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 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.”

  Then, one by one, the vineyard workers gave up. And, as though their collapse were a cue, Beppe shuffled over to a makeshift shed, poured out some grain, and with food and gentle words coaxed the cows into the next pasture.

  “Finalmente,” the driver said and opened the gate at the back of the truck.

  The bull was indeed a powerful animal. He also had a distinctly youthful face. We all stared at him. He was a boy—a large, muscular boy. He was bigger than the girls and had defined muscles, especially around the shoulders, and a body that tapered in the back, like a cartoon of masculinity. My wife and I watched from behind a rock, as though it would protect us if the bull charged. We were joined by the vineyard workers, just behind us, who seemed to believe that we would protect them.

  “He’s beautiful,” someone said.

  “Mythic.”

  “But the pressure is on. He does it now or”—a vineyard worker made a slashing movement across his own throat—“he gets sent home. He knows his job.”

  I’m pretty sure the bull didn’t know he had one. He seemed interested in more elementary questions, like why he was here, standing at the back of a truck in front of an audience eager to watch him have sex with strange cows he hadn’t met. He looked left, right, left. He stomped, he snorted. He seemed to want to be bull-like. Then he spotted the girls, gave up the routine, trotted down the ramp, and joined them, as easily as old friends meeting up after an absence. In less than a minute—and who knows? maybe instantly—he assumed his role as bull, pushed the girls out of the way, and positioned himself in front. He then led his little herd on an inspection of their new home.

  For the next hour, the onlookers remained, waiting for the bull to get to work. But he didn’t seem to understand the terms of his employment. There was some excitement when a cow became interested in his genitalia and poked her head between his legs.

  “She’s ready,” a workman whispered.

  “Toro—what are you waiting for?”

  “Four wives. Really!” Veramente! “Does it get any better?”

  But the bull just carried on. Every now and then he’d stop, and that one eager cow, seeing an opportunity, would pop down and give him another lick. The bull couldn’t have been more indifferent. That cow’s friendly tongue on his testicles could have been a gnat.

  THE BULL, I understood now, was as exotic to everyone in Panzano as he was to me, and for some time he was what people talked about: Has he scored yet? Does he need instruction? Is he a homosexual? The only place where he wasn’t mentioned was at Dario’s. This was not unusual. The shop was like a foreign country inside Panzano, with its own laws and head of state (not unlike the Vatican, if the Vatican were a giant butcher shop). But the concerns raised by the bull—chianine! Tuscan beef! the Tuscan soul!—put me in mind of something I need to come clean about: something I had been unprepared for when I discovered it and that took weeks of the Maestro’s tutorials for me to understand. Ever since I had made the discovery, I’d wondered how I’d convey its magnitude. Actually, I don’t know what to do except offer up the bare fact: the meat sold by Dario Cecchini—the most famous butcher in Italy, possibly the most famous living Tuscan—is Spanish.

  No butcher, I should clarify, slaughters his own animals, a common misconception, especially in Italy, where the word for “butcher,” macellaio, comes from the one for slaughter, macello. A butcher’s job is about mastering the thigh, in all its implications, and, in Chianti, that thigh, for a millennium or two, came from a local cow: one you saw on your way home every night. Dario’s came from a Spanish cow, raised a thousand miles away on a small farm on the Costa Brava and delivered in a truck that left Spain every Thursday and arrived in Panzano on Friday, long before anyone else in the village was up, except for the dedicated staff at a bar called La Curva, who opened at six and prepared a cappuccino for Dario, the Maestro, and me minutes after we finished unloading. For a while, I wondered if this was why the deliveries came before dawn—so no one would see the Spanish plates on the vehicle.

  My suspicion arose when I was boning a pig and noticed a stamp on the belly: Hecho en España. Made in Spain? This was puzzling. I took my boned sides to Dario and stood nearby as he prepared arista. Then, before rolling it up like a log, Dario examined the outside for blemishes, including the “Hecho en España” stamp, which he lopped off with a knife. To hide the evidence?

