A Thousand Days in Tuscany

by Marlena de Blasi

“Le erbe sono cresciute. The weeds are up,” I hear him yell as though the British were coming. It’s only grass he wants to talk about.

  Minutes later we are trudging behind Barlozzo over the back meadows and into the new light. A cloth sack over his shoulder, trowel and knife handles protruding from his jacket pockets, he folds himself neatly in two over every bright patch of hours-old green, loosening, digging, pulling some of it up with its roots, cutting others at the quick, bundling like kinds with lengths of kitchen string and flinging the muddy faggots into his sack. He hands us tools, but I’m all thumbs when I dig, my movements neither sure nor quick enough to sustain Barlozzo’s patience. “You hinder me more than you further me,” he says.

  And so he and Fernando go on ahead. I take my time, separate leaves I can recognize such as wild arugula and dandelion from those I only think might be worthy of a salad or a session in the saute pan with wild garlic and oil and at least one fat red chile. The sun is awake now and so am I, grateful for Barlozzo’s invitation to this dawn sortie. I’m walking along feeling the softening earth under my boots, composing menus, feeling gallant about my new life as a forager, singing a little. And I’m laughing, too, at a long-ago remembrance of the frantic Saturday lawnmowing scenes in my surburban Saratoga County neighborhood. The sinister whacking of the electric weed eater, the great toxic puffs of spray choking children and choking dandelions, the same race of dandelions that, today, will compose my lunch.

  I’m having a lovely time when I’m interrupted by the sound of whopping and shouting. I think they must have excavated a lode of Etruscan jewels, but when I finally get to them, they’re busy tying together bunches of scrawny brown stalks that look like perverted asparagus. They are brusandoli, wild hops, a whole patch of them. Barlozzo is already touting how he’ll cook them for our supper. “First we’ll have a salad of dandelions and other field grasses with a good spoonful of ricotta mixed with salt anchovies on top. Then we’ll eat the hops, barely poached, drained while they’re still a little crunchy, tossed with the thinnest shreds of sharp spring onion, dressed with only the squeezing of a lemon. Then we’ll fry some in the best oil, add some white butter, beat this morning’s eggs and pour them in only when the butter begins to talk. A little sea salt. And when the underside is deep brown, I’ll toss the frittata in the air, catch it on its other side, and just when the vapors of it begin to make you crazy, I’ll set it on the table and we’ll eat it straight out of the pan. Very cold white wine is permitted, but no bread. Nothing else. Florì will want to stir them into rice or some other insipid pap, but just ignore her.”

  “And since when did you begin reciting preludes to supper?” I ask him.

  “Va bene, OK, take credit for my poetry, but I do find that saying my plans out loud does stimulate the appetite more than just thinking them.”

  On another morning when March feels warm as June, Fernando is under orders from the duke to head down near the thermal springs to find wild garlic and herbs for the brewing of tonics. I stay behind for the bread vigil, and when it’s done I slip a jacket over my night dress and pull on my boots, take a basket and scissors for flowers, and walk down to meet him. It’s a rare morning during these days when Barlozzo is not present looking for cheer or balm in ever-increasing doses. I’m feeling blissfully free of him for a few hours, like a beleaguered mom when the Irish au pair takes over. Looking around me, I’m thinking there is nothing at all here that bespeaks an era, sets a date on this morning. It could be fifty years ago, two hundred years ago, many more ago. Just earth and sky and wild roses budded, sheep grazing.

  It’s so warm I take off my jacket, leave it on a rock for later. I think I see Fernando not too far ahead and, in my gauzy white dress, I am Diana invoking the chase, flailing arms, calling to him. Nothing. It’s too warm to walk farther so I’ll lie here in the spicy grass and wait for him. Now I hear him coming closer, singing “Tea for Three,” as usual. I’m still and quiet, sinuously arranged in pastoral goddess pose, ready to devastate him with my supine self. He’ll fall to his knees and cover me with kisses. My heart beats like a child’s when she’s playing hide and seek, but all my husband says is, “Ma cosa fai qui? Alzati, ti prego. Sei quasi nuda e completamente pazza. But what are you doing here? Get up, I beg you. You’re almost nude and completely crazy.”

