After I had been at the court a few months, I was summoned to the king’s presence. At first I assumed I was to take him an ice: but when I asked how many guests he had with him, I was told there was only one, and that on this occasion no ices were required. I immediately concluded that my last offering - a milk sherbet flavoured with grains of paradise - had in some way been unacceptable. My heart thudding, certain that I was about to be disgraced, I followed the footman through the 'endless corridors to the presence chamber.
I found the king in conversation with a man whose court coat was dusted with green lichen, his white stockings and the linen buckles of his shoes splashed with mud. But the king was conversing with him as easily as with any courtier I had ever seen.
‘Ah, Demirco!’ Louis exclaimed. I saw that he was holding in his hand a small fruit knife and a pear. ‘Have you met Monsieur la Quintinie?’
I had heard of the man, a lawyer by training, who supervised the king’s vegetable gardens, but I had not yet met him. We bowed to each other.
‘Smell this,’ the king instructed, passing me a slice of the pear from his own hand. ‘Go on - smell it!’
I sniffed deeply, allowing the pear’s aroma to fill my nostrils. It was very good, with a fresh, floral perfume which put me in mind of Muscat grapes. The crescent-shaped slice which the king had cut from the fruit revealed that the skin was rough, almost warty, and tinged with a blush of red like an apple; but the flesh was white and crisp, like a block of marble before it is carved.
‘Now try it,’ he instructed.
I slipped the slice of pear into my mouth. The fragrance became liquid, filling my palate: the flesh crunched beneath my teeth, releasing more of those wonderful juices.
‘Sir, that is magnificent,’ I said truthfully, when I had swallowed.
He nodded. ‘A new variety. Monsieur la Quintinie’s gardeners have been nurturing it for three years, and this is the first time it has fruited.’ He was silent a moment. ‘Truly God is the greatest cook of all, and we can only honour his recipes with as much humility as we can muster.’
‘Indeed, sir,’ I said, unsure where this was leading.
‘Perfection is simplicity, Demirco.’
I bowed my agreement.
‘You have a great fondness for snuff and spices and so on, and that is all very well. But the productions of the potager, plain and
unadorned, teach us the glory of God. Could you capture such flavours in an ice?’
‘I believe so, Your Majesty,’ I said cautiously. ‘Whether it would retain the aroma that, for example, this, pear has, I am not sure. But I would be honoured to try’
The king spread his hands to indicate the two of us. ‘La Quintinie and Demirco. Talk to each other. I look forward to tasting the fruits of your pollination.’
And so I learnt the virtue of simplicity, and sent to the king iced sorbetti of whatever fruit was most recently in season, adorned with nothing except a little sugar. I discovered that, although the process of freezing might indeed rob fruit of some of its scent, it also had the effect of concentrating the flavour, capturing its essence in a few sweet crystals on the end of a spoon. This was before la Quintinie had completed the vast pota^fer du roi^ the largest in Europe, which Louis himself considered the most beautiful part of his estate. But the orchards, kitchen gardens and glasshouses he already had at his disposal were producing extraordinary results. Louis loved pears, for example, more than any other fruit, and so la Quintinie set himself to growing the best varieties in France, as well as creating new ones for the king’s pleasure. Globular, round, pendant, slender; green, yellow, russet, red; rough-skinned or smooth; with fancy names’ such as Bon Chretien d’Hiver, Petit Blanquet, Sucree Verte, br the king’s absolute favourite, the sweet, highly perfumed Rousselet de Reims - he grew them all, and I was given the precious fruits to do with as I pleased. Once, when I sent the king a simple wooden board containing nothing but half-a-dozen sorbets, each made from a different variety of pear, culminating in a bright pink san£luinello or blood pear which had been gently roasted so as to caramehse its flesh, he was so delighted that court business was put aside, Audiger and I were summoned into the royal presence, and the whole court was made to give us an ovation for our
achievements. On another occasion I made him a bowl of cherries which, when examined closely, turned out to be twenty individual cherry cream ices which I had frozen one by one in a mould; while my mandarin sorbets - each one served inside the skin of a recently picked mandarin, the peel apparently unbroken, like a toy ship inside a bottle - were a wonder that the court discussed for days.
Sometimes the king hosted great divertissements for up to a thousand guests, when theatres and grottos almost as large as the palace itself were constructed out of papier mache for the premieres of specially commissioned masques and comedies-ballets. The fact that these elaborate buildings were to be destroyed after a single night’s entertainment was simply another aspect of their magnificence. On these occasions we would create never-to-berepeated ices in honour of a special guest, in the same way that a chef might name a new sauce after the patron who inspired it. Audiger took seriously the king’s implicit command to outdo Cardinal Mazarin’s limonadier^ and even bribed servants in the households of the other great nobles to tell us what their confectioners were up to. It was a happy day, indeed, when we heard that the famous Signor Morelli had been reduced to copying our own idea of a bitter redcurrant sherbet served on a glistening silver spoon which, when placed in the mouth, turned out to be made of sugar.
For Audiger, though, our success was always mingled with frustration. The foundation of the guild - his great dream - was bogged down in bureaucracy, and at each step required another bribe to ease it on its way. The king’s steward. Monsieur le Tellier, saw no difficulty, but referred the matter to the Privy Council. The Council could not consider it without a report from the principal clerk. The principal clerk referred the issue to the chancellor. The chancellor would only become involved if the measure was sponsored by some nobleman. The nobleman Audiger chose.
unfortunately, turned out to be sleeping with a lady who was not his wife: hardly an unusual occurrence, but his wife happened to be the granddaughter of the chancellor . . . And so it went on, around and around, with no one eager,to grant the patent which would create the guild until every last opportunity for profit, advancement, intrigue and corruption had been wrung from its passage.
‘But why do you care?’ I said at last, when Audiger was ranting yet again about the latest setback. ‘Why is a guild so important, if we are making the ices we want to?’
‘Have you understood nothing?’ Audiger demanded. He strode abruptly to where I was pouring clove-scented milk into a pewter mould. ‘Who do you think pays for this equipment?’ he said furiously. ‘For your clothes? Your fine hat? These premises? Who feeds our apprentices? Who pays our bribes? Who buys these expensive ingredients you use so liberally?’ He dug his fingers into a box of cloves and flung the whole handful into the air. ‘Do you never even ask yourself such things?’
I stared at him, dumbfounded, as the cloves pattered to the floor. What he had said was absolutely true. I never so much as considered the financial aspect of what we did. It was the one freedom which the slave shares with the gentleman; not to care about money. *