Heat: An Amateur Cook in a Professional Kitchen

by Bill Buford

  Filippo mentioned a name, stuttering.

  “No!” Dario had attracted the attention of one of the family tables. “You know I don’t want a wine made with wood. I want a real wine. I want a simple wine. I want a wine from here.”

  Filippo mentioned another name, an inexpensive red from the village.

  Dario grunted, an impatient sound, something between a belch and an inadvertent exhale, as though he’d been hit hard on the back. It was Tuscan for “Duh?” Filippo disappeared to retrieve a bottle, distressed and seemingly engaged in an internal debate over how he should deal with this man’s very high-handed conduct.

  The wine dispute was related to another piece of recent Panzano history and another Dario polemic. Around the time that the Alceos and the Dinos were ripping out the neglected vines and blasted roots of successive agricultural failures, a few local landowners had experimented with making wines in a French style. The results were so successful that others imitated them. By some perversity of cultural logic, the new wines were called not Super French but Super Tuscan. The Vigna d’Alceo, for instance, was made with cabernet sauvignon, the principal grape in a Bordeaux, which, prior to 1975, had never been planted in Chianti soil. Dino Manetti’s wines were made with sangiovese, which was a Tuscan grape, but the wine was aged in barriques, small oak barrels, which was very French, although (according to Dario) akin to marinating your wine in a tree.

  The menu was the second disaster. On the whole, it was very regional, which also means it was very brown. There is a saying in Italy, brutto ma buono, ugly but good, which celebrates the amateurish, often irregular integrity of food made by hand. In Tuscany, the phrase could be brutto e marrone, ugly and brown. The local crostini, for instance, with every available millimeter smeared with chicken liver pâté, were a brown food. Pappa al pomodoro, another local dish, was made from stale bread (the unsalted, flavorless Tuscan kind, so you know it had to be very stale) cooked with overripe leftover tomatoes until it degenerated into a dark brown mush: brown on dark brown. The many varieties of local beans: brown. (Dario once took me to an eleven-course banquet honoring the famous bean of Sorana: beans with veal head, beans with tuna roe, beans with porchetta, beans with shrimp, a torta of beans—a three-hour celebration of brown on brown, ending with a plate of biscotti and a glass of vin santo, another brownly brown variation.) The soppressata, the sausages, the famous Fiorentina: all brown, without so much as a speck of color. That chopped parsley garnish? A corrupting Italian-American intervention. There was one local pasta, called pici, thick, like giant earthworms, which was similar to a pasta the Etruscans had made, although it was a mystery why it hadn’t disappeared along with the rest of their civilization: it was inedible if boiled for less than twenty minutes. It was at least chewable if cooked for longer, when it changed color, not to brown, admittedly, but to beige, although the custom was to dress it with the local ragù, which was very brown: a brown-and-beige food. The local vegetables? Green-brown artichokes, green-brown olives, and porcini mushrooms (brown-brown). If indeed Tuscany was responsible for a sizable portion of the world’s best cooking, then it must have been the brown part. Filippo had all these Tuscan standards on his menu, printed, naturally enough, on brown paper. In addition, he had a carpaccio of goose. Carpaccio, a way of preserving meat by air-drying, wasn’t really a Tuscan preparation; geese, too, weren’t very local. There weren’t many geese in Chianti. Actually, there were none.

  By the time Filippo returned with our wine—chest out and seeming to comport himself with a swagger—Dario had spotted the goose preparation and was looking at Filippo with hyperventilating bafflement. (Poor Filippo, I thought, as he uncorked the bottle. He has no idea what he has returned to.) Dario’s stare, which Filippo avoided, was intense and full of rage. “What in the name of my testicles,” he said finally, in a low, controlled voice, “is this dish on the menu?”

  Filippo glanced casually in Dario’s direction. “What in the dick are you talking about?” (Che cazzo dici?) he asked lightly, continuing the line of genitalia metaphors that so robustly characterize male Tuscan exchanges.

  “You fat head of a penis,” Dario said loudly. “Why is this on your menu?” He was pointing to the carpaccio of goose. “Carpaccio di oca?!!”

  Oca means “goose.” Dario managed to pronounce the word with an extra long “o”—quiet at first, then much louder—ending it, the “ca” sound, as though he were coughing up his lunch.

