Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

by Bill Buford

  What I really wanted was to learn meat. I didn’t yet understand the culture surrounding Tuscan butchery. I hadn’t come here to learn about it because I hadn’t known anything about it. The truth is I came here because I wanted to make food in an Italian way, and, frankly, any place would have sufficed, because every place would be different from anything I’d known. But I was here and, fortuitously enough, I was interested in how you prepare an animal as food.

  There is a reasonably extensive literature for non–meat eaters. But there is no such literature for those who eat meat, probably because they rarely believe they need to justify what they do. My suspicion is that, at some point, most meat eaters have asked themselves why they eat meat but have been able to answer the question without getting too philosophical. I eat meat because I like it and have never wanted to talk myself into giving it up: end of self-scrutiny. I’ve been happy as a carnivore—for me, eating meat is natural (to my mind, either side of the what-is-natural? debate can be defended pretty persuasively)—although, like the rest of the thinking world, I recognize that much of the meat I’ve eaten probably wasn’t produced naturally but treated instead like something that’s not meat (the hormones, the antibiotics, the brutal results of confinement rearing), a unit of production, a reproducible item in a mass-market business. But I was frustrated that my picture of the business wasn’t much more informed than that. The meat world was so unknowable that I could never get what seemed like an honest view about how an animal was made into food, short of buying one and bringing it home and having my way with it. There was an elementary knowledge I didn’t have, and, now that I was in a butcher shop, I was hoping I’d get it.

  I wanted to be tutored in butchering. But I was also haunted by Alex’s story of a year in a Florentine kitchen, cutting vegetables. Was my prospect any better, when only two people were allowed to wield a knife? And there was the overwhelming daily routine, making pepper jelly and pouring salt into tiny jars.

  THERE WERE mishaps. I bashed myself. I cut myself. I fell: I had been myopically focused on a task, peeling garlic, and hadn’t noticed a heavy bin of beef at my feet until I walked straight into it and became airborne. Teresa looked up, dumbfounded by what she saw: this large American, inexplicably perpendicular to the floor. When I landed (in the meat, garlic peels now everywhere), she rammed a fist into her mouth to stop from laughing hysterically, at least until she confirmed I hadn’t been injured, and then that’s what she did: laughed hysterically. Then she started crying.

  I split my head open. I was cleaning a machine used to pound meat. It was like an instrument of punishment, the height of a man, all metal angles, gunged up with muscly goo. I must have assumed an unnatural position, wanting to remain at arm’s length while needing to get close enough to scrape out the red fluff, when I slammed my forehead into something and split open the skin. It was so unexpected I didn’t know what I’d hit. I felt the edges of the wound: deep. A minute later, I did it again. I slammed the same part of my forehead into the same sharp something, whatever it was, splitting open the earlier wound. I had to sit down; blood was all over my face.

  I missed Babbo: its rules and knowing how to work in them, the adrenaline of the service, the recognition I’d earned for myself. I was starting over. Then I caught on fire.

  I was making a pot of what was called ragù alla Medici, named after the famous Renaissance Florentine family whose kitchens, according to Dario, represented the high point of Italian cooking.

  The meat was beef that had been sitting around unsold, having reached its sell-by date or exceeded it: raw, marinated, even cooked, whatever was to hand. These were all put through a meat grinder and plopped into a four-foot-high pot. The vegetables, the usual suspects—red onions, carrots, celery, garlic—were put through the grinder as well, a long column of brightly colored mush. I was given a paddle, five feet long, like a shovel, with a flat burnt edge for scraping the bottom. A big burner was put on the floor so that I could stand above the pot. I was to stir for eight hours.

