Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

by Bill Buford

  By now, I’d eaten all of Dario’s meat, and I can testify: it is very good. It is the best meat I’ve eaten. But it is not a painting by Michelangelo. It’s dinner. You eat it; it’s gone.

  And yet as I stood there, suddenly taking in the display case, I had to admit that the food had something of an artist’s purposefulness. Every item there made a point. Some foods had long and complex preparations, like the red pepper mostarda, which took a whole day to make, or the beef “sushi” (a raw beef preparation made with “very good olive oil”), which took a morning, or the “Tuscan tuna,” which took nearly a week. But every item really was a “work,” even ones that seemed very simple.

  There was no ham or pork loin, for instance, but you could always buy a pork chop. Why? Because the chop was covered with fennel pollen. (Pork chop—no; pork chop with intense expression of nearby hills, according to a classic combination, now seldom seen—yes.) You couldn’t buy a leg of lamb, but at Easter you could get a baby lamb’s shoulder—delicate, the color of a pink flower, boned and rolled up with rosemary and pecorino, the local cheese made with sheep’s milk: “the milk of the mother with the meat of the child” seeming to violate some unspoken code of meat eating but, according to Dario, a Roman preparation as old as the Mediterranean. (Conventional lamb cut—no; neglected cut plus unique ingredient, according to ancient recipe—yes.) In northern Italy, you see polpettone everywhere: a meat loaf cooked in a bread tray and made from a fatty cut. Dario’s was different. The meat was the shank (once again), ground fine, mixed with red onion, garlic, and egg, and rolled into a large ball: in fact, it was gigantic. Why? Once, making it with Dario, I overheard his muttering, “It’s a family dish, a family dish, it has to look like the family bread loaf.” He had a picture in his mind, a family supper served at the end of the week: that’s when you ate your polpettone, because Tuscan bread was normally baked at the beginning of the week, and this used the leftovers. And, apart from the shank, the essential ingredient was that stale bread: lots of it, crushed and smacked into the meatball, slapped, spanked, thwacked, until the crumbs formed a thick yeasty skin. The result, when “baked,” looked like a peasant loaf: round, brown, and crusty. (Conventional polpettone—no; rustic, mutant dinosaur egg evocative of country living—yes.)

  One night, Dario woke up troubled by the thought that his message was not getting across. It was cold, he said, three in the morning, with an icy light from a full moon filling up the bedroom of Il Greppo. He got up as though summoned and began writing. “I am not an author, but there are things people should understand.” He made a list of his twenty most important works and wrote a page about each. He called the collection a Breviario, an ecclesiastical word used to describe a book of prayers. “It should be small enough to fit in your back pocket.” Dario can’t type; his letters are done by Miriam (a “retired poetess,” another charity, the one who is paid to come in to read the newspapers); and after Miriam had typed Dario’s text she gave me a copy. It was, predictably enough, informed by a high sense of purpose: dedicated to the Maestro (“who taught me the quality of meat and…made me into a man”), it opens with a declaration of principles (“I am an artisan!”), and concludes with a promise to the reader that, in eating these dishes, “your life will be improved.”

  It is not a recipe book and only intermittently describes the dishes. Instead, it is a defense, an apologia for why each one matters. The accounts have a tendency to wax a little purple (the herbal salt, “the perfume of Chianti,” expresses, in its heady fragrances, “the roots of our soil” and “the love that moves the sun and stars”). Some are more personal (the polpettone is cooked according to “the rhythm of bread”—an elegant invocation of a village’s baking routine—and was first made for Dario by his Aunt Tosca). Much of it is characteristically brazen: for those who can’t endure the unmitigated carnality of Dario’s braised shank (the bone is removed and replaced by the marrow and cooked in a pot of caramelizing shallots), Dario sanctifies it by splashing it with vin santo—Tuscany’s sweet “sacred” wine. In fact, the book isn’t really about the food of the butcher shop but about how to visit it. It was a user’s guide, addressed to strangers, the uninitiated who came to Panzano expecting a butcher.

