Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

by Bill Buford

  We had many meals. By my reckoning my green-market pig generated four hundred and fifty servings of food and worked out to less than fifty cents a plate. But the lesson wasn’t in the pig’s economy but in its variety and abundance: okay, I admit, maybe over-abundance, because pretty early on my wife and I discovered we’d had rather a lot of pig. We’d eaten our way from its snout (which went into the sausages) to its tail (which I added to the ragù). We were sick of pig. I badly needed to return to Italy. It was time to learn beef.

  TUSCAN BUTCHER

  It is important that children make their own decisions about what they will and won’t eat, whether this is on moral or taste grounds. It should be our responsibility as parents to make sure they have all the information they need. We must not pass on any of our own eating hang-ups. I have always made our children aware that when they are eating beef, for example, they are actually eating a cow. There is nothing wrong with this as long as the animal has led a good, healthy life and has been killed humanely. The quality of the meat is directly influenced by the quality of life of the animal itself. After all, evolution has designed us to be carnivorous both in the way we eat and the way we process our food.

  Unfortunately supermarket price wars have resulted in all food prices coming down, including those of meat. If we would only stop to think: how is this possible? Land and property values and wages have been increasing. Inflation still exists. How then can meat and poultry prices fall?

  —HESTON BLUMENTHAL, Family Food

  25

  THE MAESTRO GREETED me on my first morning. “So you’ve returned to resume your instruction in the thigh.” Of course I’d returned. How could I not?

  Dario, weirdly, was expecting me. What had taken so long? he asked.

  How did he know?

  He answered by telling me about a man from New Jersey. The man had come to San Gimignano, the famous town of towers about an hour away, to learn how to make bread. At the end of his stay, he packed his bags and went to Pisa to catch his flight home. He couldn’t leave. He couldn’t walk down the gangway to the airplane. So he tore up his ticket. “He has been here twenty-two years. He is a very good baker,” Dario said in that imperious, this-is-God-speaking tone. “You, too, can tear up your ticket.” (My wife, standing beside me, shuffled anxiously: she knew I didn’t even have a return ticket.)

  Without my fully realizing it, my mission had changed. When I’d begun this whole business—what I’d come to regard as my excursion into the underworld of the professional kitchen—I’d been a visitor. I’d been a tourist, and, like many tourists, I’d been able to throw myself into my journey with such abandon because I knew it would end. At Babbo, I seemed to endure abuse more easily than others because this wasn’t my life. Now I wondered: had I stayed too long? Mario once said that to learn a kitchen properly you should spend a year in it, cooking your way through the seasons, and I’d thought: I can do that. So I was at Babbo from January 2002 until March 2003 (minus the time I took off for my office job when I had one). Mario said that if you want to master Italian cooking you should learn the language and work in Italy, and I’d thought: I can do that, too. This, apparently, wasn’t sufficient, because I then got it into my head that I should undergo a miniversion of Mario’s own culinary education: knowing-the-man-by-knowing-his-teachers. Thus my time with Marco Pierre White (Mario’s first teacher) and the weeks spent with Betta and Gianni (Mario’s pasta teachers). And while Mario had never worked for Dario Cecchini, Mario’s father had: not an exact fit but close enough.

  Then I had crossed over. I was no longer on the outside looking in. I stopped being an author writing about the experience of the kitchen. I was a member of it. The crossover was obvious to the people around me—my wife, long-sufferingly, had quietly identified in me the traits commonly described as an obsessive’s (mania, a lack of perspective, an inability to recognize limits)—but hadn’t been evident to me, even when I’d woken up in New York with this resolve to return to Panzano. Did I need to come back? Of course not. But I’d been unable to forget the often repeated aphorism, occasioned by Mario’s trashing of Nick after he’d got homesick in Milan: one might never have the opportunity to learn so much again. Dario Cecchini had trusted me with a blade. He’d asked the Maestro, his own maestro, to teach me. How could I stop?

  So, yes, Maestro, I was back to resume my instruction with the thigh.

  The thigh was a cow’s, and mastering it was a crucial credential in being a Tuscan butcher. On my last day of my first stay, just before returning to New York, I’d given it a try, the Maestro by my side, but I’d made a mess of it. No matter: the Maestro, ever patient, had assumed we had weeks of instruction ahead. I hadn’t said anything about having to go home, and he had been genuinely uncomprehending when I told him the news.

