transcendent pork

I’ve just eaten the best piece of meat in my life. I went up to Carletti’s this morning to have breakfast with him, his uncle and aunt, and his mother as they get ready to finish the pista – turning their slaughtered pig into all the wonderful things you can turn a pig into.

We were clustered in a cozy room in the old stone farm house, around a wooden table with a thick top lacerated with cleaver marks. On one side of the room was a disproportionately large fireplace where Carletti’s mother sat in a tiny chair at the hearth, raking out coals and turning a wire rack loaded with bracciole steaks. Bracciole are usually thin steaks cut from almost anywhere on the pig, but in this case they were thick and came from the beautifully tender meat at the base of the back.