  I wondered if I was glimpsing Dario’s secret. Fundamentally, he didn’t want to be a butcher, and therefore if he had to be one—because of patrimony or family or simply because he had no choice—then he would be unlike any butcher you’d ever met. His was a calling, not a trade—he was an artisan, not a laborer—and his “works” were about history and self and being Tuscan and only indirectly about dinner. They amounted, ultimately, to a tortured response to grief, and the “works” had become Dario’s way of remaining in touch, physically (those giant hands), with those who are no longer with him. When you came to his shop, he didn’t want you to see a butcher—and wouldn’t be able to say why—but he knew what you should see instead: an artist, whose subject was loss.

  I THINK OF PANZANO as a village of dead fathers. In the beginning, I regarded them as ghosts—like so many Hamlet seniors rising from their graves, urging their sons to swear oaths of revenge or continuity, some business left undone. And, like Hamlet junior, I couldn’t tell if they were good ghosts or bad ones. Now, after nearly six months in the place, I saw them as neither good nor bad, just irritating doddering presences: pushy patriarchs refusing to accept they were dead. Bugger off, you creepy old bastards. Stay in your graves and let your children get on with it.

  Dario put them in my mind. So did Giovanni Manetti, who, continuing his father’s search for his Chianti heritage, had gone ahead and bought that bull. For two weeks, it was what people talked about.

  “Did you hear? Giovanni bought the bull!”

  “Boy, that lad is going to have a good time”—nudge, nudge, wink, wink—“one bull and four wives.”

  “The bull arrives next week.”

  “No, he doesn’t, he arrives tomorrow.”

  “You’re out of your mind. Giovanni is in New York. No bull is arriving when he’s not here.”

  Giovanni was in New York selling his wine. As it happened, Dario was in the Veneto, at a conference promoting his meat. The two men should have been friends, each committed to continuing traditions of Panzano, red wine and beef being at the heart of the place, as each man, separately, had urged me to understand. I liked them both. But they didn’t get on. They came from such different backgrounds. Giovanni was the son of a father proud of his family name and its long history. Dario was the son of a father proud to be a member of a line of men who worked with their hands and their long history. But the most divisive issue was a matter of honor, involving a love affair, and the culture of omnipresent patriarchs: Giovanni’s younger sister, Giovanna, and the Maestro’s son, Enrico, had fallen in love.

  Enrico was thirty, a tall, gangly, dark-haired version of his silvered father, with a clay-like nose, an easy smile, mischievously expressive brown eyes, a voice so deeply baritone that it seemed contrived, and many of the Maestro’s rhythms of speech and manner, including that way of leaning back, slightly, to make a point and emphasizing it with his hands, his (also) long fingers emphatically drawn together. Enrico made the “very good olive oil” that Dario used. He also made the vin santo splashed onto Dario’s beef shanks. And he was also accomplished at plant grafting—the meticulous science of manipulating nature—in which capacity he had been hired, seven years earlier, by Dino Manetti, to work the Fontodi vines, and had met Giovanna. The two had fallen in love, transgressing boundaries that most modern societies no longer recognize. But Giovanna’s father seems to have recognized them, and when he discovered the relationship he was not happy. According to Dario, Enrico was fired, Giovanna was ordered never to see him again, and she obeyed because that’s what the children of Panzano fathers do: they obey. (Giovanna, for her part, insists that Enrico left on his own accord, and that in any case, it was a youthful folly—she’d been nineteen and, like so many children growing up on Italian hi
lltops, sheltered from the ways of the world.) But Enrico’s sudden disappearance, however it might be described (he believes he was fired), was real and public enough—in Dario’s eyes, an outspoken how-dare-you? rebuke—and Dario, indignant on behalf of the indignity suffered by his own surrogate father (“What? A son of the Maestro, my Maestro, is not good enough for a Manetti?”), was in a rage, a rage that continues to this day. When Dino Manetti died, Dario refused to go to the memorial service, attended by hundreds (the man was much loved by everyone else in the world), which was some kind of public protest, probably comprehensible only to Dario, because later that day he attended the burial, a small affair, and the distinction was important: even in his rage, Dario couldn’t fail to attend the burial. The death of a father was still the weightiest event in a Panzano son’s life. Dario claims that the condolences he then conveyed, and Giovanni’s expression of gratitude, were the first words spoken between them in ten years.

