Inside, in contrast to the heat of Florence, it was as cold as the temperature at which water becomes ice. I was wearing only a thin hose and shirt, together with the blue apron all apprentices wore. After a few minutes I began to shake. The cold felt like a flame, or a knife that was being dragged through my skin. After half an hour I was shivering with so much violence I drew blood from my own tongue.
Not long after that, I felt the shivering stop. At last I am getting used to it, I thought. A great tiredness was seeping through me. I was, I realised, drifting off to sleep. I could still feel the searing cold, but my body was no longer capable of fighting it. I felt my defences crumbling; felt it entering the innermdst recesses of my flesh. It was not exhaustion I experienced now so much as an inner numbness, as if my limbs themselves were hardening, one by one, turning me into a statue, as cold and lifeless as the David of Florence itself. I tried to cry out, but my scream was somehow also frozen within me, and I found I could not so much as open my mouth.
The next thing I remember I was being carried into the kitchens. I woke up looking into my master’s dark eyes, before the Persian dropped me unceremoniously to the floor.
‘You won’t do that again,’ he said as he turned to go.
I never again played with the ice. But something else had changed too. It was not just that I no longer trusted my master. The cold I had felt never seemed to completely leave my body, so that there was^always a sliver or two of ice deep within my bones, and - perhaps - even within my soul.
A few days after my incarceration in the ice house, the middle finger of my right hand began to turn black. Ahmad inspected it without remark, then summoned two of his brothers to hold my arm down on a block of ice while he amputated the finger at the knuckle with a cleaver. Warm blood spurted onto the ice, turning to pink crystals as it froze.
‘It won’t affect your work,’ he said when I stopped screaming.
Each night, as tired as a dog and half frozen to death, I crawled into the palace kitchen to sleep next to one of the big, open fireplaces on which meat was roasted Mpi hr ace ^ over embers. The kitchen workers grew used to me, and no longer chased me out with brooms and knives. I began to watch the cooks as they went about their work; observing how they pureed fruits to intensify their flavours; how they extracted the perfumes of violets and orange flowers to flavour creams and liqueurs; how they made a verjuice from grapes and quinces to set the lighter fruits. But when I tried to suggest to Ahmad that these techniques could be of use in our own work, my master was scornful.
‘We are engineers, not cooks,’ he liked to say. ‘Cooking is women’s business. We know the secrets of ice.’
Indeed, these were ancient secrets, a body of knowledge which had been passed down from father to son within a few Persian families, suppliers of sherbets to the court of Shah ‘Abbas in Ishfahan. Some of this knowledge was contained in stained leather-bound notebooks, their pages covered in diagrams and spidery Arabic writing. But most was kept only in Ahmad’s head, in a set of rules and maxims he followed as blindly as any ignorant
country priest reciting a Latin liturgy he does not truly under stand.
‘To five measures of crushed ice, add three measures of saltpetre,’ he would intone.
‘Why?’ I would say.
‘Why what?’'
‘Why must the ice be crushed? And what difference does saltpetre make?’
‘What does it matter? Now stir the mixture clockwise, twentyseven times.’
‘Perhaps the humour of saltpetre is heat, and the humour of ice is cold, and so adding the one to the other means that—’
‘And perhaps I may beat you with the paddle, if you do not use it to stir the ice.’
I had been working for the Persian almost two years before I dared to ask what the ices we made tasted like.
‘Taste? What does the taste matter to you, child?’ Ahmad said scornfully.
I knew that I had to be careful how I answered if I was to avoid yet another beating. ‘Sir, I have seen how the cooks try their dishes as they make them. I think I will understand better how to make these ices if I know how they are meant to taste.’
We were making an ice flavoured with a syrup of the small sweet oranges that some call china oranges, and some mandarins. The syrup was thickened further with orange pulp’ and scented with the aromatic oils extracted from the rind, before being poured over a pile of grated ice. ‘Very well,’ Ahmad said, gesturing at the pot with a shrug. ‘Try some, if that is what you wish.’ Before he could change his mind I took a spoon, scooped out a litde of the confection, and put it to my lips.
Ice crystals cracked and crunched against my teeth. I felt them dissolving on my tongue - a cold, sparkling sensation as they shrivelled away to nothing - then the syrup ran down my throat, cold and thick and sugary. The taste swelled in my mouth like the
sudden ripening of the orange fruit itself I gasped with pleasure: then, a moment later, a terrible pain shot up inside my head as the cold gripped my throat, choking me, and I spluttered.
Ahmad’s lip curled with amusement. ‘Now, perhaps, you understand th^t it is not a dish for children. Or for the general populace, there being no nourishment in it. We are here to entertain, boy, not to feed. We are like singers, or actors, or painters, makers of fine meaningless baubles for the wealthy and the great: that is to say, kings, courtiers, cardinals and their courtesans. No one but them will ever be able to waste so much expense on something that melts to nothing on their lips even faster than a song melts on the evening air.’
But, once I had got over the initial strangeness, I found that the taste was one I could not forget. It had not simply been that extraordinary flavour of sweet, concentrated oranges; it was the ice itself, its cold, frozen grittiness, calling to me. From then on, without Ahmad knowing, I made sure I tasted every confection we made. And I never again spluttered when I felt the coldness grip my throat.
One night I found the whole kitchen smelling dark and pungent, as if livers were being cooked in a sauce of fortified wine; but this smell had a richness to it that was like no offal I had ever known. It was coming from a small saucepan on the range, where something thick and brown spat like hot lava as the cook stirred it with a wooden spoon. ‘Xocalatl,’ the cook said, as he poured the contents of the pan into a small cup for the Grand Duke’s nightcap: then, seeing my incomprehension, he offered me the end of the spoon to taste.
That is another memory I have never forgotten, one of a different kind: a heat that filled my mouth and coated my palate, leaving it full of the same rich taste for hours afterwards; bitter and thick, yet strangely warming, like the very opposite of ice.
4
Carlo
t
To make' a sorbet of apricots: stone and scald twelve apricots in season, and pass them through a sieve: take six ounces of soft moscado sugar, and beat the mixture with a little cream of lemonade. Simmer altogether, then put it in the freezing pot and work it very fine.
The Book of Ices
It was my great good fortune that there was among the Medici princesses at this time a lady called Cosima de’ Medici, who never married. Instead she dedicated her life, and the considerable portion of Medici wealth entailed on her, to good works, of which just one was to establish a kind of schoolhouse for urchins, orphans and the children of her servants, under the tutelage of two or three great men of learning. I was fortunate enough to join this group, my master being too fearful of his own position to pretend that he was anything other than delighted with the plan. I cannot now imagine what those eminent thinkers and scholars thought about having to teach the rudiments of bdok learning to a collection of m^azzi like us, but such is the power'of wealth that three times a week we all trooped into the great biblioteca above the Canons’ Cloister and parsed our first letters from the priceless manuscripts it contained. Princessa Cosima was criticised for this scheme, I believe, most particularly by churchmen, for it was said that nothing but ill would come of spreading learning outside the Church, or of confusing poor ignorant children such as ourselves about our place in the natural order of things. But my education was not only of benefit to me in the matter of bobk learning. I did not purposefully study those around me and try to copy their