Steak - Mark Schatzker [66]
For Tilde, this trip was just a typical day at the grocery store. On one mountain foray a few years back, she found a seventy-six-year-old grandmother living in a one-room cabin that had been connected only ten years earlier to Italy’s electricity grid for the first time. While the old woman’s husband played the accordion and sang dirty Italian folk songs, the old woman peeled the top off a bucket of lard and pulled out cured pork sausages that were nestled deep inside. On another adventure, Tilde visited a small seaside village near the Amalfi Coast to find a woman who knew an ancient Roman recipe for making sauce out of rotten fish. In the village where Tilde grew up, another old woman—103, on her deathbed—was the last living person who knew an ancient recipe for stuffed cuttlefish. Tilde begged her sister, who still lives there, to ask the woman for the recipe, but her sister considered it unseemly to make such a demand of someone so near passing. Tilde begged again, and eventually the sister complied. Now Tilde—and no one other than Tilde, so far as Tilde knew—possessed the ancient recipe for stuffed cuttlefish. Or so she thought. A few years after writing it down, she was reading a two-thousand-year-old Greek poem, and in it she found the very same preparation.
Back at Iscairia, Tilde poured the Podolica milk out of the old Coke bottle and into a pot. Milk is traditionally associated with whiteness, but this stuff was yellow, so much so that there are sunsets that aspire to less. Tilde spooned a sip. This is a woman, it is worth pointing out, who knows milk, who makes fresh cheese—out of local cow’s or goat’s milk—almost every day of every year. This particular milk educed a state of awe. Tilde spooned another sip and said, almost matter-of-factly, “This is the best milk I have ever used.”
The milk was warmed on the stove to roughly body temperature, and then Tilde added rennet, an enzyme found in the intestines of calves that causes milk to separate into liquid whey and solid curds—which is what you make cheese out of. (All cheese is half-digested stolen milk.) She let it sit for four hours, strained the curds from the whey, and poured the curds into little round forms, which is what gives the Italians their word for cheese: formaggio. Now we had little disks of the freshest, purest cheese in all of Italy.
It was eaten as a first course at dinner, accompanied by nothing more than a fork, and it registered a blast of milkiness so intense as to make all other milk taste like bathwater. It left a trail of herbal sweetness in its wake—ginestra whispering, fennel talking—and tasted almost as rich and sweet as custard. Eating it put everyone in mind of Monte Tresino, even Tilde’s husband, Nello Fariello, who spent the afternoon at the office. (He operates Fariello Mattresses, which holds the Guinness record for the world’s largest mattress.) The cheese was a distillation of the hillside we’d walked, a summer breeze expressed as protein and fat. Here was a food that could be reduced to a simple equation: cows + mountain = cheese. In that sense, it was a profoundly Italian experience. No other mountain has quite the same soil, rain, and pasture as Monte Tresino. But the recipe