A Thousand Days in Tuscany

by Marlena de Blasi

  SINCE THERE IS no market that sets up in San Casciano, on Friday mornings we head for the bawdy, spirited fair in Acquapendente over the regional border in Lazio and, on Saturday, to the picturesque market in Spoleto. Both are fine enough small-town markets, each of them boasting tables and stalls lorded over by the farm families, plying just-dug or harvested goods from their rich, fat earth. Surely we go to buy our daily food, but sometimes I think I haunt markets less for goods than for a few moments’ fraternity with the farmers themselves, a daily indulgence of my Venetian life that stays pungent against time:

  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. The farmers are sublime hucksters, rude, sweet, mocking. 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 ice, 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.”

  When I lived in Venice, it was mostly about everyday life, about language and local culture and history, that I learned from my friends in the market and in the nearby bacari, wine bars. But in Tuscany, the lessons are all about food. As Barlozzo promised from that first day, for a rural folk, food is the fundamental theme of their lives.

  It’s different from that of the American who gets excited about the restaurant of the week or a holiday feast or a dinner party at which someone auditions a recipe from a just-acquired cookbook. Lunch and supper here compose a twice-daily-said mass. After all, here in the countryside, some people still grow it, gather, forage, and hunt for it. Often, they’ve transformed it from innocence into its supreme form, as is the case with the courtyard pig. They birthed him, fed him, raised him up into a fine, snorting creature, butchered him, salted his legs and washed them in wine, strung them up high from the eaves of their barns to swing in the Tuscan winds. Even now that most neither desire nor have need to follow each step of this getting-the-pig-to-table, they use this history, this sort of ancestral energy in other ways, as in the angst over the acquisition of the daily etto di prosciutto.

  “From what position on the leg are you slicing? And will you slice it by hand or in the machine? Is that sweet or salty? Was it cured nearby? How near? If it’s that too-sweet stuff from the Friuli, I’ll take nostrano, our own. How long did it age? Is the flesh moist? Or is it dry? Is the grain of the meat smooth? Let me taste it. Let me taste the other one.”

  Munching dolefully, shaking his head in pig-inspired grief, he says, “Che ne so, io? Dammi un etto abbondante di quello lì. What do I know? Give me a hefty hundred grams of that one.”

  And these exchanges represent just one part of the antipasto, the “before the meal” dainties. Still there are the cheeses to ponder, the vegetables and herbs to rifle, the fruit to smell and press and pinch. And there’s the bread.

  “Mi serve una pagnotta carina, non troppo cotta. I need a pretty loaf, not too well cooked. No, no that one has no shape. And that one is worse. Crack the crust on that one over there and let me listen to it. Eh, lo sapevo io, troppo croccante. Ah, just as I thought, much too crispy. I’ll have to content myself with that one.”

  “Which one?”

  “That one, that poor thing there in the bottom of the basket.”

  All this huzza for a single meal. The dance and dialogue of it to be repeated next morning, if not again, in some diminished form, later that afternoon. And often there is a feigned hauteur between customer and provider, an authoritarian two-step complete with chest puffing, brassy voices, and hand jive. The great villagers’ burlesque. Once I saw a butcher holding high a tangle of pagliata—suckling lamb intestines, their milk and pale blood still dripping—who said, “Guarda che bello. See how beautiful these are.”

  The potential buyer volleys, “If those are the most beautiful ones you have today, I suppose, ugly as they are, I’ll just have to take them.” It’s the butcher’s turn.

  “How can you dare to call these ugly? I think it’s you who are ugly,” the butcher says, slapping the pagliata back into a ceramic bowl. “It’s amazing how you managed to get so old and learn not a thing about quality.”

  “I’ll show you what I know about quality, I’ll take that second-rate pagliata and sautee it with garlic and parsley, I’ll add a half-liter of my own white wine, just a spoonful of thick tomato puree, and let it all cook pian piano for three hours until all the people in my palazzo gather at my door to whiff and moan for the goodness of it. Sarebbe splendido. It’ll be splendid. I’ll bring a bowlful to you at 7:30, so wait for me.”

  The butcher barely smiles, not wanting to betray his glee at getting exactly what he wanted from his client.

  One day, there is a four-year-old boy whimpering in his stroller as his grandmother pushes him about the marketplace. He begs her for another piece of the focaccia from the brown paper package in the stroller’s basket.