  “What are you talking about? How can you leave, just when you need to try again with the thigh?” He’d shaken his head in bafflement. I felt as if I had been acting in bad faith: that by pretending to be a Tuscan butcher—in effect, by being a tourist—I had tricked the Maestro into giving me a thigh lesson.

  I put on an apron and went back to work and had what I now regard as a symbolic exchange. A Japanese family appeared in the butcher’s shop, clustered round their English-speaking, enthusiastic mother. (“Oh, my god, is that Dario Cecchini? Is this real Chianti in my glass?”) They took many pictures. They then came downstairs and took pictures of me, knife in hand, my floor-length apron already bloodied. The crossover was complete. I was no longer a tourist. I was an attraction.

  AS I UNDERSTOOD my schooling, I’d studied a range of things during my first stint but had majored in pig. Now, during my more studious second stint (I thought of it as graduate butcher school), I’d be taught cow. Pig was easy; cow was complex. Pig was very Italian; you can find lots of people who know pig. But few know cow. Cow was Tuscan, and knowing cow was at the heart of what it meant to be of Panzano.

  Giovanni Manetti had explained this to me when my wife and I had called on him. We’d wanted to see his wine-making operation, the vast Fontodi estate in the conca d’oro, acres and acres of vines, now droopy with swollen, purple fruit, but had been warned beforehand by his younger sister Giovanna (an acquaintance of my wife, who had to do something during the day and so befriended the nine hundred inhabitants of Panzano) that he might use our visit to show off his cows. The cows, four young, bright-white chianine known as “the girls,” had been an impulse acquisition (Giovanni was still in a discover-my-Chianti-roots frenzy) and were kept in a pen at the bottom of the valley. For Italians, no image is more evocative of Chianti than a chianina. The word “Chianti” seems buried inside it. Every cliché about the region is in this animal: all that rugged, stone-house, beef-eating, peasant authenticity. Unfortunately, you don’t see them anymore. Actually, apart from Giovanni’s, I’d seen none. Giovanni, trying to raise his girls, was involved in a major task (“I know I’m crazy, everyone in Panzano laughs at me”): rescuing the Chianti heritage from tourists and paved roads and electricity, and reintroducing to the land the famous cow that had once worked it.

  “They have delicate constitutions,” Giovanni said, staring into the pen, his forehead pressed against a slat of wood. “It’s said they get colds easily.”

  I looked. They didn’t seem fragile. They were giants, by far the biggest cows I’d ever seen.

  “Look at their legs!” (“Ecco le gambe!”) “So long, so graceful, so beautifully shaped. Really, they’re like fashion models.” He sighed.

  I studied them. They looked nothing like fashion models. They looked like cows. True, they were unusual cows. Very white and very tall. They were also leaner than a normal cow, and not as wide. Most cows are basically round. These—if you squinted to take them in—were like rectangles: not much across, but more (much more) from top to bottom.

  I then glimpsed the traditional bistecca fiorentina in their shape—the height, the narrow spine. I don’t know how this happened: probably a symptom of the
time I’d spent in a butcher shop. But once I’d seen the steak in the animals, the steak was the only thing I saw. A fiorentina looks like a triangle—analogous to a T-bone but gigantic and more geometrically defined. To make one, I now saw, you split the animal’s spine (cows arrive already cleaved at the butcher shop), which was then the bottom of the steak—in effect, the base of the triangle. The meat was in the two muscles attached to it: the backstrap (the same one you have on both sides of your own spine) and the tenderloin, the smaller one underneath. A classic bistecca fiorentina was a rather beautiful thing.

  I expressed my observation—that the girls would produce steaks like works of art. Giovanni visibly flinched.

  “We won’t eat these animals. They are for lovemaking.” The idea was that if Giovanni capriciously bought a bull as well (and, with prodding, he admitted he had his eye on a boyish ribbon winner) these four beauties would be breeders. The first generation of their offspring would also be breeders, until, eventually, the herd would be big enough to slaughter some for meat.

