Tomato Rhapsody: A Fable of Love, Lust and Forbidden Fruit - By Adam Schell Page 0,31

the vibrations never left her. And as she entered into market on Monday mornings like this one, her namesake song bouncing off cobblestones and buildings, Mari would flush with memories of her father, and for a moment it was as if he’d never left her.

In Which We Learn

the Meaning of

Cucinare con Collera

Painstakingly, Luigi Campoverde, chef for the Meducci, worked the fine, soft bristles of his mushroom brush over every pore and crevice of the enormous truffle he’d acquired earlier in the day. While brushing a truffle clean was not an especially difficult task, Luigi had already been working for hours, and the pressure of knowing that one grain of grit or dirt in the lady duke’s meal and he could very well be out of a job certainly exacerbated his mood. The lady duke very much loved to hate that which gave her husband any joy, and, after this morning’s embarrassment, Luigi was preparing himself for the worst.

She’d already changed his menu once, “requesting” that he switch the truffle preparation from risotto to ancini di pepe—ancini being an excruciatingly difficult-to-make handmade pasta, whereby tiny pinches of fresh dough are rolled between the thumb and forefinger to the exact size and roundness of a small pearl. And to think, each of the three bowls he would have to fill for supper this evening required at least one hundred and fifty of the tiny, hand-rolled ancini di pepe. Worse still, the lady duke would have hardly a spoonful: though she squawked like a gull over preparations, she ate like a hummingbird. True, cooking for the duke and young Gian was not without pleasure and reward, but the lady duke evoked in Luigi a very old and cultivated rancor. And before he knew it, the cramping in his fingers and ache of his legs brought the indignation that he constantly struggled to keep at a mere simmer to a furious boil.

The irony was, it didn’t have to be this way. Luigi could very well have become an honorable man had certain events not irreparably altered his path. He was a quiet and sensitive country boy who’d been orphaned at age six when an ungodly plague swept through his village and the outlying farms. Somehow, young Luigi’s constitution had withstood the scourge, but his parents and two older sisters were not so fortunate. Following a lonely and frightening seven-week period in which Luigi subsisted on the remnants of food to be found on his family’s small farm, he was discovered by a pair of traveling monks on their way to Florence. After unsuccessfully inquiring if the boy had any close-by relatives, the monks took young Luigi to a Franciscan monastery in Florence. There, for the next twelve years, he was trained in the kitchen arts by an angry and aging Sicilian brother, who along with being extraordinarily tightfisted and somewhat unscrupulous, instilled in his young apprentice a tenet that was unspoken, but most prevalent amongst chefs throughout the world, namely Cucinare con Collera: to cook with anger.

The idea of Cucinare con Collera is as simple to understand as two piles of fava beans. First, imagine you need to shell, blanch and peel just twenty or so pods of the broad beans for a group of ten people you care about and love to feed. Then, while you set about the slightly tedious task of shelling, blanching and peeling the beans, you busy the mind with the pleasant thought of how you’re going to mash the fava beans with cream, butter, salt, white pepper and roasted garlic. You imagine how the finished puree will appear like light green angels of deliciousness upon the plate, how the Romano-style hint of roasted garlic will thrill the taste buds of the ones you love and complement the meat you have decided to serve along with it. As you finish peeling the last broad bean you imagine humbly receiving your loved ones’ accolades as they say things like, “Only you, Luigi, could make the lowly fava bean taste as if it sprang from the Cornucopia of Bacchus.”

Now imagine the number of beans you need to peel is no longer twenty to feed the ten people you love, but two thousand to feed five hundred monastic persons you have never met. The muscles running from your neck through your shoulders to your arms and into your hands will begin to burn with the fire of five hours of repetitive motion. Your fingers, stained a sickly green, will feel as if