Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

by Bill Buford

  He handed me the knife.

  “Right,” I said, and rehearsed the procedure in a series of kung fu strokes in the air. “I do this. I do that. I cut these one by one. I work lose the spine. And basta.” (I was talking utter nonsense, of course, and had no idea what I was doing.)

  So, first thing: I did this. “This” involved working one side of the spine loose, first by pushing the animal up on its side—a hefty, slightly slippery operation—so that the spine was on top. Why? No idea. But the Maestro said to do it this way. Therefore I did.

  Second: I did that. “That” seemed to involve working loose a rectangular piece of meat, attached to what must have been the little piggy’s shoulder. (Shoulder? Neck? Head? This business of figuring out what all the animal bits had once done was a peculiar piece of speculation. If I thought too hard about it, I feared I’d get queasy, or, worse, break down and become a vegetarian. If I thought too little and resisted making the connection between the animal in my hands and its living cousins, like those running around on farms, I wouldn’t get the whole picture. My solution was to think of butchery like auto mechanics. This, here, was the axle. That, the drive shaft. The approach was meant to be honest but not too intimate—demystifying the animal but respecting it—and helped me make sense of the fact that I was deep inside it, cutting it up. It occurs to me only now that I never could figure out how a car worked.)

  Next: I cut “these” up. “These” were the ribs. To remove a rib, you sliced down one side of it with your blade, sticking close to the bone, constantly aware that every gram of tissue was meat and meat must never be wasted. If you looked up when someone entered the butcher shop, say, and your blade swerved, thereby losing a chunk, you were made to feel very bad. (It wasn’t the lost revenue; it was that you’d squandered some animal: the rearing, feeding, cleaning, caring, fattening, slaughtering, transporting, and now butchering, and, at the end of a long, disciplined line of purposefulness, you’d lost your concentration—Cazzo! You dick!—and a bit of the animal couldn’t be used! How could you? Non va bene!) Then, you sliced down the other side of the rib—again, sticking so close that you saw the white of the bone flaking up against your blade. What you were doing was freeing up the rib so that you could then pull it up toward you by the tip, while also trimming the tissue underneath—pulling and trimming, pulling and trimming.

  Finally I worked the spine free. This was an early lesson in not using a butcher’s knife. I used my fingers instead—along the seams of the muscle—and gravity: that was the point of heaving the pig onto its side, I realized, so that, with prodding, poking, and pushing, the spine might fall away naturally. Then: basta! I looked at my watch. It was eight o’clock. Half a pig had taken me one hour and forty-five minutes. There were twelve more to do.

  The Maestro came over to inspect my work. “You see that part,” he said, standing over me.

  “This part?” I said, pointing to the pink meaty rectangle-like steak.

  “Yes,” he said. “that part. It’s the best one of the animal.”

  “This part,” I said, confirming my understanding. I recognized the significance of the exchange. I was being instructed in the art of butchery by no less a teacher than the Maestro himself.

  “Exactly,” he said. “That part. It is very good.”

  “This must be the carré,” I said, giving the word my best French inflection. I wasn’t showing off; I just wanted him to know that I’d put some thought into this enterprise beforehand.

  “Bravo,” he said. “It’s true. Some people call it by the French name.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “In Italian, it’s called the lonza.”

  I repeated the word and again thanked the Maestro.

  He continued, “This is also the tenderest part.”

  “I see.”

  “It is also very precious and is, therefore, very expensive. And you have sliced it in half.”

  “Oh, shit,” I said in English. “I did that? Fuck.” Then, remembering that I was in Italy, I said (in Italian), “That was a mistake, wasn’t it?”

  “In fact, that is a very big mistake. That piece here,” he said, pointing to the two bits, “is central to the entire preparation. Do you understand?” (Hai capito?) “But you’ve cut it in half. Non va bene.”

  “I won’t do that again,” I said, trying to be reassuring.

  “Bravo,” he said, and resumed his task, which involved a very large thigh.

  The next day, May 10th, I returned to New York. I had a commitment there. My wife and I had been in Panzano nearly a month. But I’d been accepted as a butcher in training. I was being instructed by the Maestro himself. How could I stop now?

