Discovering respect for cattle in the Tuscan countryside.
Gone are the halcyon days of hunting and small-scale farming carried out solely for survival, with man and beast locked in a fateful, deadly dance. Missing are the rituals of thanks and scarce are the recipes of necessity that make use of every piece of the animal. Now, modern man simply frequents the deli counter, purchasing uniform, plastic logs of dubious content, or the meat freezer to pick up perfect beef filets, pumped up and pink, stuffed in styrofoam and handiwrapped for his convenience. A lot of the meat that is eaten today never even sees a human hand during its processing from living being to porterhouse and rib eye. In fact, if the Humane Society’s February 2008 meatpacking exposé of “non-ambulatory” cows being beaten, electrocuted and dragged around by forklift before being illegally slaughtered is anything to go by, man’s relationship with his meat is in serious need of counseling. Where is the love? The respect? Ironically in the same week that the Humane Society was suing the USDA over the aforementioned incident, I found it in Tuscany where I bore witness to a slow revolution offering an alternative model for the treatment and butchering of cattle.
The methods of the butchers of Macelleria Ricci in Trequanda, a small town in the province of Siena in Italy, though simple, today seem revolutionary, bringing dignity to the animals who have given their lives to carry on such engrained local food traditions as bisteca fiorentina, a buttery, grilled porterhouse famous in the area around Florence. What makes Ricci different is simple: speed and size. This operation is small. The storefront, with gleaming cases of elegantly presented cuts, hides nothing more than the sterile, white butchering room in the back. When a carcass comes in from the slaughterhouse, one highly skilled butcher can make his way through the meat in a matter of hours. With only two cows butchered per week, operations stay as slow and as calm as the cows who are raised nearby in the open, free to roam a wide, rolling pasture and graze on fresh grass at their leisure. Only one local breed of cattle enjoys this life and is sequentially butchered at Ricci: the Chianina. The cows themselves, characterized by a porcelain-colored coat and stumpy horns, are among the largest in the world with the record holder weighing in at 1,750 kilograms. It was a wonder therefore, getting to watch a lone butcher take on the massive carcass of one of these noble beasts.
The animal is so massive, in fact, that the only way to manage it whole is to hook it to the ceiling and roll it to its destination on the carving table by way of castors. Once the butcher, a short, slim man, dwarfed further by the enormous beast with which he was wrestling, had removed a section of the hindquarters with a wide, machete-type knife, I realized I was witnessing a rare event in modern meat processing: intimate physical contact between human and animal. His hands moved over the bright flesh, with caresses worthy of any lover, instinctually searching for the path of least resistance for his blade. Then, with swift strokes, he freed the gleaming lean from excess fat and bone, saving both for other applications. Gripping great handfuls of tender tissue, the butcher seemed transformed into some male archetype from our collective human past as he wrenched free the dinosauric femur. He performed his craft in silence, occasionally looking up and smiling with pride as familiar cuts began to emerge from the great, solid, ivory and ruby mass. Echoes of that fateful dance between man and beast reverberated throughout the room as this tiny man performed the last rite of the hunter with the kind of care which implies the deep respect so missing in the meat processing industry of much of the world. The resulting beef that the shop presents to its small clan of faithful customers reflects this healthy man-beast relationship both in theory and in flavor, a fact to which I can attest having sampled the Chianina in its most pure form: raw
Once Ricci’s olive oil-splashed carpaccio had passed my lips, I knew there was something different happening in this shop. Cool and pure, the tender bite of unprocessed meat left a slight metallic sensation on the palate as if the butcher’s knife, in its intimate exploration of the beef had imparted some of its virtues, while the dollop of olive oil seemed to intentionally recall the fresh grass of the Chianina breed’s privileged diet. Certainly something about the small-scale, slowed-down approach of Ricci had transformed their products. Such a revolution in process might not be possible everywhere, but it offers a model of hope for what might be between man and his meat.