  “I’m just feeling playful, that’s all. You were without the duke for once, and I thought I’d surprise you. Just you.”

  “But you’ll get sick lying on the damp ground,” he says bending down to hug me. “And you know as well as I do that our rascal child is stalking the meadows somewhere near. I don’t want him or anyone else to see you wandering about in your night dress.”

  I try to rise elegantly but I step on and finally trip over the Diana dress, falling, catching the heel of my boot in the hem of it, ripping the thing, trying again to get up, falling again. Some pastoral goddess, I tell myself, clumping back up the hill, up into the garden, up the stairs, damning my even fleeting faculty for self-deception. As I’m fastening my skirt, I can hear the duke shouting to Fernando from the back meadow: “Sorry I’m so late.”

  THE CHEESEMAKING SEASON is underway, with the ewes feasting on the same newly sprouted grasses as we do. And though it’s late this year, the first cheese of the season is called marzolino, little March, a pecorino eaten white and sweet and fresh, after only a few weeks of aging. Partnered with a heap of fava beans still in their pods, the cheese is dressed with oil and grindings of pepper.

  We slip the favas from their pods, ignore the still-soft inner skins, and eat them, on a hillside, with the marzolino and half a loaf of good bread. Perhaps an even better accompaniment to a fine marzolino is honey. Long before beekeeping became an art, bees still made honey and shepherds risked wrack and ruin by plunging an arm into a hive for a piece of comb, breaking it, scraping it, and eating it with their fresh sour cheese. An early dolce-salata dish. It was the shepherds who knew most about life. Shepherds who were born, lived, and as often died under the stars. They followed the pastoral ritual of the transumanza—the shepherd’s crossing with his flocks from summer mountain pastures to winter lowlands and back again, journeys of three hundred kilometers or more. As solitary as was his life, a shepherd was a bon vivant of sorts, a nomadic storyteller who carried news and folklore into the even greater isolation of the villages he passed, remote hamlets from which people never ventured from one mountaintop to the next. Welcomed as an entertainer, invited to sit around the fires of the farmers and the woodsmen, he traded tales for bread and wine and oil. An ancient supper from the days of the transumaza is one that a shepherd made with his own ricotta. He mixed the ricotta with a stolen egg or two, formed dumplings from the mash, dropped them into a kettle of water boiled over his fire, drained them, and finally dressed them with a piece of hard bread rubbed between his palms and, if he was lucky, a few drops of bartered oil. As I imagine this, I wish it were possible to trade one comfort for another as the shepherds did, as Barlozzo’s mother used to trade a pot of soup for one of ricotta. I would trade bread for secrets.

  BARLOZZO HAS FORMULAS for tonics and all sorts of virtuous drenches he mixes and ferments in a hideous vat. A wet and rusted tub on wheels, he parks it in our barn and heaves what look and smell like lawn trimmings into it, pounding at them with one of his hand-hewn tools. With the garden hose, he douses the mash, lets loose the vat’s metal cover, and says,

  “We’ll need to let it sit for a week or so.”

  I’m untrusting of the murky potion afloat with slime and foam until I taste the clean, sharp freshness of it. He empties the vat from its spigot into a pail and begins the process all over again with a different composition of materials. As each batch is brewed we filter the stuff through cheesecloth, pour it into scrubbed and sterilized wine bottles. Each one corked and labeled according to its particular benefit, we lay down some of the bottles on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator; the remainder we store in the armoire. Wild chicory for internal cleansing; wild
fennel and dandelion, a general panacea; rucola and wild onion to cleanse the blood; passion flower, valerian root, and wild garlic to lower blood pressure; wild borage for the skin.

  “These don’t age like wine, you know. Drink them all before the heat comes—a glassful, cold and neat, three times a day.” I fear for my bowels, having felt the ravages wreaked by quick sips, yet I promise to take the full cure.

