Even if I'm not from Tuscany, I heard about cinghiale in umido alla toscana way before I got this recipe requested by several supporters. Since my father is a hunter, I remember him doing many hunting trips in Tuscany every summer. Each time he would come home with a different piece of wild boar, and my mother or grandmother had the pleasure to cook it for everybody. There I learned its flavors and in particular, its secrets.
In Tuscany mens would come back from the woods in the afternoon with the boar, sit down, open the wine, and start talking about the hunt, while the woman who has been at the stove since morning, with the soffritto already going and the wine already open for the pot, puts the meal on the table. That is the actual story of this dish. The hunt is the occasion and the cooking is the ‘thing’. The hunt itself (the braccata) was never a solitary business. It required dogs, beaters, a squad leader, men posted at specific positions assigned by seniority. What came back was more than any one family could manage, so it was divided among the participants. The cooking that followed was communal by logic, even when it happened in a single kitchen, by one person, while everyone else was still in the woods.
My grandmother always taught me that flavor is in crusts. And that’s where I wanted to focus making this wonderful dish. The marinade is where everything starts, that moment where all the different ingredients’ flavors spread out to each other. For this one I let everything marinate for 24 hours in salt and wine, and I think that is the minimum I would go. You know it has been enough time when the meat and the wine change color and they become one, with a consistent purple tint. What she was making was a long braise of wild boar in red wine and tomato, built on a soffritto, flavored with juniper and rosemary and bay, cooked at the lowest possible flame for two to three hours until the meat gives up everything it has. The marinade happened the night before, the soffritto started in the morning, and by the time anyone sat down, the house had been smelling of wine and juniper for almost a day.
Cinghiale in Umido alla
Toscana
The hunt is the occasion and the cooking is the 'thing'
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