Return to Tuscany by Gincarlo Caldesi

Author:Gincarlo Caldesi
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448141142
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

Hunting for game

Hunting is a huge pastime in Italy and hunters go out to shoot every Thursday and at weekends in autumn and winter, during the hunting season. Sometimes their expeditions are pointless – they kill small songbirds that they have no intention of eating. Other times it’s serious, and they are after deer or wild boar. It can take a group of hunters almost all day to track and kill a single boar. As in Britain, Tuscans like to shoot and eat pheasant, partridge, quail and hares. Rabbits are killed all year round and are a regular addition to the Tuscan diet.

Alla brace: cooking over embers

Alla brace means ‘on the grill’ and throughout Italy is one of the most popular ways of cooking meat or fish. For years Giancarlo and I, like many others in Britain, cooked over a gas barbecue because we were fed up with lighting charcoal on a cold and windy summer’s day. But I don’t know why we bothered with either, and didn’t just cook indoors. The flavour would have been the same. Surely the whole point of barbecuing is the taste imparted to the food by the burning embers of the wood it is cooked over? That is precisely what Tuscans appreciate.

Italians light fires in a back garden, a courtyard, a restaurant kitchen. They gather wood from nearby forests and cook over it. In Tuscany we mainly used oak, which has a high burning temperature and does not fall apart too quickly. To cook alla brace, you have to wait for charcoal to form in the fire and then scrape it forward and put a grill over it. The meat, fish or vegetables sit about 10 cm (4 in) above the embers and cook quickly. It is totally different to a gas barbecue, and so much more satisfying. On the course we made an evening of it twice a week. It was wonderful to sit around the fire with a glass of local wine and watch the flames. The children loved to wrap potatoes and onions in foil and throw them into the fire. After 10 minutes they were retrieved, piping hot, ready to be eaten, with butter for the potatoes and balsamic vinegar for the onions. At local fairs there were fires in braziers with grills fixed over them. And some of the restaurants had fires in their kitchens, built into the walls and with vast chimneys to carry away the smoke. I would love to see more alla brace cooking in the UK.

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