Florentine Recipes: Peposo dell’Impruneta

The Ten Commandments of Peposo dell’Impruneta

1. Let’s not ask whether there’s a lot of pepper — doesn’t the name tell you enough?
2. It takes at least 3 hours to cook, so you binge-watch TV series to pass the time.
3. It’s not done until it can be cut with a spoon — forget American pot roasts, here there’s history.
4. The recipe is anti-vampire: a ton of garlic, pepper and red wine.
5. It’s essential to use cuts like beef shin (muscolo), with fatty sinew and gristle… long, slow cooking turns them into heaven.
6. Plenty of people still don’t know what it is; for the record, it dates back to the early 1400s — maybe it’s high time you tasted it, don’t you think?
7. In the original recipe there’s no tomato — America hadn’t been discovered yet.
8. It goes with fagioli al fiasco (flask-cooked beans) and a bit of bread for the scarpetta — you wouldn’t want to leave that gravy behind, you scoundrels.
9. Chianti red is its inseparable companion, both in the cooking and in the glass at the table.
10. Let us give thanks to Brunelleschi, who — so the story goes — had a hand in the discovery of such a marvel.
It’s a dish that tells of Firenze, of its Cupola, and of the Impruneta, of course, where this meat was left to cook at the mouths of the kilns, later feeding the workers.

Ingredients

• 2 kg beef shin (muscolo) and/or cheek
• 15 garlic cloves
• 4 heaping tablespoons of pepper
• 1 bottle of Chianti red wine

Method

This is a dish that needs meat with sinew and gristle, like shin. Cut it into fairly large pieces, bigger than you would for a stew.
Peel the garlic and, separately, prepare a little vegetable broth.
In a roasting pan or heavy pot, place the pieces of meat with the garlic cloves, salt and the abundant pepper, and pour in all the wine. To cover the meat completely, add the broth.
At this point, if you decide to cook it in the oven, it should go at 285–300°F (140–150°C) for 4–5 hours, turning it now and then. In the pot, cook it over very low heat for the same amount of time.
The result will be a creamy, tender stew, dark and appetizing in appearance.

Tips, Trivia and Variations

This is a dish that was born, so the story goes, during the construction of Brunelleschi’s dome (cupola) of the Duomo of Firenze. It was food prepared for the workers, cooked at night at the mouths of the kilns of the Impruneta, famous for its production of cotto (terracotta). At the time, America had not yet been discovered, so it wasn’t the custom to add tomato, native to that very continent.