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21 " But she was as wiry as any boy, and it had caused quite an uproar when Tessina first flexed her arm and a little muscle popped up, hard as a walnut, while us boys could hardly produce anything.But she never looked like a boy. A mass of curls, the color of August straw, made a halo around her head, tight and springy, as if a goldsmith had put them there. Her skin was pale like the flesh of hazelnuts, dusted with little freckles, except when she stayed too long in the summer sun and it burned. Like a peach, her arms were covered in fine golden down, which also clung, fainter than faint, to her upper lip. "
― Philip Kazan , Appetite
22 " There was some ordinary pork, a heap of pigs' livers and some caul fat. Carenza had been to the market that morning and bought fronds of bronze fennel with their pollen-heavy flowers still on them; sorrel; bitter lettuce. I chose the fennel, went out to the courtyard and picked some marjoram, thyme, parsley and mint.I decided to make some tomacelli, because I liked them and it was the kind of fiddly, absorbing dish I could lose myself in. So I put the livers on to boil, and then cut up some veal haunch. Carenza liked mortadelli and so I'd make her some with the veal. I chopped the veal up finely with a bit of its fat and some lardo, mixed in some parsley and some marjoram. The livers were done, so I drained them and put them in a bowl. Into the mortadella mixture went a handful of grated parmigiana cheese, some cloves, cinnamon and a few threads of saffron. An egg yolk went in too, and then I sank my hands into the cool, slippery mound and mixed it with my fingers. When it was smooth I shaped it into egg-sized balls, wrapped them in pieces of caul and threaded them onto a spit.While the mortadelli sizzled over the flame, I took the livers and crumbled them up, added some minced pancetta, some grated pecorino, marjoram, parsley, raisins, some ginger and nutmeg and pepper. I bound it all together with a couple of eggs and made the stuff into balls, smaller than the mortadelli, wrapped them in more caul and set to frying them in melted lardo. "
23 " The loin of Cinta Senese had been sitting in the cold room, begging to be cooked. I'd shown it to Filippo- This is our supper, I'd said, and he'd replied that supper was too far away, and didn't the painters deserve the best, serving God as they did? So I'd grabbed it, along with some garlic, thyme, rosemary, peppercorns and nutmeg. Surely they'd have salt at the studio... Filippo had bought some onions, a flask of milk and a hunk of prosciutto on the way. I hunted around in the small, chaotic niche where the artists kept their food and discovered a dusty flask of olive oil. Sniffing it dubiously, I found it was quite fresh: the dark green oil from the hills behind Arezzo. In Florence we almost always cooked in lard, oil would do in a pinch.The kiln was lit but not being used for anything, and the fire was dying down. I threw some pieces of oak onto it, chopped the onions and the ham with a borrowed knife, cut the loin away from the ribs. The artists had a trivet and some old pans which they used to cook with every now and again, though mostly they lived on pies from the cook-shop up the street. There was an earthenware pot with a cracked lid, which seemed clean enough. I put it on the trivet, poured in a good stream of the green oil, browned the meat in its wrapping of fatty rind. Sandro gave up a cup of white wine, unwillingly, which I threw over the pork. When it had cooked off, I crushed two big cloves of garlic and added them along with the rosemary I had brought, and a handful of thyme. The milk had just foamed, and I poured it over the meat. The air filled with a rich, creamy, meaty waft. "
24 " Though we were still half a room apart, I felt her: the tiny, coppery hairs on her arm that rose to attention when she was cold or aroused; the beautiful landscape of gooseflesh that was shivering across her skin beneath her robe; the flowery, powdery scent of that skin, as complicated as music. The faint freckles scattered across her cheeks and nose: I was falling into them, as though they were the starry summer sky. "
25 " So Tessina had become a woman, with cornflower-blue eyes, brighter than Filippo's best paint; and thick, wavy hair that had darkened a little to the color of old amber or perhaps chestnut honey, shaved back in the fashionable way from her smooth forehead. She still had freckles, the tiny upward curve to the end of her nose, but her face had changed. It had become itself. "
26 " Food can make you think […] just like music or…or words on a page. I believe we don’t understand that, because we’ve chosen not to. If a man is deaf or blind, we pity him. If he cannot taste, then we say he must be lucky, and make some joke about his wife’s cooking. "