Some Tuscan meals and thoughts on Bistecca alla Fiorentina

  Tuscany is arguably the birthplace of foodies. Dante’s ill-fated brigata spendereccia (“the Spendthrift Brigade”) that appear in the pages of The Inferno, ate and drank themselves to destruction. In reality, they were based on a set of idle rich aristocrats from Siena who Dante considered outlandish because they larded their roast pheasants or served partridge stuffed with cloves. It is also claimed they commissioned the first modern cookbooks to recount their excesses. Tuscans remain inordinately proud and protective of their culinary traditions with many still mistakenly believing Catherine de’ Medici was responsible for virtually inventing French cuisine by taking a retinue of Florentine chefs to France when she went to marry the future Henri II.

   I was a relative latecomer to Tuscany, having only visited the place for the first time in my forties. (Curiously, it was at this house party that I first encountered Matthew Fort.  He was in charge of the food and I looked after the wine) It was partly because I had spent my formative years living and travelling throughout Asia. I felt relaxed about Tuscany as I knew it would still be there when I had more time on my hands. Also, I like to slightly ration pleasurable experiences to avoid sensory over-exposure. This meant on my first trip to the Baptistery in Florence, I deliberately refrained from entering the interior. Besides, I wanted a good incentive to return.

 I am hardly the first Anglo-Saxon to respond to Tuscany’s allure  – in the twentieth century, it was home to Sir Harold Acton, the ultimate dandy-aesthete, who lived for most of his life at La Pietra, the family estate near Florence. At the other end of Tuscany - and the sexual spectrum - there was Lord Lambton, the British politician who thought it prudent to decamp from London in 1973 after he was photographed in bed with two prostitutes while smoking a joint. He set himself up in the Chigi’s magnificent Villa Cetinale outside Siena, where he lived contently for more than 30 years with his aristocratic mistress. He managed to jog along with a handful of well-trained staff and a repertoire of only two Italian words: “capito” and “grazie”. Oddly, he also loathed garlic.

Most people flock to Tuscany because of its incomparable art, breathtaking architecture and exquisite countryside. The cultural and physical richness of the region attracts me too, but the quality of its food, both at the upper reaches and on the street level, also has a powerful pull.

                                         Interior of Enoteca Pinchiorri

The epicentre for haute cuisine in Tuscany is Enoteca Pinchiorri, the only three-star Michelin establishment there. Located in a Florentine palazzo, the food is influenced by French tradition, which is hardly surprising given that chef Annie Féolde was born there. There is no such localism when it comes to the wine list, which is one of the world’s greatest, with virtually every notable wine around the globe represented among its 150,000-bottle cellar. I once spent an entire morning roaming amongst the bottles, which are formed into pyramidical stacks.

                                                                Giorgio

     Giorgio Pinchiorri, the owner, has a playful side, which manifested itself once when I was dining with Burton Anderson, perhaps the greatest foreign expert on Italian wine. Giorgio came over with a masked bottle of Mouton-Rothschild 1982, one of the iconic vintages of this famous Chateau; poured each of us a glass and asked Burton to pronounce. After a studious amount of sucking and slurping, he declared it was “a Super-Tuscan from 1990”.

   The joys of eating in Tuscany are not just at the very highest end – in 1991, after my first visit to Enoteca Pinchiorri followed by an expensive dinner on the terrace of the Villa San Michele in Fiesole, my then girlfriend and I were virtually penniless.



The next day we bought a kilogram of figs with our remaining coins and literally sat in the gutter experiencing near-blissful contentment at what remain the most luscious figs we have ever eaten.

   To check out the current state of Tuscany’s produce, I went on an olive oil seminar at Villa Campestri, (see my previous post http://www.gastroenophile.com/2012/02/villa-campestri-and-amorolio-adventures.html) whose way of diverting us between our studies was to take us to interesting restaurants in northern Tuscany.

We made a visit to the cast-iron central market in Florence, which was purpose built in the late nineteenth century when Florence was vying to remain the capital of a united Italy. Now surrounded by the usual cheap stalls selling tatty clothing and leather goods, the interior has kept its standards, with exceptional wine merchants,

fresh fruit suppliers, fish and meat purveyors 

and specialist shops selling all sorts of funghi or tripe.

There were also some excellent purveyors of sweets if that is your cup of Lapsang Souchong.

For those with a strong constitution, there is a century-old restaurant called Nerbone, which makes lampredotto, essentially a cow’s stomach sandwich with salsa verde and spicy sauce. I was impressed to see a steady stream of Japanese tourists line up for this challenging dish and then record their bravery on digital cameras.

  

                                                                Benedetta outside Zibibbo

On the very edge of Florence, up a narrow lane just beyond the old city walls, there is an excellent restaurant called Zibibbo, run by Benedetta Vitali, the former wife of the owner of Cibreo, another authentic establishment in the centre of Florence.