  Actually, it was only six hours, because there was a two-hour break for lunch, a family meal, a pasta served with an impromptu condiment made with olive oil, garlic, and the season’s first cherry tomatoes, during which Dario suddenly started reciting the end of the Divine Comedy. I have no idea why. Something about the food. The tomatoes, maybe. The tomatoes, being red, reminded him of Hell, and he was off. Everyone stopped and were respectfully silent, until it became apparent that Dario was going to continue for some time. Carlo made his I-can’t-believehe’s-doing-this-at-lunch-again face and the people at the table then resumed their conversations, finished their food, picked up the plates, washed them—Dario still going on—and got back to their tasks. I didn’t have this liberty because I didn’t know better. I hadn’t yet realized that this was akin to a plumbing problem. “Damn, there goes the toilet again!” “Damn, there goes Dario on that last canto!” I also felt I had no escape, because the recitation—Dario sweating, his face a fevery sheen—was being projected at me. When he finished, invoking a love that moves the sun and the other stars, he got up and went to the cupboard for a bottle of whiskey, knocked it back, and assumed his position on his platform, visibly shaking, his hands on the counter, only his back on view to me. He turned. He was crying. “Every passion, every feeling of fury or anguish, every thought, is compressed into those lines.”

  I nodded. I’m sure he was right. But I had things to do. I was making my first ragù. Wasn’t this why I’d come to Italy—to be told by an Italian how to make a ragù? I returned to my pot joyfully, relit the burner, and resumed stirring. The meat, long cooked, looked like gravelly dirt. Eventually, Dario appeared. He’d recovered from his Dante recitation and had come to inspect my work. He added some tomato—not much, more tomato water than tomato sauce, deepening the color from dirt brown to dark dirt brown. I kept rolling the meat round, each time pushing some to one side, exposing the hot bottom of the pot, then rolling it back again. With each pass, the meat hissed, and steam enveloped my face. I was hot: the wet-shirt, sweat-pouring-down-my-face-neck-arms routine. Marco Pierre White came to mind (“All big boys season their food with their sweat—you can taste it”), and I wondered if sweat really is a kitchen’s secret seasoning, because there was no doubt where mine was falling, even though it converted to steam on impact.

  I had concerns. One was that, in paddling the meat from side to side, I might accidentally push the pot too far—each time it bumped against my knee—and it would tip over, spilling hours of good work. (That’d be the kind of thing I’d do, wouldn’t it? I hugged the pot a little closer.) The other was that my apron, which was floor-length, would catch on fire. I rehearsed in my mind the possible scenario. The apron is secured around the waist with a string belt. To get it off, you had to untie the string. So that was the first thing—untie it. If I didn’t, it could be ugly. I pictured myself in flames, being unable to remove the apron, and Dario’s rushing over, all heroic and decisive, picking me up with his giant hands, hurling me to the floor, and stomping out the fire. (I did not want to be stomped.)

  Around five o’clock Teresa looked into the pot. “Dario, è pronto”—it’s ready. Dario came over, scooped up some ragù onto the paddle, and shook it, like a tin-pan gold prospector.

  “It’s meant to be like sand,” he explained. He tasted it. “Boh!” He passed the paddle to Teresa.

  She tasted it—” Boh,”—and passed the paddle to Carlo.

  Carlo tasted it. “Boh.”

  Riccardo tasted it. “Boh.”

  The Maestro tasted it. “Boh.”

  Oh, what the hell, I thought, and I tasted some, too. Everyone looked at me. “Boh,” I said finally. (What else could I say?)

  Dario tasted it again. “Perfetto,” he declared. I stared at it, the hours of my stirring, this dirty sticky sand.

  “Pepe!” Dario called out to the ceiling. Pepper appeared.

  “Sale!” Salt appeared.

  “Limone!” And there wa
s a bowl of lemon zest. Cinnamon, coriander, nutmeg, cloves. It interested me that the seasonings were added after the cooking. The seasonings themselves, this Medici compilation, also interested me. You’d never find these in a conventional ragù. It was nothing like a Bolognese, even if it had the same consistency. (Are all of Dario’s preparations simply polemics dressed up as food? “We have no idea where these things come from,” Teresa told me once. “Dario goes home, he reads an old book, he has another dish.”) I leaned over and took in the new aromatics, which were like Christmas and Easter and mushroomy autumn in one complex smell. Then Dario called out for vin santo—two whole bottles.

  My mouth dropped. Oh, no! After all the effort to get rid of the liquid. Am I now going to have to steam this away as well? He poured them in, and I looked inside, disbelieving. It was now soupy. And, just as I feared, I was told to resume stirring. I was tired. Then I was on fire.

