Heat (45 page)

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

O
NE
F
RIDAY
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 seen 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.

From where I stood, I could see Giovanni’s little herd. The young bull turned out to be neither homosexual nor ignorant. Just shy. “A nighttime lover,” Beppe said when I saw him on the square. “He injured his shoulder.” Beppe then made a universally recognized hip-swiveling movement. The bull had fallen awkwardly in midmount, although not before scoring. All four wives had missed their periods. So Giovanni had succeeded, and chianine would be returning to the Chianti hills. It was a curious thing to contemplate. History always teaches us we can’t turn back the clock, but I seemed to have been surrounded by people who kept trying.

It was the first day of autumn, and the weather had got hot again. The vineyard workers were coming in for lunch and wouldn’t be back in the afternoon. When grapes overheat, they behave unpredictably, and the practice is to hope for cooler temperatures in the morning. Giovanni was ahead of the others, and most of his sangiovese had been picked. Buckets of it were being dumped into a small truck, with dry ice poured on top to prevent the fruit from stewing. For Giovanni, the grape was another item essential to his Tuscan identity, and his making a wine from it connected him to the soil’s history. “Everyone knows that sangiovese has been here since Roman times,” he told me once. “It’s in the name:
sangue,
blood, plus Jove. But few people believe the Romans introduced it. We think it had been here already.” Like raising cows, growing sangiovese grapes was, in Giovanni’s view, just another one of the practices that the new tenants always appropriated: that, ever since these valleys have been inhabited, people have been drinking a version of a god’s blood.

On the far side of the valley was Castello dei Rampolla. There the grapes were the smaller, darker Bordeaux varieties planted by Alceo, another ghostly patriarch, although I couldn’t tell the difference from where I stood. I saw only symmetrical leafy green lines, with slumping, tired people walking up the hill between them. My wife and I had recently been received by Alceo’s daughter, Maurizia—wispy, evanescent, in her late forties, with a Bohemian’s baggy dress sense and an intellectual’s no-nonsense manner, living with her brother in the windy castello. She normally refused visitors and rarely ventured out, even to promote her own wine, drinking it only “every now and then, when in Florence, perhaps,” professing to like its Bordeaux perfume more than its taste. “At our family meals,” she confessed, “we preferred milk.” Unlike every other winemaker in Chianti, she hadn’t been worried by the brutal summer (her grapes will do well or they won’t), because she was philosophically indifferent to the extremes of weather (“Let nature do what nature does”). She harvested by phases of the moon, unless instructed by certain configurations of the stars, and rejected any practice that seemed too obviously modern: like the use of refrigeration or pumps or air-conditioning or filtering, although one night my wife and I were convinced that, looking across the valley at the castello, we spotted electric lights. At the end of our visit, Maurizia took us into the family’s famous cellar, where wines have completed their fermentation for more than 1,100 years. The cellar, built in the 900s, was the same age as the church.

I have been toying with a theory, one being played out now in this valley. It had originally been put in my mind by Enrico, the Maestro’s son. Enrico occasionally stopped by the butcher shop, but I never had a conversation with him until we attended an event in Montaperti, not far from Siena, to celebrate the anniversary of a battle fought there on September 4th, 1260. Until the advent of firearms, it ranked as one of the Italian peninsula’s most devastating days of war. Ten thousand Florentines were killed, one by one, a detail that Dario relishes with a butcher’s enthusiasm for knives. Dario was the guest of honor. The event featured a lot of Dante, recited in Dario’s gaslight, vaudeville manner to uproarious applause. There was also a performance by one of the last practitioners of a mournful, singsongy troubadour-like bellowing. The bellower was from Pistoia and pretended to make it up as he went along: a “spontaneous” two-line rhyme, followed by a new couplet and then the original rhyme. The structure was something like this:

I am an old man who is very boring,

I know you know this because you’re snoring,

What can I do? This is my medium,

Which seems like a poem but is actually tedium,

Besides, this is no game, with lots of scoring,

Just a drunk old man who is very, very boring.

The evening was interminable and I remember little about it, except for a brief exchange with Enrico about his olive oil. I wanted to know why it was so good.

“There are two reasons,” Enrico said. “
When
I pick and
what
I pick. Nothing else matters.”

Enrico begins his harvest in September, when common sense suggests that your trees should be left alone. In September, the olives are green and hard. Most people pick in late November or December. “Ten to twelve weeks later, the olives are swollen and full of juice. The more juice you get, the more oil you can bottle, the more money you make,” Enrico said. “But for me, the olive is bloated. It is pulpy and full of water.” The fruit is like “mush,” his father’s word. “As a result, the oil is thin. You have volume, but no intensity. For me, intensity is everything. For me, less is more. My oil is very, very intense.”

Enrico has a thousand trees, but he picks only half of them. “The others are too young.” He sells off the olives from the younger trees or lets them fall and rot, but his tone said that only a contemptuous sniveling snail of a human being, without pride or dignity, and not a true Tuscan, would make oil from a young tree. “I’m not making oil to make money,” Enrico said.

