Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany

by Bill Buford

  I pushed my way in. Everyone seemed to be holding a glass of red wine in one hand and feeding themselves gobs of a frothy white cream with the other.

  “Lardo,” a man said, offering me some. Lardo crudo. Raw, not cured. It was spread across his cheeks like toothpaste.

  I pressed forward. A man in a suit was swinging a fiasco of red wine—straw-covered, like one of those bottles you see in really bad restaurants and learn never to drink. He tried to pour me a glass but missed, and the wine landed on my shoes. It wasn’t eleven o’clock in the morning, but an energetic raucous tipsiness was everywhere: you smelled it, it elbowed you, it laughed harshly in your face. Behind a glass display of meats, salumi, and sausages was the butcher, standing on a platform, towering above the room, oblivious to the people below him, who were clamoring and giving him things: orders, money, paper for an autograph. He ignored them. He, too, was drinking wine—quite a lot, it seemed. He had a happy half grin. The music was very loud—” Dies irae, dies illa!” (“Days of wrath, days of doom!”)—and people were shouting to be heard. In one hand, the butcher held a shiny serrated knife, more military saber than butcher’s tool. He was tall, over six feet. At the time I thought he must be six and a half feet, but that was the effect of the platform, which made him seem comic-book tall, like a cartoon caveman. (“Solvet saeclum in favilla!” “The world in ashes!”) His hands were gigantic. They might have been the largest hands I’d seen in my life. They were way out of proportion with the rest of his body. They looked as if they might be half the length of his arms. The fingers were comparably long, like limbs. He was wearing pink clogs and socks, a pink bandanna round his throat, and a pink cotton shirt—taut, almost ill fitting over the shoulders, which were large and overdeveloped, giving him a hunchbacked appearance. His hair was cropped, closely cut to the side of the head, crew-cut style, and he had big eyebrows, a big nose, big lips. A face of big features. He was in his late forties, my age.

  I thought: So this is Dario Cecchini, and he spotted me spotting him. He turned off the music and commanded silence. The place went quiet. “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita,” he boomed, “mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita.” Even I recognized that this was the beginning of Dante’s Inferno. “Midway through the road of life, I found myself in a dark wood, on a lost road.” Midway through my life, indeed. Is that where I was? Lost, on the road to Hell?

  It started to rain, and more people crushed inside, pushing hard, to get out of the wet. Dario continued. Or maybe he’d embarked on something new. Whatever it was, it was being said with great gusto. His eyes were veined and red, and his pupils were dilated. I could observe them because he’d jumped off the platform, seized me by the shoulders, and, inches from my face, was spraying me with a saliva-foamy verse. He seemed to be declaiming rhyming couplets, very singsongy. One was shouted; the next was whispered. He crouched low, as though trying to take his audience by surprise. Then he thrust himself upright, as though making an announcement. He made his eyes big; he made them small. He wagged his finger; he brought his hands together in prayer. I’ve never seen such a melodramatic reading. (Someone was now playing a fiddle.) It called for gaslights and Victorian top hats: this was what Dickens must have sounded like. Frankly, it seemed ridiculous. But the room loved it, and when Dario stopped and bounced back to his platform, the audience, in a high metabolic euphoria (the drink, the raw fat, the hot, closed space, the privilege of being in it) erupted in uproarious vaudeville applause, which Dario acknowledged, waving a hand in the air. He jettisoned the Mozart CD, turned up the volume, and popped in a salsa-sounding Italian number.

  “Festa!” he shouted, gyrating to the end of the podium. “Festa! Festa! Festa!” He spun and came back in the other direction. “Festa! Festa! Festa! Festa!”

  I was to report to work the next morning at eight.

  20

  ON A MONDAY MORNING, Panzano was different. On Sunday, the place had the energy of its visitors and probably some of the romance they’d wanted to find there. On Monday, it was an out-of-the-way village, quiet and rather ugly.