  My suspicions were misplaced. Dario would never deny where his meat was from. You ask him, he’ll tell you. But he wasn’t going out of his way to advertise it.

  “It comes from where?” (Viene di DOVE?) asks a voice rising melodramatically in mounting incredulity.

  This is the first part of an exchange familiar to everyone in the butcher shop. A man—in his middle years, professional, educated, committed to the elusive relationship between food and culture and national identity—has driven many hours, a road map of Tuscany on the seat next to him, found a parking place, asked the old geezers on the square for directions, and entered the famous butcher shop. For a moment, he takes it all in: the display case, the aesthetic presentation, the loud music. (And the tune might be anything but, toward the end of my stay, was finally—“At last!” young Riccardo declared—no longer Elvis. Dario had returned to Mozart, particularly Don Giovanni, and every morning played Leporello’s inventory song, the one cataloguing Don Giovanni’s sexual conquests. “Happier,” the Maestro observed, without explanation.) The man steps up to the counter and shouts the words that will result in his banishment: “Una bistecca di chianina, per favore!”

  Dario turns down the music.

  No, he cannot give the man a bistecca from a chianina cow, he says (the voice, a monotone, bored, oppressed; the eyelids, heavy), because he does not have a chianina cow to sell.

  “Oh,” the man says, “what kind of cow do you have?”

  Dario tells him. If the man’s mind is of an inquisitive nature, he will say, “Oh, how interesting.” A simple sentence, which, in my time at the butcher shop, was uttered by only two people, who were both instantly rewarded by a bistecca, even when the allocation had been spoken for. If his mind is characterized more by respect than by curiosity, he will say, “Oh. Why’s that?” He won’t get a bistecca but will be able to reserve one. Things get nasty if the stranger is an inflexible, even if highly romantic, believer in the correctness of things. A man of this sort invariably poses the aforementioned question (“Your meat comes from WHERE?”), although its force is more declarative than interrogative. What the question is actually saying is: “I have taken time out of my precious life, driven to this godforsaken village on a windy road to visit hill people like you in order to have an authentic Tuscan experience, and you’re telling me I might as well have gone to Barcelona?”

  The man is about to be ordered out, but before his exit and his journey home, when he will reflect nostalgically on the evanescence of Italianness, he will be told there is no chianina because the chianina is now not good. It’s actually a lecture—everyone gets it—delivered in a fast I’ve-said-it-once-I’ve-said-it-a-million-times tone. “The chianina is now not good because it is fundamentally banal. It is a name. Prada is a name. Versace is a name. Armani is a name. Chianina is a name. If I sold it, which I do not, I would be selling a name. Would I make money selling a name? Certainly. Would it be good for bizzzness? Certainly. But bizzzness does not interest me. Names do not interest me. Meat interests me. That’s why I sell meat, not names. Besides,” Dario adds, in a final flourish, “I don’t believe in the purity of races. You, evidently, believe in the purity of races. So did Hitler. But Hitler, in my view, was wrong.” That legendary white cow is now an Aryan Nazi cow, and the stranger is a Fascist and a
traitor to the cause of Italian nationalism. That’s when he is invited to leave.

  Of all the tensions in the butcher shop between customer and proprietor, of all the flame-ups and flare-outs, the chianina issue was the most contentious. I knew, watching Dario during these encounters—his face stiffening, his head dropping before the speech, the weariness of the same message—that, secretly, he longed to serve a meat that came from an animal raised nearby. He hated being a myth destroyer, especially because he, too, was living some version of the myth, knew how pervasive it was and how tenaciously it was clung to. After all, the man who had driven through the hills for his Tuscan experience believed in it so absolutely that it had rendered him blind: it never occurred to him that he hadn’t seen a single cow on his journey to Panzano (and, swearing at Dario on the way back, would fail to realize that he still wasn’t seeing one). Once, when I visited Porretta for one of my tortellini lessons and mentioned casually to Gianni that Dario’s beef was Spanish, Gianni gripped the table—a telling gesture, as though the earth were unstable—stopped me midsentence, and declared that he was devastated: “From this moment on, I have no more illusions.”

