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

by Bill Buford

  They didn’t stop. They tilted back their heads, projected their voices to the ceiling, and bellowed: “’O sole mio,” they sang in unison, “sta ’nfronte a te! ’O sole, ’o sole mio…”

  (I felt so humiliated on their behalf. Didn’t they know that this was an ice cream ad?)

  When they finished, they were silent. Finally Teresa spoke. “Bravo, Maestro,” she said, wiping away a tear.

  “Brava, Teresa,” the Maestro said, clearing his throat.

  The refrain continued in my head as I walked home that night. Who would believe what I’d witnessed? No one would believe it. I’m not sure I believed it, except that I was covered with the evidence. I had soppressata gunk all over me, two fingers were stuck together, and it was going to take some scrubbing before I liberated them. (You’ve got to wonder: what must your stomach go through before it digests this stuff?) I’d stepped in some as well, scarcely surprising, since, in the three-person handover, there had been soppressata slopping all over the floor. I could hear it: it made a sticky suction-cup sound as my heel pressed into the pavement and tried to come away again. Meanwhile the refrain continued. In fact, I was humming it. It might be kitsch. It might be an ice cream ad. But I had to concede: it was catchy. Also, I couldn’t remember another job where people sang while they worked. I liked that they did. I liked that I was here, making this strange food.

  21

  DARIO CECCHINI was born on September 10th, 1955, in a house across the street from the butcher shop, now the place where Carlo keeps the books and Lucia arrives every morning to wash and hang out the long aprons soiled from the day before. Dario’s father, Tullio, who is still talked about in Panzano with much affection (often in constructions that contrast him favorably with his more histrionic son), was known for his charm, his athleticism, and his winning way with women—which distressed his own father, who, on his deathbed, ordered his son to stop being a ladies’ man and settle down. Marry Angelina, he commanded, a local girl, whereupon the father died, and the son, following the deathbed imperative, promptly married Angelina. When Dario talks of his father, he invokes a teacher, often of lessons in how to see: an aesthetic appreciation, an understanding of painting, and a proudly possessive way of viewing the Renaissance, as though its greatest achievements were incontrovertibly Tuscan. The philosophy seems to have been expressed in informal tutorials, father and son at museums together, and went something like this: “You see that statue of David? You see that painting of the Last Supper? They’re Tuscan. We did those.” What the father did not teach his son was how to prepare meat.

  Dario did not want to be a butcher and was resolved to be the first Cecchini, in six centuries, not to be. He also wanted to be the first to have a graduate education and attended the University of Pisa to study veterinary science. “I wanted to cure animals, not butcher them.” But in his second year, his sister, Marina, phoned: their father had cancer—very advanced. Dario was summoned to a hospital where his father, dying, confessed to having made a mistake: he had not taught his son how to butcher. He had thought there would be time. “Go to the Maestro,” his father said. “I’ve spoken to him. He will teach you how to recognize good meat.” Whereupon the father died.

  Dario was twenty years old. Following the deathbed imperative, he abandoned his studies. There was, additionally, a financial imperative: with the father’s death, the family, or what was left of it (a grandmother, a sister—Dario’s mother had died when he was eleven), had no money. One day in 1976, Dario paid a visit to the Maestro and asked for his help, and he agreed to give it.

  The village Dario came back to was different from the one he’d grown up in. Only old people remained, he recalls; everyone else was leaving (fuggendo—fleeing, as though from a pestilence). His father’s customers had lived nearby—contadini, tenant farmers and small-plot holders, who did a type of farming called agricoltura promiscua, a promiscuous mix: they had vines and pasture and olive trees, made wine and oil, raised livestock, and grew wheat and vegetables. The local cow was a white breed called a chianina, a work animal, distinguished by its height (it towers over conventional cattle), its size (six-month-old calves can weigh more than fifteen hundred pounds), and its strength. Chianine had been here since anyone could remember (da sempre, since forever), and you couldn’t cultivate the hilly land without them, normally two at time, yoked together by a wood harness shaped like the letter “m” to accommodate their thick necks. The older chianine, the occasional bull, and some of the calves (the vitelli surplus to a small farmer’s requirements) were sold off at a weekly livestock market in Greve, about five miles down the hill. The chianina was prized for its deep “beefiness”—a unique, complex flavor you get from worked muscles, sometimes tough, rarely fatty, not unlike an animal in the wild. The bistecca fiorentina is traditionally cut from a chianina. But the mixed farming had been disappearing.

