Florence, Artusi's adopted city: cavolo nero and Sunday arista
Episode 2. Bella follows Artusi to Florence for frost-sweet black cabbage, a pork roast named by Greek bishops, wine windows and a bread without salt.
Last weekend I opened Artusi's book where he was born, in Romagna, and ate far too many cappelletti. This weekend I followed him to where he actually lived. In 1852, after the bandits and the bad night at the theatre, the Artusi family packed up and crossed the Apennines to Florence. Pellegrino stayed for almost sixty years. He made his money there, wrote his book there, tested every recipe in a Florentine kitchen, and is buried there, on the hill of San Miniato, looking down on the whole city.
So this is the city that taught him to cook, or at least taught him what to call things. Read the book closely and you hear Florence everywhere: the rosemary is ramerino, the bacon is carnesecca, the beans are fagiuoli. At the back he even added a little glossary for the rest of Italy.
Words which, being Tuscan vernacular, not everyone would understand.
che, essendo del volgare toscano, non tutti intenderebbero
Pellegrino Artusi (translated by Bella)
That was the point, and he knew it. Manzoni had famously gone to Florence to rinse his novel in the Arno, as he put it, so that it would speak the Italian of Tuscany. Artusi did the same for dinner. A cook in Palermo or Turin could open his book and read one shared kitchen language, and it was Florentine.
Florence: bankers, beans and a bread without salt
Florence was rich for a very long time. Wool, silk and banking made the Medici, and the Medici made the city we still queue to see. But a Florentine table has never been showy. The food here is the food of careful, well-off people who hate waste: beans cooked slowly in a flask, bread that is never thrown away, a piece of pork roasted on Sunday and eaten cold all week. The rest of Italy calls Florentines mangiafagioli, the bean-eaters, and they take it as a compliment.
Then there is the bread, made without salt. Ask three Florentines why and you get three answers: a salt tax nobody wanted to pay, an old quarrel with Pisa, or simply that the bread is meant to go with salty things like prosciutto and pecorino. Dante, born here in 1265 and thrown out in 1302, wrote from exile about how salty other people's bread tastes. I like to think he missed the bland Florentine loaf. I would not.
Florence also likes its wine served sideways. All over the old centre you will find buchette del vino, little arched windows in the walls of palazzi. In 1559 Cosimo I de' Medici let the great families sell wine from their own cellars, and they did it through a hole in the wall. During the plague of the 1630s the windows kept buyers and sellers apart, and in 2020, when Italy reopened after lockdown, a few came back to life with wine, coffee and gelato. More than 150 have been counted. Florence was doing contactless service before it was cool, and twice.
A small coincidence I cannot resist: in 1820, the year Artusi was born in Romagna, an English couple travelling in Italy had a daughter in Florence and named her after the city. Florence Nightingale went on to reorganise how the world nurses its sick. Artusi, who wrote a whole appendix on cooking for weak stomachs, would have liked her.
Up at San Miniato, in the cemetery of the Porte Sante, Artusi lies in good company. Carlo Lorenzini, born in Florence in 1826 and better known as Collodi, is there: he gave the world Pinocchio, a puppet who is hungry for most of his book. So is Franco Zeffirelli, born in Florence in 1923, who filmed Romeo and Juliet and later his own childhood among the English ladies of the city in Tea with Mussolini. A cook, a storyteller and a film-maker on one hillside. I can think of worse dinner parties.
Today Florence is crowded and beautiful and a little exhausted by its visitors, but the Florentines still keep their habits. They queue at the trippai, the tripe stalls, for a lampredotto roll at eleven in the morning. They blow up a cart full of fireworks outside the Duomo on Easter Sunday, the Scoppio del Carro, and in June they play calcio storico, a sort of football with no visible rules, in Piazza Santa Croce. And right now, at the start of November, they are carrying the first green olive oil home from the mills and pouring it on toast. I did the same.