  “Oca?” He repeated.

  “Oh, Dario, it’s on the menu every year,” Filippo said, and then, despite his effort to pretend that none of this mattered, couldn’t stop himself from looking over his shoulder, just in case the anniversary party was bearing witness to his humiliation. (In fact, the anniversary party was otherwise engaged: the elderly couple were doing some kind of gyration to what sounded like the Beach Boys in Italian.)

  “Oca?” Dario repeated. “Oooooooohhhh-KA!”

  “The regulars expect it,” Filippo persisted. His restaurant had been mentioned in an English walking guide and now had a clientele. “They would be disappointed if they couldn’t order their favorite dishes.”

  “Their favorite dish of oooooooohh-KA!” Dario was persuasively incredulous.

  “Perhaps you’d like to try some, Dario,” Filippo offered. “It’s really very good.”

  “Filippo, this dish is from Friuli. Friuli is in the north. Near Croatia.” Dario could have been talking to a five-year-old. “What are you? Disneyland? There are no geese in Tuscany. You have a panoramic view. How many geese did you see tonight? How many geese, in your dickhead life, have you ever seen? This is fancy food. Like fusion. Fancy Tuscan fusion.” He then threw his menu on the floor. “OooooooOOO-KA!”

  Filippo picked up the menu and set it back on the table. “Dario, please,” he said in a whispery voice.

  Dario threw it back down.

  Filippo picked it up again. It was a tricky diplomatic moment. He had welcomed the mayor into his restaurant, but the mayor wanted to beat him up. “Dario, Dario, Dario,” he said, pleading, and tapped Dario on the head with the menu, an affectionate slap. And expecting a much more aggressive response, Dario flinched, and Filippo, sensing an opportunity, tapped him again: and then again—harder. And then, marginally losing control, he started hitting so hard and fast that Dario had to lift his arms to fend off the menu blows.

  A truce had been achieved: somehow Filippo, in unreasonably hitting Dario over the head with a menu, had persuaded him that he had been acting unreasonably. Everyone relaxed—exhaling all at once—and Filippo was finally able to take our order: two and a half kilos of Gabriella’s bistecca, Dario said, “barely cooked—so that I can taste the blood.”

  Relieved, Filippo proceeded through the rituals of ordering a meal, as though he were waiting on a normal table.

  “Perhaps an antipasto,” he asked, restaurant-like.

  “No!” Dario answered, Dario-like. “Like what? Carpaccio di’ oca? No.”

  “A primo?” Filippo pressed on, determined.

  “No!”

  “Maybe a salad, something green.”

  “No!”

  “Oh, come on, Dario,” Ann Marie said. It was her first utterance. “Let’s get some spinach.”

  “No!”

  “Dario?”

  “No!”

  “Dario, I’d like some spinach.”

  “Okay. Spinach. And bread.”

  Filippo snapped shut his order book and set off for the kitchen. Dario spotted a black bottle on the table. This was the third disaster.

  “I don’t believe it,” Dario said, unscrewing the bottle and pouring some liquid on to his hand. He tasted it. It was balsamic vinegar, which comes from Modena, in Emilia-Romagna, about a hundred miles away.

  “Filip-PO!” Dario shouted, doing that irritable last-syllable-stress thing, as though he were in his own butcher shop. Filippo froze—he’d almost got to the kitchen—and turned slowly. Dario locked eyes, extended his arm to the side
of our table, vinegar in hand, and upturned the bottle, pouring its contents on the floor.

  DURING ALL THIS, Annie, after making her pitch for a plate of spinach, said nothing. “What could I have said?” she put to me later. “Ask him to stop being such an asshole? This happens almost every time we go out. All the screaming at the proprietor? It’s so bad I hate eating at restaurants.”