  In 1956, there had been a devastating spring freeze, the worst in two centuries, which had killed most of the olive trees, including ones that, hundreds of years old, had seemed capable of living through every adversity. And the death of the trees, so associated with the area as to be a symbol or a flag—one that meant permanence and durability—seemed to kill something of the spirit of the people who cultivated them. There was another freeze, Dario’s first winter back in Panzano, severe enough to kill off the new plantings. Farmers wanted out. Many abandoned their homes: who wants a stone house with dirt floors, no plumbing, and acres of ruined vegetation? There were other factors (everyone in Panzano has a list), including a bungled effort by an interventionist government to help (too little, too late), followed by an equally bungled effort to get out of the way; the advent of supermarkets; the ubiquity of refrigeration or paved roads or travel agencies or television; the culture of electricity (if only that hadn’t arrived). In sum, they amounted, for one reason or another (call it “the very late arrival of the twentieth century”), to the end of a long era in rural Tuscany. By 1976, no one wanted to be a farmer. The year Dario embarked on being a butcher, Chianti was desolate.

  One afternoon, when the butcher shop was closed, my wife and I joined Dario and Ann Marie at their home, Il Greppo, a stone house like those abandoned by farmers in the seventies. To reach it, you carried on up the steep road by the butcher shop, heading into the wild, uncultivated part of Chianti. On each side, there was a valley. In the direction of Greve, it was rocky and uncleared, and there were herds of sheep. On the other side, it was the big basin kind, a unique piece of geography that gets sun all day called la conca d’oro—conca like conch, the shellfish, and oro like gold: a shell-shaped valley of golden sunshine. Photographs from the 1960s show white cows, high wheat, olive trees, pigpens, some vines. Now you see vines, spreading outward with neoclassical discipline, row after row, a symmetrical aesthetic of spring green, the new leaves having finally unfurled with the warmer weather. There were a few small-plot farmers, but most of the valley was divided between two winemaking families.

  One, until 1991, had been headed by Alceo di Napoli, a prince of Naples. (Much of Chianti is owned by people with titles.) Alceo’s family has lived in the Castello dei Rampolla, the castle on the far side of the valley, since the 1700s. Accounts of Alceo evoke a determined, no-nonsense man of aggressive bluntness and worldly smarts, a forthright and charismatic patriarch. Dario describes him, with no small admiration, as “the dickhead of dickheads”—testa di cazzo—“the supreme dickhead of dickheads. Il Maestro of dickheads. Always in litigation, always fighting. He was magnificent—molto bravo!” During the big freezes and the aftermath, referred to by locals as the “great migration,” Alceo was living in Brazil. When he returned, his land in neglect, he ripped everything out and planted vines. He produced his first bottle of wine in 1975, Dario’s first year back. Alceo went on to make some of the region’s most prestigious wines, but when he died in 1991 the family had difficulties running the vineyard without him. One of Alceo’s sons, Marco, said to be the most capable, had also been wild and
capricious, a rich boy rebel who predeceased his father, when he crashed his helicopter into a mountain. Matteo, the next son, took over, but he over-invested, mismanaged the finances, and disappeared in the aftermath of a tax scandal. The family seemed unable to make a wine that met the standards established by the father (who seemed to linger, like a scolding ghost). Luca, the third son, took over, and the daughter, Maurizia, then helped out. Since 2000, the wine is good again. Their most successful bottling—one Maurizia imagines their father might have made for himself—is called Vigna d’Alceo, Alceo’s vine.

