The Chef's Apprentice: A Novel (10 page)

Paolo’s visit fed the flames of curiosity lit by the peasant’s murder and fueled by my spying on the chef’s balcony. My Venetian lust to know
everything
stoked the bonfire that eventually consumed us all.

CHAPTER VIII
T
HE
B
OOK OF
A
MATO

I
t was the very same hunger to know everything that led me, many years later, to seek an interview with Chef Ferrero’s own mentor, Chef Meunier. In all the time I worked in the palace, my maestro remained an enigma and offered few particulars about himself, nothing more than a name here or an anecdote there. I would be well grown before I found an opportunity to persuade Chef Meunier to supply the connecting pieces.

I had met Chef Meunier several times when he visited my maestro in the doge’s kitchen. He was a bon vivant and a lover of good food who had traveled from France to Italy to learn how to cook, then decided to stay in
íl bel paese
. Chef Meunier was short and stout and avuncular. Smiling and effusive, he always bounded into our kitchen, embraced Chef Ferrero, and then made himself at home, testing sauces with a fingertip, offering friendly advice and lavish compliments. “
Magnifique
. Just a leetle more cream,
non
?” He walked with a hop in his step, and everything amused him.

However, his round, rosy face had a chameleon-like ability to make an unsettling shift. The warmth in his blue eyes could drain away and his smile could go cold and fixed—but only for an instant. Immediately, the chill would be displaced by a hearty laugh or a
slap on the back, and I always went away thinking it had been my imagination or a trick of the light. Now, I think not.

On each of his visits, Chef Meunier walked the length of our kitchen dispensing friendly nods and chattering.
“Bon. C’est bon. Délicieux.”
After everyone relaxed and forgot he was there, the two chefs would sit together with glasses of red wine, perhaps a dish of almonds, and talk in low tones.

Long after the events of this memoir, I returned to Venice, and Chef Meunier recounted my maestro’s personal history. The gregarious Frenchman had aged into a stooped old soul, wrinkled as a walnut. At first he didn’t want to receive me. He said, “Why do you ask an old man to recall painful events?” He stood hunched and shivering in the doorway of his home. The day was raw and overcast with rain clouds low on the horizon, and he kept shaking his head and trying to close the door in my face. But I put my foot in the doorway and begged; I reminded him that we both had loved Chef Ferrero.

When he relented, he let out a long slow breath and then took me to a small room furnished with a writing table and two shabby chairs facing each other in front of a paned window. Between the chairs there was a rickety tea table bearing an unlit oil lamp, and there were books everywhere—hand-copied books, illuminated books, even a few of the new quick-books made on a printing press. Some of the books appeared to be pristine, but most were weathered and shabby. Books lined the walls, stood stacked in precarious towers, lay scattered over the writing table and piled under it. No wonder the house was so ordinary and the furniture so spare; Chef Meunier had clearly spent every spare copper on books. There were even some scrolls on the writing table—moldering things the color of tea.

Chef Meunier called for hot mulled wine, then sat in one of the chairs covered in a worn fabric that might once have been green; he gestured impatiently for me to sit in the other. After he pulled
a knitted woolen shawl around his shoulders and laid a heavy rug over his lap, he looked shrunken in his tattered wrappings. His voice had aged to a wavering rasp, and he cleared his throat noisily again and again. His wife had died years before, and he had the look of an elderly, unkempt hermit. His servant, a shuffling old woman, brought in a covered clay pitcher of mulled wine and filled two cups. After she left, he pulled the lap rug up over his little paunch and began.

“Amato Ferrero was born in Vicenza—you’ve heard of it,
non
? It’s a village of feudal farmers just outside Venice. His birth became one of those stories that is told and retold in families. One morning, his heavily pregnant mother excused herself from her work in the fields earlier than usual. When her husband and young son came in for their midday meal, they found bread and salami on the table and the woman in bed nursing her newborn. She said, ‘His name is Amato.’”

I heard tapping on the window and saw the first drops of rain spatter the glass.

“When Amato was eleven, his father died of apoplexy.” Chef Meunier frowned. “That man liked his wine too much.” He muttered under his breath as if remembering something unpleasant. “After he was gone, tradition dictated that the little farm go to the older son, Paolo. So Amato’s mother arranged for her second son to do menial work at the Inn of St. George. You know it, eh?” He put the wine cup to his lips and peered over the rim.

