The Midsummer Garden

by Kirsty Manning

  The happy pair almost forgot that sweet Emmeline was sitting there, quiet as a larder cat, as Andreas explained the workings of a clever cart designed by Sienese engineer Taccola that he wanted to have made because it could unfold into a bridge. Together they wondered what exotic place in the Far East the shiny nutmeg traded by the Arabs in Venice came from and whether it would soon drop in price. Andreas asked Artemisia how she would cook the mushrooms and how she dried them. She found herself so pleased that someone had asked her to share her knowledge that she was happy to tell.

  Artemisia felt the fresh breeze on her face and her plaits tumbled and jiggled down her back as they emerged from the woods. They drew to a slow walk and the horses flicked their manes and snorted as they strolled beside the château’s high stone wall. Andreas admired the flourish of fierce yellow leaves peeking over the top of the hard granite wall until they reached the closed wrought-iron gates of Château de Boschaud and waited for them to be hauled open by the old gatekeeper.

  When they pulled up alongside the larder, Andreas busied himself unpacking the terracotta pots from the back of the cart. Artemisia set Emmeline to work in the kitchen alongside Hildegard rinsing, peeling and slicing the two baskets of mushrooms before laying them on a flay tray to dry out above the coals. Emmeline didn’t notice that Artemisia had slipped a few handfuls of the golden mushrooms into her apron pocket before ducking into the larder.

  As Andreas brought in the last pots, Artemisia quickly wrapped a tiny parcel with mushrooms and a sheet of parchment with three recipes. The first was for her pastie; the second was a list for a sautée with one pound of wild chanterelles, onion, butter, and a pinch each of freshly ground black pepper, ginger, nutmeg and coriander seed. The third was the recipe for her green porée with fresh fish. She also wrote a note:

  Dear Mr de Vitriaco,

  Please accept these mushrooms and the recipes we discussed as a gift. You may wish to pass them to your cook to prepare.

  I am thankful for your kind treatment of young Emmeline and myself and your interest in my recipes.

  May I be so bold as to ask for your rosewater recipe?

  Your most sincere servant and cook,

  Artemisia

  (One more request, if I may? One would hate this letter to fall into the hands of Abbot Roald as I shall be up for a severe whipping if caught. Lord Boschaud is away preparing for battle and the abbot is the master of the château in his place. You are most welcome to add the recipe parchments to your own, yet I beg you burn any correspondence.)

  She folded the thick parchment, placed the mushrooms on top and wrapped her little parcel in cheesecloth, fastening it with twine. Then she slipped it into her pocket and followed Andreas out to the cart as he carried the last of the empty pots to load.

  Andreas leaned over the cart to tuck a pot in the far corner and Artemisia surreptitiously admired the strong line of his back until he finished and turned.

  ‘Oh, sorry, Artemisia. I didn’t see you there. Is everything okay with the order?’ He frowned. ‘I hope I haven’t forgotten anything.’ He reached to pull his list from his pocket.

  Artemisia reached out to stop his hand, and their fingers touched. ‘No, pardon, Monsieur de Vitriaco.’

  She hesitated as she looked around. If she was caught by the abbot …

  Her mouth went dry just thinking about it and she felt the slow flush of humiliation spread from her collar to her face. It was too big a risk. She had no right to expect friendship from the épicier—she was a servant, by God’s wound.

  ‘Call me Andreas, please.’ He tilted his head and looked at her kindly as Artemisia drew breath and pulled the little cheesecloth parcel from her pocket.

  ‘For you, sir.’ She murmured, too afraid to say more.

  ‘Andreas,’ he said, raising his eyebrows as he took the parcel and made to untie the twine.

  Artemisia looked around for Abbot Roald. Speaking with the village merchants about anything other than larder supplies was against his rules. ‘No, not here. It’s nothing. Just—just some chanterelles and some recipes.’ She blushed. ‘To thank you for that ride. It was most courteous of you.’

  Andreas lifted dark eyes the colour of molasses and winked as he pressed the parcel to his chest.

  ‘My lucky day, Artemisia.’ He then reached over and tucked it into his cart as he tipped his hat onto his head. ‘Until next time.’

  Artemisia nodded and gave a half-wave as she turned her face up into the cool air, searching for a break in the thickset clouds to find the sun.

