Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

by Bill Buford

  It gave me pause. Who would ever know what I was talking about?

  MOST OF WHAT I learned from the Maestro was indirect instruction. I got it by being there: like the smell of good meat, which has little smell, but what little there is, even in its rawness, makes you want to eat it. Frequently, I’d take one of the Maestro’s cuts, another favorite piece, and bring it right up to my nose. Because I knew the animals had fed on grass, I expected something like a football field after it had been mowed and found instead that I was thinking of roast beef: useless information (akin to wondering what a flower smells like and concluding, “Yes, that’s it! It smells like a flower!”), except that the association was so explicitly appetizing. Good raw meat calls to mind a good plate of the cooked. The color was also telling: more rosé than red (again, uselessly, I want to say that the color was of health). There were a few occasions when the animal had been ill or injured. One had a broken shoulder; another had a trapped nerve; one, alas, had been killed badly. In these instances, the meat was more red than rosé—it conveyed adrenaline or unease.

  According to Dario, the most valuable thing he’d got from the Maestro was how to judge meat: that was the Maestro’s gift, the facility for knowing what was good. Naturally, I wanted some of that gift for myself and had been informally bringing in pieces for the Maestro to assess, samples that I’d doggy-bagged from a restaurant or another butcher. The Maestro was irritated by the practice, but it was always illuminating. “It is difficult to judge a meat that has been cooked,” he would protest, nevertheless chewing meditatively on what I’d given him. “When it’s raw,” he’d add plaintively, “you learn more about the animal. You can tell how it was raised, what it ate, and what its life was like.” He’d sigh—cooked meat made him grumpy—and then make his pronouncement: this was from a French cow, or this was aged too long, or this was from an animal that had grown up on too narrow a diet, probably grain.

  One day, I brought a sample I was sure would be very good—half of a chianina bistecca. I’d enjoyed the other half the night before. I unwrapped it solemnly and handed it to the Maestro. He chewed for some time. He was concentrating and seeming to analyze the meat’s texture, rubbing its fibers against the roof of his mouth. Then he had it.

  “You were deceived. This is not a chianina.” He chewed some more. “But it is not bad. It is from a cow in the Maremma, the one that grazes near the beach, called a maremmana.” Like a chianina, the maremmana was a white cow, but not as tall or as temperamental: a sturdy animal with big horns, like those in the cowboy movies. I’d seen small herds of them, roaming the hills by the sea.

  KNIFE SKILLS were next. I’d learned some already during my time at Babbo, but the skills the Maestro taught me were of a different order—more like a branch of metaphysics.

  The most philosophically interesting was one I call the “point cut,” which involved using a knife like a small paintbrush: no blade, only the tip. The point cut was for separating biggish muscles. You “brushed” the seam between them, tearing ever so slightly a clear, almost liquid film holding the muscles together. Then, effortlessly and rather miraculously, they peeled away from each other. At least that was the idea.

  “Lightly,” the Maestro would say, looking over my shoulder. “The knife must be free in your hand, never exercised, so that it can discover the lines of the meat.” He had become the Zen master of sharpness. “Elegantly,” he would say, “the knife should be easy. It is doing the work, not you. Your hand has disappeared into the knife.”

  Right! I’d say, and repeat the instruction: “My hand has disappeared.” Then I’d think: How is that helpful? My hand hasn’t gone anywhere. I was sweating, because I always sweated whenever the Maestro stood so close, and I was afflicted, in addition, by an acute pain radiating tightly from my lower back, because I would tense up as well, while determined to keep all this bad feeling hidden from my hand, because I knew it wouldn’t do my hand any good. “Relax, hand,” I’d say, coaxing it along. “Remember, this is your day off. You’re not doing the work. That sharp thing is.”

