Steak - Mark Schatzker [73]
A few decades ago, the Chianina was almost as rare as the TPR, displaced like the Angus in Scotland by fast-growing, high-yielding Charolais and Limousins, languishing the way the Podolica is now languishing. But as Tuscany became a trendy place for tourists, the Tuscan breed of cattle achieved a status verging on celebrity. Tourists from distant continents now include the words “Chianina bistecca” in their fragmented Italian and can be found sitting in Italian restaurants and asking for the steak by name, which was unthinkable a few decades ago. They never ask to eat Maremmana bistecca, incidentally, which is Tuscany’s other native cattle breed and remains as unpopular as ever. The Maremmana, Pretotto told me, is more marbled than the Chianina and has a more pronounced flavor. “When the meat is grilled,” he said, “it is soft and tasty.” The problem is that it doesn’t fill out like a Chianina, resulting in a poorer yield.
A few stalls down from the horses lives a bull. His name is Nano, and the name is intended ironically because he is one of the world’s largest bovine creatures, standing at six feet and ten inches at the shoulders and, from rump to nose, measuring almost twelve feet. The majority of Italian cars weigh less than Nano. Julius Caesar once observed that aurochs were “a little less than elephants in size,” and he would have said the same thing about Nano. If Nano were black, he would look something like an aurochs. But, like all big Chianina cattle, he is pure white. He is also so docile that you can pose next to him for a picture.
When Nano’s progeny graduate from the finissagio, many of them will do their frolatura at Antica Macelleria Falorni, the oldest butcher shop in the world. It is in the Tuscan town of Greve in Chianti, and locals first walked through its doors to buy Chianina beef in the year 1729—two years before Charles Darwin’s grandfather was born. Back then, it was just Macelleria Falorni. (The word antica, which means “ancient,” first appeared on a sign erected in 1840 that still hangs.) The founding patriarch was a butcher named Gio Batta, and the shop is today helmed by his great-great-great-great-great-grandsons, Lorenzo and Stefano Falorni, who met me there a few days after the sagra. Stefano Falorni has the bearing of an accountant on a yachting holiday—mustachioed, wearing tan pants and sailing shoes, and very much in control. Antica Macelleria Falorni is as much a busy butcher shop as a living ode to its butchering past. Out front, facing the town square, stands the butcher block—the most magnificent butcher block I have ever seen—that served as the primary meat-hacking surface from 1820 to 1956. The interior is festooned with butcherana. Hanging on the wall are ancient cleavers that look like small medieval axes and, in their day, cut untold bisteccas. There is a stuffed wild boar, old copper scales big enough to weigh two babies, old black-and-white photos of Chianinas (including one of a prizewinning bull from 1934), a bright red meat grinder from 1957, and a sausage-stuffing machine from 1930. From the ceiling are suspended 1,600 Italian hams, undergoing their frolatura (though, in the case of hams, the technical term is stagionatura), while customers search out and purchase meat beneath.
The hams come from a local variety of swine, extremely rare, called Cinta Senese, which are black with a white band around their midsection. You can see them in Tuscan frescoes dating to the