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Philip Kazan Biography

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“Though we were still half a room apart, I felt her: the tiny, coppery hairs on her arm that rose to attention when she was cold or aroused; the beautiful landscape of gooseflesh that was shivering across her skin beneath her robe; the flowery, powdery scent of that skin, as complicated as music. The faint freckles scattered across her cheeks and nose: I was falling into them, as though they were the starry summer sky.”

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“I speared a sausage with my knife, bit off the end. Juice and fat exploded: the pork melted. I tasted chestnuts, moss, the bulbs of wild lilies, the roots and shoots of an Umbrian forest floor. There was pepper, of course, salt and garlic. Nothing else. I opened my eyes. The Proctor was staring at me, and quickly looked away. I thought I saw a smile cross his lips before he opened them to admit another wagon-load of lentils. I tried a spoonful myself. They were very small and brown- earthy-tasting, of course. That I had been expecting. But these were subtle: there was a hint of pine, which came partly from the rosemary that was obviously in the dish, but partly from the lentils themselves. I did feel as if I were eating soil, but a special kind: some sort of silky brown clay, perhaps; something that Maestro Donatello would have crossed oceans to sculpt with, or that my uncle Filippo would have used as a pigment to paint the eyes of a beautiful brown-eyed donna. Maybe this is what the earth under the finest hazelnut tree in Italy would taste like- but that, perhaps, was a question best put to a pig. "Make sure you chew properly," I mumbled, piling my plate high. The serving girl came back with a trencher of sliced pork meats: salami dotted with pink fat, ribbons of lardo, peppery bacon. The flavors were slippery, lush, like copper leaf or the robe of a cardinal. I coiled a strip of dark, translucent ham onto my tongue: it dissolved into a shockingly carnal mist, a swirl of truffles, cinnamon and bottarga.”

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“But she was as wiry as any boy, and it had caused quite an uproar when Tessina first flexed her arm and a little muscle popped up, hard as a walnut, while us boys could hardly produce anything. But she never looked like a boy. A mass of curls, the color of August straw, made a halo around her head, tight and springy, as if a goldsmith had put them there. Her skin was pale like the flesh of hazelnuts, dusted with little freckles, except when she stayed too long in the summer sun and it burned. Like a peach, her arms were covered in fine golden down, which also clung, fainter than faint, to her upper lip.”

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“She had brought me more of the ricotta, which I ate, slurping at the spoon like a child while my companion watched, beaming. My mind showed me the bees working high in the chestnut trees, swarming through the polished, ridged leaves and over the long white brushes of flowers. I saw the dark heart of the nest, dripping gold. Goats clattered over rocks and tore at cushions of herbs.”

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“The soup was delicious in the way that very simple things can be. There was no seasoning except for salt: a house like this could never afford pepper. But the olive oil in which Velia had fried the onions and garlic, and drizzled over the finished soup, was peppery enough: spiky and throat-catching, it prickled my mouth, balancing the bitter chicory and the bland crusts of bread. And there was dry cheese to grate into it, good salty pecorino with an earthy whiff of the cave where it had been aged. I savored it for a long time, because I had never tasted it before- I'd never tasted any of these things. The oil was different from our Tuscan oil; thicker, somehow, and more flowery; and the cheese tasted the way the air smelled outside in the valley.”

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“Pots hung from the ceiling beams, between the festoons of braided garlic, the hams, the salsicce, bunches of mountain herbs for medicine, strings of dried porcini, necklaces of dried apple rings in winter, chains of dried figs. The smell of onions, of hot lard and smoldering oak wood, of cinnamon and pepper, always seemed to hang in the air. The larder was full of meat at all times, needless to say: not small pieces, but huge joints and sides of beef and lamb, which Mamma and Carenza could never hope to use just for our household, and which were quietly passed on to the monks of Santa Croce so that they could feed the poor. Carenza made salami with fennel seeds and garlic, prosciutto, pancetta. Sometimes the air in the larder was so salty that it stung your nostrils, and sometimes it reeked of spoiled blood from the garlands of hares, rabbits, quail, thrushes and countless other creatures that would arrive, bloody and limp, from Papa's personal game dealer. Next to the larder, a door led out to our courtyard, which Mamma had kept filled with herbs. An ancient rosemary bush took up most of one side, and the air in summer was always full of bees. Sage, thyme, various kinds of mint, oregano, rocket, hyssop, lovage and basil grew in Mamma's collection of old terra-cotta pots. A fig tree was slowly pulling down the wall, and a tenacious, knotted olive tree had been struggling for years in the sunniest corner.”

