Steak - Mark Schatzker [65]
The road out of Agropoli ended at the church of devil worship, which was formerly a monastery of considerable magnificence but had been abandoned long ago. Judging by the freshness of the graffiti, the devil worship was a recent development, but decline had been setting in for decades, if not centuries. The stone walls were ensnared by roots so gnarled as to look arthritic, and the building had been half digested by the slow-moving earth. You could count the remaining roof tiles, but crossbeams still spanned the distance between the walls, holdouts against the forces of rot. We peeked inside long-disused rooms that smelled sweet with decay and floated theories as to why the monks had left. Walking inside anyone’s home, inhabited or abandoned, creates an immediate and sometimes uncomfortable intimacy. To me it felt as if we were rummaging through the affairs of the dead. Tilde, who does this sort of thing all the time—she is an archaeologist in a country speckled with abandoned buildings—saw things on the bright side. She pointed out the wild roses in bloom. She picked mulberries off a tree, and I ate the same sweet fruit that had been enjoyed, presumably, by monks. She found wild fennel growing, then a bush with yellow flowers she called ginestra. None of this surprised Mario, who seemed to know his way around. Podolica cows, he said, eat all the wild herbs, flowers, and berries.
“The flavors are present in their meat,” he said.
“Of course,” Tilde said.
Snakes were probably everywhere, but the infestation was most extreme, according to Mario, on a series of grown-over rock terraces that led from the monastery toward the sea. As long as I stuck to the dirt path, I was told, I would not be bitten. We saw patties of Podolica manure, and it was evident by their placement that the cows did not stick to the dirt path. It led us to a couple of superbly old stone houses in the same sort of condition as the monastery. One was used for smoking and aging a traditional cheese called caciocavallo, which is made from Podolica milk. The fireplace was blackened from years of cheese-smoking. In a yard outside, a mother Podolica had been corralled. Her name was Badessa, and standing next to her was her little calf, Giacomino, so fresh to this world that his umbilical cord was still attached and dangling almost to the ground. The ax-wielding cowherd was back. His name was Nicola, he turned out to be Mario’s brother, and he was now going to demonstrate how a human gets milk from a semi-wild cow. Nicola tied Badessa’s head to one tree and her hind legs to another. He then invited Giacomino, who was all too willing, in for a suckle, a trick I would guess is roughly ten thousand years old. This settled Badessa down, and Nicola crouched down next to Giacomino, grabbed two teats, and began firing squirts of milk into a red pail. None of this was new to Tilde, who told me that when she was a little girl her father would milk the family Podolica and aim little blasts of warm cow’s milk into her open mouth.
Badessa, tied to two different trees, looked helpless but resigned to the situation. I watched Nicola’s pail fill and was struck by a thought: the supermarket dairy aisle is filled with stolen property. When Badessa was released, she didn’t charge us, or attempt to gore Nicola, who stood there casually pouring her milk from the bucket into an empty Coke bottle. She simply walked away, and Giacomino followed. She did what an aurochs would not do: she let us get away with it, which is why there is such a thing as a modern dairy aisle.
Farther down the hillside, we found Podolicas. A big herd, mostly females and young males milling about. The bull was in rough shape. He looked timid and tired, and had long scrapes on his flank and rump. Someone, evidently, had beaten the crap out of him. That