Steak - Mark Schatzker [68]
Less hasn’t stopped being more. This is not to say, of course, that European cuisine is devoid of mixture. Italians continue to relish one of the world’s most famous mixtures of all time: pesto (pine nuts, aged cheese, basil, garlic, and olive oil, the combination of which creates a flavor greater than the sum of its parts). But in matters of food, no country reveres simplicity the way the Italians do. When Tilde makes a pizza sauce, the only herb she adds is basil, because any others would cover up the taste of tomato. When she makes cured sausage from pork, she doesn’t add a single herb or spice—only salt and pepper—because she wants to taste the character of her pork, which is raised deep in the hills of Cilento on chestnuts and acorns. While the continent of Asia continues to smother its meats in ginger, garlic, scallions, and fermented sauces like soy sauce, hoisin sauce, fish sauce, oyster sauce, and black bean sauce, Europeans, by comparison, prefer their food more simple.
You might say, then, that the cheese made from Badessa’s unpasteurized milk represents the apotheosis of Italian culinary simplicity, the end point of European culinary evolution since the Middle Ages. But that honor may be better suited to the dish we followed it with: grilled Podolica steak. The portion, after all, was quite a bit bigger.
The night I ordered steak on my honeymoon in Florence, it was served with nothing more than a glass of red wine and was flavored with nothing other than salt and pepper. I expected garlic. I expected sauce. I expected other things on the plate—potatoes, perhaps, green beans or a salad. But service à la russe, as I’d learned that night, is at its most extreme in Italy. The waiter informed me that the steak came from a local breed called Chianina, an ancient line of pure white cattle named after the Chiana Valley. That knowledge led me, eventually, to Taurus International . Every few months, a new issue would arrive and offer me some connection to the delicious steak of memory. I would gaze at the pictures of big white cattle grazing or big white cattle winning awards at Italian cattle shows. The Chianina was the most celebrated breed, but there were others, like the Marchigiana, Romagnola, and Piedmontese. There was also one breed from the south that received scarcely any mention: the Podolica. One day, I phoned up the editors of Taurus International and asked them about this mystery cow. No one had anything bad to say about the Podolica, but no one had anything good to say about it, either. All they would acknowledge was that the Podolica was “from the south,” as though the south were a strange and unknown country. On the famous boot that is Italy, anything from the ankle on down is viewed with some degree of suspicion from the people above it: the south is unindustrialized and underdeveloped, southerners do not work hard or long, and everyone knows someone in organized crime. The people who say this sort of thing are northerners, whom the southerners believe to be uptight and lacking in passion. Given that Taurus International was published well north of Rome, were their views on the Podolica cow—or lack thereof—free from bias?
My attempt to answer that question led me to Tilde, the snake-infested slopes of Monte Tresino, and, one breezy evening in southern Italy, the gazebo that stands next to Tilde’s olive orchard, where a bag of pre-charred wood known to Italians as carbone was being dumped into her outdoor grill. Earlier that day,