  “Ma hai già finito quello con il Gorgonzola? Have you already finished the piece with the Gorgonzola?”

  “Si, ma ero troppo piccolo. Adesso ne voglio uno con le cippole. Dai, nonna. Yes, but it was too small. Now I’d like one with onions. Come on, Grandma.”

  She reaches inside the package and pulls out a ten-inch square of the flat, crunchy bread and says, “Mangia, amore mio. Eat, my love.” I laugh to imagine the scene if la nonna tried to soothe his husky Latin hunger with a graham cracker or a plastic sack of Cheerios. Now, stopping the stroller in front of a pyramid of small violet artichokes, a half-foot of their curving and slender stems still attached, grandma rifles the heap.

  The boy, focaccia in one hand, the other one free to flail at her, says, “Ma ti dico subito, sono stufo di quei carciofi fatti in padella. Ogni giorno, carciofi in padella. Per carità, nonna, facciamoli fritti oggi. But I’ll tell you immediately, I’m so tired of those braised artichokes. Every day, braised artichokes. For pity’s sake, grandma, let’s fry them today.”

  Surely there is the impulse for change, but, where the table is concerned, rituals die hard, die slowly or, one hopes, not at all. And when I witness them, participate in them, sometimes I’m reminded of California. Beginning in the mid-eighties, I spent nearly eight years there, a journalist writing about food and wine during the glory epoch, the debut of the “new” California cuisine. Which wasn’t really new, of course, as much as it was a deft repackaging of history, since cooking with the seasons was neither sprung up nor invented on the West Coast of America. I spent much time then with and among young chefs, fresh from culinary academies or an apprentice stage in starred kitchens, many of whom were bright and feverishly smitten with their work.

  Certainly there were a few who searched their own mythic grandeur more than the satisfaction of perpetuating the mostly noble legacy attached to their titles. They thought to exalt themselves by riding Harleys, wearing alligator boots, and carrying Louis Vuitton briefcases. And it was they who believed their own press releases and perpetrated the fable that “fresh, seasonal cuisine” was a new idea, dreamed up mostly by themselves. But these were relatively few, and the rest of these young people, with a truly absorbing love of food, were exuberant, aroused by a fistful of herbs, lost in a quest for flavor. But the competition was horrific back then, as it is still, and the laws of winning and losing dictated, in error, I always believed, that the only way one good chef could distinguish himself from another good chef was to present dishes always more exotic, more shocking, more improbable, which might amuse jaded guests and keep them from a table next door. Where was the cachet in pristine, slender green beans, poached to a crunch, barely shined
with sweet butter, and sparkled with a few crystals of sea salt when one could just as readily purée the beans with apples, mix the pap with minced oysters, bake it inside the belly of an artichoke, and present it with a basil and sweet-corn coulis?

  More than once I have been seated before a primped and painterly plate, its elements so overworked and disguised that, try as I might, I could identify none of them. It might have been prop food for all its aroma. Enticed neither by swirls of kiwi purée forced from a plastic bottle nor by teetering constructions built from a puff of pastry upon which rested a grilled lamb chop upon which was piled a roasted pear, the pillar secured by spears of asparagus, which leaned fetchingly against it, a few hard-cooked lentils strewn casually about with the petals of a zinnia, I’ve always wanted food that sent a current straight to my loins. I’d find it exhausting, having to break down a still life before getting to my supper. There’d always be a suspicious moment or two, knife and fork arrested, some inquiry. Is the pool of “red stuff” made from suffered beets, or is it cherries? Maybe it’s cherries and beets, an amalgam it once turned out to be, the duet swirled with a splash of fish fumet. And so it was that as chefs began to decompose the very molecular structure of food, recasting it into ever more bizarre forms and substances, it became harder and harder to stay excited about my job.

  Why didn’t more chefs and cooks and bakers walk in Alice Waters’s footsteps, or, further north up the coast, in Larry Forgione’s? And now I’m wishing I could scoop up all those men and women who began their chef lives as purists and bring them here to wander these markets, to stand in front of the burners with some of these chefs who change their menus every night so as to reflect that morning’s market, and who are not quietly amazed by this fact as a proof of their own genius. They see themselves as torchbearers, passing down their gastronomic patrimony, getting beautiful food to the table and letting that beautiful food look and taste like itself, following the ancient, normal, natural, sensical rhythms of the good cooking that survive and flourish in even the humblest countryside osteria or trattoria kitchen in every region of Italy. And not one of them has ever puréed a beet and a cherry with the broth of a fish. Save those who’ve trounced their heritage and fashioned themselves after some of the Californians.

