I’ve just eaten the best piece of meat in my life. I went up to Carletti’s this morning to have breakfast with him, his uncle and aunt, and his mother as they get ready to finish the pista – turning their slaughtered pig into all the wonderful things you can turn a pig into.

We were clustered in a cozy room in the old stone farm house, around a wooden table with a thick top lacerated with cleaver marks. On one side of the room was a disproportionately large fireplace where Carletti’s mother sat in a tiny chair at the hearth, raking out coals and turning a wire rack loaded with bracciole steaks. Bracciole are usually thin steaks cut from almost anywhere on the pig, but in this case they were thick and came from the beautifully tender meat at the base of the back. 

All around us were buckets of meat, separated into the various grades and ready to be made into salami, ciauscolo, sausage, etc. and we had to step around them to get to the plate of still-smoking steaks in the middle of the table. Carletti’s aunt cut slices from a charred loaf of white bread with a knife that until that moment she’d been using to cut up raw pork. And we stood around making easy smalltalk and eating these steaks with lots of pepper, open-face on a slice of bread and washing it down with sharp white wine.

The meat was staggeringly good – it was perfect meat. And we ate it as you’re supposed to: finger-burningly hot, as Carletti’s uncle said.

It’s easy to find excellent meat around here – many of the butchers carry meat from local farmers. Local restaurants specialise in grilled meat and everyone is a connoisseur. But this bracciole steak left them all behind.

I met the pig. In fact, I went up Tuesday to watch the slaughter. She was an enormous animal – somewhere between 250 and 300 kilos – and Carletti had raised her on grain and kitchen scraps and, late in autumn, acorns. And now, two days later, the meat had had a chance to rest and conditions were perfect.

Tessa was at home, already working at the computer. She’s not mad about pork anyway. But the family insisted I take a plate of smoking steaks down to her. It was the fastest I’ve ever been allowed to leave a social gathering in Marche. Ordinarily there would have been long goodbyes and just-one-more’s and promises of future visits extracted. Only the exigencies of food trump social niceties. As soon as Carletti’s mother handed me the plate, she shooed me out of the room, flapping her apron and shouting “vai! vai! vai!“. And out I ran.

And I made it home with the steaks still steaming and presented them to Tessa. She looked at them sceptically (partly, I imagine, because it was half past eight in the morning) while I overflowed with enthusiasm about what a great time I’d just had. So she tasted one just to be polite. And now I’m at the computer and she’s still in the kitchen with juice running down her chin, working her way through the entire plate. You can’t argue with meat this good.