  There were nine hundred people. They were served, I would learn, by two butchers, two cafés, two bars, four family-run food stores or alimentari, two restaurants, two hotels, and (uncharacteristically) three bakers. I would also discover that, with the town’s offerings so precisely divided, the task of buying, say, a loaf of bread or a coffee was believed to reveal things about your character, probably your politics, and—who knows?—maybe your attitude to the afterlife. Wine was an entirely different category, because there were not two winemakers but eighteen, and ordering a glass at a bar could be a delicate social feat. There were also, fittingly, two towns: ancient and new.

  The ancient town was a maze of old and imitation old: remnants of a castle (the archways), a medieval wall, a twelfth-century church rebuilt in the twentieth century (both it and the castle had been destroyed just about every hundred years since the 1100s), bad sewage, noisy neighbors, and no privacy. It was a characteristic feudal fortification constructed on the top of a hill during the long wars between the Sienese and the Florentines, both defense and shelter for the people who worked the land. You could see that land, looking more or less as it has at any other time in Panzano’s history, spreading out in a series of basin-like valleys: more giant bathtubs than conventional river-carved ravines. The view was pretty and tranquil-making. I was surprised by how much was still wooded and wild. What was cultivated was mainly grapevines: their proliferation represented the only significant change in the landscape in the last five hundred years. It was the beginning of April, and the vineyards were long lines of plowed dark earth, a mathematical map of gnarly black stumps with tight fists of tiny green leaves that would open any day now, like a hand.

  The new part of town was made of stucco walls with few adornments: a postwar efficiency. Like many hill towns, Panzano had been occupied by the Nazis, who had set the buildings near the main road alight when they retreated. The conflagration destroyed structures that had been standing for centuries, including the Antica Macelleria Cecchini, which had been in the same spot, run by the firstborn male of the Cecchini family, for eight generations. Upstairs, in an abandoned floor above the macelleria, I got a sense of what the old building had been like: the stone walls and floors are still intact, the very place where Dario’s grandfather, the man Dario was named after, housed twenty-two members of his family, protecting them in adversity. During the war, he sold meat to the partisans, who crept up the hill before dawn; two hours later, promptly at eight, the Fascists appeared. In Chianti, I would discover soon enough, no one goes without meat.

  This morning, the macelleria was in a frenzy. It was a “production day.” I would learn this later; at the time, I understood only that I was always having to get out of the way of people moving very quickly. In the back, there was a small kitchen—an oven, a marble counter, and a butcher’s block, where an older man worked. He was referred to as Il Maestro, “the master,” and treated with unrelenting respect. All exchanges ended with this title. It was: How are you today, Maestro?

  Would you like a coffee, Maestro?

  May I remove these scraps, Maestro?

  Around eleven, the Maestro had something to eat, which was bread (the “Maestro’s loaf,” cooked in a wood-burning oven and purchased by someone on their way to work) with olive oil and sprinkled with salt.

  May I prepare it for you, Maestro?

  Are you finished, Maestro?

  May I remove the plate, Maestro?

  Only two people were allowed to use a knife: Dario and the Maestro. Dario wielded his in the front, in view of visitors. The Maestro, in the back, kept his in a drawer underneath the butcher’s block. The Maestro was sixty-two, dressed in his own white smock (everyone else was in the butcher uniform—a medieval floor-length “Antica Macelleria Cecchini” apron). He lived in the next valley, near his son Enrico, who owned a thousand olive trees and made a fragrant, intense oil,
very hard to come by, mainly because Dario bought most of it. The Maestro had silver hair, a thin, expressively lined face, black eyebrows, big ears, and a large masculine nose. “Look at that face,” a friend of the Maestro’s instructed me some time later, when I’d become comfortable enough in Italian to follow some of the back-and-forth banter of the place. “Isn’t that the face of an Etruscan? Don’t you recognize it from the tomb paintings? It’s as old as these hills.” The Maestro was deliberate (in that ancient masculine way) and understated (in that ancient masculine way), and spoke with what sometimes seemed like an exaggerated gravitas, gathering his long fingers together like a piece of punctuation. The fingers were enormous. Astonishingly, the Maestro’s hands were bigger than Dario’s. His hands were so big they made me uneasy. (Why were mine so small? I often asked myself at the end of a long day, staring at them on my walk home. I now realize that they aren’t that small. In the normal world, they might be called large. The last time I needed a pair of gloves, that’s what I bought: large ones. Even so, the whole time I was at the butcher shop, I would re-examine my hands from time to time: they were so pudgy, the fingers so runty, the whole package so inadequate. Maybe that’s what you need to do this job: gigantic hands. If you don’t have forest animals growing at the end of your forearms, take up pastry.)