  At the end of the summer, my wife and I were on the square when Dario and Giovanni ran into each other: by Dario’s reckoning, the second time in ten years; Giovanni, for his part, wasn’t aware that the two of them hadn’t been speaking, which might well be true: sometimes Dario’s rages were very private affairs. The occasion was an annual wine festival, held at harvesttime, when Panzano’s eighteen winemakers (mainly sons and daughters of recently departed patriarchs) set up stalls and offered tastings. Dario, objecting to the fact that most Panzano wines are aged in wood barrels, normally boycotted the event, but he had a new love in his life, Kim, and she wanted to attend. The two of them showed up late, Dario in his look-at-me party clothes, a linen blowsy shirt, a leather cowboy vest, and brightly red-striped trousers. Giovanni, in a dark blue silk suit with a light blue shirt and tie and brown leather shoes, was returning from a proprietors’ dinner, another harvest ritual, and had stopped by the Fontodi stand. Dario spotted him.

  “Eccolo!” he boomed, so loudly that people stopped what they were doing. “There he is!”

  Giovanni bowed.

  Dario bowed.

  So they’re friends after all, I thought, until I realized that the display was the kind of over-the-top friendliness you see only between people who are not really friendly. At a safe-seeming twenty feet apart, they were never in danger of having to shake hands, for instance. A frantic moment followed as each one tried to think of a nice, vacuous thing to say to avoid an act of brutta figura.

  Dario bowed again and cleared his throat.

  Giovanni bowed, too.

  Dario grinned.

  Finally, in an effort at grace, Giovanni mentioned that he’d seen Dario’s meat on the menu of Da Caino, where he’d had dinner “only last week!” Restaurants that buy Dario’s meat cite the butcher shop—an honor, and a way, too, of explaining the price; Da Caino was the famous southern Tuscan restaurant that did not teach me how to make pasta.

  Dario said, “It’s true, Da Caino orders my meat,” and bowed again, accepting the compliment. (There were multiple ironies: Giovanni did not say he had actually eaten the meat, and, in any case, he had no need to travel a hundred miles either to see or eat it; the butcher shop was around the corner. But Giovanni didn’t buy his meat from Dario; he patronized the other butcher shop, the one run by Filippo and his father.)

  The men remained thus—was Dario humming?—surrounded by a dozen or so onlookers who all sensed the prospect of a terrible spectacle and couldn’t stop staring. I counted myself a member of that voyeuristic audience. I had a camera in my pocket and, recognizing the fear-and-awe uniqueness of the encounter, wanted a picture. But how to take it? The two men were standing so far apart I couldn’t get them into a frame, but I didn’t dare ask them to move. I couldn’t even summon the courage to tell them to stand still (Giovanni was shuffling), until finally I gave up. My pulling the camera out might have acted as a trigger, and the frightful thing would happen, whatever it was—Zeus zapping me with a thunderbolt, probably. Finally, they parted.

  “Well,” Dario said.

  “Well,” Giovanni said.

  Dario whipped round a hundred eighty degrees and walked off, Kim tagging along behind, trying to keep up. Giovanni turned round as well, and walked off in exactly the opposite direction. I’m not sure they knew where they were going. Both men seemed to have had different destinations in mind when they ran into each other. Because of the hasty spin-and-flight, their backs were simultaneously on view. I saw it first—a thing clinging to the back of Dario’s neck. I saw that Giovanni had one, too. I elbowed my wife, standing next to me, and pointed, and she gasped but then wasn’t sure she had seen it. “Look again,” I said. “Giovanni doesn’t know it’s there.” He was easing into the evening’s shadowy darkness, just outside the range of the wine festival’s night lights, but he seemed so preoccupied (by the harvest he now had to deal with or the exchange he’d just had or maybe the regret that he hadn’t ordered a steak at Da Caino) that he appeared wholly oblivious to the thing—a tiny, wizened figure, looking something like an old man, hanging on with a bony clutch.

