Heat (41 page)

I repeated the word and wrote it in my notebook.

“It’s very tender. So tender you can eat it raw—served with lemon and olive oil. But,” the Maestro said, lecturing me with his long finger, “the olive oil must be very good. Do you understand? The olive oil is important.”

He seemed about to describe the campanello’s other qualities when he stopped himself, smiled broadly, and pulled out something else. “Aah, but this, too, is special.” This one was more substantial. He trimmed it. It was a pinkish eighteen-inch-long cylinder, also a single muscle, very uniform in texture.

“This is called the
girello.
You can do many things with the girello. It’s not as tender—the tissue is more compressed—but it is still very good.” He stared at the meat happily. “Here in Chianti, the girello is cooked whole in olive oil with shards of garlic poked inside and served rare with peas. In Umbria, you eat it with fava beans.” And the way he described these distinctions—the authority of them, their absoluteness—I knew that if I was in Panzano, I’d never eat a girello with fava beans.

The Maestro returned to the leg, working his knife, a rhythmic series of small strokes, until he’d extracted another piece, the largest so far. “The
sottofesa,
” he said.
Fesa
means “rump.”
Sotto
means “underneath.” This was the cut below the rump. It was a hefty, worked muscle, as you’d expect it to be. A cow butt is a big thing.

“Some butchers slice this and sell the slices as steaks.” The Maestro shook his head disapprovingly. “
Non va bene.
It is too tough.” In the Maestro’s eyes, passing off a piece of cow butt as a steak came close to shady trading. “I prefer to braise it with olive oil, tomatoes, and rosemary. That’s called
stracotto.
”
Cotto
means “cooked,”
stra
is an intensifier—in effect, directions for beef stew.

That night, I went home with three new words—
campanello, girello,
and
sottofesa:
a very tender piece, a less tender piece, and one that wasn’t tender at all. Actually, that’s not true. I went home with about thirty new words, but these three were ones I understood and wanted to know more about.

I didn’t find them in my Italian-English dictionary. I then flipped through Artusi’s
The Art of Eating Well,
where I came upon an instance of
girello
but none of the others. The next morning, in the butcher shop, I consulted other texts, including some translations. Again, I found only
girello,
several instances of it, but each time it seemed to be defined differently. In one, an American edition of Artusi, a girello was described as a “rump roast.” In a different book, it was a “top round.” In a third, published in England, it was a “silverside.” These were cuts from a cow’s hindquarters, but none were what the Maestro had held in his hand. Instead they were complex pieces that had to be roasted slowly before they would be edible. The Maestro’s was a simple cut, which cooked uniformly and quickly.

The discovery led to a modest epiphany. Until now, I’d assumed that there was a universal lexicon of meat terms (after all, a leg is a leg is a leg), which, like any other piece of language, could be translated from one country to the next. The belief, I was now realizing, had been encouraged by those diagrams of a cow cut in half, the kind you sometimes see in cookbooks telling you what a thing is in France, England, and America. These early lessons with the Maestro taught me that a cow was not knowable in this way. One day, wanting to confirm a spelling, I consulted an Italian food encyclopedia from Dario’s bookshelves and discovered (under
bovino
) not three or four diagrams but pages of them, thirty in all, none in French or English but only Italian, broken down by region, each one different, no two cuts alike, with few shared terms. The Tuscan chart was dizzying. Every single tissue seemed to be identified. The thigh was a maze, like a road map of an impenetrable medieval city, with more names than there was space on the two-dimensional representational leg to accommodate. I understood why there were no obvious translations of
girello, campanello,
or
sottofesa:
because, outside Italy, they don’t exist. Outside Tuscany, they rarely exist. I remembered how I’d researched the short rib and been surprised that the terms my butcher in New York used were so different from the ones known to a butcher in Edinburgh or Paris. But I’d understood only half of it: every country—and in Italy, every region and, sometimes, every town—has its own unique way of breaking an animal down into dinner-sized portions. Finally, I was getting it: there is no universal butcher language;
none
of it is translatable.

