Besides the beef, the dish has four ingredients—pepper, garlic, salt, and a bottle of Chianti—and a simple instruction: put everything in a pot, stick it in the oven before you go to bed, take it out when you wake up. Beef cooked in red wine is ubiquitous, and every European country has its version, but nowhere will you find one more elementary. It helps to recognize what’s
not
in it: there are no sauce-enhancing vegetables (no carrots, celery, or onions), no broth, no herbs. There is no water. There is no fat—not even olive oil. There are no salty intensifiers like bacon or pancetta or olives. There is no orange zest. There is no browning of the meat. It is five ingredients plopped into a pot and cooked all night. (Thus the name:
peposo notturno
—“pepperiness by night.”)
The secret is in the cut, the shin, which you prepare by using all the knife techniques taught to me by the Maestro: the point cut, to separate the major muscles; the dagger cut, to remove the shinbone; the silver sliver, to eliminate the gnarly stuff; and the scrape-and-slice, to reduce the connective tissue. At home, I cook two shanks at once and use four heaping tablespoons of coarsely ground pepper. (Dario uses more, but his peposo is so peppery it makes Teresa cry.) I add a tablespoon of sea salt, plus a bulb of garlic, start the oven hot and turn it down to two hundred degrees. After two hours, the meat is cooked. After four, it has the chewy mouth-feel of a stew. Over the course of the next eight hours, the dish gets darker and the smaller bits break down into a thick sauce, until, finally, at a point between a solid and a liquid, it is peposo. It smells of wine and lean meat and pepper. You serve it with a rustic white bread and a glass of a simple red, preferably the one you cooked with—once again, the three elements of Giovanni Manetti’s Tuscan soul: the beef, the bread, the wine. The taste is a revelation: it seems impossible that something so deeply flavored can be made with so little. When I eat it, I find myself using words like “clean,” “natural,” or “healthy”—none of which is among conventional descriptions of meat. In this dish, I rediscovered a commonplace that I’ve long heard but never really believed: that the most worked muscles have the most flavor, provided you learn how to cook them.
26
I
N THE
M
AESTRO,
I found a tranquillity I hadn’t witnessed before: a patience, a sense of order, a stable relationship to a world that was old and trustworthy. This was new to me. It was also very different from the rest of the butcher shop. At the best of times, Dario was not one of the planet’s more serene individuals. (“It is my affliction, I have too much passion, I don’t know how to control it.”) As it happens, he was, on my return, even more unstable than normal. He and Ann Marie had split up, and Dario was either sullen and morose or unpredictable and manic. He seemed to be heartbroken. Then he seemed to be newly in love. He was probably both. At dawn, just after the meat was delivered, he would sit outside on a curb, memorizing poetry. When he finally entered the shop, it was to play Elvis love songs. Every day began with “Love Me Tender.” Actually, there were many “Love Me Tender”s in a row, sometimes a whole uninterrupted morning of “Love Me Tender”s, before he would relent and move on to “It’s Now or Never.”
“Melancholy,” the Maestro said without explanation.
Dario’s condition was hard on customers. One day, he wanted to show off his horns, including a multivalved instrument that played the three-note siren of an Italian emergency vehicle. The last time he’d used it was on a visit to Grossetto, in southern Tuscany, to see a friend, Simon (a characteristic Dario charity case, a middle-aged man with the emotional age of a child, living in an assisted care accommodation). After lunch, Dario led Simon out into the main piazza, and they played police cars, the two of them alternating blowing into the siren instrument, until the real police showed up and told them to stop.
Dario blew into the instrument. It was loud and sounded so siren-like that it provoked in me a feeling of panic, as though I needed to get out of the way quickly. Dario’s eyes were glistening. He’d had, I suppose, a tad too much red wine at the family meal. There was a bottle of Jack Daniel’s on a shelf. He drank bountifully from it and walked outside.
Panzano is too small to have a police force, so when Dario blew his siren there was no official to stop him. So he didn’t stop. People appeared in the street, summoned by the urgent blaring. Dario blew and drank some more Jack Daniel’s and didn’t notice a man trying to get his attention. The man was in his sixties—wool trousers, a matching jacket, good shoes—with a moustache and a civilized manner. He made an effort to be noticed, but Dario was noticing nothing. In his excitement, he was probably blind. He blew, drank more Jack Daniel’s, and blew again.
