“The market, the taxi, folk on the street. Your kitchen comes highly recommended among those who care more about skill than popularity.”
It was cheap flattery, but enough that she gave him a second look. His old coat was of decent quality, its lines elegant if plain. The hat was the sort of thing she recalled seeing on old men in the mountain villages, the ones who sat about all day commenting on the world. Not a beggar, perhaps, but certainly no man of means. Still, he had taste and tact; that was enough to decide her.
“The Milano night is cold,” she said, gesturing toward the door with the ladle. “I suppose I can keep my kitchen warm awhile longer.”
“You have my gratitude, signora.” The man moved past her and inside, pausing first to knock snow off his boots at the door.
The common room of the inn had closed down for the evening some time before, though the smell of cigarettes and prosciutto lingered in the air. Old deaf Giovanni hummed to himself as he swept behind the bar; long used to Franca’s tantrums, he had already cleaned up the pappardelle from the walls and floor. The stranger paused to look about and for a moment Franca sighed, ashamed as always by the badly sealed stone walls, the uneven wooden floor, and the yellowed newspaper clippings and photographs decorating the walls. It was a cozy little inn, the locals said. So rustic, so quaint.
So far have I fallen, she thought.
“The special tonight is hare.” She said it gruffly, picking up a nearby rag to give the table a cursory swipe. “Nothing left of tonight’s soup, though, and tomorrow’s caponata is scorched so you’ll have to do without an appetizer. I suppose there might still be some pappardelle.”
The man sat down, not removing his hat and coat. “Hare?” He lifted his head slightly—his face was still in shadow—and sniffed the air. “Roasted in an herb-crust?”
“And a dolce e forte sauce, with Sicilian cabernet.”
“You’ll have used tomatoes as a thickener, then.”
“I’ll have used hare’s blood, as God intended before the damned Americas were discovered. Do you want it or not?”
“Please. With the pappardelle—such as you have left.”
Franca snorted and went into the kitchen. For a moment she contemplated simply reheating leftovers from the freezer. The sauce’s tart sweetness would only have deteriorated a little, and her guest would probably never know the difference.
Bah—she was thinking like one of the stupid assistants, for whom the subtle arts of the kitchen were merely a job, a living, a way to impress their friends. What did her audience matter, dignitary or destitute? She cooked for herself, and she had never cooked less than her best.
So she cut apart the hare and browned the quarters with garlic and onion, searing the meat to seal the juices before removing it to the oven to roast. Then after deglazing the browning pan with red wine, she added vegetables, herbs, the organ meats, and blood. This she simmered uncovered to reduce, meanwhile basting the oven quarters with honey and horseradish. The pappardelle she boiled in salted water, al dente, and tossed with the sauce. As a finishing touch she set the roasted hare portions to stand at the center and grated parmeggiano around the dish’s edge.
And while she worked, the small nuisances of the day faded and her mind focused wholly on the marvel of creation. There was such balance in food. Sweetness and sharpness, blood and oil, the delicate influence of ingredients and the controlling power of flame … If only men and women could be so simple, so malleable! “Give me a well-stocked kitchen and I could rule the world,” she whispered to herself, and wished for all her heart that it was true.
The meal was done. She carried the platter out to the common room and set it down in front of the man. “You’ll want wine?”
“In a moment.” The man lifted a hand to waft the dish’s steam toward himself; Franca could barely hear his soft inhalation. “Ah. And now …” He took up the spoon and tasted the sauce, then plucked loose a morsel of hare. He chewed slowly and thoughtfully, then swirled a few fat ribbons of pappardelle in the sauce before slurping them up. He took his time tasting this as well.
Franca folded her arms. She usually didn’t watch when people ate her dishes—it felt somehow incestuous—but something about this man had piqued her interest. “Well?”
The man looked up at her and for the first time she got a good look at his face. Older than she’d expected, gaunt and solemn though his eyes were merry. Might have been handsome twenty years before. Not Italian, though his Milan accent had been flawless; she could not guess his ancestry other than that. French, perhaps, or UK.