  In effect, Dario had become a food cop, enforcing a law of no change. Dario was trying to stop time. He’d grown up in a region where people had ceased observing the old ways, and he was determined to get everyone back on track before the old ways disappeared entirely. (Historically, time stoppers don’t have a great win-loss record, although they score high in the sentimental doing-all-the-wrong-things-for-the-right-reasons stakes.) For Dario, implicit in the old ways was an assumption that the culture of a place was in its language and its art and its food—maybe the most direct expression because the habits of cooking and eating arise out of the land itself. What is Tuscan food, precisely? I’d asked Dario earlier at his house, and he’d said something vague, and I’d pressed him, and finally he’d said that true Tuscan food was evoked by the unique fragrance of the wet earth at that moment—and he pointed outside where it was still wet after a late-afternoon storm, the grass now glistening in the sun. “The smell of the dirt, here, after a rain,” he said. (Which wasn’t ultimately illuminating: Tuscan food is mud?)

  The final disaster was the meat. It arrived, a steak five inches thick, sitting in a pool of blood. Dario started cutting it up with a pocketknife he carries with him and distributed slices around the table, until he grew impatient and tore off a chunk directly from the serving platter and speared it with his blade and ate it rapidly, re-enacting the evening’s earlier furious outsized chomping.

  “The meat,” he said after taking a deep breath, “is not good.” He resumed chewing and speared another chunk. “No. This is not good meat.”

  It was the first time he’d eaten one of Gabriella’s steaks. Gabriella is a rare woman butcher (daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter, et cetera, of a family of butchers) whose shop is on the square in Greve. This was where the livestock market had been held, which accounts for the square’s curious nonsquare design: narrow at two ends. The chianine used to come in through the entrance at the top—be displayed, win a prize, be sold—and leave by the exit at the bottom, where, after so much public glory, their lives were dispatched into so many dinners. The square is now dominated by tourists, who are Gabriella’s principal customers. She is in her sixties; has disconcertingly bleached blond hair (more strawberry than lemon), very thick glasses, and a butcher’s outfit that looks like bedtime pajamas. The last time we were in her shop, she had a chicken on a cutting board, its entrails pulled out—she’d started it and forgotten about it—and was hand-feeding raw sausage meat to some queasy Bavarians, barking in Italo-German. (“Molto gut!”)

  Dario speared another chunk. “With your tongue,” he instructed me, “I want you to touch the roof of your mouth. Do you feel that? It’s coated with wax.”

  I did as he said, and it was true—there was a greasy film. I wondered if the waxiness was so obvious that I would have noticed it without being told about it. I continued rubbing. I wanted to memorize both the slippery sensation and something else—what was it? a taste?—when I was reminded of eating as a child. It was a disconcerting association, rising up ungovernably, and suddenly my mind was entertaining a picture of me at the kitchen table, a child, my father to my right, my mother directly across from me. Where did that come from? I continued rubbing. It was this, the residue, that had evoked the memory: the eating of a steak, bought by Mother at a suburban supermarket and characterized by this same quality of fat. There had been a sense of occasion. This, in fact, might have been my first steak, and my father must have been feeling flush enough to buy one. I ate it and thought: This is it?

  Dario took another bite, chewed, paused. His cheeks puffed out a little, as though they were being punched from the inside: he was trying to identify the source of the meat’s sticky cloyingness. “The roof of your mouth should never be waxy,” he reflected. “The waxiness betrays what the animal was fed on, which would have been cheap grain, to fatten it up.” (And that’s what I must have been remembering from my first steak—the peculiar qualities of cereal-fattened American beef.) Dario seized another chunk. He was eating with unabated intensity. “This meat will sit heavily on your stomach.” He ate another chunk, just to make sure that it would sit heavily on his stomach. “The secret of meat is in its fat,” he continued. “When the fat is good, you can eat two kilos without feeling full. But with this, you’ll feel full, even though you are not full. All night, you will feel its weight. Here,” he said, motioning to the upper part of the stomach. “Like a rock.” He grunted and ate, grunted and ate, until he finished the platter.

  It was past midnight and time to return home.

  In the parking lot, Dario addressed me with great solemnity: “A butcher never sleeps. A butcher works in meat during the day and plays in flesh at night. A true butcher is a disciple of carnality.”

  The point was a piece of wordplay made possible in Italian. The word for meat and flesh are the same: carne. (The line in the Bible about the word being made flesh is, in Italian, the word being made “carne.”) Carne, flesh, carnality, sex, meat, skin, dinner, sin, and the word of God or, in the case of the Dante-reciting Dario, that of the Devil: it was one continuous stream of associations.