  The flames started at the hem and, like that—two seconds—the whole apron was burning. Wow! Just like the movies. (It’s animal fat, it occurred to me—of course! I’m a grease fire!) The fire was well under way before I noticed it, even though I’d been expecting it, and had already raced around the apron. It was, fittingly enough, a circle of flames: very Inferno-like. But I knew what to do. Evidently, so did Dario. Where did he come from? I went straight for the belt, fast, and located the end of the strings so I could undo the knot—a simple bow, one tug. But Dario, with heroic urgency, also went straight for the belt. I was much more relaxed, probably because I’d been rehearsing the fire drill all afternoon. Dario, however, was so focused on undoing my apron knot that he failed to notice that I was already there and grabbed the strings I was already holding. (How do you say, “Hey, Dario, kindly remove your gigantic fucking paws”?) We struggled. My hands went one way, his another, until I found I was once again holding the strings, which was good. But Dario was now clenching the knot itself. How can I undo the knot if his hands are all over it? But between his efforts and mine, the knot somehow came undone. The apron was then ripped off and hurled violently to floor: whereupon Dario stomped it.

  Later that night, in something of a metaphysical mood, I was visited by Mr. Commonsense, whom I hadn’t heard from in some time. He addressed me: Why did you want to be a butcher? Doesn’t Benny, in the West Village, give you good service? And this language thing—what’s wrong with English? And why did you ever want to learn to cook? Really—at your age?

  THE BREAKTHROUGH MOMENT was soppressata. Teresa asked me to help. It was the next day’s project.

  From what I could tell, soppressata is pig meat and pig fat in an intestinal casing—like salami, but meatier, fatter, bigger—and each region seems to have its own version. Dario’s is a sopressata de’ Medici, a sixteenth-century spelling, because the by-now-familiar Medicean ingredients—cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, citrus zest, and sweet wine—were added to a very gelatinous pork filling. The fascination with the Medicis was a daily theme. I knew elements of the story: that after Caterina de’ Medici left Italy in 1533 to become the future queen of France, she not only jump-started the culinary revolution there but also gave away all of Italy’s kitchen secrets. Her pack train, it was said, had been loaded with lettuces, parsley, and artichokes (familiar in Italy, foreign in France), and her kitchen help included banquet stewards, butchers, and pastry chefs, so that, when she finally settled in, she was able to introduce pastries, custards, profiteroles, vegetables, and herbs to a population that had never had such things, plus the best of Renaissance cooking, along with an attitude of seriousness about food, as well as that enduring utensil, the fork (an Italian invention—how else could you eat pasta?). In educated food circles, much fun is had at the expense of Italians who still think the story is true: there are the Tooth Fairy, and flying carpets, and…Dario, of course, had no such doubts. I understood this after I once remarked on his using shallots in one of his preparations.

  “Shallots?” I asked, exaggeratedly perplexed. “Dario, aren’t shallots French?” It was a mischievous query. Dario did not respond well to suggestions that his food was covertly Gallic.

  “No!” he boomed. “No! No! No!” According to Dario, shallots were another item introduced to the French by Italians. “How long have you been here? Boudin blanc,” he exclaimed, referring to the French white sausage. “Boudin noir! La crème caramel! Le soufflé! La crépinette!” He was shouting. “Le pâté! La mayonnaise! I salumi—la charcuterie! Canard à l’orange! These dishes did not originate in France! They arrived in France!” Tutta la cucina e arrivata! “Until Caterina de’ Medici, there was no grand French cooking!”

  Dario’s face was red. I thought of coming clean: “Hey, Dario, just joking!” No chance. He wouldn’t be stopped. He cited German dishes, Viennese dishes—” The Sachertorte? Eh? From Sicily!” Argentine ones. Chimichurri—the country’s beef preparation? “Where in the dick do you think that comes from?” Maybe he’d had too much wine at lunch, because he then declared that “most of the world’s cooking”—tutta la cultura della cucina è nata nel Mediterraneo—“comes from the Mediterranean, and most of that comes from Tuscany.”

  I stared at him blankly, taking in the proposition that Tuscans, ultimately, were responsible for all the good cooking everywhere.

