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The challenge was getting it into the apartment. The transparent sheet ensured that every passerby knew what I’d bought. It was not your normal parcel of urban shopping. It was not your normal green market purchase either, and many people looked at me as though I were a bad man. There was only so much of this I could take, and I was tempted to prop our pig against the organic wheatgrass stand (“Mind if we leave this here while we finish our shopping?”). A woman was standing in front with her arms folded across her chest in open disapproval.

I had a scooter. Cars are not permitted at my green market, and if I hadn’t had a scooter I wonder what I would have done. Hoisted the animal on my shoulder and walked home? Flagged a taxi? I was relieved I could strap my purchase onto my scooter rack, hooves dangling on either side of the front wheel, a pair of ears just underneath the handlebars, my wife on the back. The three of us, precariously poised, puttered home. I parked in front of our building, unloaded my cargo with difficulty, and staggered to the front door, cradling it in my arms, wondering, is there a law against this? Am I allowed in the lobby?

The doorman, Gary Miro, a proud Italian American, greeted me with the enthusiasm of a man who appreciated his meat, and we stepped into the elevator. But before we ascended, a problem appeared in the casual Saturday morning dress of a Wall Street banker who’d followed us in from the street.

“Gary, do we want another passenger?” I was struggling. Two hundred and twenty-five pounds was akin to a big man. What’s more, things had shifted in the transporting, and blood was pooling up in a crease of the plastic.

It was a warm summer day in a small elevator. There were the doorman and the Wall Street banker and, just behind, my wife and me and my pig. The Wall Street banker turned. I don’t know why. Maybe he smelled something, although the smell, as these things go, wasn’t bad. He saw what was in my arms. His eyes conducted a rapid inventory of the details apparent in the plastic sheet, and when the door opened he exited with unusual speed.

“Did you hear the sound he made?” the doorman asked with a meat lover’s sadistic glee. I had heard it, and I was distressed. I had been uncomfortable in the green market. Now I’d made my neighbor sick.

I deposited my pig on the breakfast table and got ready. I emptied out the refrigerator and washed down the counters. I sharpened my new boning knife—short, thin, and stiff. (The Maestro had mocked a long floppy one I’d brought from New York—
Che cazzo fai con questo
? What in the dick are you going to do with this?) I then reflected on the difficulty of a pig at home. I hadn’t wanted to upset my neighbor. I didn’t know him well but suspected, and later confirmed, that he was a meat eater. The ironies are familiar enough. My pig was just a more elementary form of things he’d been eating for years. The implication confirmed what I knew but was reluctant to acknowledge: people don’t want to know what meat is. For my neighbor (and my friends and me, too, for most of my life), meat wasn’t meat: it was an abstraction. People don’t think of an animal when they use the word; they think of an element in a meal. (“What I want tonight is a cheeseburger!”)

I wasn’t a proselytizer. Meat, for me, had never been a cause. I didn’t feel as strongly about it as Dario, who banishes vegetarians from his shop and tells them to go to hell. To my mind, vegetarians are among the few people who actually think about meat—at least
they
know what it is. I just believed people should know what they’re eating. After all, at the green market, you overheard discussions about fertilizers and organic soils and how much freedom a chicken needs before it’s free range. Wouldn’t it follow that you’d want to know what your meat is? And that’s what I thought I was doing. I had brought home a recently killed animal, healthier, fresher, and better raised than anything at a store, and, in preparing it, I was hoping to rediscover old-fashioned ways of making food. This, I felt, could only be a positive thing. But I was sure getting a lot of shit for it.

I got to work.

I began by cutting an arc around the hips to remove the hind legs—the prosciutti. In Italian, a prosciutto is both the limb and the preparation, the tasty salt-cured ham you see hanging from deli ceilings. I wasn’t going to cure these—a long, ritualized business that, like Miriam’s culatello, is traditionally done in January—but do something I regarded as “Dario’s summertime pig.” Dario had learned the recipe from an elderly contadino, who in turn had learned it from his father on his deathbed. The father had ordered him to convey the recipe to someone at the Cecchini butcher shop: not Dario, because he wouldn’t have been born yet, but probably Dario’s father. The contadino wasn’t sure why it had taken him so long, apart from his rarely coming to Panzano and not knowing how to drive. But he was happy to have fulfilled his father’s wish and passed on an old Chianti preparation into the appropriate hands before it disappeared.

The recipe was really just an elevated way of incinerating a piece of meat (and everything else residing in it) without actually torching it. First you broke the legs down into what Marco Pierre White calls “the cushions.” The Maestro had taken me through the process and created a road map of sorts, going through each muscle, using gravity and your fingers to find “the seam.” The result was a bowl of pork pieces—around a dozen.

Next, you brined them. For the brine, I tipped a bag of salt into a bucket, added water, and swirled until the salt was half dissolved. After a day or two, you removed the pieces, put them in a pot filled with white wine, cooked them for a few hours, and left them to cool overnight. In the morning they were done and could be stored in olive oil. The pieces, half cured by the brining, flavored by the wine, and now submerged in oil, keep for a year.