(I wonder if I need to stop here and acknowledge that exchanges of this sort were becoming fairly familiar. I quote Enrico as though he were a perfectly normal human being. But occasionally, as I nodded in a socially affirmative way, saying nothing, patiently listening to sentiments of this kind—like, “I’m not interested in bizzzness,” or “I don’t care if the weather ruins my grapes” or “I do this only for the smell”—I had to hit an imaginary pause button, as I’ve just done now, and admit to myself that there was nothing normal about what I was hearing. Sometimes when I was having these pause-button-like reflections, I wondered what made these people into hill-poet freaks. Was it not eating enough vegetables when children? An excess of protein? I wanted to scream: Hey, you there, Enrico! Don’t you like island holidays and flat-screen televisions? Don’t you like money?)

Enrico’s olive oil, I can testify, is very good, but there are a lot of good olive oils, made by other nutty earth artists with no interest in money, obsessed with smell, looking over their shoulders to make sure they’re the first on their mountain to pick their greenly pungent unripe olives, squeezing the tiniest amount of intense juice from their oldest trees. The viscous, gold-green liquid that dribbles out from their stone-like fruit is unlike any other oil I have tasted, and the makers chauvinistically boast that none of it leaves Italy.

For me, these oils have qualities that you also find in the region’s good wines (and there are plenty of good wines—in Chianti, it’s hard to go to bed sober). Giovanni’s best bottling (his Flacianello, named after the Roman village by the old church) is made from old, gnarly, tree trunk–sized, unproductive vines. Like old olive trees, old vines make less fruit, but the grapes produced by them have a grapiness (again
that
intensity) that you don’t get from younger vines. Giovanni’s riserva is very good, but for me the olive oil is the precious thing. Unlike an expensive bottle of wine, a good oil doesn’t improve with age. It is most vibrant just after the olives are crushed. Then its vibrancy dissipates, ineluctably, minute by minute, until it is gone: evanescent, like a season.

My theory is one of smallness. Smallness is now my measure: a variation on all the phrases I’d be hearing, like the Maestro’s “it’s not in the breed but the breeding” or Enrico’s “less is more.” As theories go, mine is pretty crude. Small food—good. Big food—bad. For me, the language we use to talk about modern food isn’t quite accurate or at least doesn’t account for how this Italian valley has taught me to think. The metaphor is usually one of speed: fast food has ruined our culture; slow food will save it (and is the rallying manifesto for the movement of the same name, based in Bra, in northern Italy). You see the metaphor’s appeal. But it obscures a fundamental problem, which has little to do with speed and everything to do with size. Fast food did not ruin our culture. The problem was already in place, systemic in fact, and began the moment food was treated like an inanimate object—like any other commodity—that could be manufactured in increasing numbers to satisfy a market. In effect, the two essential players in the food chain (those who make the food and those who buy it) swapped roles. One moment the producer (the guy who knew his cows or the woman who prepared culatello only in January or the old young man who picks his olives in September) determined what was available and how it was made. The next moment it was the consumer. The Maestro blames the supermarkets, but the supermarkets are just a symptom. (Or, to invoke a familiar piece of retail philosophy: the world changed when the food business agreed that the customer was right, when, as we all know, the customer is actually—well, not always right.) What happened in the food business has occurred in every aspect of modern life, and the change has produced many benefits. I like island holidays and flat-screen televisions and have no argument with global market economics, except in this respect—in what it has done to food.

The watery eggs Gianni bought when he fell asleep after lunch: big food. Granny’s eggs sold under the counter to Panzano regulars: small food. The pig I brought home on my scooter: small food, even if it was in such big food quantities I couldn’t finish it. A ham from a chemically treated animal that has spent its life indoors in a scientifically controlled no-movement pen (every cut perfectly identical as though made by a machine): big food. The so-called ricotta in a supermarket: big food, don’t touch it. The ricotta in Lou di Palo’s shop in New York’s Little Italy—cheaper than the supermarket stuff, but because Lou is in the back making it and not at the counter serving you’ll have to wait an hour before you get any: small food. (Even in New York there are a few people in no hurry because you’re just a customer and therefore a dickhead.) Actually, Lou’s cheese is both small food and slow food; in fact, very, very slow food. But these are exceptions.

Italians have a word,
casalinga,
homemade, although its primary sense is “made by hand.” My theory is just a variant of casalinga. (Small food: by hand and therefore precious, hard to find. Big food: from a factory and therefore cheap, abundant.) Just about every preparation I learned in Italy was handmade
and
involved my learning how to use my own hands differently. My hands were trained to roll out dough, to use a knife to break down a thigh, to make sausage or lardo or polpettone. With some techniques, I had to make my hands small, like Betta’s. With others, I made them big, like the Maestro’s. The hands, Dario says, are everything. With them, cooks express themselves, like artists. With them, they make food that people use their hands to eat. With the hands, Dario passes on to me what he learned from his father. With the hands, Betta gives me her aunts. The hands of Miriam’s mother, her grandmothers. The hands of Dario’s grandfather, the great-grandfather he never met, except indirectly, in what was passed on through his hands.