  (Then again, maybe he was right. I’d been surprised how many items I’d always thought of as French were on a traditional Tuscan menu—like crêpes, crespelle in Italian, or flan, called sformato.)

  This morning, the soppressata reminded Dario of Armandino’s stay in the butcher shop. When he’d been here, Armandino had video-recorded everything he was taught so he could reproduce it when he returned to Seattle. But, as Armandino couldn’t speak Italian, he had used Faith Willinger as his translator—Mario had introduced the two to each other. During a soppressata-making session, Armandino stood on a stool filming, just over Dario’s shoulder, and Willinger provided a steady commentary in English. Suddenly Dario became very upset. Making soppressata involves three people, and, for Dario, those three people had always been his father, his mother, and his grandmother. They are now dead, and it was too much—there were just too many associations—and Dario exploded in a sentimental outburst. “It takes three people to make soppressata! One person can’t do it!” He ordered Armandino down from the stool and told Faith to shut up, get dirty, and help.

  This time I was the third person, joining Teresa and the Maestro. First I was told to weigh the meat, a pot of leftover pig bits: two hundred pounds of knuckles, heads, toenails, tits, tongues, plus some misshapen parts I couldn’t identify. The Renaissance ingredients were added, and it was all boiled slowly until it became a thick, gray sludge, at which time the fire was turned off and the pot was allowed to cool—but only a little. A pig’s bony bits are full of gelatin, and they solidify like cement if they reach room temperature.

  We began. Teresa worked from the pot, filling a cup with the lumpy mixture and emptying it into a canvas sack, not unlike a coarse sock, which she then handed to me. I tapped it twice, letting the mixture settle, and wiped off the sides—goo seeping through the weave—closed it up, and passed it to the Maestro, who gripped it firmly from the top, his gigantic hand enveloping my puny paw. He then rapidly looped a string around the bundle, like a parcel for the post office.

  We established a rhythm. Teresa, the handover to me, the Maestro. At some point, Teresa started humming. She hummed so much I rarely noticed her humming: it was a background noise of cheerfulness. But the Maestro noticed, and he joined in, whistling. The tune was “’O Sole Mio.”

  The three of us continued. Teresa filled a sack, I tapped it, the Maestro tied it. Meanwhile, Teresa hummed, and the Maestro whistled. Then they reached the end of the song. The Maestro cleared his throat.

  No, I thought. He wouldn’t dare.

  “Che bella cosa,” he sang. It was an impressive baritone. “Na jurnata ’e sole.” What a beautiful thing a day in the sun is. I don’t think I’d heard the words before. I was impressed tha
t someone knew them. Then again, if anyone was going to know them, he probably would, wouldn’t he? (After all, he’s Italian.)

  Teresa replied. “N’aria serena,” she sang. Hers was a perfectly reasonable mezzo-soprano, and I was impressed that she, too, knew the words. She filled up another sack and handed it to me, singing, “doppo a na tempesta.” In the serene air after a storm.

  This was all very sweet. The problem was the song, and the real problem, for me, was that I’d lived in Britain, where a corrupted version was the theme tune in a television advertisement selling a factory-made fake Italian ice cream called a “cornetto”: Venice, gondolas, and some guy in a beret singing “Just one more cornetto” to the refrain of “’O Sole Mio.” I was finding these two versions difficult to reconcile: on the one hand, “just one more cornetto,” openly accepted as a joke; on the other hand, this Italian hill town, the making of soppressata according to a Renaissance recipe, surrounded by people who were singing this landmark piece of Italian kitsch in earnest. And they knew the words. And it wasn’t a joke.

  “Pe’ ll’aria fresca,” the Maestro continued, “pare già na festa.”

  “Che bella cosa na jurnata ’e sole,” Teresa replied, and set down her sack. The Maestro put down his as well and took a deep breath. They were preparing for the high notes of the famous refrain.

  (No, I found myself saying quietly, Please, don’t do it. Aren’t you embarrassed? Please stop.)

  They didn’t stop. They tilted back their heads, projected their voices to the ceiling, and bellowed: “’O sole mio,” they sang in unison, “sta ’nfronte a te! ’O sole, ’o sole mio…”