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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 six 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?

What I really wanted was to learn meat. I didn’t yet understand the culture surrounding Tuscan butchery. I hadn’t come here to learn about it because I hadn’t known anything about it. The truth is I came here because I wanted to make food in an Italian way, and, frankly, any place would have sufficed, because every place would be different from anything I’d known. But I was here and, fortuitously enough, I was interested in how you prepare an animal as food.

There is a reasonably extensive literature for non–meat eaters. But there is no such literature for those who eat meat, probably because they rarely believe they need to justify what they do. My suspicion is that, at some point, most meat eaters have asked themselves why they eat meat but have been able to answer the question without getting too philosophical. I eat meat because I like it and have never wanted to talk myself into giving it up: end of self-scrutiny. I’ve been happy as a carnivore—for me, eating meat is natural (to my mind, either side of the what-is-natural? debate can be defended pretty persuasively)—although, like the rest of the thinking world, I recognize that much of the meat I’ve eaten probably wasn’t produced naturally but treated instead like something that’s not meat (the hormones, the antibiotics, the brutal results of confinement rearing), a unit of production, a reproducible item in a mass-market business. But I was frustrated that my picture of the business wasn’t much more informed than that. The meat world was so unknowable that I could never get what seemed like an honest view about how an animal was made into food, short of buying one and bringing it home and having my way with it. There was an elementary knowledge I didn’t have, and, now that I was in a butcher shop, I was hoping I’d get it.

I wanted to be tutored in butchering. But I was also haunted by Alex’s story of a year in a Florentine kitchen, cutting vegetables. Was my prospect any better, when only two people were allowed to wield a knife? And there was the overwhelming daily routine, making pepper jelly and pouring salt into tiny jars.

T
HERE WERE
mishaps. I bashed myself. I cut myself. I fell: I had been myopically focused on a task, peeling garlic, and hadn’t noticed a heavy bin of beef at my feet until I walked straight into it and became airborne. Teresa looked up, dumbfounded by what she saw: this large American, inexplicably perpendicular to the floor. When I landed (in the meat, garlic peels now everywhere), she rammed a fist into her mouth to stop from laughing hysterically, at least until she confirmed I hadn’t been injured, and then that’s what she did: laughed hysterically. Then she started crying.

I split my head open. I was cleaning a machine used to pound meat. It was like an instrument of punishment, the height of a man, all metal angles, gunged up with muscly goo. I must have assumed an unnatural position, wanting to remain at arm’s length while needing to get close enough to scrape out the red fluff, when I slammed my forehead into something and split open the skin. It was so unexpected I didn’t know what I’d hit. I felt the edges of the wound: deep. A minute later, I did it again. I slammed the
same
part of my forehead into the
same
sharp something, whatever it was, splitting open the earlier wound. I had to sit down; blood was all over my face.

I missed Babbo: its rules and knowing how to work in them, the adrenaline of the service, the recognition I’d earned for myself. I was starting over. Then I caught on fire.

I was making a pot of what was called
ragù alla Medici,
named after the famous Renaissance Florentine family whose kitchens, according to Dario, represented the high point of Italian cooking.

The meat was beef that had been sitting around unsold, having reached its sell-by date or exceeded it: raw, marinated, even cooked, whatever was to hand. These were all put through a meat grinder and plopped into a four-foot-high pot. The vegetables, the usual suspects—red onions, carrots, celery, garlic—were put through the grinder as well, a long column of brightly colored mush. I was given a paddle, five feet long, like a shovel, with a flat burnt edge for scraping the bottom. A big burner was put on the floor so that I could stand above the pot. I was to stir for eight hours.

Actually, it was only six hours, because there was a two-hour break for lunch, a family meal, a pasta served with an impromptu condiment made with olive oil, garlic, and the season’s first cherry tomatoes, during which Dario suddenly started reciting the end of the
Divine Comedy.
I have no idea why. Something about the food. The tomatoes, maybe. The tomatoes, being red, reminded him of Hell, and he was off. Everyone stopped and were respectfully silent, until it became apparent that Dario was going to continue for some time. Carlo made his I-can’t-believehe’s-doing-this-at-lunch-again face and the people at the table then resumed their conversations, finished their food, picked up the plates, washed them—Dario still going on—and got back to their tasks. I didn’t have this liberty because I didn’t know better. I hadn’t yet realized that this was akin to a plumbing problem. “Damn, there goes the toilet again!” “Damn, there goes Dario on that last canto!” I also felt I had no escape, because the recitation—Dario sweating, his face a fevery sheen—was being projected at me. When he finished, invoking a love that moves the sun and the other stars, he got up and went to the cupboard for a bottle of whiskey, knocked it back, and assumed his position on his platform, visibly shaking, his hands on the counter, only his back on view to me. He turned. He was crying. “Every passion, every feeling of fury or anguish, every thought, is compressed into those lines.”