  There was the “dagger cut,” an aggressive piece of business, looking like the bad guy in a silent movie, holding a blade high above the head and plunging it. The dagger cut was for removing tenaciously adhering meat from a bone. I had practiced a version when I made arista, holding the blade like Jack the Ripper and scraping it against the ribs until they flaked white. But that had been pig; this was a cow, and cow is different because a cow is so big. Let’s say you’re working on a rump. You’ve done your point cut, and two beautiful muscles have cleaved like water, revealing a gigantic Fred Flintstone–like bone underneath, the femur, which the two muscles are still very stuck to, clinging to it by a thick membrane. To remove the muscles, you’ve got to get underneath that membrane (jam the knife in there!), and, once in position, you rip across the bone. It was a violent moment, and people stood back when they saw it coming.

  “You must not fear the knife,” the Maestro commanded. “You can’t be hesitant. You are one with the knife: attack!”

  I did my best, but it was tricky. One moment, the knife was a paintbrush, which I couldn’t feel because I had no hand. The next moment, it was an assault weapon.

  There was the “silver sliver” to get rid of the “silver skin.” (Okay, so maybe the names were a little goofy, but no one else seems to have come up with anything like them. The truth is much of the time I was lost. I remember writing a friend, Pete de Bolla, the son of a butcher, thinking he’d understand when I said that, often, when I was deep inside these giant thighs, I had no idea where I was. These names—they’re what my brain devised, like a map.) Silver skin is a shiny coating of inedible white stuff ruining what would otherwise be a beautiful piece of meat. If you don’t know it, you’ll recognize it the next time you buy an expensive cut from your butcher, take it home, and find a silvery bit you can’t pull off: it isn’t fat, it isn’t a tendon, and it isn’t going to do your meal any good. The trick is to slip your knife underneath and drag the blade down its length. If you’re the Maestro, the silver skin comes off in one long piece, and the meat is pure and pink. If you’re me, the silver skin comes off in eighteen bits of knotty string, and the meat has more or less survived. The implications are in the silver skin’s texture: once you realize how hard it is—that it’s like plastic and you can push your blade right up against it—you’re ready for the next technique: the “scrape and slice.”

  I don’t know why I had such trouble nailing the scrape and slice, but I spent hours on it, watching the Maestro like a movie, hoping to commit his movements so deeply into my brain that I’d be able to imitate them without thinking. The approach was used on stumpy scraps—the stuff that’s left over after you’ve trimmed up your choice cuts—and is based on your perfecting a lateral flick with the side of your knife, a flick-flick-slice sort of thing, to push off any ugliness. In my first week, predictably, that last flick flicked off the meat entirely and caught a knuckle on the index finger of my other hand, which I kept forgetting was in the vicinity and which then beaded up redly. This was the same knuckle I’d lacerated when looking for duck oysters in the Babbo prep kitchen. By now, you would have thought I’d known it was there.

  You use the scrape and slice when it doesn’t matter what the meat looks like. Marco Pierre White had used the Harrogate version when he’d been ordered to pick up the scraps from his butcher and make a meat pasty from them. Dario used it to make terrines or ragù or peposo, now my favorite winter preparation and one that cooks so long you could also toss in a sneaker and no one would notice.

  Peposo is a traditional, slow-cooked beef shank, surrounded by a typically Italian debate about its origins. According to one theory, the dish comes from Versilia, on the northern Tuscan coast, although that recipe—with a familiar French medley of finely chopped vegetables, plus the stand-in herbs (rosemary, thyme, bay leaf), a broth, and even a pig’s foot—is more like a boeuf bourguignon than anything served in Panzano. There
people believe the dish came from Impruneta, halfway to Florence, where the furnaces of Giovanni Manetti’s family have been preparing red terra-cotta tiles for seven centuries. The conceit is that pots of peposo were always being cooked by the same fires baking the tiles. Dario is confident the dish was devised in the fifteenth century by the architect Filippo Brunelleschi to feed artisans employed to work through the night constructing the dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral, further proof of Brunelleschi’s genius, that he came up with the first great dome and the first peposo.