  But in all the years I traveled on my stomach, almost wherever I landed it was the same lesson I learned. Foodstuffs the world over are as connected as the humans who survive by them. There’s grain with which some form of bread is fashioned—flatbreads cooked fast over wood or coal or peat for the hungry and the fleeing, steamed breads, fried breads, baked breads. There are spontaneous grasses and herbs that shoot up through drought and blood almost as faithfully as they do in temperate fields. What a culture farms depends on its soil and rock and water. Upon the hands of its people. Upon its past. Every culture ferments and distills some fruit or vegetable or herb into spirits. And in all the places—however remote they might be from one another—where there are a pig and a cow, there will be some local, lush savory made from the flesh of the former and the juice of the latter. In Alsace it’s flammkuche, in Umbria, it’s a traditional bread that’s fat with these two components, shaped like snails and hence called lumachelle. And how would America eat without ham and cheese? Ravioli are nothing more or less than kreplach or spring rolls, which are all kith to canederli, the dumpling of the Alto Adige, the Italian region that borders Austria. And when it wasn’t gnawing the flesh of a beast, our race kept itself on cereal. Mush—a grain, any grain, softened in water. The Romans called it puls, which, even when the word slid to become polenta or pulses or pablum or pap, was still the same nourishing mush. One can see and taste the lineage of food as, for instance, in a menu offering “roasted polenta with arugula pesto,” another reading of “grits and greens.” The world’s food is a story of mirrors and reprises, just as music is a story of what virtuosity, great or humble, can caress or liberate from those same eighty-eight keys.

  And the selfsame normal, natural, sensical rhythms practiced in the restaurants here are practiced in the family kitchen. No one ever has to think too awfully hard about what to fix for supper. The day dictates. More specifically than the season, the determining factor of what makes it to the table is the weather within that season. Has there been rain, has the sun been hot enough to ripen the red peppers yet, or is there another day left for yellow beans and tiny new potatoes?

  Here poor people eat far more magnificently than the rich in America. And so I ask myself—as I strain the cooking water from boiled potatoes into my bowl to enrich a bread, or let the juices of a once-a-week roast, as it turns on a spit, drip over and flavor a pan of potatoes, or stew hard bread with wild herbs and oil to make a soup—what does it mean to be poor? I think I’m learning how to live gracefully in need as well as in abundance. Essentially the approach is the same. But the trick is to define abbondanza, abundance. For us abundance has become a giara of just-pressed oil, far fewer things, a little more time. I remember Barlozzo telling us about the old days when accumulation signified three sacks of chestnuts rather than two. Different from the sort of accumulation some of my California acquaintances could carry off—1,000-square-foot travertine kitchens with three ovens, two dishwashers, and two refrigerators, fireplace, bar, and the cook’s bath and changing room. There is clarity in this Tuscan life.

  BESIDES, HOW COULD a person who has a wood oven in her garden ever feel poor? Even during these frigid months, we won’t surrender our outdoor cooking, and yet we know some greater efficiency must be practiced to conserve the woodpile. We’ll light it once a week and cook as much as we can in that single session—breads, focaccie, a braise or a roast, a stew of root vegetables. And in the last of the heat, we’ll roast pears and apples hoarded in the barn or plump dried figs and prunes with a handful of cracked cinnamon bark and a good splash of vin santo. And each day and evening, we’ll just take portions of what we’d like and gently reheat them in the kitchen oven. A perfect plan, until we consider storage for this wood-smoked bounteousness. Our refrigerator is barely grander than a good hotel room’s minibar. But I’ve solved this problem before.

  When the children and I lived in Cold Spring–on-Hudson, it was in a stone cottage, the gardener’s house at the edge of an estate’s park. The house was wonderful, but it was small, and everything in it was sized to a proportionately diminutive scale, including our refrigerator. In the winter, we’d cook and bake away all of our Sunday afternoons and then we’d store the lot in the trunk of the old Pinto. Pots of beef stew and chicken and dumplings, red peppers stuffed with sausage and bread, meat loaves wrapped in bacon, a corn pudding, a casserole of potatoes and Emmenthaler, or maybe one of spinach and cream—all of it packed like a puzzle, taut and safe, in my mobile fridge, the security of our suppers keeping me company as I drove to and from work each day, praying there’d be no thaw.