  Chapter 12

  Tasmania, May 2014

  To: maryarnet@bigpond.com

  From: parnet@unitas.edu.au

  Subject: Extended holiday!

  Hi Mum,

  I’ve just handed in some deferral forms for my PhD. My co-supervisor, Jim Grant, will hold my research position. It was his idea—along with Imogen—that I take a break from writing up my thesis. Said it might help me find some ‘clarity’ when it comes to analysing my data.

  Of course I was offended—but it makes sense. They don’t have the funding for me to stuff about.

  I’ve been toying with having a break to go travelling since Jack and I separated. I mentioned it to Dan (the chef at Zest you met last time you were in Tasmania) and he suggested I could get some work with his friend Eduardo in San Sebastián, Spain.

  Eduardo is somewhat of a BIG DEAL in Spain, the pioneer of a style of cuisine they call molecular gastronomy. Weird, huh? It’s kind of a blend of everything I’m good at: science and cooking. So you can be pleased at least that my chemistry and biology will be put to good use! I know you are probably thinking I’m going to quit my PhD. Dad will. Well please hose him down a bit before I get there. I’m not quitting just yet!

  You know how much I love my work at Zest. I’ll be sharpening up my cooking skills. So make sure you tell Dad I shall not just be wandering the world without a plan. Although, really, what the hell is wrong with that? Most of my mates are.

  Anyway, in Spain they forage ingredients daily in the mountains. Who knows, maybe I’ll come back to Australia and open a restaurant here? Just kidding!

  Dan and Eduardo have assured me that everyone speaks great English in the kitchen. And besides, I speak chemistry!

  Just one more thing—I won’t be meeting up with Jack in Italy. Better to make a clean break. (I am trying hard to remain good friends. Bit tricky when he won’t return my calls.) Megs has kindly agreed to store all my stuff in her garden shed. (It’s not like they use it!)

  Anyway, hope this letter hasn’t set off your ticker, or Dad’s. Probably inevitable though. Don’t worry, I’ll be fine. I’ll call you in a day or so to work out dates for my visit.

  Lots of love,

  Pip x

  Chapter 13

  Château de Boschaud, Autumn 1486

  Dear Artemisia,

  I hope I may be so bold as to address you as Artemisia in the written word as I mean for us to correspond insofar as you can manage it. With such a beautiful name, drawn from the great Mother of Herbs and Plato’s huntress, it would be a shame to neglect the temptation to use it on another fine maiden.

  Let me assure you I took a flame to the letter as soon as it was read. It was your words that warmed me, Artemisia, and I am well pleased, if most surprised, of your command of the quill. Your kindly Abbot Bellamy showed much foresight when he taught you to read and write. You have a mind as sharp as pepper and I very much enjoyed our chat on the cart.

  I hope you will allow me another opportunity for such a meeting.

  Please find enclosed the standard recipe from Le Ménagier de Paris for making house rosewater, as requested. I assume the recipe has come from his cook, though none is credited. My own father would turn in his grave if I were to disclose the exact measurements of the spices we blend with our de Vitriaco version. It has been our family business for centuries. I may be convinced, however, after some careful negotiation with the head cook of Château de
Boschaud.

  If I were to recommend a blend for laundering sheets and shirts, I’d consider adding a handful of fresh lavender flowers, two ounces of orris, a drop of musk, three ounces of ambergris, as much civet and four drops of oil of clove. Stop this close, and set it in the sun for a fortnight. Put one spoonful of this into a small basin of water, and sprinkle it over your clothes when folding.

  Rosewater brings out the flavours of summer. The sauce for a roast chicken is half vinegar, half rosewater and press (orange juice may be swapped for the vinegar).

  To make red rosewater, take a flask and fill it half full of good rosewater and fill the other half with the petals of young red roses from which you shall have cut off the end of the petal, which is white, and leave it nine days in the sun and nine nights likewise, and then pour it out.

  Lastly, may I be so bold as to suggest a recipe to sweeten your sheets and your dreams.

  Three pounds of rosewater, cloves, cinnamon, sandalwood and two handfuls of the flowers of lavender. Let it stand a month in the sun in a sealed jar. It makes a water of wondrous sweetness.