  24

  I WAS HOME and wanted a pig.

  My friend Paul had a stand called Violet Hill Farm at my local green market and sold chickens, rabbits, and pigs. Paul’s pigs were sucklings. I didn’t want a suckling. I wanted a proper pig: a big one. I wanted to apply what I’d learned in Italy.

  Could Paul get me a pig?

  Well, yes, he probably could. His neighbor had big healthy sows, and if I ordered one, while alive, the animal wouldn’t have to be approved by the Department of Agriculture. This—an animal’s transit from pasture to plate without a USDA stopover—was seen as a good thing. The rustic logic of animal husbandry can seem contradictory and might be summarized thus: anything involving a government agency is an intervention and regarded as bad, even though the agency was established to prevent you from getting ill and dying, which you would have thought was good. In Panzano, for instance, a food store did an under-the-counter trade in uova proibiti, illegal eggs, because they came from the grandmother’s chickens and hadn’t been examined by a European Union official. I bought them and they were good, although I’m not sure whether their appeal was in their flavor or in shells that hadn’t been blemished by a bureaucratic stamp.

  In my case, there was no need for a USDA inspection, because I was buying a living pig from Paul’s neighbor—in effect, purchasing a pet—rather than a dead one from, say, a butcher. But when Jessica and I showed up to pick it up, the animal was definitively dead, wrapped in a transparent plastic sheet and flopped across the back seat of Paul’s vehicle: a medium-sized animal, about two hundred and twenty-five pounds, with everything on view—hooves, legs, little piggy tail, head, plus (stuffed in the cavity, Paul told me) the lungs, heart, and liver.

  The challenge was getting it into the apartment. The transparent sheet ensured that every passerby knew what I’d bought. It was not your normal parcel of urban shopping. It was not your normal green market purchase either, and many people looked at me as though I were a bad man. There was only so much of this I could take, and I was tempted to prop our pig against the organic wheatgrass stand (“Mind if we leave this here while we finish our shopping?”). A woman was standing in front with her arms folded across her chest in open disapproval.

  I had a scooter. Cars are not permitted at my green market, and if I hadn’t had a scooter I wonder what I would have done. Hoisted the animal on my shoulder and walked home? Flagged a taxi? I was relieved I could strap my purchase onto my scooter rack, hooves dangling on either side of the front wheel, a pair of ears just underneath the handlebars, my wife on the back. The three of us, precariously poised, puttered home. I parked in front of our building, unloaded my cargo with difficulty, and staggered to the front door, cradling it in my arms, wondering, is there a law against this? Am I allowed in the lobby?

  The doorman, Gary Miro, a proud Italian American, greeted me with the enthusiasm of a man who appreciated his meat, and we stepped into the elevator. But before we ascended, a problem appeared in the casual Saturday morning dress of a Wall Street banker who’d followed us in from the street.

  “Gary, do we want another passenger?” I was struggling. Two hundred and twenty-five pounds was akin to a big man. What’s more, things had shifted in the transporting, and blood was pooling up in a crease of the plastic.

&nb
sp; It was a warm summer day in a small elevator. There were the doorman and the Wall Street banker and, just behind, my wife and me and my pig. The Wall Street banker turned. I don’t know why. Maybe he smelled something, although the smell, as these things go, wasn’t bad. He saw what was in my arms. His eyes conducted a rapid inventory of the details apparent in the plastic sheet, and when the door opened he exited with unusual speed.

  “Did you hear the sound he made?” the doorman asked with a meat lover’s sadistic glee. I had heard it, and I was distressed. I had been uncomfortable in the green market. Now I’d made my neighbor sick.