  I tell Fernando this story and ask, “Why can’t we just store the cooked food in the barn?”

  “Because the local nocturnal animals would feast on it.”

  “Not if we build up a shelter. Bricks, logs, stones, we’ve got all we need to construct some simple food safe.”

  I prepare myself for a skirmish, but he’s saying, “Va bene. OK. Barlozzo and I will put something together later this afternon. He’ll love this idea. Also, he told me last night he wants to talk with us about Christmas.”

  I’m not so sure I want to talk about Christmas. Prescribed holidays can seem a sham to me. I’d rather have a dose of celebrating in each day, some small recognition of the miracles contained in it. The grand spectacles put me off. They end. And when they do, one often feels whittled down rather than refreshed by them. I like my daily life enough so that I’d rather live it even on Christmas. I want to light the fire, bake my bread, run up to the Centrale for breakfast, cook a beautiful lunch and dine with Fernando and Barlozzo, read and sleep by the fire, stomp through the woods and into the tangled, frozen fields until I’m breathless and aching with the cold and
with the wonder of a black, starry night. Then I’d like to wrap my hands about a cup of hot, spiced wine and sip it together with our friends and neighbors who’ll surely gather, at some point in the evening, up at the bar. As both the children are Christmasing with the families of their partners, perhaps a piece of this resolve is bravado, the result of my learning about and understanding that holidays must be shared when one’s children are adults with complicated lives of their own. I know they’ll be here with us for two months this summer, and that helps, if not so much. And I want to see Floriana. I sent a note to her through Barlozzo, asking if we might stop by. She has not replied.

  IT’S THE SECOND weekend of December and every little village and borgo is celebrating their own newly pressed oil. Bonfires in village squares, great wood-fired grills set up on which to roast bread and sausages, whole pigs gilding on spits, makeshift burners to heat red wine, accordion players, mandolin duets, mangiafuochi, fire-eaters, giocolieri, jesters in medieval dress, tarot readers in satin skirts come to say the future and bishops in silk robes come to bless the oil and the souls it will nourish. Pagan rites, sacred rites embraced together in the warmth of the long, licking flames of a fire. Country festivals are cures. Sweet revels come to interrupt the constancy that life asks of a farmer. We will go to the sagra dell’olio nuovo in Piazze along with almost everyone else in San Casciano. Twill jodhpurs, riding boots, a white lace shirt, its collar tight and high as my chin, a soft leather jacket the color of sweet wine, my hair pushed up inside a brown beret. The night is black and scented in wood smoke and new snow as we jump down from the duke’s truck on this Tuscan Saturday-night-at-the-world. In a wave of what seems like five hundred strong in a village where perhaps seventy-five people live, we walk in the dark toward the municipal parking lot, the scene of the sagra. We come upon the light. The first thing I see is the paiuolo, a cauldron rigged up over a fire that leaps from a pyramid of logs, waiting for a witch. There are beans cooking in it, red borlotti beans and the scored skins of a pig, branches of sage and rosemary, whole heads of bruised garlic, all of it bubbling in a broth of tomatoes and red wine. There are two narrow grills set up, each perhaps twelve feet long and glowing with the red and white ash of olive wood and vine cuttings. The crowd is thickest around them, waiting for the grilling of the bread, which would soon become bruschette. A man steps forward with a great basket of bread sliced into one-inch trenchers. With deft and flying fingers, he lays the bread along the lengths of first one and then the other grill, tilting around them to place a layer on the far side. The hot ash grazes the bread in less than a minute, and thus the man must race back to his first slice and turn it with the tongs just slapped into his hands as would be an instrument to a surgeon. In fact, he has two sets of tongs and uses them one after the other, never missing a beat. He is playing the marimba, turn, turn, dancing down one side of the grills and up the other in a thrillingly smooth glissade. When both sides of the bread are gently toasted, he lays the pieces onto restaurant-size sheet pans. Another dancer enters and drizzles gorgeous, thick green oil onto the hot bread from a two-liter bottle with a spigot, which he holds up a meter above the bread. The third dancer is behind him pinching sea salt over the oil, the pearly crumbles of it melting like ice on a griddle over the very hot bread. As quickly as he finishes one tray, someone passes it to the crowd, and then another one passes the next, until all the bread has been distributed and the marimba master is beginning his dance all over again.