“Please,” the man said, and stepped forthrightly in front of Dario. “You are Dario Cecchini, are you not? May I introduce myself? I have driven from Monaco to see you.” Monaco was a long way away.
Dario nodded vaguely and took a hit of the bourbon.
“You are very famous. Did you know that there was a long article about you in
Le Figaro
?”
Dario shrugged. “It’s possible,” he said and turned slightly. The man was in Dario’s way. He blew, drank, and wiped his mouth with his sleeve.
“
Le Figaro
says you are very good,” the man persisted. “It says you are the best butcher in the world. That’s why I’ve driven all this way. To meet the best butcher in the world.”
Dario dropped his siren instrument to his side and stared at the man with blurry intensity. Then he laughed. “Ha! Ha! Ha!” It was more a coarse bellow than a laugh, inches from the man’s face. “Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!” He turned to me and said, “I am a nightmare!” He looked back at the man and blew into the siren instrument.
The man retreated, disappointed, and walked back to his car.
One busy Saturday, Dario was serving a woman about to purchase her first bistecca who then asked him if the meat was good.
“E’ buona?”
Dario said, his voice rising theatrically with exaggerated indignation.
“Non lo so. Proviamo.”
(I don’t know—let’s find out.) So he took a bite—the woman’s raw purchase—chewed it melodramatically, swallowed, said, “Yes, it’s good,” wrapped it up, and gave the woman her change. The woman, aghast, took her package and fled. The consequence was that several people asked Dario if he would take a bite out of their steaks as well—as though his teeth marks were an autograph. “Please,” one man said, “it’s for my wife.”
When the atmosphere was jovial, exchanges like this could be jolly. But there could be real tension. Twice, I feared a fight. “No! No! No!” Dario shouted at a man who had wanted a smaller piece of meat than what had been offered him. “What’s for sale is what’s on view, and if you don’t like what you see you can go. You are in my territory. You are not welcome. In fact, you should leave. Good-bye.” I had to remind myself I was in a food shop. Even in New York (once famous for its rudeness, now stuck in a condition of permanent impatience), I had never seen anything like it. There, a retailer, however jaded, still pretends to honor the shopkeeper’s code that a customer is always right. Dario followed a much blunter, take-no-prisoners philosophy that actually the customer is a dick.
O
NE DAY
, I was looking at Dario’s display case (“what’s for sale is what you see”) and realized there were no lamb chops. There were also no birds, not even a chicken. There was no meat for stewing. There was no wild boar or rabbit or hare, although Tuscany was known for its game. For the first time, I saw that most of the items you go to a butcher shop to buy weren’t there. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed this until now except (as my Babbo polenta lesson had taught me) you sometimes have to be in a place a long time before you see it.
What I saw now was what Dario called “my works”
(le mie opere),
which I’d been reluctant to acknowledge because it sounded so pretentious. But that was what you got: a butcher and his works. I remembered the earful I’d got when I’d suggested that the butcher shop was a business—an innocent enough assumption when you think about it. What I had actually said was a question: What will happen when Dario dies? It had probably come out wrong. I wasn’t meaning to dwell on Dario’s dying. The point was theoretical: a feature of a good business, in the United States anyway, was its ability to function without the main guy.
Dario exploded. “What are you talking about? I don’t have a good bizzzness. I have a bad bizzzness. I am not interested in a good bizzzness.” “Business” in Italian is
commercio,
but Dario preferred his own mutilation of the English, with its corrupting sense of foreignness, hissing the sibilants as though he were about to spit. “I do not want to be Mario Batali,” he said, punching the “B” in Batali like an air bag. “I am repelled by marketing. I am an artisan. I work with my hands. My model is from the Renaissance. The bodega. The artist workshop. Giotto. Raphael. Michelangelo. These are my inspirations. Do you think they were interested in bizzzness?”
By now, I’d eaten all of Dario’s meat, and I can testify: it is very good. It is the best meat I’ve eaten. But it is not a painting by Michelangelo. It’s dinner. You eat it; it’s gone.
