Agnello da Latte in Tegame sul Forno a Legna

Agnello Piccino, Piccino, Picciò (Delicate, more Delicate, The most Delicate Lamb of all). Just outside the village of Campo di Giove—Field of Jove—southeast of Sulmona, there lives and works a butcher who is also a chef of sorts, roasting and braising, as he does, some of his wares in a great, old stone bread oven that sits behind his pristinely stuccoed shop. His clients come sometimes to buy their lunch or their supper still warm and fragrant, readied for the table. Though it was achingly cold on that February morning when first we came upon the butcher at work in his outdoor kitchen, we joined the long, decorously kept line that wound its way from his ovens down the country road. We offered our good-days to the mostly women in whose midst we now stood, women typically Abruzzese, with serene, high-boned faces. They carried their pots and casseroles in sacks or against a hip and, when they felt our interest, they talked to us a bit about the dishes for which the old butcher was celebrated. Mutton braised overnight with tomatoes and onions and red wine; pork braised with bay leaf and garlic and peperoncino in Trebbiano d’Abruzzo; tripe and pancetta with tomatoes and yet more peperoncino; kid roasted with centerbe (an artisanly distilled liqueur made with mountain herbs). Long and reverent was their litany, but when one of them spoke of his agnello da latte—of suckling lamb that he braised only with butter in a sealed copper pot—there came a swift agreement that it was his piatto prelibato—his dish of greatest refinement and delicacy. As the gods would have it that day, the butcher had not prepared agnello da latte but intinglio di agnello allo zafferano (page 47), which, when it came our turn, he packaged for us in a little plastic tub and on which we later lunched in the car with the motor running. It was luscious. We returned in the afternoon, forsaking the day’s program, to beg its formula and to know when the mythical angello da latte might be forthcoming. Il macellaio, the butcher, shook his head on both counts. The suckling lamb in the sealed casserole he prepared only when he found lambs of just the right plumpness and age whose mothers fed only on certain grasses. He turned to the next question. “Una ricetta è una questione di cuore, signora mia; è molto personale,” he said. “A recipe is a thing of the heart, my lady; it is most personal.” I simply looked at him, neither beseechingly nor with delusion, and proceeded to tell him how I thought it had been accomplished. I spoke for a long time, I suppose, he never interrupting even as clients accumulated around his cold white cases. I sealed my discourse by asking why he’d used imported saffron rather than the milder one harvested locally up near Navelli. By now, he was laughing, mostly at my accent, I thought, which is distinctly Northern and often unpleasant to southern ears. At a point much later, after we knew each other longer, he confessed it was only my determinazione—determination—that had made him laugh. The butcher, at least with words, never told me if my understanding of his beautiful lamb stew was correct, but each time I make the dish, I know that the pungent, melting result is a fine tribute to him. And so, when Campo di Giove sits even remotely on our route, we visit, happy to see our friend and hoping to find agnello da latte. We are always a day too late, a week too early. Someday our timing will be divine. Curiously enough, though, the butcher, without my asking for it, one day told me its formula.