  27

  THE DELIVERY of Giovanni’s bull—for eventually it arrived, on a Wednesday, when the butcher shop was closed, and my wife and I had rushed down the valley to watch—turned out to be one of the most illuminating pieces of theater I had seen in some time. No one was ready for the animal. I now suspect that, on an unspoken but profound level, people didn’t believe the beast actually existed until they could see it with their own eyes.

  The beast in question was pacing back and forth on a flatbed truck. Vineyard workers were running around confused and frantic. Some were putting posts in the ground—a fence was required, rather urgently: no fence, no pasture, and no one wanted a giant white bull roaming around the open valley. A manger was also being built, and you could hear the frenzied hammering of a half-dozen carpenters just over the crest of a hill. The bull’s four wives needed moving as well: they had been in a smaller pasture with another breed, a French one, locally called la rossa. But the vineyard workers had no idea how to persuade a cow to move.

  All and all, there was a lot to do, and the driver of the flatbed truck was in a condition of utter incomprehension. “I don’t believe this. You knew I was coming, didn’t you?” (He, too, was unlike anything anyone had seen before. He resembled a large frog—head like a bullet, no neck, and a very croak-capable-seeming belly—and was wearing a T-shirt the size of a military tent, probably because it was one of the few garments that could cover his girth. Until this moment, I’d never contemplated the kind of person who delivers bulls, but if I had, I’m sure I would have pictured someone exactly like this man.)

  The principal difficulty was the bull’s four wives. They were really not cooperating. The workers shouted at them and made cowboy sounds and chased the animals with branches of wood. The effect was animals in panic. They sprinted, they jumped, they dodged: they could have been a species of white antelope. I had to remind myself that they had been docile, passive animals. Until now, the most movement I’d seen was in their chewing.

  “Why do I let you guys bust my balls?” the frog man shouted. “I’m coming back in the morning.”

  A worker undid his belt, swung it above his head, and charged, something the cows interpreted as an even more pressing danger to their well-being, and they sprinted in four directions. There was now a cow in each corner of the pasture. Two workers had given up. They were leaning together against a post, their shirts dark with sweat, their chests heaving. A cow stood nearby, eyeing them.

  I don’t know why they had taken it upon themselves to move the cows in the first place. Beppe was supposed to be in charge. Beppe was the gap-toothed geezer from the town square—the one with the incomprehensible rustic accent who had grown up in the Fontodi borgo. When Giovanni had decided to raise his own chianine, he’d put the word out that he needed someone. “Everyone wanted the job,” he told me, “but there was only one position. So I asked them to pick the most qualified person among them.” Keepin
g their own animals was central to how Tuscan men of a certain generation liked to think of themselves, but almost none of them had done it. In fact, of all the men in the village, Beppe was the only one with any experience. And, of course, in hiring Beppe, Giovanni had completed a circle.

  Beppe was sitting on a stump. The vineyard workers had irritated him. It seems that, in their excitement at the bull’s arriving, they’d rushed out like film extras on a western.

  “What do those guys know?” Beppe asked. “They’re grape pickers. They know dirt. They don’t know animals. Beppe knows animals. You can’t make animals do what they don’t want to do.”

  The frog driver shouted. “I’m going to put the bull into that pasture. That will chase out the cows.” He laughed heartily, and the laughter moved like a wave across his massive cotton T-shirt. “He’s coming!” The driver made to open the gate at the back of the truck. “He’s coming!”

  “Patience,” someone shouted.

  “Patience?” the driver said and spat. “Don’t talk to me about patience. I could write a book about patience, and the first chapter would be about you dickheads.” He waddled over to the side of the truck and shook the slats. The bull stopped pacing and stomped. Why would he provoke a bull he was about to release?

  “I can’t keep him back any longer. He’s so horny he’s dangerous.”

  Beppe chuckled. “The bull is going to have a good life.” He was staring unapologetically at my wife’s thighs. (“Maybe,” she said later, “it was a mistake to wear shorts.”) “Tonight he’ll have four women.”