My butcher and I

We have the best butcher you could wish for. I don’t know what it is like where you live but I know that for example there are very, very few still open in Sweden. So you can imagine how happy my father has been the times when he has been here and we and we have gone shopping at the butcher’s! My father’s a cultivated man, a man capable of assimilating all the beauty and greatness of Italy’s past but when I once asked him what he liked best of the things he had seen, he answered: “The butcher”! First I was a bit taken aback but then I understood why; it is possible to experience all the art and the architecture through reproductions and photos but it is impossible to go back in time but by entering the butcher’s store, my father could for a while relive his childhood and youth and remember things forgotten…

The butcher is called Tiziano and he looks just like a butcher should, fat and smiling and always holding a big knife. Until a year ago, his father worked in a room behind the shop, cutting meat, making sausages and salamis but he has had to give it up due to back problems and when you have seen how they carry a quarter of an ox or cow on their shoulder, you don’t have any problem imagining how their vertebras look like.

Yesterday we felt that we needed some red meat, we don’t eat meat that much but now and then we are overcome with cravings for it and it’s not difficult to give in, the only problem are all the people who also want to eat meat and as Tiziano is the best around here, people travel from far away to buy his meat. But yesterday I was lucky, when I went there I was so lucky that I had to wait for about one minute and when I had to go back because I had forgotten to buy a salami, I had to wait for 30 seconds, clearly my lucky day!

In the first photo you can see his wonderful salsicce, spicy but not too much and with the right balance between meat and fat. I never eat any other salsicce. No way.





Here we have one of the steaks I bought. You probably have heard of la fiorentina, a very high or thick steak (10 cm high) from a particular breed of cow/beef, la Chianina, that you find in Tuscany. People are crazy about it but I have to say that I prefer my butcher’s! Tiziano gets his meat from Piedmonte in the north of Italy where you find Italy’s best beef and I can assure you that it lives up to its reputation! We like our steaks a bit thinner than the real fiorentina but we grill it in the same way and enjoy it as much! A nice steak from Tiziano and a glass of wine-what else could one ask for?