Steak - Mark Schatzker [70]
The bigger question was this: How would a Chianina steak hold up against the Podolica? Would it still taste as good as it had on my honeymoon? Or was I cherishing steak memories from a more gustatorily naive time?
To find out, Tilde, Nello, and I set out to visit the greatest celebration of steak in all of Italy, and possibly the whole world: the Sagra della Bistecca. It takes place every August in the medieval town of Cortona, which, as medieval towns go, is quite the archetype. Cortona is a maze of narrow, winding streets with stone steps that have been worn smooth by the geologic action of tourists. A step in any direction presents a postcard snap of a perfect cobbled alleyway or a glimpse of the Val di Chiana—the Chiana Valley—which has a habit of appearing both suddenly and magnificently between two ancient buildings. The valley itself is a sprawl of tilled fields, cyprus trees, and olive groves that induces a sizable percentage of foreigners to buy a vacation home in rural Tuscany. Almost every view in Cortona is breathtaking, so much so that if you keep your eyes open for too long, you will run short of breath.
It was evening at the peak of the Italian summer when we arrived, and strolling conditions could not have been better. A person could walk with no more than a Kleenex draped over his shoulder and feel neither too warm nor too cold. In a town made for strolling, during an evening made for strolling, we strolled over to the cathedral, which has looked out over the Val di Chiana since the eleventh century. The nearest field was at least a few miles away, and if Chianina were grazing, it wasn’t possible to see them. Outside the cathedral, a crowd had formed around a parked ambulance. Robed priests and nuns were carrying a statue of the Virgin Mary from the cathedral in a slow procession, and they placed her into the ambulance’s interior, which had been decorated with sheer pink curtains, flower garlands, and silver and pink ribbons. The three of us strolled into the cathedral and were met by the cool, damp embrace of thousand-year-old stone. As with all ancient European cathedrals, it was filled with the tombs of important people who’d been dead for centuries. One of the very biggest was in the middle of the central aisle and featured as its insignia the horned head of a cow. A good sign.
Back outside, a priest closed the ambulance doors. It drove off, and the crowd broke into a prolonged round of waving and clapping. The Virgin Mary, apparently, was going to make it.
Strolling back to the central square—Piazza della Repubblica—we passed a trattoria, and next to its entrance was a little blackboard on which was written a single word in chalk: “Bistecca.” Two attractive fe male customers—shapely, stylishly dressed, cell phones at the ready—were carving hunks off a steak so large it would not have looked out of place on The Flintstones. A very good sign.
The Sagra della Bistecca, which was celebrated for the first time in 1959, may be the newest thing about Cortona. At various strategic points around town, promotional posters—one of which I stole—displayed a still life of an earthenware jug filled with wine standing next to a big steak fabulously branded with grill marks. When we arrived at the sagra, it looked like a summer fun fair that had caught fire. There were festive lights, the din of voices, outbursts of laughter and music—and massive clouds of smoke. We headed straight for the grill, which, though not height-adjustable, was huge—six feet wide by twenty feet long. It had been made especially for the sagra by a local ironworker and appeared to be brand-new. But in a few years, another grill would be commissioned