A Thousand Days in Tuscany

A Thousand Days in Tuscany

ALSO BY MARLENA DE BLASI

Regional Foods of Northern Italy
Regional Foods of Southern Italy
A Thousand Days in Venice

A Thousand Days in Tuscany

A B
ITTERSWEET
A
DVENTURE

• • •

by Marlena de Blasi

Published by

ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

a division of
Workman Publishing
708 Broadway
New York, New York 10003

© 2004 by Marlena de Blasi. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Published simultaneously in Canada by Thomas Allen & Son Limited. Design by Anne Winslow.

Quotation on page 224 from
A Thousand Days in Venice,
© 2002 by Marlena de Blasi, published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.

To protect the privacy of friends and neighbors, names and, sometimes, chronology have been changed, while certain characters embrace more than a single person.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

de Blasi, Marlena.

A thousand days in Tuscany; by Marlena de Blasi.—1st ed.
     p. cm.

ISBN 1-56512-392-1

1. Cookery, Italian—Tuscan sytle.    2. Food—Italy—Tuscany.    3. Tuscany (Italy)—Social life and customs.    I. Title.
TX723.2.T86D36 2004
641.5945'5—dc22                                                                                                 2004051589

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition

F
OR
J
ILL
F
OULSTON
,
A BEAUTY WHO, LIKE
A
BRAHAM
’
S ANGELS, STOPPED BY
ONE EVENING AND, BEING HERE, CHANGED THINGS
,
ENOBLED THEM FOREVER.

Because being here is much, and because all this that’s here, so fleeting, seems to require us and strangely concerns us.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

Contents

PROLOGUE

Summer

1 The Gorgeous Things They’re Cooking Are Zucchini Blossoms

2 Figs and Apples Threaded on Strings

3 The Valley Is Safe, and We Will Bake Bread

4 Are You Making a Mattress Stuffed with Rosemary?

5 Sit the Chicken in a Roasting Pan on a Pretty Bed of Turnips and Potatoes and Onions, Leeks and Carrots

Fall

6
Vendemmiamo
—Let’s Pick Those Grapes

7
Dolce e Salata,
Sweet and Salty—Because That’s How Life Tastes to Me

8 Now
These
Are Chestnut Trees

9 Do Tuscans Drink Wine at Every Meal?

Winter

10 Perhaps, as a Genus, Olives Know Too Much

11 December Has Come to Live in the Stable

12 Supper Made from Almost Nothing

13 Fasting Was How We Were Living Anyway

Spring

14 Virtuous Drenches

15 Florì and I Are Shelling Peas

16 The First of the Zucchini Blossoms Are Up

Recipes

Prologue

Ce l’abbiamo fatta, Chou-Chou,
we did it,” he says, using the name he gave to me, clutching the steering wheel of the old BMW with both hands, elbows out straight like wings, shoulders hunched in glee, wheezing up a conspiratorial laugh.

“Yes. We did it,” I say, with only a crinkle of disdain riding on the “we.” I look away from him and out the window to the lights of the Ponte della Libertà. The day still sleeps. Creamy shimmers of a waking sun curl about the fading moon, lowering now in the damp, dark blue of the lagoon sky. His child’s joy and the whirring of the road beneath us make the only tracks on the silence. The weeping begins, tears pouring hot and fast no matter my will to hold them back. I don’t want to go away from Venice. Still, I smile at the aptness of the bridge’s name. Liberty. What better road for an escape? But this is
his
escape,
his
new beginning. Oh, I know it’s mine as well. Ours. And much of me is rejoicing in this prospect of setting up house in the exquisite Tuscan countryside. Besides, we’ll be a morning’s drive away from Venice. We’ll go back and forth. I know we will. But for now I must call on the enduring vagabond in me and hope she will oblige.

This Venetian husband of mine has unstitched every tie to his city. Having resigned from his work and sold our home, he is tearing up the remains of his past like a punishing letter, strewing the pieces out to a swallowing sea. This willful reformation he performed—plodding, sometimes, other times galloping—over these last thousand days since we met. His ending sealed, his says that
now
he can begin to be a beginner. Though inclined to melancholy, Fernando believes that beginnings, by nature, are joyful and flower-strewn passages, forbidden to pain. He thinks old ghosts won’t find their way to Tuscany.

