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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

W
HEN
D
ARIO 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 convocation 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.
”

He handed me the knife.

“Right,” I said, and rehearsed the procedure in a series of kung fu strokes in the air. “I do this. I do that. I cut these one by one. I work lose the spine. And
basta.
” (I was talking utter nonsense, of course, and had no idea what I was doing.)

So, first thing: I did
this.
“This” involved working one side of the spine loose, first by pushing the animal up on its side—a hefty, slightly slippery operation—so that the spine was on top. Why? No idea. But the Maestro said to do it this way. Therefore I did.

Second: I did
that.
“That” seemed to involve working loose a rectangular piece of meat, attached to what must have been the little piggy’s shoulder. (Shoulder? Neck? Head? This business of figuring out what all the animal bits had once done was a peculiar piece of speculation. If I thought too hard about it, I feared I’d get queasy, or, worse, break down and become a vegetarian. If I thought too little and resisted making the connection between the animal in my hands and its living cousins, like those running around on farms, I wouldn’t get the whole picture. My solution was to think of butchery like auto mechanics. This, here, was the axle. That, the drive shaft. The approach was meant to be honest but not too intimate—demystifying the animal but respecting it—and helped me make sense of the fact that I was deep inside it, cutting it up. It occurs to me only now that I never could figure out how a car worked.)

Next: I cut “these” up. “These” were the ribs. To remove a rib, you sliced down one side of it with your blade, sticking close to the bone, constantly aware that every gram of tissue was meat and meat must never be wasted. If you looked up when someone entered the butcher shop, say, and your blade swerved, thereby losing a chunk, you were made to feel very bad. (It wasn’t the lost revenue; it was that you’d squandered some animal: the rearing, feeding, cleaning, caring, fattening, slaughtering, transporting, and now butchering, and, at the end of a long, disciplined line of purposefulness, you’d lost your concentration—
Cazzo!
You dick!—and a bit of the animal couldn’t be used! How could you?
Non va bene!
) Then, you sliced down the other side of the rib—again, sticking so close that you saw the white of the bone flaking up against your blade. What you were doing was freeing up the rib so that you could then pull it up toward you by the tip, while also trimming the tissue underneath—pulling and trimming, pulling and trimming.

Finally I worked the spine free. This was an early lesson in not using a butcher’s knife. I used my fingers instead—along the seams of the muscle—and gravity: that was the point of heaving the pig onto its side, I realized, so that, with prodding, poking, and pushing, the spine might fall away naturally. Then:
basta!
I looked at my watch. It was eight o’clock. Half a pig had taken me one hour and forty-five minutes. There were twelve more to do.

The Maestro came over to inspect my work. “You see that part,” he said, standing over me.

“This part?” I said, pointing to the pink meaty rectangle-like steak.

“Yes,” he said. “that part. It’s the best one of the animal.”

“This part,” I said, confirming my understanding. I recognized the significance of the exchange. I was being instructed in the art of butchery by no less a teacher than the Maestro himself.

“Exactly,” he said. “That part. It is very good.”

“This must be the carré,” I said, giving the word my best French inflection. I wasn’t showing off; I just wanted him to know that I’d put some thought into this enterprise beforehand.

“Bravo,” he said. “It’s true. Some people call it by the French name.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“In Italian, it’s called the
lonza.
”

I repeated the word and again thanked the Maestro.

He continued, “This is also the tenderest part.”

“I see.”

“It is also very precious and is, therefore, very expensive. And you have sliced it in half.”

“Oh, shit,” I said in English. “I did that? Fuck.” Then, remembering that I was in Italy, I said (in Italian), “That was a mistake, wasn’t it?”

“In fact, that is a very big mistake. That piece here,” he said, pointing to the two bits, “is central to the entire preparation. Do you understand?”
(Hai capito?)
“But you’ve cut it in half.
Non va bene.
”

“I won’t do that again,” I said, trying to be reassuring.

“Bravo,” he said, and resumed his task, which involved a very large thigh.

The next day, May 10th, I returned to New York. I had a commitment there. My wife and I had been in Panzano nearly a month. But I’d been accepted as a butcher in training. I was being instructed by the Maestro himself. How could I stop now?

24

I
WAS HOME
and wanted a pig.

My friend Paul had a stand called Violet Hill Farm at my local green market and sold chickens, rabbits, and pigs. Paul’s pigs were sucklings. I didn’t want a suckling. I wanted a proper pig: a big one. I wanted to apply what I’d learned in Italy.

Could Paul get me a pig?

Well, yes, he probably could. His neighbor had big healthy sows, and if I ordered one, while alive, the animal wouldn’t have to be approved by the Department of Agriculture. This—an animal’s transit from pasture to plate without a USDA stopover—was seen as a good thing. The rustic logic of animal husbandry can seem contradictory and might be summarized thus: anything involving a government agency is an intervention and regarded as bad, even though the agency was established to prevent you from getting ill and dying, which you would have thought was good. In Panzano, for instance, a food store did an under-the-counter trade in
uova proibiti,
illegal eggs, because they came from the grandmother’s chickens and hadn’t been examined by a European Union official. I bought them and they were good, although I’m not sure whether their appeal was in their flavor or in shells that hadn’t been blemished by a bureaucratic stamp.

In my case, there was no need for a USDA inspection, because I was buying a living pig from Paul’s neighbor—in effect, purchasing a pet—rather than a dead one from, say, a butcher. But when Jessica and I showed up to pick it up, the animal was definitively dead, wrapped in a transparent plastic sheet and flopped across the back seat of Paul’s vehicle: a medium-sized animal, about two hundred and twenty-five pounds, with everything on view—hooves, legs, little piggy tail, head, plus (stuffed in the cavity, Paul told me) the lungs, heart, and liver.