  Your most humble servant and épicier,

  Andreas de Vitriaco

  Chapter 14

  Mount Macedon, Victoria, May 2014

  Pip studied the faded black-and-white wedding photo of her parents displayed in a simple wooden frame at the entrance to their house. Mary short and dark, David tall and broad, both with their heads thrown back, eyes creased and mouths open laughing as they were showered with rose petals. Her parents married within five months of meeting on the wide stone steps of the biology department at the university they both attended. Both went on to finish their degrees. Forge careers. Raise a family. Pip’s stomach clenched and guilt surged through her body. How had they both been so certain? She loved Jack—so why had he cut her off? Why wasn’t she enough?

  Her heart ached as she swung open the front door and headed outside to walk up the mountain.

  ‘Jesus,’ she gasped, as she was engulfed by the sharp autumn mist. She’d forgotten how cold early mornings were at her parents’ place on Mount Macedon. She tugged on her navy woollen beanie, scarf and matching gloves, quietly thanking her mum for keeping these remnants of her schooldays. The driveway gravel crunched underfoot as she turned right and headed up the hill to the spot where she would meet her father and his friend Dom for some pre-dawn mushrooming.

  Autumn mornings with their clear soft light were Pip’s favourite time of day to be alone on the mountain. She loved to wake early and head out for a few minutes of solitude. Her father was still inside, making an espresso and filling a thermos for another one later up the hill. She had at least five minutes up her sleeve before the men joined her and the hike began. A couple of kookaburras hidden in the bush let rip with their cackling, breaking the quiet.

  Pip strode up the Tuscan-style gravel path—crunching with each step—enjoying the scent of her mother’s herb beds planted with rosemary hedges and bordered with sage. She paused and plucked a leaf of her favourite broadleaf sage and rubbed the wide soft leaf against her skin before crushing it in her fingers and inhaling the rich, woody fragrance. Out of habit, she also picked a sprig of rosemary, rubbed the oil on her fingers and sniffed. The aggressive scent snapped her out of autopilot. She used to keep rosemary on her desk when she was ploughing through sample maths exams for her VCE and sniff it sporadically when she lost focus. That or lick green wasabi paste straight from the tube! Her mother told her constantly: ‘You’re mad, Pip—bonkers with your herbs.’

  Like she could talk! Mary had planted acres of rosemary, sage, lavender, catmint and about five different types of thyme. She used thick hedges of broadleaf sage as borders around the four raised vegetable squares to keep the white moths off the broccoli and cabbages, and catmint under the fruit trees to attract the bees. For dinner she served chicken roasted in layers of catmint, pork stuffed with chestnuts, sage and lavender, roast lamb and crispy potatoes smelling of rosemary. In the summer, Mary added seasonal plants like basil between the tomatoes to repel the slugs, mints to scare aphids and sprawling borage to sweeten the blackberries and raspberries. She always collected and froze the azure blue star-shaped flowers in ice cubes, which added a fairy-like touch to jugs of water laced with mint and sliced lemons.

  Pip started walking again and looked up beyond the canopy of the chestnut grove. There was the familiar dark wall of purple-grey where the giant stands of mountain ash framed the rise of the mountain. A great blanket of mist spilled down the slope and over the gum trees towards the farmland far below.

  Though the uphill walk to the meeting spot was only two hundred metres, Pip found herself puffing. She reached the intersection marked with a stand of dusty green blackwoods nicknamed ‘Pip’s forest’ from when she used to ride her bike up here as a kid. Megs sure as hell never made it up there. Her sister didn’t really get into the bush. Some of the blackwoods and gums beyond had the telltale sign of charcoal up the trunks. It’d been decades since a fire went through here but Parks Victoria did controlled burns every few years. Controlled burns that sometimes went a bit haywire and tore up the slopes, leaving blackened scars right through the bush.

  Pip jogged on the spot to keep warm and clapped her hands together. The sound ricocheted down the slope. She was grateful for this moment of solitude before the men arrived. Autumn mushrooming was a ritual Pip’s father David and his mate Dom had had forever. Since Pip was about seven—old enough to walk up the hill in the cold without complaining—they’d included her on this annual foraging expedition. They always went after Anzac Day, when the autumn rains had started, softening the ground underfoot.

