It seems that everybody is finally coming out of hibernation after a very long, very damp, cold winter in Florence (which even included a frosting of snow). However, although flowers are beginning to bloom and grass is beginning to send up lush green shoots, it is still too cold to think about eating insalata. What’s a good spring food?
While consulting in a restaurant last week, I met a meat supplier, a trusted local butcher, we will call Don Blanco. Eager, I thought, to impress a foreign woman, he promptly took me to his shop to show me his wares: the meaty carcasses, both vitello (young cow) and maiale (pig), hanging in his walk-in cool-rooms.
The strong smell that a bunch of male pig carcasses gives off, even at a temperature of just above freezing, could bowl anyone right out of anywhere. Nevertheless, I was impressed rather than intimidated. Now I understood that intimidation was the effect this macellaio was seeking: ‘A foreign woman advising Italian chefs on what to cook? What can she teach us?’
It was time to play my aces, I thought. The restaurant owner whom the macellaio supplies owns a farm with cows, chickens and pigs, along with horses, a few donkeys, a couple of dogs and a cat. The cow and pig that Don Blanco was storing were his. As my job was to revise the restaurant menu, now they were mine to use as I saw fit. They had already been cut down into sides, stripped, weighed and hung at least 30 days as I had specifically requested. Don Blanco had little choice but to accept me-and my wishes. My wish was to make sweet spring sausage.
The floor behind a banco in a bar or shop in Italy is usually heightened by a good few inches. Most Italians will explain that this is because all the wiring, tubing and plumbing must go under their feet, but I am convinced, after this experience, that it’s to give them height. Don Blanco, I believe, feels inches taller when he tells me that because his customers are put off by the dark colour of the sausages he makes using my recipe for sweet spring sausages, he replaces the red wine with white, and his customers are then happy. But what would I know anyway, being a foreign woman who gave a recipe to a Florentine butcher for sweet springtime salsiccia?
I can’t say where this local, trustworthy butcher shop is located because Don Blanco the macellaio is very protective of ‘his’ secret recipes. Just be pleased that you know how to make these tasty spring salsicce from scratch.
Buon appetito!
RECIPE
SWEET SPRING SAUSAGE
1.5 kg capocollo (boned neck pork; don’t trim the fat)
500 g vitello (veal, lean)
130 g smoked pancetta
200 ml Shiraz or good red wine of choice
Fresh rosemary and bay leaves
1.5 teaspoons good-quality fresh peppercorns
Half a teaspoon dried chillis, finely chopped
150 ml milk
Half a loaf of stale white bread, crusts removed
Pig intestine (from a local butcher shop), for casing
(You will also need a piping bag)
First, soak the pig intenstine in water and leave overnight in the fridge. Cut the capocollo and the vitello into big, chunky strips and slice the pancetta into small strips. Marinate overnight in fridge with the red wine, rosemary and bay leaves. The next day, remove the rosemary and bay leaves, pour off the wine marinade and save for later use. Hand dice half the capocollo and the vitello into about a 3-mm dice. Coarsely mince the pancetta and the remainder of the meat. Dry-fry the peppercorns to toast in a pan, allow to cool and grind into the mixture. Add chilli. Crumb the bread by hand, add the milk and wine marinade to absorb the bread crumbs. Mix all together, adding 12 grams of salt per kilo of meat (this recipe needs 24 grams). Remove the pig intestines and wash through with fresh running water. Using a piping bag without the nozzle, stuff the casing with the mixture, twist to make sausage links, and refrigerate or cook and eat straight away (with more of the Shiraz).