I now understand that the method was devised to clean up pork that the contadino hadn’t got around to dealing with during the hot months. In general, you don’t kill pigs in the summer unless something has gone wrong, and Dario had once let slip that the contadino had used the recipe for his sick pigs, not the kind of information nugget a butcher forthrightly shares with his customers: Here, try this, a bit of diseased pork I hammered. In the event, what Dario did or didn’t say was immaterial because, for several years, no one bought it. Who wants fat (pork) in fat (oil)? But the meat was actually lean, with the texture of fish, and in a moment of marketing clarity he renamed it
tonno
(tuna)
del Chianti.
Now it is the most popular item in the shop. In 2001, the European Union recognized it as a food unique to the region and, giving it an official designation, ordered that the recipe be preserved as a monument of Tuscan culture. I like it with beans, parsley, lemon, and olive oil—like tuna.

O
N THE SECOND
day of my pig, I addressed the front, removing the forelegs and boning them. These are Mario’s unsung heroes, tough and supposedly flavorful and good for slow braising (or rather, good
only
for slow braising), although I was going to use them in sausages.

When I made these at the butcher shop, people often ate the meat raw, straight from the bowl, while I was preparing it, which—I don’t know, call me old-fashioned—just seemed wrong. But it illustrated an attitude toward good meat, if you’re lucky enough to get it: don’t mess with it. The shop followed the recipe (to the extent that one existed—everything was pretty much eyeballed) of three parts meat to one part fat, the rich back fat from the top of the pig, all ground up together, plus garlic, pepper, and salt: that was it. You mushed it all together until it became an emulsified pinkish goop, which you then stuffed into a canister that looked a like a giant bullet. At one end of the canister was a spout: this was where you slipped on the casing, about twenty feet of pork intestines, which the meat mix went into. The task of getting the intestines onto the spout, which was not unlike putting on a condom the length of an African serpent, involved a universally recognized hand movement, and, alas, predictable Tuscan jokes were had at my expense (at which point I tended to fall into a Freudian state of mind and wonder softly to myself what humor tells us of a culture).

Tuscan sausages are smaller than their American cousins, and each one is demarcated with a string, a graceful loop drawn tightly into a knot—looping and tightening, looping and tightening, a symmetrically floppy, aesthetically appealing rhythm. At the butcher shop, I made sausages in the lower room, and visitors came down to watch. “Aaaah,” they’d say, “so that’s the way it’s done.” One man, his voice cracking, whispered, “This is how my grandfather made them.” Sometimes the visitors would want to chat, a dodgy moment (How could I chat? What came out of my mouth would have blown my cover), which I survived by limiting my replies.

“Salsicce?”
someone would always ask, rather redundantly.

“Sì,”
I’d answer forcefully, in what I believed to be an imitation of a singsongy Panzano rhythm, packing in all the notes that the locals seemed to get into a one-beat word like
“sì.”

“Di maiale?”
(pork?) they asked next, with tautological tenacity.

“Sì,”
I replied again, impatiently this time so they understood I was very busy.

Once I got in a jam. “What herbs do you use?” a visitor asked.

I panicked. This was the kind of question I avoided.
“Sì!”
I said inexplicably. I couldn’t bear the prospect of his realizing he’d been duped: the romance, the history, the handmade integrity of it all, only to discover that an American was the sausage maker.

M
Y PIG
was now legless, but there was one more cut, just between the shoulders, that I was hoping to have for dinner on the third day. This was the meat encased by the first four ribs, the “eye” of the chops. In Italian, this is called the
coppa
or
capocollo
—
capo
means head and
collo
means “neck”; the capocollo starts at the top of the neck. When it’s cured and aged, it makes for the lean salumi that was served to the Nashville diners. The preparation was associated with Bologna and was therefore one you rarely saw in Tuscany, where the coppa is normally sold fresh, not cured, and broken down into the chops. When it is roasted whole, it is called something else again: a
rosticiana,
the best meal in the house. I cooked one on the bone, in a hot oven for about thirty-five minutes, and contemplated how brief the journey can be from the very raw to the only-just-been-cooked.

On the fourth day I made arista. I sawed the torso in two, boned each half according to the Maestro’s instructions, and added the ingredients in Dario’s order: garlic, thyme, the fennel pollen (which I’d stashed into my suitcase; everyone else was smuggling it—why not me?), the black blanket of pepper, the green blanket of rosemary, and the salt blizzard. I rolled it up into a giant Christmas log, cut lines along the skin to render the fat, tied it up, and cooked it until it was crispy and blackly smoking.

On the fifth day, I made a ragù—enough for two hundred people. A pig was turning out to be a pig of work.

On the sixth, I made headcheese, boiling the head until the meaty bits come loose and set in their own gelatin.

On the seventh day, I contemplated the lungs, tempted by a recipe I had found in Apicius, who recommends soaking them overnight in milk, filling each cavity with two eggs and some honey (what, when you think about it, could be simpler?), sealing them back up and boiling them until ready, the lungs bobbing like pool toys. He doesn’t say when a lung is cooked, but I concluded that the virtue of having two is that if the first lung isn’t quite ready you know to wait a little longer for the second. In the end, I didn’t cook the lungs. It was hard to throw them away. It seemed so wasteful—why buy a whole pig if you’re going to throw away the lungs?—but I’d been working on this pig for a long time. It was the seventh day. I needed a rest.

We had many meals. By my reckoning my green-market pig generated four hundred and fifty servings of food and worked out to less than fifty cents a plate. But the lesson wasn’t in the pig’s economy but in its variety and abundance: okay, I admit, maybe over-abundance, because pretty early on my wife and I discovered we’d had rather a lot of pig. We’d eaten our way from its snout (which went into the sausages) to its tail (which I added to the ragù). We were sick of pig. I badly needed to return to Italy. It was time to learn beef.

T
USCAN
B
UTCHER