  Pip’s father had met Dom twenty years earlier. David and Mary had just purchased the chestnut grove and had no idea what they were going to do with the fruit of forty mature trees. They had bought the block on a whim: two wrong turns on a Sunday and it was pretty much theirs. The first year David placed an advertisement in Il Globo, Melbourne’s Italian newspaper: Pick your own chestnuts. Free to good home! Domenico Sculli, a retired truck driver who had migrated to Australia in 1970 from Piedmonte, had been coming up from Northcote every autumn since.

  ‘Castanea. Food of my people,’ declared Dom. He showed David and Mary how to extract the chestnut from the prickly husk by stepping on the ball, causing the chestnuts to shoot out the side. Then he’d carefully shown them how to score the shell: ‘Shiny, like your hair, Philippa. It is the exact colour, no?’

  He taught Pip to look beyond the bracken and harvest weeds dotted up the mountain. He’d yank the cardoon thistles and steam them like an artichoke: ‘Best way to eat ’em. No place for them in these forests anyway, they’ll take over, like the sorrel. A weed’s just something that’s in the wrong place. At home, these are delicacies.’ Dom also taught Pip to pay more attention to the native plants that tended to fade into the scrub. He showed her how to harvest the native mountain pepper berry and dry it out on newspaper and also to take the young shoots and seeds of the strappy grass Lomandra longifolia. He’d fry them up with the mushrooms or use them in a salad.

  But mostly Dom came in autumn for the mushrooms: saffron milk caps; the more powerful, meaty orange pine mushrooms; and the slimy brown slippery jacks.

  ‘Are you sure these aren’t death caps?’ Pip would ask doubtfully. ‘Dad told me they can kill you.’

  Dom replied patiently: ‘I’ve told you a million times, Philippa: the ones with the orange gills and hollow stems are pines. Once they are cooked, they are perfect. They’ll go beautifully with these slippery jacks.’

  Pip glanced inside her basket filled with the dark caps and squashy undersides of yellow. They smelled moist and peaty. She’d adored mushrooms ever since.

  Over the years, Dom had shown Pip how to see fungi everywhere: a fairy ring of delicate threads of red toadstools poking through moss, a staircase of brown coral-like bracket fungi clinging to the pale bark of a eucalypt, tiny fluorescent red and pink caps popping from a rotti
ng soil-filled log. She’d learned to look for the telltale holes scratched by wallabies searching for nuggets of native truffles and to watch for the globs of golden jelly bells. The prettier they were, it seemed, the more poisonous.

  Megs wasn’t interested in cooking at all, she was always off playing with Barbies in her bedroom. Ripping their limbs off and putting them back together. But Pip would stand in the kitchen helping her mother peel warm chestnuts until her fingers were raw. Her mother would freeze the chestnuts in portions, ready to roll into a pork shoulder or stuff into the cavity of a chicken with garlic, sage and rosemary …

  Pip was jolted from her memories by a giant bear hug from Dom.

  Her father beamed beside her, rugged up in army disposal gear and a red sleeveless puffer vest with a thermos sticking out of the pocket. He held out a basket to her: ‘You forgot this when you raced out the door, love. You were in a bit too much of a hurry, as usual.’ He grinned and handed her the basket and Pip noticed a slight stoop in his shoulders. When had her dad started getting old? In the rising light his curly hair looked silver. It was as if he had aged ten years since her last visit, six months earlier.

  ‘So, Philippa,’ Dom said as the trio marched up the hill, ‘your father tells me that you are off to Spain soon.’ He bent and reached for a slimy brown mushroom. ‘Slippery jacks.’ He nodded in approval, picked a handful and gave them a vigorous shake before dropping them into his basket. He lowered his voice and leaned in close: ‘He’s very proud of you. Sì—always talking about his clever daughters. Now look here, young Philippa: sorrel, plantain and dandelion. My parents lived off these in the mountains during the war. Try the sorrel. It tastes bitter now, sour, but come back when the new growth is out and the young leaves are sweet and delicious. Add to some salads with beetroot leaf. Nothing is as it seems, young Philippa. Sometimes you have to take a second look. And sometimes what was plentiful one year is missing the next. You have to keep your eyes open, to look for new places. It’s a matter of survival for all of us. You know this, mia cara.’