  I WENT TO the Maestro for an explanation.

  “In the seventies,” he said, “the chianine were good. They tasted of the hillsides and clean air. They ate grass and had acres to roam in, and, because they were work animals, they were exercised constantly. The meat was firm and pure. It might take two weeks before it softened up.” He was alluding to the meat’s aging. I used to watch the process in the walk-in: each day, a piece would yield a little more to a prod from my finger. “Today, the chianine do not have hillsides to roam in, because they are covered with vines. The chianine are not exercised, because you use a tractor to work vines, not an animal. And instead of grass, they eat cereals, grains, and protein pellets: mush.” He used the English word, with its irresistible onomatopoeic veracity. “They eat mush. They taste of mush. And after the animal is slaughtered, the meat behaves like mush: it disintegrates in days. A chianina is a thing to flee from!” (Da sfugire!)

  In the butcher shop, the Maestro was everyone’s senior, but he had the innocence of a younger man—a lack of guile. He had no campaigns or polemics. He never made speeches about Hitler or marketing. “I have no enemies,” he said during a family meal, after an oblique reference was made to the terminated romance between his son Enrico and Giovanna Manetti. “I have no grudges.” So when the Maestro uttered a judgment you didn’t think twice about it, and if he said chianina was now bad I stopped going out of my way to find some. “You should always listen to the Maestro when he speaks,” Dario told me, “because he doesn’t speak much. Six, maybe eight sentences a month. But the sentences have the weight of thought.” (I knew enough to listen to the Maestro, but I don’t know where this six-to-eight-times-a-month masculine taciturnity thing came from. My suspicion was that Dario and the Maestro didn’t spend a lot of time alone together anymore, except at five in the morning, waiting for the meat truck to arrive from Spain: at that hour, I, too, would be lucky to get out six to eight sentences a month.)

  “When I was young,” the Maestro recalled one day, “there was one kind of prosciutto. It was made in the winter, by hand, and aged for two years. It was sweet when you smelled it. A profound perfume. Unmistakable. To age a prosciutto is a subtle business. If it’s too warm, the aging process never begins. The meat spoils. If it’s too dry, the meat is ruined. It needs to be damp but cool.” Umido ma freddo. “The summer is too hot. In the winter—that’s when you make salumi. Your prosciutto. Your soppressata. Your sausages.”

  The Maestro suddenly put me in mind of Miriam—I don’t know why I hadn’t seen the connection before—and her insistence on making culatello only in January, because that’s when you make your meat. Both were members of the old-way-is-the-best-way-because-it-is-the-old-way school.

  “When I was young,” the Maestro continued, “there were no supermarkets. Now there are many. They’re able to sell more prosciutti than it is possible to make. So they invented new kinds. In addition to a prosciutto that’s aged for two years, you can now get a cheaper one-year kind, a cheaper six-month kind, and a very cheap three-month variety. They are made all year round, in prosciutto factories. The truth is, there is only one kind of prosciutto, and it is made in the winter, by hand and not in a factory, and aged for two years. These new varieties are not good. They do not smell sweet. They are bad.”

  What the Maestro was describing was the familiar, sad history of animal husbandry since World War II, an Italian history, but also a European and American one. In the event, I don’t know if supermarkets are to blame—they’re too easy a target and, like bad newspapers, wouldn’t exist if people didn’t want them. But something, somehow (call it, once again, the twentieth century) went badly wrong, almost everywhere, as though great stretches of the globe had been inexplicably afflicted by a gastronomic amnesia and forgot that beef came from a cow, an animal that, like all animals, needed to be treated well.