  Ann Marie used to work at the butcher shop but now came in only on Sundays. Sundays were so busy that anybody with a connection to Dario (even my wife, eventually, when she popped in to say hello) was ordered to put on an apron, pour wine, spread lardo on bread, and serve whatever meaty thing Dario had made for his visitors to sample. On one such Sunday, Dario had proposed to Ann Marie, climbing down from his podium, pulling out a big ring, and getting down on his knees in front of everyone there to ask the question, amid applause and hooting and picture-taking. This was several years ago, and even though the two hadn’t actually married—“He gave me the movie instead”—she referred to herself as the butcher’s wife. Ann Marie was five foot seven, but, next to Dario, seemed dinky and waif-like. She had bright, untamable copper hair, willful like a broom, a pale freckly complexion, a Phyllis Diller cackle, and an attitude of irrepressible irony. She wore red cowboy boots, turquoise jewelry, and a piece of bright green—somewhere: a redheaded study in color conflict. Her background was in fashion, her first job had been preparing costumes for the movie Flashdance, and she had come to Italy on behalf of the Banana Republic and never left. She had devised Dario’s antilogo logo, his labels, and his business card (a fold-over piece of peek-and-see design, with a vivid picture of a piece of raw meat inside, held in his giant hands).

  In most ways, the shop was run by Carlo and Teresa, a husband and wife. They had been Florentine factory owners, making men’s dress shirts until men had started wearing T-shirts instead and their business had gone bust, and were now, by their own description, living in “reduced circumstances.” They still had an apartment in Florence but in Panzano looked after a widow in exchange for room and board in her farmhouse. Carlo tended the butcher shop’s accounts and deliveries. He was fifty-five, with a dark moustache and a dark manner—a man still owed his dues: a hard man with a soft, bruised heart. For the first year after the bankruptcy, Dario told me, Carlo had never spoken, not a word. Now he speaks—in fact, every three days or so, he also smiles—but the difficulty for me was his accent. Florentine speech is exaggerated. The “c”s are soft rather than hard: casa is “hasa.” But in the Tuscan hills, that “casa” is not a quiet “hasa” but a spit-spraying fricative “HA-HAHA-HAAAAsa,” more animal than human. Even today, I don’t easily ask Carlo anything, because I fear I won’t understand the reply.

  His wife, Teresa, looked after the kitchen: all the items that were cooked or prepared, which represented more than half of the shop’s activity. I didn’t understand what they were yet—jellies, sauces, terrines, beans, some sold in packages, some by the ladle from a bowl. None of it was what you’d expect in a conventional butcher shop. I would learn that most of it was so unusual it wasn’t found in any other butcher shop anywhere.

  Teresa was short, with round hips, very feminine, permanently on a diet (she made the salads at the two o’clock family meal, the only time you saw fresh vegetables), always changing her hair color, and effervescently happy. She hummed, broke out into song, laughed at the slightest absurdity, and because she found the world delightfully absurd she laughed all the time, unless she laughed too hard, and then she cried. She was the daytime to her husband’s darkness. Like her husband, she had no experience in a professional kitchen, even though she was now running one. In this, she was like everyone else. Many people had some kind of job at Dario’s (previous experience not only not required but not wanted), even if it was nothing more than coming in at ten to read the newspapers and highlight articles about Tuscanness, or at eleven to make the coffee (two jobs, two different people). To be hired, you needed a misfortune and a capacity to sprint. The misfortune could be bankruptcy (like Teresa and Carlo), a sick husband (like Lucia, who came in to wash the aprons), visa problems (like Rashid, who appeared one morning from Morocco without a passport), a bit of trouble with the law, a dying mother, a father with cancer, an abusive parent, a spot of incest, mental dysfunction, a speech impediment, a walking disability, a collapsed spine, or simply some tic of socially inappropriate eccentric behavior. “Tuscans,” Dario told me later, “have an affection for crazy people—I can’t explain it.” The capacity to sprint was needed because, whatever your task, that’s what you did: you sprinted flat out to Dario’s beck and call.

