manners, but just as a child will learn to speak the language of his parents simply by hearing it, so growing up in that court I acquired without realising it something of the manners and easy demeanour of a gendeman. I believe, too, that it was being tutored in Latin from such an early age that was responsible for my fluency with languages - a skill that has been almost as useful to me as my abilities with ice.
As the years passed, I gradually came to despise my master. For all that he took great care to ensure that I remained in mortal fear of him, he was a man in fear himself; and what he was principally afraid of was that someone would steal his secrets. He often told the story of the famous cook, chef d^equipe to a great nobleman, who was so proud of his creations that he decided to write his recipes down and publish them in a book. The book was a great success, widely copied and republished (with, of course, no further payment to the author); meanwhile, other cooks seized on the recipes and improved them, or simply served the dishes as if they were their own. The result was that the chef was dismissed, his position taken by a younger rival, and he died famous but destitute. It was, Ahmad said, an illustration of the folly of seeking acclaim instead of riches in this world.
I sometimes wondered why Ahmad was prepared to share his own knowledge so readily with me; but I soon decided that, so far as he was concerned, I was simply a workhorse, a creature incapable of reason. He taught me what he knew, not because he wanted to share his secrets, but because he wanted to share the labour. And so I learnt the difference between the four kinds of ice that could be made: cordidle or liquors, into which crushed snow was stirred to chill granite^ shavings of frozen water over which were poured syrups made from rosewater or oranges; sorbetti^ more complex water ices, in which it was the syrups themselves that were frozen, the mixture paddled as it hardened so that the fragments lay in the pot like a glittering mound of sapphires; and finally sherbets, the most difficult of all, made with
milk that had been infused with mastic or cardamom, so that they resembled snow that had refrozen overnight. I learned how to construct chilled obelisks of jelly; how to use silversmiths’ moulds to cast fantastic frozen plates ^nd bowls, and how to carve the ice into extravagant table decorations. I mastered the spectacular entertainments of the great engineer Buontalenti, who had constructed fountains, tables, and even whole grottos out of ice. But I knew that if I so much as breathed a word of these techniques to anyone else, Ahmad would have me blinded and my tongue put out with one of the red-hot irons we used to carve ice sculptures. He hinted, too, that there were still secrets that I was not yet privy to: special ingredients and gums described in the notebooks which he was keeping to himself, to ensure that I would always know less than he did.
And yet the learning, I noticed, was all one way. As I have said, I often observed the cooks around us as they worked, and it sometimes seemed to me that the confections they came up with would make good syrups with which to flavour our ices. A summer dolci of lemon froth and dessert wine, for example, or slices of musk melon whose natural sweetness was offset with a sprinkling of ground ginger - these, surely, were tastes which would provide us with welcome variety. But if I suggested we try such a thing, even as an experiment, Ahmad would look at me as if I were mad.
‘It is not one of the four flavours. If you don’t believe me, look in the book.’
He was taunting me, of course: he knew I could not read the Arabic in his notebooks. Nor did I need to read them to know the handful of flavours - rosewater, orange, mastic and cardamom which were all that the ancient vellum pages permitted.
It seemed to me, too, that if our ices had a drawback, it was that shooting pain which had gripped my throat as I crunched the orange-scented crystals between my teeth. It appeared to come from the action of biting down on the ice, and was thus presumably impossible to eradicate. We tried to make the crystals
as small as possible, grating the ice from the blocks with a kind of chainmail gauntlet until they were as tiny as chips of salt or sugar: but once you went below a certain size the ice would melt away to water, and all that you had in your goblet or glass after that was a kind ofjorange- or rosewater-flavoured slush. I longed to make an ice that was as smooth and thick and soft as that chocolate the cook had offered me to taste; an ice that contained the cold of ice, without its harshness.
One day Ahmad was away from the kitchens with a toothache. He left me with strict instructions as to how I was to occupy my time, but evidently the tooth-pulling was more painful than he had anticipated, since he failed to return when he had said he would. At last I saw my chance.
Apricots were in season just then. The cooks served them to the Medici peeled and quartered, with the juice of melons and some cream. Taking a bowl that had already been prepared for the Grand Duke’s table, I mashed it up, tipped the mixture into the sabotiere^ the freezing pot, and waited eagerly for it to congeal, stirring it in the usual way.
It was not a success. The mixture froze, certainly, but the different parts had frozen in different ways - that is to say, there were rock-hard pieces of apricot, and crystals of frozen melon juice, but the cream had turned powdery, like curdled egg, and far from combining, the various elements appeared to have become more separate. When I tried to eat a spoonful of this granular mixture, the different parts did not even melt in the same way on my tongue, so that it was like chewing frozen gravel. But even so, there was something about the freshness of the fruit, and the sweetness of the melon juice, that was a refreshing change from the heavily perfumed flavours Ahmad insisted on.
A better solution, I realised, would be to make a simple apricot cordial or syrup and then freeze it - a sorbetto^ in fact. The smoothness would have to wait for another time: it was the flavour of the fruit that was important here. I went to get another
dish of apricots, and witnessed a violent altercation between the cook who had prepared the previous one and a servant he was accusing of having stolen it. It was not the time to try to filch another. Besides, Ahmad might return at any moment, and I had to clean all the utensils before he realised what I had been up to.
And so I began a period in which I lived a double life. With Ahmad, during the day, I was a servant, following his instructions dutifully and without complaint. But by night I was a kind of alchemist, the kitchen my laboratory as I experimented with different combinations of flavour and ingredient. Nothing was too outlandish or ridiculous for me to try. I froze soft cheeses, digestifs^ vegetable juices and even soups. I made ices from wine, from pesto Genovese, from almond milk, from crushed fennel, and from every different kind of cream. I experimented wildly, blindly, without method or purpose, hoping to chance on something - some method, some key - which I was sure existed somewhere: something that could unlock the deepest, frozen secrets of ice. It was as if the ice itself was calling to me, enticing me on: and, although I cannot claim that I ever truly got to the bottom of what would or would not work, just as a painter by practising at his palette will gain an understanding of what colours he must mix to achieve a given effect, so I gradually became more fluent in the language of tastes. Ahmad, I am sure, noted my increasing confidence, but doubtless put it down to the fact that I was becoming older in years.