Buglione d'Agnello

Buglione is old Maremma food, born of the gap between two kinds of Tuscan table: the few rich boards of the lords, heavy with meat, and the many poor ones of everyone else. The household cooks, the massaie, were left the scraps of veal, poultry, game and lamb, and made a virtue of them. They would parboil the trimmings to loosen the meat from the bone, chop it by knife, build a soffritto of aromatics in olive oil, add the meat, deglaze with red wine, stir in tomato and water, and let it all boil down slowly for hours until the meats fell apart. The dense, brothy result was poured over slices of toasted bread with a thread of oil, and the buglione was served. The word itself means a jumble of things thrown together, so strictly it names a mixed-meat pot rather than a single meat; in practice it is made with lamb, wild boar, hare, rabbit, pork, even snails. It spreads across the whole Maremma up to Monte Amiata and the Pitigliano country, and at Sorano it is served with a small bruschetta set in the middle of the plate, the stew ladled over it. It is drunk with the big local reds, Brunello and Vino Nobile, and lamb buglione is the pride of the spring lamb festival at San Martino sul Fiora, near Sorano.

Strong, rustic and deeply savoury: the lamb is meltingly soft and gamey, loosened from the bone, its richness cut by the acidity of wine and tomato and scented with rosemary and garlic. The sauce is thick and brothy at once, and the toasted bread beneath drinks it up, turning soft and saturated. It is a bowl for cold weather and big appetites.

The long, slow braise is what turns tough lamb tender. Above roughly 70°C the connective-tissue collagen in the working muscles slowly unwinds and, with hours of moist heat, hydrolyses into gelatin, so the meat slips from the bone and the liquid gains a glossy body. The red wine marinade does double duty: its acid and its alcohol help break down muscle fibre and dissolve flavour compounds, and as the wine simmers the harsh alcohol boils off, leaving concentrated fruit and depth. Tomato adds acidity and a load of glutamate for savoury depth, and the long reduction concentrates it all into a dense sauce. The soffritto of garlic and rosemary in olive oil builds an aromatic base as its sugars gently brown. Finally the toasted bread matters: toasting browns and stiffens its surface through the Maillard reaction so it holds together, while its open, porous crumb acts like a sponge, soaking up the heavy sauce without dissolving to mush.