terracotta into a small pan. Adding half a glass of wine to refresh the long-stewed juices, a teaspoon of tomato concentrate, I blend it all over a low flame. A few grains of sea salt and the result is good. We take out a few more pieces of the boar and try it with the adjusted sauce, deciding it will make a fine condiment for pasta.
That’s how I serve it to the duke the next day at lunch, before a soup bowl of the boar straight from its braising pot as a second plate. We eat our fill and more, but when I look at what remains, I could swear that the boar has replenished itself. And the plenty inspires another ritual.
We begin to take a supper basket up to the bar on Friday evenings, every Friday evening. A casual thing meant to provide us a form of social life, we share whatever we have with whomever is there. After three weeks of bringing braised boar in one disguise or another, we pack our basket with a mashed-potato tart crusted in pecorino and a little pot of sauce for it made of green olives crushed with leaves of fresh oregano. There’s a dish of small red peppers stuffed with fennel sausage and roasted in the bread oven and for later, a plate of crisp cornmeal biscuits rolled in sugar. Vera pours us some wine, brings bread, sets a place for herself at our table, and before five minutes pass it feels as though this is exactly how and where we were meant to spend our Fridays. Vera eats very little, very slowly, and I’m uncertain whether it’s the unfamiliar food or just her patrician manners. Still, she seems pleased as she bids us good evening, proceeds upstairs to the family apartments and her television. Tonino takes the night shift. As each person comes in for an espresso or a digestivo, he walks out from behind the bar, escorts him or her over to our table, urges a taste, a bite, inviting them to sit with us.
After a few intimate suppers with Vera, we are joined by others until there grows up a quiet fame about Fridays—far les
s for what we bring to eat than for what the communal suppers recall for the San Cascianesi. Soon they bring their own Friday suppers to the bar, tying up the pots and bowls in white cloths, tucking their stories inside. They tell us how they shared food during the war, they recount every detail of their grandmothers’ and great-grandmothers’ best dishes and their most cherished sweets. Wanting us to explore friendship free of his tenacious presence, Barlozzo wanders in late, sniffing about for a dessert before calling for his grappa. Sometimes he would portion himself out a plate if anything was left in the pots.
“Ma perchè i tuoi piatti sono sempre dolce salati? But why are your dishes always sweet and salty?” he wants to know one evening, racing a heel of bread through the pan juices left from a duck braised with pears in moscato.
“Because that’s how life tastes to me.”
Braised Pork to Taste Like Wild Boar
Serves 6
10 juniper berries, 10 whole cloves, and 10 black peppercorns
2 teaspoons fine sea salt
3 pounds leg or shoulder of pork, trimmed of excess
fat and cut into 3-inch chunks
2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
3 medium yellow onions, peeled and minced
3 large cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed
1 small dried red chile, crushed
1½ teaspoons fine sea salt
2 bottles sturdy red wine 1 cup thick tomato purée
1 cup red wine
2 large cloves of garlic, peeled, crushed, and finely minced
2 teaspoons good red wine vinegar
1 tablespoon fresh rosemary leaves, minced to a powder
Crush the juniper berries, cloves, and peppercorns to a coarse powder in a mortar and pestle and turn out into a small bowl. Add the sea salt and mix well. Rub this spice mixture over the prepared pork, massaging it onto all surfaces. Place the spiced pork in a nonreactive bowl and cover tightly. Store the pork in the refrigerator for three days, turning the pieces once a day.
Heat the oil in a large, heavy pot over a medium-high flame. Dry the spiced pork carefully with paper towels and add it to the pot—only as many pieces at a time as will fit comfortably without crowding. Permit the pork to take on a crust before turning it, letting it crust on all sides. As the pork is crusted, remove it to a holding plate and continue the process, adding a few more drops of oil as the pan dries, until all the meat is crusted.
Add the onions, garlic, chile, and salt to the pan and stir over a medium flame only until the onion is transparent, taking care not to let it or the garlic color. Add one bottle of the wine and, as it heats, scrape the bits and pieces sticking to the pot. Add the tomato purée and bring the mass just to the simmer. Add the crusted pork and as much of the second bottle of wine as is necessary so that the pork is nearly immersed in it. Heat the mass to the simmer once again, cover the pot, leaving the lid slightly askew, and stew the pork very gently over a low flame. Stir the mass from time to time to keep the meat moist, and continue to stew it for 2 hours. Test the meat for tenderness. Continue the stewing until the meat is extremely soft and falls to shreds at the touch of a fork.
With a slotted spoon, remove the pork to a holding plate; add the last cup of wine to the juices in the pot and bring just to the simmer. Add the garlic, vinegar, and rosemary to refresh the sauce; return the meat to the sauce, stir well, cover, and let rest a few minutes. Serve some of the sauce with pasta as a first course and the meat as a main course, accompanied by only bread, a few leaves of salad, and the same good red wine used to cook it.
8
Now These Are Chestnut Trees
Sono buoni, proprio una delizia quest’anno. They’re good, absolutely a delicacy this year.”