It gave me pause. Who would ever know what I was talking about?

M
OST OF WHAT
I learned from the Maestro was indirect instruction. I got it by being there: like the smell of good meat, which has little smell, but what little there is, even in its rawness, makes you want to eat it. Frequently, I’d take one of the Maestro’s cuts, another favorite piece, and bring it right up to my nose. Because I knew the animals had fed on grass, I expected something like a football field after it had been mowed and found instead that I was thinking of roast beef: useless information (akin to wondering what a flower smells like and concluding, “Yes, that’s it! It smells like a flower!”), except that the association was so explicitly appetizing. Good raw meat calls to mind a good plate of the cooked. The color was also telling: more rosé than red (again, uselessly, I want to say that the color was of health). There were a few occasions when the animal had been ill or injured. One had a broken shoulder; another had a trapped nerve; one, alas, had been killed badly. In these instances, the meat was more red than rosé—it conveyed adrenaline or unease.

According to Dario, the most valuable thing he’d got from the Maestro was how to judge meat: that was the Maestro’s gift, the facility for knowing what was good. Naturally, I wanted some of that gift for myself and had been informally bringing in pieces for the Maestro to assess, samples that I’d doggy-bagged from a restaurant or another butcher. The Maestro was irritated by the practice, but it was always illuminating. “It is difficult to judge a meat that has been cooked,” he would protest, nevertheless chewing meditatively on what I’d given him. “When it’s raw,” he’d add plaintively, “you learn more about the animal. You can tell how it was raised, what it ate, and what its life was like.” He’d sigh—cooked meat made him grumpy—and then make his pronouncement: this was from a French cow, or this was aged too long, or this was from an animal that had grown up on too narrow a diet, probably grain.

One day, I brought a sample I was sure would be very good—half of a chianina bistecca. I’d enjoyed the other half the night before. I unwrapped it solemnly and handed it to the Maestro. He chewed for some time. He was concentrating and seeming to analyze the meat’s texture, rubbing its fibers against the roof of his mouth. Then he had it.

“You were deceived. This is not a chianina.” He chewed some more. “But it is not bad. It is from a cow in the Maremma, the one that grazes near the beach, called a
maremmana.
” Like a chianina, the maremmana was a white cow, but not as tall or as temperamental: a sturdy animal with big horns, like those in the cowboy movies. I’d seen small herds of them, roaming the hills by the sea.

K
NIFE SKILLS
were next. I’d learned some already during my time at Babbo, but the skills the Maestro taught me were of a different order—more like a branch of metaphysics.

The most philosophically interesting was one I call the “point cut,” which involved using a knife like a small paintbrush: no blade, only the tip. The point cut was for separating biggish muscles. You “brushed” the seam between them, tearing ever so slightly a clear, almost liquid film holding the muscles together. Then, effortlessly and rather miraculously, they peeled away from each other. At least that was the idea.

“Lightly,” the Maestro would say, looking over my shoulder. “The knife must be free in your hand, never exercised, so that it can discover the lines of the meat.” He had become the Zen master of sharpness. “Elegantly,” he would say, “the knife should be easy.
It
is doing the work, not
you.
Your hand has disappeared into the knife.”

Right! I’d say, and repeat the instruction: “My hand has disappeared.” Then I’d think: How is that helpful? My hand hasn’t gone anywhere. I was sweating, because I always sweated whenever the Maestro stood so close, and I was afflicted, in addition, by an acute pain radiating tightly from my lower back, because I would tense up as well, while determined to keep all this bad feeling hidden from my hand, because I knew it wouldn’t do my hand any good. “Relax, hand,” I’d say, coaxing it along. “Remember, this is your day off. You’re not doing the work. That sharp thing is.”

