A Thousand Days in Tuscany

by Marlena de Blasi

  Fernando heaves the first batch into the pan and nestles it in a place between the embers and the flames. “Because the nuts are so fresh, they’ll cook in minutes. But keep moving the pan, shake it,” says Barlozzo. A chef with a sauteuse, Barlozzo takes his turn with the pan, holding it by its handle, flicking his wrist, tossing the nuts in the air, catching all but one. He yells for red wine and I hurry to get a glass of it for him, but it’s the bottle he wants, and when he has it, he places his thumb over the opening and splashes the nuts, baptizing them, sending up a great spluttering of damp, winey smoke. “To make them tender,” he says.

  We sit there in front of the fire, two bowls in front of us, one full of just-roasted nuts, the other for the shells and skins, which slide off like a baby’s pajamas. We keep on making crosses and roasting and baptizing and peeling and eating and drinking. I’m wrapped round twice in a feather quilt, my head on a pillow set on the hearth step, while Fernando and Barlozzo sit like bookends against either side of the tea table. Barlozzo is telling stories.

  “Chestnuts were sometimes the only food people had during the great wars. Lots of other times as well. Around here, until fifty years or so ago, the harvesting of chestnuts was as much a part of rural life as growing grapes and raising pigs. Since medieval times and probably long before that, chestnuts have been a staple food. The leaves were fed to the pigs and chickens, the shells were used as kindling—except in the hardest times, when they were brewed into a drink—and when a tree was sacrificed, woodworkers built primitive furniture from its hard, thick trunk. What do you think your madia over there is made from?” he asks pointing to the sixteenth-century chest whose lid opens to the space where I set bread to rise.

  “People still talk about when they lived through winters on pane d’albero, tree bread. Ground chestnuts and water and a little yeast. It was rock-hard and had to be moistened with water before one could eat it. Some people called it pane di legno, wooden bread, and I think that name was better earned.

  “My father walked home from the Russian front during the winter of 1943. He walked for three months from the Ukraine to Poland to Germany and Austria back into Italy and finally home here with a chestnut sack tied to his belt—a sack only now and then replenished. By February, he said it was hard to find any chestnuts; most were already gathered, the ones left gone halfway to rot. If the sun shined for a day or two where the snow was thin, a few courageous wild grasses would sprout, and when he found a patch he said he would just sit there, legs splayed, pulling them up and stuffing them in his mouth like they were shreds of life itself.

  “Sadder yet is that, when most of these reluctant soldiers, like my father, finally crawled up to their own gates, rather than the succour of home and hearth, what they found were their families sitting about spent fires, just as hungry as they were. No fatted lamb turning on the spit, no bread in the oven. No jugs of warming wine. No hero’s welcome. While my father was in the Ukraine searching for chestnuts under the snow, my mother and I were on hands and knees in the forests, digging for them under the leaves, digging just a little too desperately, as I remember. Those days were seared deep into that part of a boy that can’t heal. It’s still a raw place that screams when I begin to poke about anywhere near it. I remember that as soon as the nuts were ripe we’d make expedition after expedition, filling baskets and sweater pockets, my beret, my mother’s apron. Back home, we’d store them in an old baule, a trunk in the basement, safe from mice. There were few other animals left scurrying about near the house, let alone in the woods or the fields, most having been sacrificed to a stewpot. We’d rest a little, warm our hands over what was left of the fire, then head back out for another search. We did this for days, for as long as the bounty lasted, finally climbing the trees, shaking the branches against the nuts that clung there, teasing us. And we were always on the lookout for pinecones, too, the great, fat ones that cradled a handful of the tiny, white nuts. Pinoli. Those I carried gathered up in my arms, close to my chest, they being the first things I ever thought of as valuable. It was the way I remembered my mother carrying me. As for the chestnuts, some we roasted right away as a reward, splashing them with a few drops of watered wine. Others we boiled and, after peeling away the shells and saving them to dry and grind up and brew like coffee, we’d boil the meat of the nuts in more water, this time with a few field lettuces, an onion, some wild herbs, until the mass was soft and thick as porridge. This we ate hot for supper while we talked about how delicious it would be with just a thread of good oil or even the smallest piece of butter or a few grains of sugar.