The duke is talking to himself, flailing his cane at the lower branches of one of the chestnut trees that hug the road winding up from the village. He grinds his booted foot over a few nuts, smells the meat of one, chews it. We’re returning home from breakfast at the bar and decide to come upon him quietly, intending to give him a good fright. On tiptoe we approach his back, disturbing not a single bronze leaf of the pile in which he stands. “Domani, tomorrow,” he shouts without turning toward us, knowing all the while we were there. Now shifting toward us, his evil-child grin in full pose, he salutes by touching two fingers to his old blue beret and strides off toward Piazze. Either he talks until we break a sweat or he talks hardly at all. Still, the significance of Barlozzo’s “domani” is clear. The chestnuts are ready for harvest. He’d been telling us, warning us for days, that as soon as the nuts were ripe, he’d take us into the woods to gather from the oldest, best-yielding trees.
“First order of business in harvesting chestnuts is to prepare the ground under the trees,” he tells us next afternoon as we set out.
Walking past all the roadside trees, carrying rakes, a shovel, a tree-swatting device that looks like a carpet beater, a large basket shaped like a cone with leather shoulder straps and three five-kilo jute flour sacks begged from the baker, in single file procession we turn into the woods where the road bends just past La Crocetta. We walk deeper into the woods, still passing by what seem to be perfectly beautiful chestnut trees, until Barlozzo stops short at the entrace to a stand of great, thick-trunked ones and says, soft as a prayer, “Now these are chestnut trees.”
We unload our weapons and he begins to rake the dross of old leaves and twigs, cleaning and smoothing a wide patch of earth around a tree, keeping the new, just-fallen nuts apart and putting them in one of the sacks. We work together then, doing the same under each tree in the stand. Then Barlozzo hands Fernando the swatter and tells him to whack as high up and firmly as he can to release nuts to the waiting ground.
Fernando is nearly grim as he steps near the tree. Batter up, bottom of the ninth. He concentrates, strikes. And the chestnuts rain down. Repeatedly he strikes, now with war whoops and screeched admonitions for us to stay clear. Observing the monster he’s invented, the duke retrieves the swatter, calms his friend, and we begin the harvest.
“Take only the shiniest, fattest nuts,” he says, “and leave the smaller ones for the beasts. Too much damn trouble to peel, those little ones. And pick them up one by one, not by the handful. Examine each one and leave behind what doesn’t look just right. Don’t take what you won’t eat. Remember to take enough but don’t take too many.”
Everything is a life lesson with the duke, I think as I sit on a rock in the leaves, absorbed in studying the size and brilliance of a chestnut. But I’ve always loved being the student—that is, whenever a teacher instructed up and over and straight into the spleen of the lesson at hand.
“Why don’t we put nets or a cloth or something under the tree we’re harvesting, so we can just roll it up and funnel the nuts into the bags? That’s sort of what’s done in some places with the olives, isn’t it?”
“Maybe so, but these are not olives, and laying down cloths to catch chestnuts is not what we do here,” he says.
There are so many nuts already on the ground, and I’m sifting among these, muttering something in English about the scurrilous duke while Fernando, deprived of his swatter, is climbing trees, plucking the nuts from the highest branches, stuffing his pockets with them, and, when they’re full, throwing the rest down to a place on the ground he’s designated private territory. I like it when he claims a day of childhood.
It takes no time at all before my hands are numbed with the late October cold, but my gloves are too thick, rendering my fingers clumsy around the nuts. Without words, Barlozzo stands before me, takes off his own strange gloves, the kind with the fingers shortened just above the first knuckle, gives them to me and turns back to what he was doing before. I’d rarely seen him without the things. He’d worn a canvas version of these woolen ones in high summer.
I tug my hands into the duke’s gloves, still warm from him. Though they’re much too large for me, they feel good. Even with the cutoff fingers they reach beyond the ends of mine and they’re
anything but clean, caked with mud and who knows what else. Still, I like them. I like them close to me. Maybe they’ll enthrall me and I’ll become a duke. Or I’ll enthrall the gloves and the duke will dance the tango. When our sacks are nearly full, we drag them back out to the road where we’ve left Barlozzo’s truck and head to our house for the unloading. It’s beginning to rain and so Fernando lays a fire in the salotto rather than out in the fire ring. Barlozzo is out back sharpening tools and I’m scrubbing the duke’s chestnut-roasting pan, a heavy, forged-metal beauty with a meter-long handle of olive wood, its bottom pierced all over. At the ready is my chestnut knife—short, evil, and hooked. But Barlozzo has prepared his own knife and demonstrates how to place the nut flat side down on a steady surface and carve a cross into its rounded cheek.
“Never an X, he says. Always a cross. An X is for canceling. I’ll show you how to do that, too, if you want. We all need to know how to cancel, be it a thought or a person or the ghost of a person. But we’ll save that for another day. Learning to make a good strong X is a rite of passage that takes some time.” When the fire is tamed to a steady roar, Barlozzo tells me to throw on some rosemary, saying, “I know it will make you happy, and it won’t do the nuts any harm.”
A Thousand Days in Tuscany Page 11