Take
a "boned-steak, about one or two fingers high, cut from the veal
loin […], put it on the grill over a burning charcoal fire, just
the way it comes from the animal or at the most, having rinsed and dried
it; turn it over several times, dress it with salt and pepper when it
is done and serve it with a small dab of butter on top."
This is how the great Pellegrino Artusi described the preparation of
the Florentine steak about one hundred years ago. He doesn’t tell
us anything about the veal because it would have been useless to go
into detail: obviously in Tuscany the real Florentine steak could only
come from the Chianina breed of cow.
This very ancient breed, probably of Umbrian-Etruscan origin, has been
raised in the middle valley of the Tiber and the Chiana valley for at
least twenty-two centuries. Fine and powerful with a white porcelain-like
coat, short horns and small head, these cows have a long, cylindrical-shaped
body with wide back and loins and long, perfectly perpendicular legs.
At Fattoria Poggio Alloro in San Gimignano the calves, after the first
six months of milk-feeding, are weaned with a "diet" of flours
made from corn, wheat and barley grown only by certain companies as
well as with hay in the winter and grass in the summer. Butchered when
they reach eighteen months and about seven hundred kilos in weight,
the calves have a lean meat, with a lovely light-red color, a fine grain
and renowned tenderness.
Thirty years ago there were four-hundred-thousand heads of Chianina
beef cattle in Italy whereas today they number less than one hundred
thousand. They are always threatened by the competition from meat of
foreign breeds which costs less because the animals are of inferior
quality.
There are reports that in the Abruzzo National Park the lynx, long considered
extinct, is making a comeback. To avoid the extinction of Chianina cows,
we must contribute actively: when we go to buy a fiorentina, let’s
not say "the one that costs the least!". Instead let’s
take home a good kilo or more of Chianina steak. It only needs to be
cooked a few minutes so that, "when it is cut, it should send out
plenty of juices onto the plate" (again, Artusi’s words).
It can be enjoyed with a good glass of Chianti. As an old wise man in
my town used to say: life is short, destiny is ironic and at table it’s
always better to have remorse than regret.
WILD BOAR
SALAME
Ugo
Tognazzi, who was an expert on cooking and love, used to say that
for food to become an aphrodisiac it had to be helped along by our
imagination even if, he had to admit, that "doubtless certain
foods like game, oysters and red pepper are better suited than others
for encounters of love." The only cuts he used from wild boar
were the loin (for stews) and the leg, marinated and braised "Ugo-style".
A glass of Barolo Zonchetta from Ceretto for the first dish and a
Tignanello di Antinori for the leg would complete his rite of seduction.
To these preparations I would like to add another that I tried out
myself in a Tuscan bed and breakfast farm some time ago. Take a slice
of Tuscan bread, baked in a wood-burning oven, and lightly toast it
over the coals; spread it with a veil of creamy butter and cover with
thin slices of wild boar sausage. It is a sure success!
If finding the wild boar sausage is an impediment, I recommend the
"Buca di Montauto" in San Gimignano which prepares some
excellent ones: natural; made with Chianti, Vernaccia or Brunello
wines; "creative" with myrtle berries that grow naturally
in nearby woods, with summertime black truffles or with walnuts. These
sausages are made with meat from the stomach and shoulder of boars
raised in the semi-wild and fed exclusively on barley and wheat germ
and, in the summer, on plums, prunes and tomatoes. The meat is carefully
cleaned of all fat (since its "wild" taste might ruin the
sausages’ flavor) and ground to a medium consistency together
with fat from pork bacon. The mixture is seasoned and stuffed into
pork guts, left to ripen several days in a warm place and then to
mature for a period of one to two months according to the size of
the sausages.