  I deposited my pig on the breakfast table and got ready. I emptied out the refrigerator and washed down the counters. I sharpened my new boning knife—short, thin, and stiff. (The Maestro had mocked a long floppy one I’d brought from New York—Che cazzo fai con questo? What in the dick are you going to do with this?) I then reflected on the difficulty of a pig at home. I hadn’t wanted to upset my neighbor. I didn’t know him well but suspected, and later confirmed, that he was a meat eater. The ironies are familiar enough. My pig was just a more elementary form of things he’d been eating for years. The implication confirmed what I knew but was reluctant to acknowledge: people don’t want to know what meat is. For my neighbor (and my friends and me, too, for most of my life), meat wasn’t meat: it was an abstraction. People don’t think of an animal when they use the word; they think of an element in a meal. (“What I want tonight is a cheeseburger!”)

  I wasn’t a proselytizer. Meat, for me, had never been a cause. I didn’t feel as strongly about it as Dario, who banishes vegetarians from his shop and tells them to go to hell. To my mind, vegetarians are among the few people who actually think about meat—at least they know what it is. I just believed people should know what they’re eating. After all, at the green market, you overheard discussions about fertilizers and organic soils and how much freedom a chicken needs before it’s free range. Wouldn’t it follow that you’d want to know what your meat is? And that’s what I thought I was doing. I had brought home a recently killed animal, healthier, fresher, and better raised than anything at a store, and, in preparing it, I was hoping to rediscover old-fashioned ways of making food. This, I felt, could only be a positive thing. But I was sure getting a lot of shit for it.

  I got to work.

  I began by cutting an arc around the hips to remove the hind legs—the prosciutti. In Italian, a prosciutto is both the limb and the preparation, the tasty salt-cured ham you see hanging from deli ceilings. I wasn’t going to cure these—a long, ritualized business that, like Miriam’s culatello, is traditionally done in January—but do something I regarded as “Dario’s summertime pig.” Dario had learned the recipe from an elderly contadino, who in turn had learned it from his father on his deathbed. The father had ordered him to convey the recipe to someone at the Cecchini butcher shop: not Dario, because he wouldn’t have been born yet, but probably Dario’s father. The contadino wasn’t sure why it had taken him so long, apart from his rarely coming to Panzano and not knowing how to drive. But he was happy to have fulfilled his father’s wish and passed on an old Chianti preparation into the appropriate hands before it disappeared.

  The recipe was really just an elevated way of incinerating a piece of meat (and everything else residing in it) without actually torching it. First you broke the legs down into what Marco Pierre White calls “the cushions.” The Maestro had taken me through the process and created a road map of sorts, going through each muscle, using gravity and your fingers to find “the seam.” The result was a bowl of pork pieces—around a dozen.

  Next, you brined them. For the brine, I tipped a bag of salt into a bucket, added water, and swirled until the salt was half dissolved. After a day or two, you removed the pieces, put them in a pot filled with white wine, cooked them for a few hours, and left them to cool overnight. In the morning they were done and could be stored in olive oil. The pieces, half cured by the brining, flavored by the wine, and now submerged in oil, keep for a year.

  I now understand that the method was devised to clean up pork that the contadino hadn’t got around to dealing with during the hot months. In general, you don’t kill pigs in the summer unless something has gone wrong, and Dario had once let slip that the contadino had used the recipe for his sick pigs, not the kind of information nugget a butcher forthrightly shares with his customers: Here, try this, a bit of diseased pork I hammered. In the event, what Dario did or didn’t say was immaterial because, for several years, no one bought it. Who wants fat (pork) in fat (oil)? But the meat was actually lean, with the texture of fish, and in a moment of marketing clarity he renamed it tonno (tuna) del Chianti. Now it is the most popular item in the shop. In 2001, the European Union recognized it as a food unique to the region and, giving it an official designation, ordered that the recipe be preserved as a monument of Tuscan culture. I like it with beans, parsley, lemon, and olive oil—like tuna.

  ON THE SECOND day of my pig, I addressed the front, removing the forelegs and boning them. These are Mario’s unsung heroes, tough and supposedly flavorful and good for slow braising (or rather, good only for slow braising), although I was going to use them in sausages.