“Marvelous. The perfect balance of salt and sweetness, the tang of the capers, the tender texture … all blended with such subtlety. Signora, you are amazing.”
“I know.” Inordinately pleased, Franca went to the bar and returned with a wine bottle, a corkscrew, and a glass, all of which she thumped down in front of him. Old Giovanni was gone, probably to bed. Isadora, the inn’s owner, might notice the missing wine when she next did inventory, but Franca would blame it on the assistants she’d just fired. “Call me when you’re done.”
She’d just finished cleaning up the kitchen—perhaps she would miss the assistants a little—when she heard his call from the common room. “Mi scuza, signora, I’ve just finished the best meal of my life.”
She stepped outside to see with satisfaction that he had cleaned his plate. “I suppose I could make something for dessert.”
“Perhaps next time, signora. I cannot linger tonight, though I shall most certainly return.” The man dabbed his lips with a napkin, belched heartily, and pushed back his chair. “In the meantime, I must repay you for your talent and effort—though for that I have something more interesting than money to offer. A challenge.”
She did not particularly care whether he paid; it wasn’t her inn. But at his words she lifted an eyebrow. “What sort of challenge?”
“A very special one.” He slipped a hand into his coat like an old-fashioned pistolero, but before Franca could worry, he pulled out a bulging sack made of what looked like deerhide. He set this on the table—carefully, Franca noted.
“You are willing to follow a recipe? So many chefs of your caliber think themselves above the direction of others.”
She lifted her chin. “I was head chef for Parliament once—before that bastard Berlusconi, anyhow. While I was there, I had to make Florentine dishes like a Florentine and Venetian dishes like a Venetian and the Madonna help me if I did them wrong. If the recipe is sound, I can follow it.”
“This one is sound. Just difficult. I present it to you, along with a few special ingredients.” He gestured toward the sack with a flourish. “I have been looking for a true artist of the kitchen for some time, signora. I beg you not to disappoint me.”
She stared after him as he straightened, touched fingertips to the brim of his hat, and walked out with a smile.
Bemused, she picked up the sack and emptied it onto the table. An astonishing number of items fell out: an assortment of what looked like balls of dirt, a wad of moss, twenty or thirty fresh herb-bunches tied with string, and three great gnarled things like the mating of an onion with a tree-bole. Last there fluttered out a small roll of parchment paper, held shut with an old-fashioned wax seal.
“Not a beggar indeed; a madman,” she murmured, but she picked up the scroll and opened it nevertheless.
Signora,
The ingredients of this recipe must be blended precisely. Any deviation could be dangerous. Please do not waste the frava root; it is very difficult to come by.
This was followed by a beautifully illegible signature and a list of the ingredients provided. The gnarled things must be the frava root, she decided, whatever that was. The herbs were a mixture of familiar and unfamiliar; tarragon was followed by “3 sprigs takiprik” and “powdered honavia.” Then she gasped, for the recipe listed something that was truly impossible. She set the parchment down and snatched up one of the dirtballs.
Tartufo bian
co. A white truffle.
Freshly dug; the clay covering hadn’t even dried. A dozen of them lay scattered on the table—no, two dozen. Last she’d heard, white truffles sold for 1500 Euros a kilo in the chefs’ markets uptown. Her “beggar” had been carrying a fortune in fungi about in his coat.
She took a shaking breath and picked up the parchment again. At the bottom of the page was the recipe itself. She made herself read it, and read it again. Then, disbelieving, she read it through a third time.
“Roast the truffles …” That was bad enough. Truffles were best uncooked. But a little farther on she saw “evaporate the anise effusion under a cheesecloth” and later “on bisection of the frava: a blowtorch will be required.”
It was a bitch of a thing. A monster of a thing. And cruel; it would use up more than half the truffles he’d given her, if not all.
And yet … she felt the familiar clench in her belly, the thrill along her spine. A challenge, the man had called it. Oh and it was, for even as her practical mind insisted she ignore the mad recipe and take the truffles out to sell, her heart was pounding in excitement.