  “Afterward we’d spread out the rest of the mush onto the kitchen table into a neat rectangle about two inches high, leaving it to harden while we slept. And then, twice each day while it lasted, we’d cut pieces of it with a string and set the little ‘cakes’ to roast over the fire, sometimes laid between two chestnut leaves, which would curl around the stuff as it roasted, forming a package of sorts we’d eat, hot, from our hand.

  “But most of the nuts we’d spread out over the grates in the essiccatoio, the drying room. It was an ingenious setup. Halfway up the stairs to the upper level of almost every farmhouse back then, one would create a sort of balcony—a supalco, it was called. The part of the balcony near the stairs was constructed of rough floorboards, but the rest was strung with wire netting that swung a few meters above where the wood stove sat. We would place the chestnuts over the netting, the heat and the fumes from the stove rising up and smoking the nuts, slowly drying their flesh before it escaped out the small windows we’d leave opened a crack. The essiccatoio in our house, your house, was where the entryway is now. We’d keep the fire going day and night so the nuts would never cool and we’d never risk letting them dry unevenly and spoil.

  “It took six weeks or so before the process was complete. The scientific method for determining if they were dried properly was to take two of them, clashing them together like bells. If they rang, they were dry. It’s not so different from banging the crust of a just-baked bread, listening for that hollow sound. But when the nuts were dried, that was when the real work began. While they were still warm, we piled them into pillow sacks and pounded them with mallets and stones to free them of their shells and skins. That’s when I began to learn how to separate things into parts, understanding what to keep, what to put aside,” he says, burrowing his eyes into mine.

  “The peeled nuts we’d stuff back into the pillow sacks and then I’d haul the mean bonanza down to Tamburino, the miller, who ground them for us into a rough, brown flour, just as he did for all the families. Back up the hill then, turning for half a second to wave to Tamburino, I’d race to the house, to the front steps where my mother stood, her fists twisted inside her apron. To that juncture, it’d been rugged, this chestnut business. But once we had the flour from them, the rest of our work might have passed for fun.

  “Into what had always been our pasta bowl, she’d scoop out two or three portions of the chestnut flour with the metal cup that hung by the sink while I stirred in a thin, steady smirr of water. I knew the recipe well. When the batter was smooth, she’d pour it into a shallow pan. It was my job to strew on as many pine nuts as I was willing to part with from my private store of them. Then she’d place the pan over the coals, set an old pot cover upside down on it, filling its hollow with embers. As though it was for news from the front, the wait for the castagnaccio was unquiet, fevered in a way. And when it was almost cooked, my mother would take off the cover, and, rubbing a few dried needles of it between her fingers, she scented our cake with rosemary. She always scented the castagnaccio with rosemary. Didn’t I already tell you how much you’re like her?

  “She’d put on her sweater, wrap her head in a scarf and the pan in a clean straccio, a kitchen cloth, and head for the bar with me hungry at her heels. And with whomever was there, we ate the thing—part cake, part pudding, still hot—the smokiness of it filling our nostrils and consoling us, feeding us more deeply than any great p
ot of flesh would forever after that. We were safe for a little longer.

  “It was a fairly common thing for people to bring their food to the bar. There were so few of us. A sparse tribe of women and children and men too old to fight. But I think my mother was the one who first began to do it, the one who others followed. But after the wars, all that changed. Everyone stayed to themselves, except during festivals and such, that is, until you began bringing up all your fancy dishes, shaming us out of our laziness and maybe even out of our greed, helping us to remember why we live up here together on this foolish hunk of rock. What made you do such a thing? I mean, what made you bring soup and bread up there to eat with strangers? Was it some sort of memory you had about your childhood?”

  “No,” I tell him, “at least no memory that’s surfaced yet. I guess Fernando and I were a little lonely for company. I guess I just like to cook for as many people as I can gather around me. Mostly I guess it’s because every time I sit down at table, I find it exciting—that first sip of wine, that first mouthful of bread—it almost doesn’t matter what’s on the table, but it’s always mattered very much who was on the chairs. And since we like you and we like Florì and we like . . .”

  Barlozzo’s laugh drowns out my homage. His silvery eyes crinkle into shiny slits like starlight.

  In bed that evening, Fernando lies with his arms folded under his head, eyes opened but fixed somewhere inside himself. “When Barlozzo tells his stories, he takes me back with him. His words pull me with a force that I can feel afterward in my limbs. And my breath is short, like I’ve been climbing or running. Do you understand what I mean?”