Saturday: cavolo nero
Cavolo nero, black cabbage, is the Tuscan winter vegetable. It is long, dark and crinkled like an old leather glove, and it only becomes properly sweet after the first frost, which is why Florentines wait for November. Artusi's recipe no. 438 is a side dish: strip the leaves, boil them, chop them fine and finish them in a little sauce of prosciutto, onion and butter. It is the cabbage he served beside boiled meat or cotechino, and it is quietly delicious.
Then, in the last paragraph, he describes what Florentines really do with it: thick slices of toast rubbed with garlic, dipped in the cabbage water, the hot leaves piled on top, olive oil poured over. Cavolo con le fette. And he is rude about it.
This is a dish for Carthusian monks, or a penance to inflict on a glutton.
è un piatto da Certosini o da infliggersi per penitenza ad un ghiottone.
Pellegrino Artusi, recipe no. 438 (translated by Bella)
With all respect to the maestro, he was wrong, at least in November. With new oil, still peppery and green, it is one of the best things you can eat on a cold evening. I made both, ate the toast standing up, and kept the buttery version for Sunday.
Recipe: florentine cavolo nero artusi
Sunday: arista
Recipe no. 369 is filed under cold dishes, which surprised me the first time I read it. Arista is a pork loin roasted on the bone, studded with garlic, rosemary and a few cloves. Florentines eat it cold, in thin slices, and Artusi agrees with them.
It is eaten cold, being much better than hot.
essendo assai migliore che calda
Pellegrino Artusi, recipe no. 369 (translated by Bella)
He is right. Cold, the meat firms up and you can slice it thin as paper, and the rosemary and garlic settle into it overnight. So I roasted mine on Saturday evening while the cabbage was boiling, let it cool, and carved it this morning. He is also careful with the seasoning, and for a very Artusi reason.
Use them sparingly, since they are smells that easily come back up your throat.
essendo odori che tornano facilmente a gola
Pellegrino Artusi, recipe no. 369 (translated by Bella)
And then comes the legend, which is why everyone loves this recipe. During the great Church council held in Florence to reconcile the Roman and Greek churches, the Greek bishops were served this roast, liked it, and started saying arista, arista, good, good, from the Greek aristos, the best. The name stuck.
Finding it to their taste, they began to say: arista, arista (good, good!).
Trovatala di loro gusto cominciarono a dire: arista, arista (buona, buona!)
Pellegrino Artusi, recipe no. 369 (translated by Bella)
Artusi dates the council to 1430; it actually moved to Florence from Ferrara in 1439. Food historians treat the whole story as a legend, and the word may well be older than the council. I do not care. A roast that got Roman and Greek bishops to agree on something, even for one lunch, deserves its legend. Artusi's other tip is pure Florentine thrift: keep the fat that runs into the tin and use it to roast potatoes or to warm up greens. Which is how the Saturday cabbage ended up next to the Sunday pork, glossy with dripping. The two recipes are a couple.
Recipe: arista florentine roast pork artusi
Bella's tip: Do the work on Saturday. Boil and chop the cavolo nero in the afternoon, put the arista in the oven at the same time, and let the pork cool overnight. On Sunday you only slice the meat, roast potatoes in its fat and warm the cabbage in a spoonful of the juices. Lunch takes forty minutes and you get to sit down for all of it.
What to pour
- Chianti Rufina: From the hills just east of Florence: Sangiovese with a cool, fresh edge. Perfect with cold arista.
- Carmignano: Sangiovese softened with a little Cabernet, from a zone Grand Duke Cosimo III protected by law in 1716. Lovely with the cabbage and dripping.
- A young Barbera: From my cellar in Piedmont, because I always bring one. Its bright acidity loves pork fat.
Next weekend
Artusi spent most of his life in Florence but cooked from everywhere, and next Saturday I will open the book somewhere new. Bring an appetite, keep your roasting fat, and be kind to the cabbage. It only wants a frost and a little good oil.
Recipes adapted from Pellegrino Artusi, Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well (La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene, 1891). Quotes translated from the Italian by Bella. Buy the book on Amazon.