  One Saturday at the market in Cetona I’m in a rapture over a wooden box of lettuces, little ruffled nosegays of them. Leaves like satin cream or yellow speckled in winey red, some of them green as limes, frilled in pink. I want to just look at them, I want to draw them. Most of all I want to feel them in my hands, taste them. Maybe it’s true that life is a search for beauty, for the harmony that comes from the mingling of things. Maybe life is a search for flavor. Not the flavor of just a food but of a moment, or a color, a voice—the flavor of what we can hear and see and touch. Certainly good cooking is about flavor. About the liberation of flavor, the suspension of it, and, finally, the release of it. One liberates the flavor of an herb by gently bruising it, thus freeing its natural oils and essences. Next, one suspends those oils and essences inside other components. For instance, to make a basil pesto, one pounds garlic and basil to release their oils and essences. Then one captures, holds those flavors by suspending them inside olive oil, forming an emulsion, a thick, smooth sauce. But this sauce has yet to rerelease all those flavors one worked to liberate and suspend. The sauce needs heat, contact with heat. First, taste the sauce cool, just as it is, from a spoon or your finger. Certainly it’s wonderful. But then toss the pesto with just-cooked pasta or spread it on a roasted tomato, hot from the oven. The contact with heat intensifies the flavors of the sauce to their fullness. The business of cooking has much in common with the business of life.

  A Tasting of Pecorino Cheeses with Chestnut Honey

  Approximately 3 ounces of cheese per person

  A basket of thinly sliced artisanal breads

  Dark honey, preferably chestnut or buckwheat, lightly heated

  A bottle of vin santo, chilled

  In lieu of a sweet, this is wonderful thing to carry out at the end of a Tuscan supper. The only work it asks is the shopping or the bread baking, if you wish. Collect as many varieties of pecorino—ewe’s milk cheese—as are to be found, trying to find both fresh, soft varieties as well as those drier, crumbly ones with a bit of age on them. Tuscan pecorinos are more readily available now in America than they were a few years ago when only the Roman, peppercornstudded varieties, best used as grating cheeses, were to be had. Two soft varieties and two more aged ones compose an honorable field, yet serving one or two, especially paired with a pot of dark, rich chestnut honey, some dark, whole grain breads, and a bottle of chilled vin santo, will be quite enough to please.

  15

  Florì and I Are Shelling Peas

  You haven’t said much about the house. I mean, do you like it, do you like the idea of it?” I ask her. Florì and I are shelling peas. Sitting on the terrace steps between the two pots of white hydrangea we’ve just planted, our frilly spring dresses ruched up on our thighs, the jellied peach light of five o’clock stroking our bare legs, bare feet.

  “It’s a fascinating old place and I think it could be beautiful. But I’m not excited about it in the way Barlozzo is excited. Of course, he’ll see the process through and have it in the end. But, Chou, it’s enough for me when the daylight comes.”

  Barlozzo’s been up terrorizing the butcher into carving lamb ribs, which he’ll grill out in the fire ring for our early supper. Toting his prize, he strides up from the drive and stops a little way from us. “Poveri fiori, poor flowers,” he says, “having to sit so close to the two of you. They might as well be swamp grasses for all anyone could notice of them. Belle donne, buona sera. Beautiful women, good evening.”

  He and Fernando set about bathing the ribs in oil and white wine. Pulling stalks of it from his ever-present canvas shoulder bag, Barlozzo tears the leaves of mentuccia, wild mint, he’d gathered on the hillside, pressing them onto the scant flesh of the lamb. They stoke up the fire and Florì pours some white wine into a pot, setting it over the grate to boil. She poaches the peas in the wine, drains them—saving the cooking liquors—and smashes the peas to a paste.

  Meanwhile, I’m sautéing onions in a soup kettle with olive oil, sprinkling on some cinnamon and a few grains of sugar, sea salt, and grindings of white pepper. It takes a long time to caramelize the onions, to cook them down to a jam. Leaving the stirring to the duke, Floriana and I set the table and open some wine. Earlier, she had climbed the hill with a dish of eggplant, tiny white ones she’d roasted whole until their flesh collapsed. When they were hot from the oven, she’d poured over a sauce of crushed new garlic and olive oil and marjoram picked from the windowsill pot in her kitchen, piercing the skins of the eggplants so they could drink in the savory juice. I keep eyeing the old iron dish of them sitting on the table. How gorgeous they look. A fat round of potato bread, crusty and brown, rests on an upturned basket over a branch of rosemary, the scent of which it will take in as it cools. A bowl of young lettuces waits to be dressed with the drippings the little ribs will surrender into a pan set below them as they grill. There’s nothing to do but finish the soup. I ladle veal stock into the cooked onions, add the smashed peas, the reserved pot liquors and a bit more wine, stirring the mass to blend and heat it. Carrying the pot directly to the table, I add a handful of pecorino to the soup and then spoon it out into shallow bowls, threading each portion with oil. The carabaccia, as it’s called, should be eaten tepid. And so we let it cool while we begin with the eggplant. Each of us tears away at the skin of one, spreading the perfumed cream on a piece of bread, eating it out of hand between sips of wine.