  Dario continued, “You are now a member of the carnal confederation of butchers. You are learning to work with meat like a butcher. You must now make love like a butcher. For the rest of the night, you must enact the dark acts of carnality, a butcher’s carnality. And then you will rise in the hours before dawn, smelling of carnality, and unload the meat from the truck, like a butcher.”

  I didn’t know what to say. My boss was telling me that, to do my job, I now needed to go home and have sex. It had already been a long, long day of carnalities. That meat truck was arriving in a few hours. It seemed unlikely that I had the stamina for more carnality and making butcher love to my wife for the rest of the night and reporting for work before dawn with no sleep. Maybe I didn’t have the constitution for this life after all. But, you know, I did the best I could. I didn’t want to let the guild down.

  23

  WHEN DARIO CITED my membership in the guild, he was alluding to a recent breakthrough at the butcher shop. I had convinced him that I could make sausages, had been entrusted with a week’s orders, and had acquitted myself well enough.

  Never in his life, Dario said, had he seen someone master the craft of handmade sausages so quickly. “You are a natural butcher,” he told me. “In the history of your family, there were butchers. It is in your blood.”

  This was a pleasing thing to be told, and from now on I was officially a butcher in training, although I was skeptical of the role performed by my family blood. Dario never took seriously the time I’d spent at Babbo. But by now I’d been working in a professional kitchen for some time, and—although I didn’t have the heart to tell Dario, because I rather liked the butcher-in-the-blood theory—I’d taken a one-day sausage-making course at New York University. Okay: NYU wasn’t a Tuscan butcher shop (and I got shit when I returned to my day job smelling of pork fat), but I’d learned some basics.

  No matter, I’d been elevated to a new level, and the next morning, after we unloaded the meat, Dario handed me his knife and, recognizing the seriousness of the occasion, gave me a steel glove to protect me from injury, the very thing he had used when he’d started out more than twenty-five years ago. (It was gigantic. I could have fit my head inside—it was more jousting-match body garb than glove—and there was no way I could wear it.) My task, under the supervision of the Maestro, was to bone pigs that would be made into arista. Arista is a Greek word meaning “the best” and, according to local legend, refers to a preparation first served at a Florentine peace summit in 1439, a co
nvocation of Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches: at the end, the Greek prelates were so satisfied with their meal that they chanted “Arista, arista, arista” to express their appreciation. Was there such a chant? I’ve since discovered the first published mention of arista—in a story, written in 1400, by Franco Sacchetti, which, predating the banquet by nearly forty years, weakens some of the poetic force of the spontaneous Greco-Italo outburst. Whatever its origins, arista appears regularly on Tuscan menus today. In my experience, no two plates are the same, although they usually feature a herbal mix stuffed into the best cut of the pig, what Italians sometimes refer to as the carré (the pork equivalent of a rack of lamb).

  Dario’s arista uses not one cut but nearly half the pig, the torso, which is boned and rolled up with an extravagance of herbs and seasonings: garlic, thyme, fennel pollen, pepper, rosemary, and double-ground sea salt. The logic is that each new item is applied in increasingly larger quantities so that by the time you get to the pepper the meat is covered by a thick black blanket, followed by an abundance of rosemary (a green blanket) and completed by the salt, which, being twice ground, looks like a dollhouse replica of a blizzard. It is then cooked at a high temperature for four hours, emerging from the oven as a noisy sizzling racket, the fat rendered and popping in the roasting tray, trailing a black acrid cloud of smoke, a glistening and rather beautiful thing (brown, of course). When sliced, you get a range of cuts: the carré, tasting like a tender steak; the bacony stomach; and everything in between. But it is an unquiet food, which sends your taste buds in many directions—a slice manages to be both burnt and tender, caramelized and salty, lean and fatty, exploding with both rosemary and fennel—and you can’t eat much. After a few bites, your mouth is exhausted from a sensory pounding.

  This was what I was to prepare and, at six-fifteen a.m., I stood in front of two halves of a pig cut lengthwise, knife in hand, no mace glove, ready to start. The Maestro was going to show me how to remove the bones from one half; I was going to do the other. He took my knife, and his initial instruction went something like this. “Guarda!” (Watch!). “You do this” (così). “You do that” (così). “You cut these”—tagliale—“one by one. You work the spine loose, and basta.”