  Giovanni remained staring at his animals. The thing about Giovanni was that, in most things, he was really quite worldly—even a familiar type. In vintners’ circles, he was a celebrity: savvy, easy with journalists, sound-bite fluent, comfortable in a business dominated by image making. He was handsome, with dark hair and classical features, meticulously dressed, overwhelmingly courteous, and had a reassuringly normal set of narcissistic concerns: he worried about his weight, for instance (unnecessarily); he fussed with his hair; if he had lived in a city, he would have belonged to a gym. You did not expect him to be smitten by a cow.

  “If you’re Tuscan, you love beef,” he explained. “Every family prizes it, knows where to find it, has a butcher who is like next of kin.” You would never find a tortellini recipe among the Manetti family recipes; instead, you’d find a knowledge of what to do with different cuts—the cheek, tongue, shoulder, stomach, breast, haunch, tail—although the most prized was always the bistecca. “For us, the bistecca is a spiritual food,” Giovanni said. “It is one of three elements”—the others being Tuscan bread and a red wine made with the local sangiovese grape—“which, when combined in one meal, makes for an experience that is almost mystical.” (Bad bread, good wine, great steak—a happy repast, and every Chianti restaurant offers up its version: not a lot of veggies, of course, but I’d accepted that Tuscans don’t like green, and none of them had grown up with parents’ urging them to eat their greens; their mothers had obviously said, “Eat your browns.”) “Beef speaks to our souls. I don’t know how else to explain it. It’s in our DNA, this appetite—this need—for beef. It’s what makes us Tuscan.”

  This was pretty heady stuff, but okay, I’d go along with it—beef as Tuscan soul food—even though I’d done my own research, inspired by a clever piece of analysis by a medieval historian named Giovanni Rebora. It was based on an obvious but seldom recognized fact that, until recently, there had always been plenty of meat: that in the long era of human history before rubber, plastic, and the use of freon as cooling agent, meat was consumed in quantities that, to us, seems excessive. It was also cheap. Meat was so available because farm animals were, in the pre-plastic days, essential for many other things besides dinner: like leather for belts, boots, helmets, and the adornments required by Europe’s vast armies. These other needs—wool for the English garment industry, say, or goatskins for Spanish winemakers—could be, at any point, the “dominant” one of the animal: if you had to fight the Austrians yet again, and your army wanted a lot of saddles urgently, and you were prepared to pay whatever it cost to get some hides, there was going to be a lot of meat around afterwards. The analysis is known as “the dominant demand food theory.” I liked it because it made sense of something that had always seemed more than a local coincidence: that Florence, the historic capital of European leather making, was only twenty miles from Panzano, in the historic heartland of the Italian cow. Even today Florentine guides urge tourists to buy leather shoes in the morning and have a Florentine steak for lunch, without anyone observing the relationship. Now I understood it. According to the dominant demand food theory, a chianina cow would have been prized for many qualities, including its strength, a boon to the farmer in a hilly landscape, and the very thing that Giovanni believed made them so beautiful: being tall, they had more hide than most other breeds.

  I stared at Giovanni and rehearsed in my mind how I might advance my theory. But I couldn’t. You don’t tell a romantic that it can all be explained by economics—especially when the romantic is your host. What’s more, the romantic might be right: maybe it wasn’t all economics. Maybe economics itself was a metaphor, a pseudo-scientific way of accounting for something much more mysterious, this profound, dark thing Giovanni referred to as the Tuscan soul. Maybe, on balance, the economic theory was plain wrong. So I said nothing about my theory. In fact, I abandoned it. I thanked Giovanni and told him that I now understood Chianti much better.

  THE MAESTRO began with names.

  “Oh, this,” he explained, manifestly pleased, “is very dear,” and, from somewhere inside a thigh, he pulled out a small cut about eight inches long, tapered at both ends. I was standing next to him but missed where it came from and looked back inside the leg to see if I could locate the spot. I couldn’t, of course. My assumption had been that an animal must be like a jigsaw puzzle and would have one obvious piece not there. (Actually, that’s still my assumption, and I have no idea why I couldn’t locate the spot, apart from everything being big and complex and maybe a little scary.)