  “I’ll take another dose of nightshade, if you don’t mind,” I say, reaching for the eggplant. “Melanzana, a bastardization of mela insana. Literally, ‘unhealthy apple.’ That’s what we’re eating. A part of the nightshade family, as is belladonna.” Eggplant was a centuries-old staple of Middle Eastern cuisine by the time it was introduced in Europe, but here it was shunned as food, revered as a table ornament. “I guess someone got hungry enough to eat it one day and here we are.”

  “Belladonna,” says the duke sotto voce. I’m sorry for the old chap who first called poison a beautiful woman.”

  Florì and the duke say good night before the sun sets. They walk down the drive, climb up into town and we watch them until they vanish among the new-leafed trees.

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, Florì and I walk along the Celle road. I tell her that Barlozzo has told us about his mother, his father.

  “I was certain, sooner or later, he’d tell you. He’s never talked to me about it, you know,” she says, stopping to look at me, facing the sun so her long skittish eyes are yellow as saffron.

  “Maybe he never needed to talk with you,” I say. “He trusted that you knew it all. And, too, he trusted that you understood it had always been the obstacle between you.”

  “I suppose that’s true. And it’s also true that, in the deepest part of me, I’ve always known that he wanted to love me. But maybe it was me, my inconsolable fear of what I knew must be his torment. I never felt wise enough to help him wash all that away so I could find his heart. So, you see, I was as much an obstacle as were Patsi and Nina. I never knew how to begin. I never knew what to say. Why can’t we talk to each other, Chou?” She asks the question for all of us.

  We’ve walked only half a kilometer or so when she laughs and says, “I’m tired. Spring fever. I think I’ll just take to my bed for a few days, let everyone fuss over me. I can do that now that I know I’m well. Before, when I wasn’t sure, the idea of everyone being around me seemed too scented in farewell. But now I think I’m ready for a week of women’s care and company.”

  The word goes out, and next morning five of us are gathered in Florì’s small apartment, each of us getting in the others’ way, clea
ning, cooking soup, keeping her company, painting her toenails, listening to her stories. She looks at me, tells me to come closer so she can ask me something important. She says she wants me to put makeup on her face. She wants mascara and a touch of powder, “e un pò di ombretto, appena, appena, just a very little bit of eye shadow.” But what she really wants are red lips. As though they were a sin, she asks for them in a hoarse whisper, pointing to mine—colored, as they always are, red as an anemone—then pointing to her own. I run up the hill to get my kit. I smudge and draw and brush about her eyes and face, paint her mouth and, when I finish, I hold a mirror for her inspection. She is silent. She closes her eyes. I sit next to her on the bed, holding her hand. We stay that way for a long time. When we look at each other, I see her face is wet and warm, her powder streaked, her mascara slipping into black puddles in the deep half moons under her eyes. But her lips are perfect. I tell her that and she answers, “Yes. They are perfect.”

  I fix the damage before calling in the others to admire her. They shout and scream and say they all want red lips. One by one, I paint them until we’re all sitting there around the bed and on the bed, giggling, passing the mirror, telling first-time stories about lipstick and secret love and high heels and wedding dresses. Somehow the telling of memories gives way to a round robin of sorts whereby each one shares un detto, a quote from scriptures or from literature. But here, more often the phrases are formed of succulent observation. Florì calls it saying truths.

  “Tradition, whether the gastronomic kind or the lovemaking kind, is perpetuated by daily application.”

  “Beware of the tyranny of the giver. The giver has more cards than the getter. Or perceives it so. Yet how often is the giver giving to gain control, or at the least, the sanction to plunder the givee’s life, how and when he may.”