Tomato Rhapsody: A Fable of Love, Lust and Forbidden Fruit - By Adam Schell Page 0,14

come upon in the last three days. Rabbi Lumaca and a small entourage from the town of Pitigliano were visiting to discuss wedding plans and they brought with them a fine pair of bronzini, just pulled from the waters that very morning and packed in salt. Fresh fish was a splendid treat for all, especially Davido, as it afforded him more leeway with the restrictive Ebreo dietary laws than did preparing a meal with meat. How it was that a few brief biblical passages stating that one should not cook a calf in its mother’s cud got extrapolated into a set of food laws so elaborate that one could not even place cheese and meat upon the same table, not even with poultry, was beyond Davido’s sense of logic and gastronomy. How could one cook a chicken in its mother’s milk?

Fish, on the other hand, gave Davido the opportunity to work with cheese, which he enjoyed greatly. Ever since he and his kin began raising their own animals, Davido had rather lost his taste for meat. The idea of eating one of the cows, goats or sheep that he had helped rear and could not help but adore now had little appeal. Thankfully, the farm’s five sheep, four goats and two cows were needed for their milk, not their meat. Even the farm’s thirty or so chickens—more valuable for their eggs, soil-nourishing manure and insect-eating prowess— got to live a long life before finding their way into the cook pot or onto a spit. While meat had become of less and less interest to Davido, vegetables and cheese—vegetables he grew and the goat, sheep and cow’s milk cheeses he and Uncle Uccello had begun to make—had never before been so precious and delicious to him.

Cooking too. Since moving onto the farm, the preparing of food had taken on a whole new attraction for Davido, and he threw himself into it with all his heart. It was the culmination of the cycle of life that so enamored him: earth, seed, plant, blossom, vegetable, fruit, cutting board, cook pot and finally table. It was also something that came naturally to him and that he did exceedingly well, the one thing he understood and did better than Nonno ever had.

Back in Florence, Davido’s grandfather seemed to have a mastery of everything in which Davido struggled and Ebrei were judged by. Though they lived humbly in Florence (best not to raise the suspicion of the ruling gentile class), every Ebreo knew that Nonno was the richest man in the ghetto and the de facto leader of the Ebreo community. His life story was legendary. At age twenty-three, little older than Davido, back in Toledo, Nonno’s skill with numbers had vaulted him to the position of finance minister for Ferdinand and Isabella. He had voyaged with Cristoforo Colombo and spent ten years living among the island natives before returning to Europe. The man was smart beyond comprehension; in addition to Italiano, he spoke Spagnolo, Francese, Portoghese, Tedesco, Latino, even the ancient Ebreo language which was only used for prayer. And sometimes, when his grandfather’s siesta slumber was especially deep, Nonno could be overheard mumbling in that bizarre tongue that he claimed to have learned from the Indiani of Il Nuovo Mundo. But when it came to the farm and kitchen, Nonno was all thumbs and none of them green. True, the old man loved his tomatoes and was singularly responsible for introducing them to Europe, but his expertise was only in eating them. Here, among the trees and plants, fruits and vegetables, cook pots and roasting fires was where Davido shined, and his illustrious Nonno had little choice but to defer to his knowledge and instinct.

Despite an early rise, a three-hour donkey ride from Florence, a two-hour effort in the kitchen, a full belly and the cool weight of tomatoes shading his eyes and perfuming the air around him, Davido couldn’t sleep. This was especially disconcerting to him, as just being around his tomato plants tended to calm his mind and deepen his breath. There was something about the smell of tomato plants that Davido adored so profoundly that from first planting in early May through last picking in late October, he would sneak away to siesta in between their rows every day, with the zeal of a young lover off to visit his paramour. With certainty, he could be found just a few dozen meters from the barn, between the first and second rows

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