Benedetta serves fine Tuscan dishes such as Inzimini di Calamari, a stew of squid and kale with recently pressed olive oil plus some dishes from Sicily, which she especially admires. Like most good restaurants in Tuscany, there is a wide variety of local wines, but

what makes Zibibbo special is that there are also impressive wines from Burgundy and Bordeaux at acceptable prices.  This willingness to offer the best wines of other countries is testament to a certain maturity and confidence in the local product. For me, Tuscan wines are not generous when young and they invariably improve when consumed with food. There is a tannic edge even to the best quality Chianti Classico or Brunello di Montalcino wines that dominates the aftertaste, unless one is eating something substantial that can neutralize its impact.

Then, for a change of scene, we travelled into the Appenines in Northern Tuscany, just beyond the notorious Gothic Line, where Hitler’s Armies made their last stand during the Italian Campaign. Even though it is only 30 or so miles from Florence, it takes nearly two hours to traverse the steep hills which divide Tuscany from Emilia-Romagna. It almost seemed like somewhere in central Europe rather than Tuscany.

Here there is a rustic place called Locanda Senio, where a husband-and-wife team serve their own vegetables and homemade hams and sausages.

Their speciality is Culatello di Zibello, one of the finest cured hams in Italy, which is encased in a pig’s bladder and aged for up to a year in their cellar.

Outside in the narrow streets, the villagers were holding their annual Marrone Fair, in honour of the local Marrone del Mugello, a large sweet chestnut.

We were the only non-Italians present at the celebrations, the highlight of which was a bearded man wearing priestly garb who appeared to be auditioning to become a latter-day St Francis of Assisi. He had a pigeon perched on his shoulder, next to a donkey with a white rabbit and ancient rooster on its back while a goose, dog and tame goat ambled between them all.

                                 The author consuming a Fiorentina in Roma

Although I have eaten Bistecca alla Fiorentina (a Florentine T-Bone steak) on several occasions, this time I decided to visit the butcher who has become almost as well known as this famous Tuscan speciality – Dario Cecchini in Panzano, Chianti.

His tiny butcher shop is constantly crammed with curious tourists, who eagerly consume the free salami and terrine samples along with glasses of Chianti. Dario seems perfectly happy to entertain the crowd with verses of Dante’s Divine Comedy, music which veers between Italian opera and Jimi Hendrix along with knife displays as he hacks a leg of beef into its manifold parts while Japanese tourists suck their breath in and shout their approval.

He declares that because Bistecca alla Fiorentina is one of the great pleasures of life “it follows that this dish cannot be improved upon nor modernised because it is perfect as it is and thus untouchable”.

While it may be sacrosanct in its cooking technique, Dario is quite happy to break with tradition when it comes to using the Chianina cow, the white-coloured traditional breed for the dish. “I must say that the Chianina is a fine breed but ultimately what is more important is the search for quality,” which means he uses an organically reared cow from Catalonia in Spain.


Although Dario professes admiration for Bistecca alla Fiorentina, his real passion is for using the entire offerings of his animals. “Being a butcher, I never like to waste any cut of the animal. For me, the best part is the tenerumi, or the knee of the cow.”

Just opposite the butcher shop is his simple restaurant, where he serves all number of obscure and wonderful portions of the cow, including one dish called ramerino in culo, or as his menu puts it “rosemary up your bum” – roughly minced buttock cheek with sprigs of rosemary. Another admirable dish was Tenerumi in salata, which was gelatinous portions of beef knee in salad.



There were a total of 10 courses, including perfectly cooked roast beef and an array of braised meats with onions, plus water and wine all for the princely sum of €30. He also positively encourages people to bring their own wine without asking for corkage – almost unheard of in the rest of Italy. Given that the Fontodi estate is right next door, this is a very tempting offer. Dario sees his role as an ambassador for consuming the entire animal, not just the 40 or so bistecca alla Fiorentina’s that come from a single beast. “I like to take on the responsibility of using every ingredient well, to show people the whole animal. This is an awakening experience similar to that described in the opening verses of the Divine Comedy.” How can one not approve such a description?

He believes that “the Fiorentina is a celebration of food in Tuscany – a noble cut – and means of sharing the very best thing, but that is not the dish in itself. Usually for the cook, the dish is the goal but in Tuscany it the means of sharing with friends, which represents a very different philosophy than simply creating an individual dish. It is the joy, it is the rebirth (Renaissance) – it is not a philosophy of the search for perfection. This is actually Etruscan philosophy – to enjoy together this gift – it is not an egoistic philosophy.”

Dario then explained that “French and bourgeois cuisine is about the search for status – whoever was richer, ate better, but the Tuscan idea is that you eat richer when you eat together. For the Tuscan, a banquet of 40 people with a big fireplace and a grill – this is paradise on earth – it is our religion.”