  When I made these at the butcher shop, people often ate the meat raw, straight from the bowl, while I was preparing it, which—I don’t know, call me old-fashioned—just seemed wrong. But it illustrated an attitude toward good meat, if you’re lucky enough to get it: don’t mess with it. The shop followed the recipe (to the extent that one existed—everything was pretty much eyeballed) of three parts meat to one part fat, the rich back fat from the top of the pig, all ground up together, plus garlic, pepper, and salt: that was it. You mushed it all together until it became an emulsified pinkish goop, which you then stuffed into a canister that looked a like a giant bullet. At one end of the canister was a spout: this was where you slipped on the casing, about twenty feet of pork intestines, which the meat mix went into. The task of getting the intestines onto the spout, which was not unlike putting on a condom the length of an African serpent, involved a universally recognized hand movement, and, alas, predictable Tuscan jokes were had at my expense (at which point I tended to fall into a Freudian state of mind and wonder softly to myself what humor tells us of a culture).

  Tuscan sausages are smaller than their American cousins, and each one is demarcated with a string, a graceful loop drawn tightly into a knot—looping and tightening, looping and tightening, a symmetrically floppy, aesthetically appealing rhythm. At the butcher shop, I made sausages in the lower room, and visitors came down to watch. “Aaaah,” they’d say, “so that’s the way it’s done.” One man, his voice cracking, whispered, “This is how my grandfather made them.” Sometimes the visitors would want to chat, a dodgy moment (How could I chat? What came out of my mouth would have blown my cover), which I survived by limiting my replies.

  “Salsicce?” someone would always ask, rather redundantly.

  “Sì,” I’d answer forcefully, in what I believed to be an imitation of a singsongy Panzano rhythm, packing in all the notes that the locals seemed to get into a one-beat word like “sì.”

  “Di maiale?” (pork?) they asked next, with tautological tenacity.

  “Sì,” I replied again, impatiently this time so they understood I was very busy.

  Once I got in a jam. “What herbs do you use?” a visitor asked.

  I panicked. This was the kind of question I avoided. “Sì!” I said inexplicably. I couldn’t bear the prospect of his realizing he’d been duped: the romance, the history, the handmade integrity of it all, only to discover that an American was the sausage maker.

  MY PIG was now legless, but there was one more cut, just between the shoulders, that I was hoping to have for dinner on the third day. This was the meat encased by the first four ribs, the “eye” of the chops. In Italian, this is called the coppa or capocollo—capo means head and collo means “neck”; the capocollo starts at the top of the neck. When it�
��s cured and aged, it makes for the lean salumi that was served to the Nashville diners. The preparation was associated with Bologna and was therefore one you rarely saw in Tuscany, where the coppa is normally sold fresh, not cured, and broken down into the chops. When it is roasted whole, it is called something else again: a rosticiana, the best meal in the house. I cooked one on the bone, in a hot oven for about thirty-five minutes, and contemplated how brief the journey can be from the very raw to the only-just-been-cooked.

  On the fourth day I made arista. I sawed the torso in two, boned each half according to the Maestro’s instructions, and added the ingredients in Dario’s order: garlic, thyme, the fennel pollen (which I’d stashed into my suitcase; everyone else was smuggling it—why not me?), the black blanket of pepper, the green blanket of rosemary, and the salt blizzard. I rolled it up into a giant Christmas log, cut lines along the skin to render the fat, tied it up, and cooked it until it was crispy and blackly smoking.

  On the fifth day, I made a ragù—enough for two hundred people. A pig was turning out to be a pig of work.

  On the sixth, I made headcheese, boiling the head until the meaty bits come loose and set in their own gelatin.

  On the seventh day, I contemplated the lungs, tempted by a recipe I had found in Apicius, who recommends soaking them overnight in milk, filling each cavity with two eggs and some honey (what, when you think about it, could be simpler?), sealing them back up and boiling them until ready, the lungs bobbing like pool toys. He doesn’t say when a lung is cooked, but I concluded that the virtue of having two is that if the first lung isn’t quite ready you know to wait a little longer for the second. In the end, I didn’t cook the lungs. It was hard to throw them away. It seemed so wasteful—why buy a whole pig if you’re going to throw away the lungs?—but I’d been working on this pig for a long time. It was the seventh day. I needed a rest.