  The Maestro held up the cut. It had no fat or connective tissue and had a grain like a piece of wood. I touched it. It was soft. In fact, if you hadn’t known better, you’d think it was fillet, except you’d never find a fillet in the leg.

  “This is one of my favorites,” the Maestro said. “It’s called the campanello.”

  I repeated the word and wrote it in my notebook.

  “It’s very tender. So tender you can eat it raw—served with lemon and olive oil. But,” the Maestro said, lecturing me with his long finger, “the olive oil must be very good. Do you understand? The olive oil is important.”

  He seemed about to describe the campanello’s other qualities when he stopped himself, smiled broadly, and pulled out something else. “Aah, but this, too, is special.” This one was more substantial. He trimmed it. It was a pinkish eighteen-inch-long cylinder, also a single muscle, very uniform in texture.

  “This is called the girello. You can do many things with the girello. It’s not as tender—the tissue is more compressed—but it is still very good.” He stared at the meat happily. “Here in Chianti, the girello is cooked whole in olive oil with shards of garlic poked inside and served rare with peas. In Umbria, you eat it with fava beans.” And the way he described these distinctions—the authority of them, their absoluteness—I knew that if I was in Panzano, I’d never eat a girello with fava beans.

  The Maestro returned to the leg, working his knife, a rhythmic series of small strokes, until he’d extracted another piece, the largest so far. “The sottofesa,” he said. Fesa means “rump.” Sotto means “underneath.” This was the cut below the rump. It was a hefty, worked muscle, as you’d expect it to be. A cow butt is a big thing.

  “Some butchers slice this and sell the slices as steaks.” The Maestro shook his head disapprovingly. “Non va bene. It is too tough.” In the Maestro’s eyes, passing off a piece of cow butt as a steak came close to shady trading. “I prefer to braise it with olive oil, tomatoes, and rosemary. That’s called stracotto.” Cotto means “cooked,” stra is an intensifier—in effect, directions for beef stew.

  That night, I went home with three new words—campanello, girello, and sottofesa: a very tender piece, a less tender piece, and one that wasn’t tender at all. Actually, that’s not true. I went home with about thirty new words, but these three were ones I understood and wanted to know more about.

  I didn’t find them in my I
talian-English dictionary. I then flipped through Artusi’s The Art of Eating Well, where I came upon an instance of girello but none of the others. The next morning, in the butcher shop, I consulted other texts, including some translations. Again, I found only girello, several instances of it, but each time it seemed to be defined differently. In one, an American edition of Artusi, a girello was described as a “rump roast.” In a different book, it was a “top round.” In a third, published in England, it was a “silverside.” These were cuts from a cow’s hindquarters, but none were what the Maestro had held in his hand. Instead they were complex pieces that had to be roasted slowly before they would be edible. The Maestro’s was a simple cut, which cooked uniformly and quickly.

  The discovery led to a modest epiphany. Until now, I’d assumed that there was a universal lexicon of meat terms (after all, a leg is a leg is a leg), which, like any other piece of language, could be translated from one country to the next. The belief, I was now realizing, had been encouraged by those diagrams of a cow cut in half, the kind you sometimes see in cookbooks telling you what a thing is in France, England, and America. These early lessons with the Maestro taught me that a cow was not knowable in this way. One day, wanting to confirm a spelling, I consulted an Italian food encyclopedia from Dario’s bookshelves and discovered (under bovino) not three or four diagrams but pages of them, thirty in all, none in French or English but only Italian, broken down by region, each one different, no two cuts alike, with few shared terms. The Tuscan chart was dizzying. Every single tissue seemed to be identified. The thigh was a maze, like a road map of an impenetrable medieval city, with more names than there was space on the two-dimensional representational leg to accommodate. I understood why there were no obvious translations of girello, campanello, or sottofesa: because, outside Italy, they don’t exist. Outside Tuscany, they rarely exist. I remembered how I’d researched the short rib and been surprised that the terms my butcher in New York used were so different from the ones known to a butcher in Edinburgh or Paris. But I’d understood only half of it: every country—and in Italy, every region and, sometimes, every town—has its own unique way of breaking an animal down into dinner-sized portions. Finally, I was getting it: there is no universal butcher language; none of it is translatable.