  “Yes. Yes, I think I do. It’s not enough for him that we feel what he feels. A part of his power is that he can make us feel what he felt.”

  “I just hope I won’t dream of chestnuts tonight,” he says, turning toward me, wrapping his legs around mine.

  NEXT DAY, I wash the duke’s gloves and dry them near the fire, but when I try to give them back to him, he says I’ve ruined them. I know that he just wants me to keep them, so I do, passing them on to Fernando. He slips one on, pulling at the cuff of it, stretching his fingers through the holes, opening and closing his fist to get the fit just right. Now the other one. “These are wonderful,” he says, scrunching his shoulders, then holding his arms out straight in front of him, admiring his gauntled hands, palms up, palms down. “I tell you, I really think I was meant to be a farmer.”

  On one Friday evening we bring a pumpkin up to the bar for supper. I’d seen the beauty at the market in Acquapendente a week earlier, sitting in the back of a truck with a load of curly cabbages. Not so very big, it was the perfect roundness of it, the tight copper-red of its green-striped skin that intrigued me—a lovely autumn ornament to guard the stable door, I’d thought. But this morning, after baking bread out in the garden, I had nothing ready to use up the waning heat of the oven. I looked at the pumpkin, began to think how I could sacrifice it for supper. In jack-o’-lantern fashion, I cut off its cap, scoop out the innards, discarding the fibers and spreading the seeds out to dry on a baking sheet. A quick perusal of the cupboards and the refrigerator yield onions, bits and pieces of several cheeses, that morning’s pair of eggs and half a bottle of white wine. I sauté the onions in some olive oil, mash Gorgonzola, shred a piece of Emmentaler, one of Parmigiano, and blend them together with a tablespoon or so of mascarpone and the eggs. Long scrapings of nutmeg, some white pepper, sea salt, and the wine go in at the last. I stuff the pumpkin with the paste, replace its cap and set it to roast in the wood oven until the pumpkin’s flesh is soft and its stuffing is giving off the scents of a good onion soup. I roast the seeds and salt them lightly. We carry the masterpiece up to the bar in the bread bowl to keep it steady, then spoon out the stuffing and some of the pumpkin into soup plates, sprinkle each portion with some of the roasted seeds. With bread and wine, the supper is complete. Except for dessert. I put down a brown-sugared, Cognac-laced chestnut purée forced out through a pastry tube into a hill of thick, smooth strings with barely beaten cream trickling through its crevices and the whole of it dusted in bitter cocoa.

  “And what are we calling this, Chou?” Barlozzo asks, as though he’d decided the cocoa was ashes of hemlock and had already disapproved the thing no matter what its name or its savor.

  “Mont Blanc. A French sweet from the haute cuisine repertoire,” I say in my chef’s voice.

  He tastes it, saying nothing, tastes it again, begins to spoon it up with an almost imperceptibly piqued emotion and yet when he finishes, he says, “That was very nice, but we’re not in France and somehow making a thing dainty as this with chestnuts seems a mockery. Like being creative with the recipe for communion bread. It feels like too much forgetting. Next Friday will you bake a castagnaccio with pine nuts and rosemary?” asks the Tuscan duke in a half-cracked stammer that might once have been his eleven-year-old voice.

  “You know I will. But why must you be so arrogant? You sit there crossing and uncrossing your legs, flinging out damnations like Mephistopheles. Fernando really loves this dessert and I think condemning it for all of us might be just a bit too absolute.”

  Fernando is shaking his head in dismay at my outburst. His eyes say “stai tranquilla, stay calm”—the constant Italian prayer used to stave off all unpleasantness and secure the sacred state of bella figura, good impression. But Barlozzo doesn’t seem offended. Like wild mint is the duke. Bruise him and he gives up more sweetness. “Va bene, OK, but do I still get the castagnaccio? And can we eat it with a spoonful of ricotta and drink a glass of vin santo?” His laugh is warmed honey then as he says, “Will you listen to me, rolling out melodies, anticipating all the pieces of my supper just like you do.”

  OUR CHESTNUT FORAGES continue for weeks, interspersed and sometimes in tandem with porcini hunts. After night rains, in Wellies and wielding viper-discouraging sticks, we follow Barlozzo into thickets of oak woods, stalking wild mushrooms. Fernando and I sing.