  Besides the beef, the dish has four ingredients—pepper, garlic, salt, and a bottle of Chianti—and a simple instruction: put everything in a pot, stick it in the oven before you go to bed, take it out when you wake up. Beef cooked in red wine is ubiquitous, and every European country has its version, but nowhere will you find one more elementary. It helps to recognize what’s not in it: there are no sauce-enhancing vegetables (no carrots, celery, or onions), no broth, no herbs. There is no water. There is no fat—not even olive oil. There are no salty intensifiers like bacon or pancetta or olives. There is no orange zest. There is no browning of the meat. It is five ingredients plopped into a pot and cooked all night. (Thus the name: peposo notturno—“pepperiness by night.”)

  The secret is in the cut, the shin, which you prepare by using all the knife techniques taught to me by the Maestro: the point cut, to separate the major muscles; the dagger cut, to remove the shinbone; the silver sliver, to eliminate the gnarly stuff; and the scrape-and-slice, to reduce the connective tissue. At home, I cook two shanks at once and use four heaping tablespoons of coarsely ground pepper. (Dario uses more, but his peposo is so peppery it makes Teresa cry.) I add a tablespoon of sea salt, plus a bulb of garlic, start the oven hot and turn it down to two hundred degrees. After two hours, the meat is cooked. After four, it has the chewy mouth-feel of a stew. Over the course of the next eight hours, the dish gets darker and the smaller bits break down into a thick sauce, until, finally, at a point between a solid and a liquid, it is peposo. It smells of wine and lean meat and pepper. You serve it with a rustic white bread and a glass of a simple red, preferably the one you cooked with—once again, the three elements of Giovanni Manetti’s Tuscan soul: the beef, the bread, the wine. The taste is a revelation: it seems impossible that something so deeply flavored can be made with so little. When I eat it, I find myself using words like “clean,” “natural,” or “healthy”—none of which is among conventional descriptions of meat. In this dish, I rediscovered a commonplace that I’ve long heard but never really believed: that the most worked muscles have the most flavor, provided you learn how to cook them.

  26

  IN THE MAESTRO, I found a tranquillity I hadn’t witnessed before: a patience, a sense of order, a stable relationship to a world that was old and trustworthy. This was new to me. It was also very different from the rest of the butcher shop. At the best of times, Dario was not one of the planet’s more serene individuals. (“It is my affliction, I have too much passion, I don’t know how to control it.”) As it happens, he was, on my return, even more unstable than normal. He and Ann Marie had split up, and Dario was either sullen and morose or unpredictable and manic. He seemed to be heartbroken. Then he seemed to be newly in love. He was probably both. At dawn, just after the meat was delivered, he would sit outside on a curb, memorizing poetry. When he finally entered the shop, it was to play Elvis love songs. Every day began with “Love Me Tender.” Actually, there were many “Love Me Tender”s in a row, sometimes a whole uninterrupted morning of “Love Me Tender”s, before he would relent and move on to “It’s Now or Never.”

  “Melancholy,” the Maestro said without explanation.

  Dario’s condition was hard on customers. One day, he wanted to show off his horns, including a multivalved instrument that played the three-note siren of an Italian emergency vehicle. The last time he’d used it was on a visit to Grossetto, in southern Tuscany, to see a friend, Simon (a characteristic Dario charity case, a middle-aged man with the emotional age of a child, living in an assisted care accommodation). After lunch, Dario led Simon out into the main piazza, and they played police cars, the two of them alternating blowing into the siren instrument, until the real police showed up and told them to stop.

  Dario blew into the instrument. It was loud and sounded so siren-like that it provoked in me a feeling of panic, as though I needed to get out of the way quickly. Dario’s eyes were glistening. He’d had, I suppose, a tad too much red wine at the family meal. There was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s on a shelf. He drank bountifully from it and walked outside.

  Panzano is too small to have a police force, so when Dario blew his siren there was no official to stop him. So he didn’t stop. People appeared in the street, summoned by the urgent blaring. Dario blew and drank some more Jack Daniel’s and didn’t notice a man trying to get his attention. The man was in his sixties—wool trousers, a matching jacket, good shoes—with a moustache and a civilized manner. He made an effort to be noticed, but Dario was noticing nothing. In his excitement, he was probably blind. He blew, drank more Jack Daniel’s, and blew again.

