Butchering a pig, Tuscan style

Ever want to know what goes into that rustic Italian sopressata? Ever want to go to your local greenmarket and drive away with a whole pig carcass draped over your Vespa? Here's a great article by Bill Burford about learning how to butcher a pig from Dario Cecchini, the man who inspired his Babbo-ness, Mario Batali.

In one passage, Buford describes an old Tuscan recipe for the pig's hind legs, called proscuitti.

You started by breaking the legs down into their major muscles, using your fingers to find “the seams.” The Maestro had taken me through the process and created a road map of sorts. The result was a bowl of pork pieces—around a dozen. Next, you brined them by tipping an abundance of salt into a bucket of water and swirling until it half dissolved into a soupy paste. Two days later, you removed the pieces and cooked them slowly in white wine, leaving them to cool overnight before storing them in olive oil in the morning. The pieces, half cured, wine-flavored, and submerged in oil, keep for a year.

The recipe, I now appreciate, was probably devised to clean up problem pork during the hot months. In general, you don’t kill pigs in the summer unless they’re ill, and Dario once let slip that the contadino had used the recipe for his sick pigs—not the kind of information a butcher forthrightly shares with his customers. (“Here, try this, a bit of diseased pork I incinerated.”) In the event, what Dario did or didn’t say was immaterial, because no one bought it. Who wants fat (pork) in fat (oil)? But the meat was actually lean, with the texture of fish, and in a moment of marketing clarity he renamed it tonno (tuna) del Chianti. In 2001, the Ministry of Agriculture recognized it as a food unique to the region, and today you find it on restaurant menus throughout Chianti. I prepare it with beans, lemon, and olive oil—like tuna.

A good, brief profile of this famous butcher of Chianti, without any blood or guts, can be found here. Dario's recipe for Florentine roast beef is here.