“I do know it,
monsieur
.” Indeed, everyone knew it. The Inn of St. George still stands along the Grand Canal next to a square stone building, the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, a warehouse for German merchants. At that time in Italy, almost anything German was synonymous with barbarism, and Venetians were relieved to have the Germanic traders neatly segregated, grateful to be spared the pain of mingling and the spectacle of indelicate Teutonic customs.

But, as Chef Meunier explained, those social distinctions were
unknown to Amato’s mother. He said, “The poor woman had to hug herself to contain her happiness when she told her son his little job had been secured. Amato told me she danced around her kitchen singing, ‘Venice! You’re going to Venice!’ He said she smiled so broadly you could see all six of her teeth.”

The old man chuckled, and I caught a glimpse of the young chef who used to visit our kitchen. Then he sighed. “Amato was still a child. He didn’t want to leave home. He told me that while his mother danced around the kitchen, he stared at the floor so she wouldn’t see his tears.”

The rain on the window thrummed louder, and the light in the room dwindled, but the old man seemed unaware.

“Amato liked his mother’s rough bread, he liked collecting chestnuts in the fall, and he liked the smell of apples and homemade wine that seeped up from the cellar. He even liked sleeping with the cows and goats in the winter to keep from freezing—he told me the crackle of hay and the thick, tangy animal smells made him feel secure. Why would he want to leave all that for a big city full of sinister men in black capes?”

Chef Meunier raised a gnarled hand. “
Mais oui
, even in little Vicenza people knew about the Council of Ten and the
Cappe Nere
. The boy told his mother, ‘I could sleep in the barn. I could eat less.’ Ah,
le pauvre enfant
.”

He sipped his wine in a melancholy pause, and rain pelted the window; by the time he resumed, the light in the room had gone gray and gloomy. He said, “That leathery little peasant woman had ambitions for her clever son. She pointed to her hovel with its length of burlap for a door and said, ‘You can be better than this, Amato. Be better than this.’ The boy tried to argue, but she poked his forehead with a stiff finger. She said, ‘You have
brains
. Be better than this.’” Chef Meunier pushed out his lower lip and nodded. “She knew Venice was the place for a boy with quick wits.”

Amato quickly learned about the inn, and about the Venetian
contempt for Germans. His job offered him many opportunities to talk to Venetian suppliers who made their disdain bitingly clear. Chef Meunier said, “A butcher who supplied pork hocks and pigs’ feet once dumped his bloody delivery in the courtyard, winked at Amato, and said, ‘God bless the Huns. They pay me for my garbage.’” He chuckled merrily. “True story.”

I knew it was true. I had often heard Venetian merchants exchange horrified descriptions of the inn’s patrons and their filthy habits: grunting diners with grease-smeared chins who gnawed on huge joints of meat; odiferous, foamy beers guzzled out of cups fashioned from stag’s feet still hairy above the cloven hooves; bedchambers made noisy and foul by flatulence from the great quantities of cabbage consumed with every meal; and the slovenly German custom of an annual bath, which was particularly disgusting to the fastidious Venetians, who bathed as often as twice a week.

Chef Meunier adjusted his shawl. “Most of the cooks at the Inn of St. George were German—you know, trained to smoke pig flesh and marinate cabbage.
Ach!
Culinary heresy!” I smiled, but he appeared not to notice. “A few Venetians worked there, too.
Naturellement
, they were unhappy to be there but a job is a job, eh?”

I sat forward, nodding vigorously, ready to describe how grateful I’d been to carry water and haul wood for my room and board, but the old man turned to the window and exclaimed, “
Mon Dieu
! The angels weep!” The rain came down hard and steady, and I heard the far-off rumble of thunder.

Chef Meunier sipped his wine and patted his mouth with his shawl.

“There was one at that inn, a pointy-faced soup cook who felt especially above it all. I don’t remember his name. He kept a haughty silence, and he refused to eat or drink with his German colleagues. On his private shelf, he kept a bottle of Chianti and a goblet made of Murano glass—no doubt stolen from his former
employer. He even kept a fork in his apron pocket.” The old chef shook his head in amazement. “Imagine that. A fork.”