  “Please,” the man said, and stepped forthrightly in front of Dario. “You are Dario Cecchini, are you not? May I introduce myself? I have driven from Monaco to see you.” Monaco was a long way away.

  Dario nodded vaguely and took a hit of the bourbon.

  “You are very famous. Did you know that there was a long article about you in Le Figaro?”

  Dario shrugged. “It’s possible,” he said and turned slightly. The man was in Dario’s way. He blew, drank, and wiped his mouth with his sleeve.

  “Le Figaro says you are very good,” the man persisted. “It says you are the best butcher in the world. That’s why I’ve driven all this way. To meet the best butcher in the world.”

  Dario dropped his siren instrument to his side and stared at the man with blurry intensity. Then he laughed. “Ha! Ha! Ha!” It was more a coarse bellow than a laugh, inches from the man’s face. “Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!” He turned to me and said, “I am a nightmare!” He looked back at the man and blew into the siren instrument.

  The man retreated, disappointed, and walked back to his car.

  One busy Saturday, Dario was serving a woman about to purchase her first bistecca who then asked him if the meat was good.

  “E’ buona?” Dario said, his voice rising theatrically with exaggerated indignation. “Non lo so. Proviamo.” (I don’t know—let’s find out.) So he took a bite—the woman’s raw purchase—chewed it melodramatically, swallowed, said, “Yes, it’s good,” wrapped it up, and gave the woman her change. The woman, aghast, took her package and fled. The consequence was that several people asked Dario if he would take a bite out of their steaks as well—as though his teeth marks were an autograph. “Please,” one man said, “it’s for my wife.”

  When the atmosphere was jovial, exchanges like this could be jolly. But there could be real tension. Twice, I feared a fight. “No! No! No!” Dario shouted at a man who had wanted a smaller piece of meat than what had been offered him. “What’s for sale is what’s on view, and if you don’t like what you see you can go. You are in my territory. You are not welcome. In fact, you should leave. Good-bye.” I had to remind myself I was in a food shop. Even in New York (once famous for its rudeness, now stuck in a condition of permanent impatience), I had never seen anything like it. There, a retailer, however jaded, still pretends to honor the shopkeeper’s code that a customer is always right. Dario followed a much blunter, take-no-prisoners philosophy that actually the customer is a dick.

  ONE DAY, I was looking at Dario’s display case (“what’s for sale is what you see”) and realized there were no lamb chops. There were also no birds, not even a chicken. There was no meat for stewing. There was no wild boar or rabbit or hare, although Tuscany was known for its game. For the first time, I saw that most of the items you go to a butcher shop to buy weren’t there. I don’t know why I hadn’t n
oticed this until now except (as my Babbo polenta lesson had taught me) you sometimes have to be in a place a long time before you see it.

  What I saw now was what Dario called “my works” (le mie opere), which I’d been reluctant to acknowledge because it sounded so pretentious. But that was what you got: a butcher and his works. I remembered the earful I’d got when I’d suggested that the butcher shop was a business—an innocent enough assumption when you think about it. What I had actually said was a question: What will happen when Dario dies? It had probably come out wrong. I wasn’t meaning to dwell on Dario’s dying. The point was theoretical: a feature of a good business, in the United States anyway, was its ability to function without the main guy.

  Dario exploded. “What are you talking about? I don’t have a good bizzzness. I have a bad bizzzness. I am not interested in a good bizzzness.” “Business” in Italian is commercio, but Dario preferred his own mutilation of the English, with its corrupting sense of foreignness, hissing the sibilants as though he were about to spit. “I do not want to be Mario Batali,” he said, punching the “B” in Batali like an air bag. “I am repelled by marketing. I am an artisan. I work with my hands. My model is from the Renaissance. The bodega. The artist workshop. Giotto. Raphael. Michelangelo. These are my inspirations. Do you think they were interested in bizzzness?”