She got to her feet, gathered up the ingredients, and carried them into the kitchen. She put them into their proper places—herbs in the herb rack, strange roots with the potatoes. The truffles she put into a risotto basket and tucked them away under the sink. She took in the dishes the man had emptied, wiped down the table, and cleaned up the kitchen. Then she shut off the lights and headed home.
I’ll sleep on it, she told herself, but that was a lie. She had already made up her mind.
It took five days.
Franca informed Isadora that she would be taking a vacation that week. Isadora was upset at the late notice, but had no choice; she had asked Franca to work through August when most of the country enjoyed its traditional four weeks of vacation. Franca’s price had been compensatory time whenever she wanted. But when Franca informed Isadora that she would be using the kitchen during her vacation, the old innkeeper had grown curious. “Who works on vacation?” she asked. And Franca had replied that she would not be working, but creating.
There were problems. The unidentifiable ingredients: She researched on the internet, browsed through books, even did chemical tests to make sure she knew what was what. But in all her searching, she never once found any reference to a frava root. The root’s smell was bitter when she finally wrestled one open, and there was a faint underscent of something fouler, like hot asphalt. She made herself taste it and her tongue went numb for two days—a severe handicap for any chef, but doubly frustrating under the circumstances.
Worse, the recipe was unclear. “A pinch” here and “a spoonful” there, interspersed with “select a mid-sized” example of this or that. She had never worried about such things before; art was rarely exact. But the strange fellow’s note had been emphatic about precision, so Franca had no choice but to employ a blend of intuition and quasi-science to determine the correct balance. She calculated that the truffles’ oils would need to be emulsified by an equal proportion of ground herbs. She added a third thread of saffron because the mixture’s color just didn’t look right.
She also thanked God she’d fired the assistants. Just having them around would have cocked up everything.
But despite the stress and the labor, she persevered and triumphed—or so she thought. The resulting concoction, shaped into bite-sized loaves each precisely thirty grams in weight, looked unappetizing and smelled worse. Surely the things were not supposed to develop that greenish oily sheen after she chilled them? She stored them in the small freezer, for fear the deep freeze’s thermostat might spark and set the cakes on fire.
On the night that she finished, the stranger returned.
Franca hovered nervously this time while her guest sat down to table. She had opted for a presentation of elegant simplicity on plain china, but this was a feeble diversion. The frava cakes had the color and texture of that American monstrosity called Spam. They smelled like petrol, and the one she’d dared to taste had been indescribable—somewhere between fish liver and turpentine, with a subtle underflavor of rotten egg. She waited for his disgust while mourning the waste of so many beautiful truffles.
“Ah,” breathed the man, wafting the scent toward himself. “Just now ripe, I see. And the taste …” He picked up one of the cakes and popped it into his mouth. She winced as he grimaced, but then he swallowed and smiled. “Perfect.”
“Perfect?” She stared at him. “If I hadn’t tasted one myself, I would say you just ate poison, signore. Never in my life have I made anything so foul.”
He smiled and lifted the glass of Riesling she’d poured in hope of countering the cakes’ bitterness with sweet. “But they aren’t meant to taste good, signora,” he said. He paused to take a long sip of the wine. She nearly bounced on her toes while he held it in his mouth a moment before swallowing. “The important thing is that the ingredients were mixed in the proper proportions. Doing it wrong creates a substance so noxious the very fumes can kill. But doing it right …”
He stretched out a hand, examining the back of it. She followed the gesture in confusion. “Yes? Yes? Doing it right?”
He looked up at her. The hat still shadowed his eyes, but—she blinked, frowned, peered closer. Then took a step back.
He was handsome now. Not quite as handsome as she’d speculated, but certainly better-looking. As if he’d suddenly become a good ten years younger.
He smiled and popped another of the cakes into his mouth. This time it happened while Franca watched. The deepest-etched lines in his face lightened and the gauntness filled out. In a few seconds she was looking at a hale and healthy man of middle years.