  Manetti was the valley’s other family, headed, until recently, by Dino Manetti, an old Florentine family that has been making terra-cotta tiles since the Renaissance in nearby Impruneta. The Manetti property in Panzano, which the father bought in 1968, included a whole former borgo, a little village: several families clustered together, living around a courtyard, with a ninth-century cantina (a combined kitchen, pantry, and cellar) with stalls for the chianine. The borgo had a routine for sharing the domestic duties, including making bread in the borgo’s wood-burning oven every Saturday morning and only on Saturdays, in part because Tuscan bread, which is made without salt, is believed by many to improve the staler it gets (which might well be possible if only because it tastes of so little when it’s fresh). I met the last contadino to have resided at the borgo (in Panzano, you eventually meet everyone), Beppe—a big man, now seventy but seeming much older, with a hefty belly and suspenders to keep his trousers up, long unkempt hair, missing front teeth, and a wild stare. He could be found in the late afternoons in the square where the old men gather. In his time, Beppe had been the animal guy, looking after the chianine needed for the planting and the harvest. Implicit in the arrangement had been a long-standing rural attitude of husbandry: when the animals are so intimately involved in your life, you treat them with the care of a family member—even if it’s one you expect to eat for dinner, and maybe because you expect to eat it for dinner.

  When Dino Manetti took over the borgo, there were vines everywhere, but they, too, had been neglected, and, like his neighbor, he pulled them out and planted new ones. The effort took four years; he, too, finished in 1975. I never met Dino Manetti; he died weeks before we arrived, although even I, in my ignorance, could feel the loss his death represented. He had been widely adored, something like the unofficial mayor of Panzano, a romantic who had come here, he was quoted as saying, to discover his Chianti roots. Giovanni, his son, who was forty, seemed to be continuing his father’s effort by digging deeper to find them. Three months after his father’s death, Giovanni began excavating the old borgo. The wood-burning oven had only just appeared underneath what had been a modern floor. From the ridge, you could just see men pulling down rooms, their impromptu partitions, the ad hoc refurbishments: like an archaeological site.

  IL GREPPO was a three-story stone house, another mile along the ridge, and overlooked a precipitous ravine. Dario bought the building in 1980, when he’d been at the butcher shop five years. It had been a lonely time. One moment, he had been enjoying a student’s life, which was novel and diverting and full of promise. “I’d discovered movies.” (There are no movies in a Tuscan hill town.) “I had girlfriends, read books, attended gallery openings, went to parties. From there to a butcher shop in Panzano. It was like going to Africa. Africa would have been easier.” He lived in the family home, every morning traversing the same piece of earth (“la stessa terra!”) his father had walked on; and his grandfather, and his great-grandfather. The steel Dario used to sharpen his knives had been his father’s. So, too, had the counter, where Dario now prepared his meat. He was cutting himself. Incompetence or fear? Both, he said, a debilitating terror. His forearms were covered with scars. Knives frightened him. “In the beginning, I saw only the blade and kept ruining the beef. I hurt myself terribly.” He needed to make this new life work for all kinds of reasons he didn’t understand. He was in a rush. He wanted to do everything quickly, urgently, even though he knew nothing. The Maestro slowed him down. “You can’t do traditional work at a modern pace. Traditional work has traditional rhythms. You need calm. You can be busy, but you must remain calm.”

  Padre Giovanni, an eighty-two-year-old monk, told Dario about Il Greppo. The monk was a Sanskrit scholar, a poet, a lecturer in dead languages, an alchemist, and for Dario another mentor. Dario wasn’t raised religiously. (“A true Tuscan cannot believe in Christ, because a true Tuscan believes only in liberty.”) But his father used to take him to see monasteries and churches. (“He wanted me to experience tranquil spaces.”) Padre Giovanni seemed to understand Dario, and Dario openly talks about needing male figures—figuri maschili—to teach him how to be a man in the aftermath of his father’s death: like the Maestro and like Padre Giovanni. Padre Giovanni introduced Dario to the cooking of the Italian Renaissance, the works of the “Glorious Tradition,” including Martino, Scappi, and Latini. “Padre Giovanni helped me control my passions. He told me I needed a place to be alone.” Dario bought Il Greppo because the monk lived next door. “I didn’t see him much, but I was calmer knowing he was nearby.”