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“All around me, other dishes were taking shape: for the first service, a group of young girls were gilding candied plums, figs, oranges and apricots with fine gold leaf, and more gold was being smoothed onto sweet biscuits of fried dough cut into witty shapes and drenched in spiced syrup and rose water. There were torte of every kind: filled with pork belly and zucca; torte in the style of Bologna, filled with cheeses and pepper, and torte filled with capons and squabs. There were sausages, whole hams from all over the north of Italy. My suckling pigs were for the second service, alongside the lampreys, candied lemons wrapped in the finest sheet of silver, an enormous sturgeon in ginger sauce, a whole roast roebuck with gilded horns, cuttlefish cooked in their own ink.”

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“There was some ordinary pork, a heap of pigs' livers and some caul fat. Carenza had been to the market that morning and bought fronds of bronze fennel with their pollen-heavy flowers still on them; sorrel; bitter lettuce. I chose the fennel, went out to the courtyard and picked some marjoram, thyme, parsley and mint. I decided to make some tomacelli, because I liked them and it was the kind of fiddly, absorbing dish I could lose myself in. So I put the livers on to boil, and then cut up some veal haunch. Carenza liked mortadelli and so I'd make her some with the veal. I chopped the veal up finely with a bit of its fat and some lardo, mixed in some parsley and some marjoram. The livers were done, so I drained them and put them in a bowl. Into the mortadella mixture went a handful of grated parmigiana cheese, some cloves, cinnamon and a few threads of saffron. An egg yolk went in too, and then I sank my hands into the cool, slippery mound and mixed it with my fingers. When it was smooth I shaped it into egg-sized balls, wrapped them in pieces of caul and threaded them onto a spit. While the mortadelli sizzled over the flame, I took the livers and crumbled them up, added some minced pancetta, some grated pecorino, marjoram, parsley, raisins, some ginger and nutmeg and pepper. I bound it all together with a couple of eggs and made the stuff into balls, smaller than the mortadelli, wrapped them in more caul and set to frying them in melted lardo.”

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“The loin of Cinta Senese had been sitting in the cold room, begging to be cooked. I'd shown it to Filippo- This is our supper, I'd said, and he'd replied that supper was too far away, and didn't the painters deserve the best, serving God as they did? So I'd grabbed it, along with some garlic, thyme, rosemary, peppercorns and nutmeg. Surely they'd have salt at the studio... Filippo had bought some onions, a flask of milk and a hunk of prosciutto on the way. I hunted around in the small, chaotic niche where the artists kept their food and discovered a dusty flask of olive oil. Sniffing it dubiously, I found it was quite fresh: the dark green oil from the hills behind Arezzo. In Florence we almost always cooked in lard, oil would do in a pinch. The kiln was lit but not being used for anything, and the fire was dying down. I threw some pieces of oak onto it, chopped the onions and the ham with a borrowed knife, cut the loin away from the ribs. The artists had a trivet and some old pans which they used to cook with every now and again, though mostly they lived on pies from the cook-shop up the street. There was an earthenware pot with a cracked lid, which seemed clean enough. I put it on the trivet, poured in a good stream of the green oil, browned the meat in its wrapping of fatty rind. Sandro gave up a cup of white wine, unwillingly, which I threw over the pork. When it had cooked off, I crushed two big cloves of garlic and added them along with the rosemary I had brought, and a handful of thyme. The milk had just foamed, and I poured it over the meat. The air filled with a rich, creamy, meaty waft.”

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“The first dishes, carried out on Barroni's exquisite silver platters, were a selection of marzipan fancies, shaped into hearts and silvered; a mostarda of black figs in spiced syrup; skewers of prosciutto marinated in red wine that I had reduced until it was thick and almost black; little frittate with herbs, each covered with finely sliced black truffles; whole baby melanzane, simmered in olive oil, a recipe I had got from a Turkish merchant I had met in the bathhouse. I set about putting the second course together. I heated two kinds of biroldi, blood sausages: one variety I had made pig's blood, pine nuts and raisins; the other was made from calf's blood, minced pork and pecorino. Quails, larks, grey partridge and figpeckers were roasting over the fire, painted with a sauce made from grape molasses, boiled wine, orange juice, cinnamon and saffron. They blackened as they turned, the thick sauce becoming a lovely, shiny caramel. There were roasted front-quarters of hare, on which would go a deep crimson, almost black sauce made from their blood, raisins, boiled wine and black pepper. Three roasted heads of young pigs, to which I had added tusks and decorated with pastry dyed black with walnut juice so that they resembled wild boar, then baked. Meanwhile, there was a whole sheep turning over the fire, more or less done, but I was holding it so that it would be perfect. The swan- there had to be a swan, Baroni had decided- was ready. I attached it to the armature of wire I had made, so that it stood up regally. The sturgeon, which I had cooked last night at home, and had finally set in aspic at around the fourth hour after midnight, was waiting in a covered salver. There were black cabbage leaves rolled around hazelnuts and cheese; rice porridge cooked in the Venetian style with cuttlefish ink; and of course the roebuck, roasting as well, but already trussed in the position I had designed for it.”