“Go and look at yourself, signora,” he said, his eyes twinkling. “You tried one, didn’t you?”
“Oh, Madonna,” Franca whispered, and hurried through the kitchen to the employees’ bathroom. Even in Isadora’s cheap lighting the difference was clear. The lines in her face had faded, and the second chin she’d been working on since her mid-forties was now smooth taut skin. She examined herself everywhere and found that she’d lost ten pounds and her breasts were still in the vicinity of her chest.
When the shock finally began to fade, she stumbled back to the common room. Her guest stood beside the table, inserting the last of the cakes into a wooden box incised with strange designs. He closed the lid and smiled at her again.
“How …?” It was all she could manage.
“Through your five days of labor, of course,” he replied, “and your pure skill in the kitchen. The last time I tried this recipe, it nearly killed me. Thanks to you, my life is now renewed.”
She stared at him, mind and tongue mute. Then he gave another of those little flourishes and she noticed that another deerhide sack lay on the table.
“No.” She shook her head, unable to express her horror. She needed a month of sleep. She could not bear more strange ingredients. She was afraid of another recipe that could cook the impossible. She was afraid of him, who brought such things.
“The choice is yours, signora. The ingredients will keep until you’re ready. No recipe this time; I want to see what you can do on your own. When you’re finished, if you finish, we’ll speak again.”
He tipped his hat once more and strode out on his vigorous younger legs.
She took another week off.
Isadora was incensed, but finally capitulated as Franca had known she would. If Franca hadn’t once spat on the most powerful man in Italy (who’d had the nerve to call her zabaglione boring!), Isadora would have been stuck with a second-rate chef from a third-rate school. Franca needed the job, but Isadora needed to keep Franca happy.
“At least the vacation is doing you some good,” Isadora grumbled. “You don’t look quite so much the hag today.”
The deerhide bag sat on a counter in the kitchen. Franca did not touch it for several days. She cleaned up the mess left behind by the frava cakes and went home to sleep for the w
hole weekend. On Lunedi she rose, went to the hairdresser (who exclaimed over the perfection of her coloring job; the gray was all but gone), visited her favorite stalls at the farmers’ piazza and the fish pier, and meandered home. The whole time her mind was racing, her heart a-thud. The deerhide bag. The waiting nightmare. The possibilities.
Returning to her bungalow, she set down her purchases and went to the mirror. Her own face stared back at her, haunted and younger. Once she had been at the top of her field: a certified master, a respected woman in a man’s profession, an artist with a promising career. One error of judgment had sentenced her to an endless Purgatory of downscale, dead-end restaurants. She would not have minded that so much if the appreciation had not vanished along with the acclaim, but there it was: She was a better chef now than she’d been at the height of her career, and no one cared. Except one man.
I want to see what you can do on your own, her stranger had said.
A slow, ferocious smile stretched across her lips. Had she been actually looking at herself in the mirror, she might have marveled at the beauty this smile produced, but her mind had already turned to the deerhide bag.
“Just you wait,” she whispered to herself, and to her peculiar dining guest. “Just you see what I can do.”
She went to the inn, and into the kitchen, and there she opened the bag.
Three more sprigs of takiprik. An assortment of more mushrooms, including several which were red with vibrant blue stripes. Five vials of powdered herbs, which were fortunately labeled, though she had never before heard the names. The carcasses—somehow fresh, though the bag had lain about for days—of four midsized birds with brilliant red-gold feathers. A large wart-covered melon of some sort. A length of vine laden with cherry-red fruits. An ancient, dusty bottle, sealed liberally with wax.
Franca snorted to herself. No worse than the master chef’s exam.
So she set to work, sorting the mushrooms and testing the herbs. She plucked and gutted one of the birds, puzzling for a moment over a strange, hard object in its gullet, which was hot to the touch. Though the vine fruits smelled heavenly, she quickly discovered that their fragrance could send her into a daydreaming fugue for an hour or more. “Potential,” she declared, then plugged her nose and sliced them up anyhow.
How Long 'Til Black Future Month? Page 7