  “Must you provide accompaniment? Please be quiet,” he hisses.

  He’s the only viper in these woods, I think. “Why do we have to be quiet? Who will we wake if we sing?”

  “Eventually you’ll wake the moldering dead. You disturb concentration. I start listening to you, start trying to learn the words, and I get confounded.”

  Fernando and I slide our full-voice duet down to a vampy whispering of “I’ve Got a Crush on You” and trot virtuously behind our conqueror deeper yet into the woods.

  Though he was somewhat proprietary about his chestnut trees, Barlozzo is ruthless about guarding and concealing his own muddy haunts where porcini flourish. Sliding his way into gullies, prowling every chine and niche, lifting the camouflage of ancient ferns, the fraud of gnarled roots, he is conspiratorial, silent save his craggy breathing, as he digs the fungi called porcini—the name a titillating allegory to fat, newborn piglets. And while he’s at it, Barlozzo grabs a handful of berries from between the branches of a juniper, snatches a pinecone fat with the soft white jewels of his childhood.

  We take the haul back to our place, wipe the porcini gently with a soft cloth, cleave them into thick, uneven slices which are ready, then, for the sauté pan. A sprig of mentuccia, wild mint, six, only six crushed junipers to a kilo of porcini, garlic, unpeeled, bruised with the thud of a black iron pan, a splash of white wine hissing up the fumes of earth and musk, a fistful of roasted pine nuts, and lunch is ready. Barlozzo is pouring wine, Fernando is tearing into the bread. Buon appetito.

  “HOW MANY KILOS of chestnuts do you think we’ve consumed, you and Barlozzo and me, over this past month?” I ask Fernando one night in bed, transfixed by the Buddha dome of my chestnut-swollen belly, gleaming up at me in the candlelight. And how many kilos of porcini?” I add, checking myself for mold.

  I’m full, plumped from this autumn chestnut/mushroom regime. Though I’ve rejoiced in their harvesting, rejoiced in the roasting and cooking of them, it’s a week of clear, strong broth and b
its of beef off the bones from which it seeped that I want now. It’s longings for bread and butter and tea that come creeping in the night.

  Hoping to trifle what he knows has been pure debauchery, Fernando says, “Not that many. Maybe a half-kilo a day of chestnuts and that much again of the porcini.” I watch him ticking off the dishes on his fingers. “Between the ones we roasted and the ones in the soup or the polenta or the pasta, maybe it’s more.”

  I adjust my desires. It will be a week of broth without beef, without bread. Without butter.

  I am a day and part of an evening into my slimming when Barlozzo suggests a journey. “Let’s go to the chestnut fairs on the road to Monte Amiata. Some of the best cooks in Tuscany live up there and it’s beautiful country,” is his simple seduction.

  I am a woman loyal to self-imposed embargo and yet, with the duke’s words still hovering, looking for a place to land, I slip my hand, smooth as a lizard, into the waist of my skirt, gauging it might well contain the sins of a few more intemperate days.

  “When will we leave?” is all I want to know.

  AT 1,738 METERS, Monte Amiata is the highest peak in Tuscany. A volcano long spent, its earth is fat and fecund, nourished by old eruptions, and over its steep black flanks grow more than 2,000 hectares of cultivated chestnut trees, their collected annual yield sworn to weigh 60 million pounds. That’s where we’re headed.

  Back in the truck and onto the Via Cassia, and then onto the mountain road all the way to the crest where we base ourselves in what’s called a rifugio, refuge, a log house used mostly by skiers. It’s divided into small bedrooms, each one with a camp bed or two and a wood stove. Zero stars. And so for three days and nights, we are pilgrims on a castagne e porcini crawl, visiting the villages that cling to Amiata’s lower stretches, following the handmade signs to gustatory paradise. Abbadia San Salvatore, Vivo d’Orcia, Campiglia d’Orcia, Bagni San Filippo, Bagnolo, Arcidosso, each one with its characteristic dish—risotto with chestnuts and wild mushrooms; wild mushrooms grilled in chestnut leaves; hand-rolled chestnut pasta with roasted mushrooms; a braise of venison with chestnuts and dried oranges. Of course there are chestnut gelati and cornmeal-crusted tarts with chestnut jam and hot, crisp chestnut fritters drizzled with nothing less than chestnut honey.