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“He ranted at me while I put out the next course: a dish of boiled pigeons enveloped in a blancmange, the best I had ever made, with pulverized chicken, rose water, almonds, sugar, capon broth, ginger, verjuice and cinnamon. I had them placed in a deep dish, poured on the blancmange and scattered the snow-white surface with a thick covering of poppy seeds until the silver dish seemed to hold nothing but tiny black grains. Over this I arranged stars cut out of fine silver foil. There was a breast of veal, stuffed with cheese, eggs, saffron, herbs and raisins, upon which I scattered the darkest rose petals I could find at the flower market. There was a soup of black cabbage; boiled calves' feet with a sauce of figs and black pepper; and boiled ducks with more sliced black truffle.”

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“It was a good-sized trout, opened out, salted, pressed, floured and fried. The entrails had been cooked with some vinegar and mint, mashed up and spooned onto the plate as a sort of afterthought. It was delicious: simple and honest. I ate it all, and didn't give a single thought for what it might do to my humors. I sucked every bone, washed it down with some thick, spicy red wine- peasants' wine- from the hills above the town. I knew that I was tasting the place itself: the fish from the river I had crossed on my way into the town, the pig that had rooted in the woods I had ridden through, olives grown a short walk away. The pig had snuffled under the pine trees whose nuts had adorned its sausages. I had eaten the land. The town itself will always be nameless in my memory, but even now I can assemble it from its flavors, because I have never forgotten any of them. A meal of pigs' liver and fish, served with apologies.”

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“All the flavors lined up, an army getting into ranks: peeled, ground almonds; elderflowers; bread, sugar, the lush heat of ginger. It is hard, looking back, to remember exactly what a mouthful like that would have done to me, but I think it would have told me some kind of small but complicated story, or perhaps I would have seen a piece of carved ivory, for all the white things: almonds, bread, flowers, sugar. Something obvious like flames for the ginger, or less obvious: a sun-warmed brick or a cockerel's comb. What do I remember about this particular bowl of menestra, though, is that nothing like that happened. I tasted... almonds. I still saw them as bright green in my mind's eye, but somehow it didn't take over the whole world. Instead I thought to myself: There are almonds in this. An almond is a nut. It grows on a tree. A tree with sweet white flowers, of course, and there's the nut itself, nestled inside its speckled, woody shell. I found myself savoring the milky bitterness of almond meat, noticing how the sugar seemed to flow over the bitter, not destroying it but creating a separate taste. The ginger and the elderflowers fell into each other's arms, and all four things sank into the comforting blandness of the soaked bread. To my amazement I discovered that I could keep each clamoring taste, with its color, in its place; and pick out other flavors too, each with its own color and image. I dipped my spoon in again, tasted, swallowed. Another spoonful, then another. The flavors weren't disappearing into nothingness, they were becoming part of me.”

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“One day they let me knead the ingredients for sausage meat, and the raw foods themselves seized me: lean pork and soft, white fat- The one talks to the other, said Carenza. Without the fat, the lean is too dry, and without the lean... she stuck out her tongue, too much. I grated some cheese: dry pecorino that had been in our larder for months, and some fresh marzolino, tasting both. Mace went in, and cinnamon, and black pepper. How much salt? Mamma showed me in the palm of her hand, Let me sweep it into the bowl. Then she broke some eggs onto the mixture. This is my secret, she said, and grated the rind of an orange so that the crumbs covered everything in a thin layer of gold. Do you want to mix it, Nino? Almost laughing with excitement, I plunged my fingers through the cold silkiness of the eggs, feeling the yolks pop, then made fists deep inside the meat. I could smell the orange, the pork, the cheese, the spices, and then they started to melt together into something else. When it was all mixed together I licked my fingers, though Carenza slapped my hand away from my mouth, and after we'd stuffed them into the slimy pink intestines and cooked up a few for ourselves, I discovered how the fire had changed the flavors yet again. The clear, fresh taste of the pork had deepened and intensified, while the cool blandness of the fat had changed into something rich and buttery that held the spices and the orange zest. And the salt seemed to have performed this magic, because it was everywhere, but at the same time hardly noticeable.”

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