Chef Meunier smoothed his lap rug and marveled at the notion of a soup cook in a second-rate kitchen having such an expensive implement. “
Oui
, while the Germans ripped meat away with their teeth and washed it down with beer, this fellow sipped Chianti from his goblet and wielded his fork with his little finger out like this.” The old man picked up his wine and crooked his pinky at an effeminate angle.

“That fellow refused to speak anything but Italian. He pretended not to understand even a simple
ja
or
nein
, and he advised Amato to do the same. He said, ‘Amato, you’re still young enough to escape the barbarians.’

“And Amato listened.
Mais oui
. In time, even Amato—remember, he was still a child, a peasant, and the son of a wine-besotted serf—
oui
, even Amato developed enough Venetian arrogance to make him look down on those he served. Day and night he watched for an opportunity to ‘escape the barbarians.’ That’s what Amato wanted—an escape to something better.” The old man stared out the window, transfixed by the gray sheets of rain lashing his house.

“How did he manage it,
monsieur
?” I asked.

“Quoi?”
He looked surprised, as if he’d forgotten I was there. “
Ah oui
. One night, a German trader brought a Venetian nobleman to the inn. The Venetian was impeccably dressed in a satin doublet and a deep-red velvet cape. Amato said it was the color of Bordeaux wine. I can imagine that fashionable man wrinkling his nose when he entered the inn—that place always smelled of sweat and beer.”

The knobby finger came up so suddenly I flinched. “Amato saw what was going on. He was a sharp boy. His mother was right about that.” The old chef wagged the misshapen finger at me. “He knew the Venetian had come reluctantly to finalize a deal. Of course he knew.”

The crabbed hand disappeared under the shawl, and the sound of rain surged as thunder boomed in the distance.

“Amato watched the two men negotiate over hollow stag hooves slopping with foam. He said that the German proposed a toast and drank his beer, but the Venetian only touched his lips to it. “Why would anyone drink beer when they could drink wine, eh? Beer.
Mon Dieu
.”

I saw that Chef Meunier’s attention could easily wander. Old age and the loss of too many loved ones had subdued him and made him ruminative. “What did my maestro do,
monsieur
?”

“What? Oh. Amato ran to the kitchen and swiped the soup cook’s Chianti and his goblet. He was a bold one.
Audacieux
.” Chef Meunier bobbed his head, bestowing approval on my maestro’s daring. “Back at the table, the Venetian was looking grim and pale. Well, who wouldn’t? The man was staring at congealed fat on a pig’s foot. Ach! Amato set the wine and goblet before him, offered a sympathetic nod, and backed away.
Oui
. Just so.

“That man was Ercole d’Este, and I”—the finger shot up—“I was his chef. Este called Amato aside as he was leaving the inn. He asked, ‘Can you cook?’ Amato said,
‘Sì, signore.’”
Chef Meunier smiled and bobbed. “
Oui
. He said it just so, no hesitation.
‘Sì, signore.’”
He slapped the arm of his chair and laughed so hard he started to cough. It sounded as though he might be choking. I stood over him and thumped his back. After he caught his breath he looked up at me and smiled. He said, “That boy couldn’t cook anything.
Rien!
But he became my apprentice.”

I sat back in my chair and marveled at how small turns—a glass of wine to cut the oleaginous taste of a pig’s foot, or even a stolen pomegranate—can lead us onto unimagined boulevards. I warmed my hands around my wine cup and inhaled the scented steam.

Chef Meunier took a napkin from the tea table to blow his nose with a loud honk, and then he mopped his face. “It was one of the finest houses in Venice.
Oui
. In the House of Este, Amato discovered
the world of privilege.” The old man clutched the shawl tight around his shoulders, and there was something proud in the way he did it.

“I remember that house well—always hushed. Quiet talks over tisanes and cakes, silk dresses rustling in the halls. Every room had bowls of fresh roses, and in the evening candlelight glinted off the silver and set off little sparks in the crystal. It was a pleasure to be called to the dining room for a compliment.
Vraiment
. Nothing but the best in that house.”