  “Everyone in Italy likes steak,” the Maestro said, “and the supermarkets have always been able to sell more than they could get. You see the problem.” In the Maestro’s history, the supermarkets were unable to invent new varieties of steak, like so many different kinds of prosciutti. The challenge, therefore, was to produce industrial quantities of steak, faster and cheaper; the rest of the animal could be sold off as meat product. “Someone came up with the idea of feeding the animals fish meal.” Farina di pesce; ground-up fish. “It was cheap and high in protein, and the cows fattened up quickly. But the meat tasted of fish. Next they tried feeding them a manufactured protein mix, made with the remains of the animal itself. The meat no longer tasted of fish, but it wasn’t correct.” This was high-tech cannibalism with famously disastrous consequences: bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cows. “Now,” the Maestro sighed, “well…” His voice drifted off. I braced myself: any moment, he was going to declare he’d become a vegetarian.

  “You see why Dario doesn’t sell chianina. The breed doesn’t matter. This Spanish meat: it happens to come from a white cow. It’s not a chianina. But it doesn’t matter. It could be an American cow or a French one. It’s not the breed. It’s the breeding.”

  The Spanish meat came from an out-of-the-way rustic farm: backwards, family-run, ideologically tiny, incapable of becoming bigger unless Dad wins the lottery and buys the next mountain. The family knows what it can do with its land and that it can’t do more. In the world according to the Maestro, the most important knowledge is understanding what you can’t do. Most of the great meat producers are, in the Maestro’s view, small and old-fashioned and philosophically conservative.

  “Very good beef in Namibia,” he said one day.

  Christ, I’d think, Namibia! Do I have to go to Namibia to get a good steak?

  “Yugoslavia—very good beef there as well.”

  Argentina, he said another day. “Very, very good beef. Probably the best in the world. It tastes of the open air and long grass and wild hills. In Argentina, that’s where you’ll discover Tuscan meat of thirty years ago.” He stopped what he was doing and pointed his long finger at me. “Billy”—he’d taken to calling me by my diminutive, because it seemed more Italian—“you have to go to Argentina. For the beef.” He paused, enjoying the memory of something cooked over an open fire and smiled. “And when you’re there, you can also eat exceptionally good goat.”

  And I found myself writing in my notebook, “Don’t forget—when in Argentina, eat the goat.”

  In fact, every place cited by the Maestro was provincial and unmodern, with one exception: Denmark. “I can’t explain it,” the Maestro confessed, “but in Denmark you can get very good meat.”

  “Not the breed but the breeding”—it was the secret password of the butcher shop.

  28

  ONE FRIDAY in September, I walked to Panzano’s oldest church, La Pieve di San Leolino. I’d been in Panzano nearly seven months and hadn’t s
een it. It was on a high hill, along a dirt ridge near the cemetery, and was known for the best view of the area. The church was something of a puzzle: erected in the 900s, destroyed soon after (when the valley was a Florentine-Sienese war zone), rebuilt in the 1100s, and now a Romanesque mishmash: a square building with old bits attached, tipping precariously. To complicate its genealogy, a stone remnant had been dug up nearby, with an incomprehensible Etruscan text around the perimeter, dating from five centuries before Christ. People have been enjoying the view for a long time.

  Dario describes this valley as among the oldest cultivated lands on the planet. After the Etruscans, the Romans moved in (a grain tower remains—built for livestock fodder); a few centuries later, they were chased out by the Lombards, the so-called northern barbarians of history, who were then converted by Christians in the 700s. For centuries, the tenants changed but the valley didn’t, each occupier taking over from the one before, assuming agriculture routines that have continued without interruption since the invention of the hoe. The routines are implicit in a thirteenth-century letter by Luca di Matteo, a landowner, written in the aftermath of the valley’s being ravaged by Sienese troops. Soldiers had burned huts and homes (chapane e chase, in di Matteo’s old Italian), killed cows and livestock (perduti buoi e bestiame), and everyone would be without grain or fodder for a year (un anno senza richore grano e biade). The letter is revealing for what’s not said. Amid so much destruction, there is no mention of an olive tree, a grapevine, or wheat, although I’m sure all would have been features of the landscape. After church and home, what mattered was the cows (buoi) and the fodder (biade) to feed them. Dario might be correct, that this land has been long cultivated, but if so it has been cultivated for raising livestock. Cows have been here as long as people.