He was quite specific about the characteristics of it too: “It has to be thick, the best quality, from an animal that lead a good life and it has to have a good death and then hang for 30 days.” He also believes that there are only at best six perfect bistecca's on his animals, given that he likes them to be somewhat thicker than convention would have it - between one and a half to two kilos.

                                                  One of Dario's Chianina

However, the biggest shock was that while he has a small herd of Chianina on the edge of the famous Fontodi Chianti estate, the beef he prefers is not even from Tuscany, but Catalonia in Spain. He thinks these cattle have better characteristics for cooking than the native variety and has been importing them for several years.

Artusi describes the Bistecca quite well in his nineteenth century book (the best English edition of which is published by the University of Toronto Press)

Another devotee is Bob Hughes, the greatest art critic of his time, who adored bistecca all fiorentina, “the mighty long-aged beefsteak at least two inches thick, which, rubbed with oil and sprinkled abundantly with sea salt (and nothing else: pepper could come later), would be flung on a raging-hot grill like the martyred St. Lawrence, searing it almost black on the outside but blue-red and still veined with white fat within. You could not dispose of a fiorentinasingle-handed unless you were Gargantua himself, or perhaps one of those formidable, long-dead mercenary leaders with horseback names like Giovanni Acuto or Castuccio di Castracane. Because it took two to eat it, it was, despite its size, an intimate dish, and definitely not one for delicate appetites, especially since it came garnished with a mound of potatoes, boiled, cut up into irregular chunks (no effetely exact parallel slices, please), and sautéed to a golden crust interspersed with garlic, and another mound of spinach moistened with glugs of Tuscan olive oil. Simple and direct, but one gets the point. (Things I didn’t Know by Robert Hughes London 2006 p.343)

In order to put the quality of Dario's Spanish beef to the test, I decided to cook one from Dario and another original Chianina. We drove on for an hour or so to visit Claudio Lunghini, a third generation butcher on the edge of Cortona, which is where Chianina cattle are said to actually originate from.

“The demand is very great,” said Signor Lunghini – “in fact it is more than what is available as there are only about 40 bistecca’s available on an animal if you cut them quit big.” He slaughters about 12 annually from his herd of 35, but has no objection to others using different breeds. “Anatomically, you can make it with other beef – there is no law that says you have to have Chianina. If I need more, there are a couple of other places in Tuscany I use. We have always raised them in stalls in the Val di Chiana, not in pasture. In the Casentino (north of Arezzo) they raise them on pasture but the meat is probably healthier but it is much tougher.

They were in danger of disappearing in the Sixties because tractors took over a lot of their functions and as they are not a good animal for commercial production, it has became a niche product which because of its price, will never have a mass attraction.”

                                         Chianina on the left, Catalonian on the right

Both butchers had provided me with prime cuts, which they had butchered from the untouched sides of beef, with the Spanish one having hung for 30 days and the Chianina for 10 days less.

I was staying at my friend Nancy Jenkins exquisite farmhouse about half an hour east of Cortona, which has uninterrupted views over the countryside right down the Arno Valley.

The first task to perform before being able to compare and contrast the two bistecca’s was to create a bed of hot coals over which to grill them. Fortunately Nancy’s farmhouse has a cavernous fireplace with a number of metallic grills, which craftily raise and fall to within a whisker of the embers I created after burning logs for two hours.

Mindful of the advice from Dario about no seasoning before grilling, I merely placed them both on the fiery grill for an initial two minutes hovering over the heat. Curiously, Dario’s was quickly engulfed in flames, caused I presume by it releasing more fat than the other, which caused them to leap up and thus release more fat and become a vicious circle. After some anxious moments, given that one steak was marginally thicker than the other, it was time to move them higher for a further five minutes before resting them for 12 minutes before putting them each to the flavour test.

Both were cooked perfectly, with a wedge of very rare meat in the centre. We followed tradition and sprinkled on them some absolute fresh extra virgin olive oil from Vila Campestri. Apart from Nancy and myself, the other two participants were long-term English and American residents in Tuscany. The conclusion of all four participants in the taste test was that the Spanish version definitely had more flavour and was also more succulent, doubtless because of the additional fat. The following day, once the remnants had cooled, it was impossible to judge which was superior, which was a pleasing result as I would hate to think that a two thousand year-old tradition could be upset merely by using a different breed of cow.

The next few days were spent just idling plus a visit to Montepulciano for lunch at La Grotta with a neighbouring foodie. Papardella and duck were all that I can recall.

                                         Final course using my newly acquired knife from Tuscany


A shorter version of this story appeared in Newsweek last November 2011
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/11/06/a-gourmand-s-trip-to-tuscany.html