  “Ri-ccaaar-DO!” Dario shouted all day long. He had a way of saying a name so that the middle syllable was stretched out long and impatiently, with a last irritated stress on the final one. “Ri-ccaaar-DO!” and Riccardo would appear, panting, looking exactly like the butcher’s apprentice I expected to find: round and fleshy with rosy cheeks and floppy black hair and seeming fourteen. (He was twenty-one.) “Fi-nalmeeen-TE!” Dario would say, stretching out that middle syllable again and spitting out the last one. (Fi-naaaa-LY!)

  Often, Dario simply invoked ingredients. “Pe-PE” he shouted, and, back in the kitchen, everyone scrambled to find the pepper and grind it by hand. In the macelleria, there were only three machines, and you got the sense that they’d been purchased reluctantly and after much internal debate. “A-GLIO!” Dario said to no one, but boomingly because he was also playing a loud Puccini opera, and someone grabbed garlic from a straw basket, peeled it, and rushed it to Dario. “Boh!” he said, a Tuscan grunt conveying his wonder that you hadn’t known he needed it without his having to ask for it, and then minced it in a hand-cranked mill stuck to the counter with a suction cup.

  I tried to be helpful—advice I’d got from people at Babbo about what to do when you’re in a new kitchen: be invisible, be useful, and eventually you’ll be given a chance to do more. I swept floors, washed pans, pulled thousands of rosemary leaves off stems. After a day or two, I knew enough to grind the pepper when Dario called out for it. On my third day, I prepared red peppers for a fiery sweet jelly called a mostarda. The peppers were boiled with sugar, chili peppers, and gelatin, and, after seeing my writing down the recipe, Carlo grew concerned that I would walk off with the shop’s most lucrative secret. Then he took me aside, a businessman trying to get back into the game, and suggested, in his heavy Tuscan accent, that maybe when I got back to New York the two of us might set up an enterprise together: “America is a very big country.” By then I’d prepared 2,500 peppers (each box contained 50, which I know because I was desperately keeping count), quartering each bell-shaped vegetable, meticulously slicing away the white part, and brushing away the seeds. I wasn’t about to steal a recipe. I haven’t eaten a pepper since.

  I went home that night with stained red hands, wondering: What is this place? It was famous for its bistecca fiorentina, the legendary Florentine steak. Poems were written about it, poems which Dario sometimes recited. Each bistecca weighed about five pounds, was five to si
x inches thick, and cost around a hundred and twenty-five dollars. But they were scarcely sold. I had been at the butcher shop four days before anyone actually scored one. On my first morning, three requests had been refused for no reason that I could understand, except, in Dario’s eyes, the customers hadn’t been worthy. Then, instead of selling meat, the place virtually closed down to make gallons of pepper jelly.

  The experience was akin to my being back in Elisa’s prep kitchen, but a weirder, more single-mindedly purposeful version. Each day, we made another new thing. After the pepper jelly, we prepared a terrine called a pasticcio rustico. In fact, it was very, very rustico. I couldn’t imagine people actually wanting to eat it (neither the Maestro nor Teresa could bring themselves to taste it) unless they were very poor and without a refrigerator and hallucinating from starvation. The principal ingredient was very old pork that had been aging in its own blood, sealed in a plastic bag. When you opened one, the smell hit you like a stinging slap of stinky molecules. The smell was so bad (“Mal’ odore!” Teresa shrieked) that Dario rushed back to turn on the extractor fan: customers in the shop were uncomfortable. We started our stinky terrines in the morning, cooked them in the afternoon, and chilled them overnight. The next day we prepared salt. We took bags of it, mixed it with dried herbs, and put it through a grinder to make a herbal concoction called Profumo del Chianti. The result was indeed aromatic and evocative of summer camp when I was eight, and, having been finely pulverized, was fluffy and snow-like. But for the next six hours, five of us poured fluffy salt into tiny one-and-a-half-ounce jars. Hadn’t machines been invented to do this sort of thing?