  Dario pointed to a ruin on the facing slope, a stump covered with moss and shrubs. It had been, he said, the ancestral castle of Guido Cavalcanti, the impetuous, reckless father of Italian love poetry and early advocate of the dolce stil nuovo (the new sweet style). Cavalcanti had died here, in 1300, while exiled from Florence. In the butcher shop, you need only say “Donna, me prega”—woman, ask me—the first words of Cavalcanti’s famous love poem, and several people were guaranteed to recite the rest in unison. Cavalcanti had been Dante’s best friend, and when Dario mentioned the two men the association called a passage to mind, and he began declaiming the Inferno, Canto 10 in fact, where Dante meets the father of the poet in Hell, the none-too-happy Cavalcante Cavalcanti.

  Dario’s house was like a neglected museum. Apart from an upper floor—where Ann Marie had successfully prevailed upon him to install a working bathroom—the property was largely untouched since its last inhabitants. The ground floor dated from the twelfth century, and most of it was taken up by an open-hearth kitchen. Dario referred to it as il forno, which today means oven, and in many ways it was more oven than hearth. It was capacious and accessible—a giant source of heat, a place to cook and be warmed by. Dario grew still. “I don’t want to change a thing. I come here to smell. Sometimes I do nothing but sit in a corner and smell.” I tried to take in the room’s musty history but couldn’t stop my mind from recognizing some of the absurdities of where I found myself: are running water, gas, electricity really so evil? Even so, as I stood there, not moving, scrutinizing the silence, I couldn’t deny that the room had an eerie power. I walked across the hearth—gray ash rubbed into the clay floor—and looked into the adjoining bedrooms. They were small—space for a bed, not much more. The windows had the original crisscrossing metalwork. During the hot months, they admitted a breeze and summer smells of animals and fruit and olives. In the winter, shutters wouldn’t have kept out the cold, and everyone would have gathered round the heat of the forno. I stood in the doorway of one room, lost in a meditation of the house’s recurring habits. People had made love here, sweated through pregnancy, gave birth, looked after children, became ill, died, a fire always burning in the kitchen. In this room, the next generation had done the same, the fire still burning. And the next generation, for a thousand years.

  It was getting dark. I walked out onto a stone porch to take in the view of the ruined stump that had once been Cavalcanti’s home. I couldn’t see it. In good light, you had to know it was there to locate it—the outline was apparent in a deeper, more fluorescent shade of green—but now, the sun setting, the outline was gone. It was late, and we were hungry. Dario suggested we get something to eat, perhaps in the nearby village of Lamole.

  22

  THE RESTAURANT, normally empty at this time of year, was hosting an anniversary party. As we stood at the entrance, an elderly couple were being led
up to a small stage to receive their first lessons in karaoke. The owner, the hardworking, thirty-three-year-old English-German-French-speaking Filippo Masini (who, with his brother, had only recently taken over from their father), knew he should be turning us away. His greeting was excessive and full of panic, as though the mayor had just popped in, unannounced. “Eccolo!” Filippo cried. “Dario Cecchini. How very good to see you! You are so very welcome! I am so lucky. The very grand Dario has come to my humble Restaro di Lamole!” But everything else about Filippo’s manner was conveying how bad it was that Dario had turned up (how, for instance, can you say it’s good to see someone without actually smiling?) and that, actually, he was very unwelcome.

  “I want only bistecca, dripping with blood,” Dario said as Filippo seated us at a table on the edge of the anniversary party. “A butcher likes raw,” he explained to me. “A butcher likes the warm tissue of an animal freshly killed, tasting only of blood. Give me blood!” he boomed to the room and enacted a show of masticating, an exaggerated chomping of his teeth, very big-mouthed. Filippo, standing by the table, taking all this in, was starting to fidget. Dario’s display was really a challenge: How good is your bistecca, Filippo? Every Tuscan restaurant has bistecca on the menu, but none of the restaurants in the area offered Dario’s meat: it was too expensive and, on some level, just too ideological. Filippo’s menu advertised that his came from Gabriella’s, a butcher in Greve.

  The wine was the first disaster. Filippo was proud of his list, which was many pages long and included all of Tuscany’s established names. He handed it to Dario—a large book, which Dario seized, lifted above his head, and hurled to the floor in disgust. The action was startling in the extreme. I looked to Dario for an explanation, but he was staring at Filippo with loathing.