And yet as I stood there, suddenly taking in the display case, I had to admit that the food had something of an artist’s purposefulness. Every item there made a point. Some foods had long and complex preparations, like the red pepper mostarda, which took a whole day to make, or the beef “sushi” (a raw beef preparation made with “very good olive oil”), which took a morning, or the “Tuscan tuna,” which took nearly a week. But every item
really
was a “work,” even ones that seemed very simple.
There was no ham or pork loin, for instance, but you could always buy a pork chop. Why? Because the chop was covered with fennel pollen. (Pork chop—
no;
pork chop with intense expression of nearby hills, according to a classic combination, now seldom seen—
yes.
) You couldn’t buy a leg of lamb, but at Easter you could get a baby lamb’s shoulder—delicate, the color of a pink flower, boned and rolled up with rosemary and pecorino, the local cheese made with sheep’s milk: “the milk of the mother with the meat of the child” seeming to violate some unspoken code of meat eating but, according to Dario, a Roman preparation as old as the Mediterranean. (Conventional lamb cut—
no;
neglected cut plus unique ingredient, according to ancient recipe—
yes.
) In northern Italy, you see
polpettone
everywhere: a meat loaf cooked in a bread tray and made from a fatty cut. Dario’s was different. The meat was the shank (once again), ground fine, mixed with red onion, garlic, and egg, and rolled into a large ball: in fact, it was gigantic. Why? Once, making it with Dario, I overheard his muttering, “It’s a family dish, a family dish, it has to look like the family bread loaf.” He had a picture in his mind, a family supper served at the end of the week: that’s when you ate your polpettone, because Tuscan bread was normally baked at the beginning of the week, and this used the leftovers. And, apart from the shank, the essential ingredient was that stale bread: lots of it, crushed and smacked into the meatball, slapped, spanked, thwacked, until the crumbs formed a thick yeasty skin. The result, when “baked,” looked like a peasant loaf: round, brown, and crusty. (Conventional polpettone—
no;
rustic, mutant dinosaur egg evocative of country living—
yes.
)
One night, Dario woke up troubled by the thought that his message was not getting across. It was cold, he said, three in the morning, with an icy light from a full moon filling up the bedroom of Il Greppo. He got up as though summoned and began writing. “I am not an author, but there are things people should understand.” He made a list of his twenty most important works and wrote a page about each. He called the collection a
Breviario,
an ecclesiastical word used to describe a book of prayers. “It should be small enough to fit in your back pocket.” Dario can’t type; his letters are done by Miriam (a “retired poetess,” another charity, the one who is paid to come in to read the newspapers); and after Miriam had typed Dario’s text she gave me a copy. It was, predictably enough, informed by a high sense of purpose: dedicated to the Maestro (“who taught me the quality of meat and…made me into a man”), it opens with a declaration of principles (“I am an artisan!”), and concludes with a promise to the reader that, in eating these dishes, “your life will be improved.”
It is not a recipe book and only intermittently describes the dishes. Instead, it is a defense, an apologia for why each one matters. The accounts have a tendency to wax a little purple (the herbal salt, “the perfume of Chianti,” expresses, in its heady fragrances, “the roots of our soil” and “the love that moves the sun and stars”). Some are more personal (the polpettone is cooked according to “the rhythm of bread”—an elegant invocation of a village’s baking routine—and was first made for Dario by his Aunt Tosca). Much of it is characteristically brazen: for those who can’t endure the unmitigated carnality of Dario’s braised shank (the bone is removed and replaced by the marrow and cooked in a pot of caramelizing shallots), Dario sanctifies it by splashing it with vin santo—Tuscany’s sweet “sacred” wine. In fact, the book isn’t really about the food of the butcher shop but about how to visit it. It was a user’s guide, addressed to strangers, the uninitiated who came to Panzano expecting a butcher.
I wondered if I was glimpsing Dario’s secret. Fundamentally, he didn’t want to be a butcher, and therefore if he had to be one—because of patrimony or family or simply because he had no choice—then he would be unlike any butcher you’d ever met. His was a calling, not a trade—he was an artisan, not a laborer—and his “works” were about history and self and being Tuscan and only indirectly about dinner. They amounted, ultimately, to a tortured response to grief, and the “works” had become Dario’s way of remaining in touch, physically (those giant hands), with those who are no longer with him. When you came to his shop, he didn’t want you to see a butcher—and wouldn’t be able to say why—but he knew what you should see instead: an artist, whose subject was loss.