Our taste buds have a long memory. Disgust often lingers far longer than delight, and those sacred little bumps have not forgotten the taste of raw Tuscan sausage, squeezed between a soggy focaccia and reluctantly consumed somewhere on the road to Venice…
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One day during Lockdown my mind wandered back to Italy, to summer and to our run-in with one of the most famous eateries in the world, the Florentine sandwich shop All’Antico Vinaio.
I had decided to make focaccia from scratch. Far too manic to consult a book, I plugged ‘focaccia’ into Youtube and found myself face to face with Jamie Oliver. I offered a quiet prayer to the gourmand gods, promising to sacrifice guinea fowl entrails on the Aga at some later date and plowed on.
Unearthing some primitive scales, I hastily measured out the ingredients and cast them into a large brown mixing bowl. Swimming in olive oil and thoroughly stuffed with black olives, I thrust it into the oven and retuned to Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. An otherwise perfect afternoon.
But I couldn’t concentrate. Something had unsettled me. Something to do with the focaccia. Was it Dino? That suave Slovene who had knocked together two plump, spongy focaccia with such ease one afternoon in Melbourne…No, a darker thought…My taste buds bristled. That afternoon in Florence on the coach, the sausage…The horror.
We had walked for miles, bouncing sweatily from one delectable collection of Renaissance masterpieces to another – cutting through the hordes with casual abandon. Inevitably we were ravenous. It must’ve been about three or four in the afternoon, far too late, apocalyptically late. I could see the blood sugar barometer in the red, the arrowhead spinning violently.
And of course, much to my loyal companions’ annoyance, I could only see the platonic ideal of lunch: bijou, rustic, all checkered tablecloths and busty waitresses shouting at the kitchen – off the main drag, eternal. “What about that place?” he asked, “too chic”, “that one?”, “too corporate”, “slow down!”
Then a glimmer of hope. Oily greaseproof paper everywhere. Where were they coming from? Fat Americans, wiry French women and everyone in-between clutching their wrappers with gusto. A red typeface on the paper, something Warhol might reproduce. “We’ve got to have that” I said, whatever that was.
And so with the forensic precision of extreme hunger, we followed the wrappers home to All’Antico Vinaio, the hallowed Florentine sandwich shop. We must have been the only tourists in Florence unaware of this little Eden, because the queue matched Michelangelo’s David. Being English and famished we relented, quite happy to ignore countless other suggestions for this promised land.
And there she was, ready to be devoured – all crispy and holey, still warm – technically a ‘schiacciata’, the Tuscan focaccia, but I had no time for pedantry. I opened her up to sure of the filling. Nailed it. Tuscan ham in reels, scrunched up to maximise room and lying on a bed of truffle pâté. And of course, whole mozzarella balls. Fior di latte, literally ‘flower of milk’, a different species to the stringy supermarket stuff – impeccably creamy. Forget cryonics, I want to be preserved somewhere between the skin and body of a giant ball of mozzarella. I want to hang there, suspended forever, feasting on its salty juice. I took a bite and looked upwards, to the heavens. Perhaps I should have looked the other way. I imagined Dante and Virgil peering over my emaciated carcass and grinned.
On the day we left Florence we only had one plan in mind – grab a couple of focaccia early, beat the queues, and then ration the pleasure on the coach to Venice, removing the possibility of any kind of service-station pleasure void.
When I got to the counter, keen to prolong the ritual of ordering, I asked one of the high priests his preference. A gauntlet had been thrown. He leaned in, looked into my soul and told us about Salsiccia Cruda – raw Tuscan sausage. We got two, one each.
I found it hard to imagine what raw Tuscan sausage might look like. Probably a very fine mince, thick with herbs and spices – basically cured. Illusions shattered, as our new friend opened a fridge door, pulled out a string of well, raw sausages, sliced them open and squeezed translucent flesh onto bread. A scene similiar to that one in Star Wars when Hans Solo slices open that fluffy Alpaca like creature with his lightsaber. To be safe, we also got a couple of salami, thoughts of salmonella swirling.
We stuffed the sandwiches into out backpacks and set off over the Arno for a saunter around the Medici’s old pad, safe in the knowledge that we would be tucking into our supercharged pack-lunches later that afternoon. Unable to wait too long, we ravaged the salami, up against a wall by the Uffizi Gallery. Crispy edges, fresh cherry tomatoes and layers of fatty meat blending with as much simple beauty as the buttery flesh, delicate cloths and rich canopy of Boticelli’s Primavera a few metres away.
Art is thirsty work and it seemed only right before the voluntary torture of long distance coach travel to imbibe. We did so gladly at a wine bar on the river, polishing off a bottle of Franciacorta in record time. One very sickly run across town later and we were on our way to Venice.
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There’s a line I kept coming back to, a line from a film or book – ‘his breath smelled like he’d been eating raw sausages’. I looked across the aisle of the coach. There was of course an exceptionally gorgeous Italian girl sitting there: brunette, bronzed legs, a feline grace. No chance, raw sausage breath or not. I looked ahead. In the netting of the seat in front of me, our only source of food for the next six hours: raw sausage, truffle cream, focaccia. I took the plunge.
Raw sausage verges on the heroically unpleasant, like brain or sweetbreads. The texture is soft and sticky, coating the roof of your mouth in a thin layer slime not unlike mucus. In a sandwich the texture becomes unholy, as the sausage and bread becomes one indivisible substance. Bread becomes sausage, sausage bread – cheese can’t help you now, neither can wine. Even the truffles, usually able to overpower any impurities on the palate, were impotent. There was no choice but to accept our fate.
Still drunk and lolling around as the coach bounced along the motorway, our day had reached lofty heights. The sandwich was now an important act of self-flagellation. This greasy, stale, sweaty, soggy, rich, creamy lump even started to become enjoyable. Each bite was life-affirming, the disgust mingling with the delight. It wasn’t all that bad, we had our freedom, our youth and companionship. Raw sausage, why not?
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The focaccia turned out well in the end. Perhaps not as fluffy as Dino’s, or as crispy as a Florentine ‘schiacciata’, but good. I opened the fridge to search for toppings, my eyes hovering over a plastic tray with cellphone on top, six porkers. I took a gulp and pushed them aside for some chargrilled artichoke hearts.
The Trough 