Peposo alla Fornacina

Florence, Tuscany

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The working recipe — the Market List, the Method, and where it lives or dies

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Origin

Impruneta, Florence, Tuscany

Description

Brunelleschi's stew — a near-mythological Florentine preparation traditionally attributed to the workers of the Impruneta terracotta kilns who cooked beef in the residual heat of the cooling furnaces. The recipe is brutally simple: tough cuts of beef (shin or chuck) submerged in Chianti Classico wine with garlic (a full head, unpeeled, split in half), whole black peppercorns (in extraordinary quantity — a full tablespoon per kilo), tomatoes, and nothing else — no vegetables, no herbs. Cooked at 160°C for 3-4 hours or overnight at 120°C until the meat falls apart and the wine reduces to a dark, peppery, wine-saturated sauce.

III

The Thread

—Both are long-braised wine-beef preparations where the wine is used in high proportion and the collagen converts to a thick, gelatinous sauce — Provençale uses orange peel, olives, and herbes de Provence, Florentine uses only garlic and whole peppercorns, demonstrating the same slow-braise principle with radically different flavour philosophies French

—Both are long-braised beef preparations with an unusual quantity of a single spice defining the entire dish — Vietnamese uses star anise in abundance, Florentine uses whole black peppercorns in abundance, both achieving a dish where the spice is inseparable from the meat Vietnamese

Flavour Context

Deeply wine-stained, aggressively peppery, with collagen-rich beef falling apart in a dark, intense sauce — medieval Florentine cooking unchanged for 600 years

Pillars V — VII

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