There was the “dagger cut,” an aggressive piece of business, looking like the bad guy in a silent movie, holding a blade high above the head and plunging it. The dagger cut was for removing tenaciously adhering meat from a bone. I had practiced a version when I made arista, holding the blade like Jack the Ripper and scraping it against the ribs until they flaked white. But that had been pig; this was a cow, and cow is different because a cow is so big. Let’s say you’re working on a rump. You’ve done your point cut, and two beautiful muscles have cleaved like water, revealing a gigantic Fred Flintstone–like bone underneath, the femur, which the two muscles are still very stuck to, clinging to it by a thick membrane. To remove the muscles, you’ve got to get underneath that membrane (jam the knife in there!), and, once in position, you
rip
across the bone. It was a violent moment, and people stood back when they saw it coming.

“You must not fear the knife,” the Maestro commanded. “You can’t be hesitant. You are one with the knife: attack!”

I did my best, but it was tricky. One moment, the knife was a paintbrush, which I couldn’t feel because I had no hand. The next moment, it was an assault weapon.

There was the “silver sliver” to get rid of the “silver skin.” (Okay, so maybe the names were a little goofy, but no one else seems to have come up with anything like them. The truth is much of the time I was lost. I remember writing a friend, Pete de Bolla, the son of a butcher, thinking he’d understand when I said that, often, when I was deep inside these giant thighs, I had no idea where I was. These names—they’re what my brain devised, like a map.) Silver skin is a shiny coating of inedible white stuff ruining what would otherwise be a beautiful piece of meat. If you don’t know it, you’ll recognize it the next time you buy an expensive cut from your butcher, take it home, and find a silvery bit you can’t pull off: it isn’t fat, it isn’t a tendon, and it isn’t going to do your meal any good. The trick is to slip your knife underneath and drag the blade down its length. If you’re the Maestro, the silver skin comes off in one long piece, and the meat is pure and pink. If you’re me, the silver skin comes off in eighteen bits of knotty string, and the meat has more or less survived. The implications are in the silver skin’s texture: once you realize how hard it is—that it’s like plastic and you can push your blade right up against it—you’re ready for the next technique: the “scrape and slice.”

I don’t know why I had such trouble nailing the scrape and slice, but I spent hours on it, watching the Maestro like a movie, hoping to commit his movements so deeply into my brain that I’d be able to imitate them without thinking. The approach was used on stumpy scraps—the stuff that’s left over after you’ve trimmed up your choice cuts—and is based on your perfecting a lateral flick with the side of your knife, a flick-flick-
slice
sort of thing, to push off any ugliness. In my first week, predictably, that last flick flicked off the meat entirely and caught a knuckle on the index finger of my other hand, which I kept forgetting was in the vicinity and which then beaded up redly. This was the same knuckle I’d lacerated when looking for duck oysters in the Babbo prep kitchen. By now, you would have thought I’d known it was there.

You use the scrape and slice when it doesn’t matter what the meat looks like. Marco Pierre White had used the Harrogate version when he’d been ordered to pick up the scraps from his butcher and make a meat pasty from them. Dario used it to make terrines or ragù or
peposo,
now my favorite winter preparation and one that cooks so long you could also toss in a sneaker and no one would notice.

Peposo is a traditional, slow-cooked beef shank, surrounded by a typically Italian debate about its origins. According to one theory, the dish comes from Versilia, on the northern Tuscan coast, although that recipe—with a familiar French medley of finely chopped vegetables, plus the stand-in herbs (rosemary, thyme, bay leaf), a broth, and even a pig’s foot—is more like a boeuf bourguignon than anything served in Panzano. There people believe the dish came from Impruneta, halfway to Florence, where the furnaces of Giovanni Manetti’s family have been preparing red terra-cotta tiles for seven centuries. The conceit is that pots of peposo were always being cooked by the same fires baking the tiles. Dario is confident the dish was devised in the fifteenth century by the architect Filippo Brunelleschi to feed artisans employed to work through the night constructing the dome of the Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral, further proof of Brunelleschi’s genius, that he came up with the first great dome
and
the first peposo.