As we hit terra firma and wend through Marghera to the
autostrada,
he flashes blueberry eyes at me, caressing my tears with the back of his hand. Ancient, faraway eyes made of sadness, made of mischief. It was the eyes I loved first. The eyes and the shy Peter Sellers grin.
Unexpected
they called it, this story of ours, unexpected, improbable, the stuff of fables. He—no longer young—sits across the tiny room of a wine bar on a stormy Venetian Tuesday and sees a woman—no longer young—who changes something in him, everything in him. This, only days before he begins to change everything in her. A chef, a writer, a journalist paid to trek through Italy and France in search of a perfect thing to eat, to drink, she gathers what she can of her quite lovely, quite lonely life, hugs her two grown and thriving children and goes to live with this stranger on
the fringes of the Adriatic Sea. Midst flames of a hundred white candles and musky plumes of frankincense, they marry in a small stone church that looks to the lagoon. They ride the night train to Paris and eat ham sandwiches and chocolate cake in an upper berth. They live this love. They fight and they laugh. They try to learn each other’s language, each other’s ways, but soon realize there’ll never be enough time to know all they want to know, one about the other. There never is.

Summer

1
The Gorgeous Things They’re Cooking Are Zucchini Blossoms

The scent of them is enough to send up a short, sharp thrill in a hungry person. Seething hot beauties, they repose in a great unruly pile on the white linen. The yellow of the naked blossoms shows through the gilt sheaths of their crackling skin. Skin thin as Venetian glass, I think. But I’m far away from Venice. We live in Tuscany, now. As of this morning, we live in Tuscany. I say it breezily to myself as though it was all in a day’s work. Yesterday, Venice. Today, San Casciano dei Bagni. And six hours after arrival, here I am already in a kitchen: in the small, steamy kitchen of the local bar, watching two white-hatted, blue-smocked cooks preparing antipasti for what seems to have become a village festival.

The gorgeous things they’re cooking are zucchini blossoms, fat and velvety, almost as wide and long as lilies. And the frying dance is precise: drag a blossom quickly through the nearly liquid batter,
let the excess drain back into the bowl, lay the blossom gently in the wide, low-hipped pot of hot, very hot shimmering oil. Another blossom and another. Twelve at a time in each of four pots. The blossoms are so light that, as a crust forms on one side, they bob about in the oil and turn themselves over and over until a skimmer is slid in to rescue them, to lay them for a moment on thick brown paper. The paper is then used as a sling to transport the blossoms to a linen-lined tray. One of the cooks fills a red glass bottle with warm sea-salted water. She fits a metal sprayer onto the bottle and, holding it at arm’s length, spritzes the gold blossoms with the salty water. The hot skins hiss and the perfume of them is whipped up and out into the moist June breeze.

Pan-to-hand-to-mouth food, these are sustenance for the twelve-minute interval before supper, and so when the first hundred are ready, the cook, the one called Bice, hands me the tray and says, “
Vai,
go,” without looking up. A kitchen directive from one colleague to another, from one chef to another, she says it with familiarity, as though we’ve worked together for years. But tonight I’m not the chef. I think I’m a guest—or am I the hostess? I’m not at all sure how this festival got started, but I’m happy it did.

Happy and still unwashed from the morning’s journey, from the afternoon’s work, I’m salty as the blossoms I offer to people, who take them without ceremony. The same familiarity is at work here as
each one smiles or pats me on the shoulder, says,
“Grazie, bella,
thank you, beauty,” as if I’d been passing them hot, crisp flowers all my life. I like this. For one moment it occurs that I might run with the basket to some dim corner of the piazza to devour the remaining blossoms myself, eyes half closed in a lusty swoon among the shadows. But I don’t. Some can’t wait until I reach them but come to me, take a flower while sipping wine or talking over their shoulders. People are collecting about me now, rooks swooping in for the things until nothing is left save errant crumbles, crunchy and still warm, which I press onto my finger and suck.