The
carpaccio
, as it is normally prepared, should be the cheapest dish of any letter.
Whenever they serve it to me, it makes me want to say: "What's wrong, there was no more?"
I know that this complaint sounds like a goat herder, and that my uncle's big hands survive idealized in my memory, cutting the sausages into thick slices like cards with a razor, which nevertheless seemed thin between those fat, calloused fingers that reminded of the roots of a vine.
Those slices of lunch in the sun forced you to open your mouth completely to chew, like Pepe Sonrisas when he introduced his guests in the muppets, always on the verge of breaking his neck.
But beyond the nostalgia for agriculture and the television of a channel, that is, of my old age,
carpaccio
seems a hoax to me.
What do you earn by eating nanometric sheets of nothing?
How does transparent food improve taste?
Are the arms of Queen Letizia more beautiful than those of a miller?
The
carpaccio
is the snobby version of the thin slices, they are loaded charcuterie and illustrate our sometimes demented relationship with food.
"Give me one hundred and fifty grams of that ham that you have on sale, but finite, uh, the thinnest that the slicer gives you!".
And you come home with a package in which it is impossible to separate the ham without breaking it, which already makes me sick.
What do we believe in, that this way they will last us longer?
What will help us lose weight?
What are we going to save?
We went out to eat brontosauric steaks matured for seven winters, but then we pumped 20 euros for eight sirloin post-it with four slices of Parmesan.
We think we buy a package of cooked turkey cheap, -only one euro! -, when in reality we buy 50 grams of powders and crushed bones plastered in a cylinder, 50 grams of dodgy cold cuts, which it turns out that you have paid at the price of sirloin of wagyu when you look at the apportionment per kilo.
With another added cost, and intolerable for the planet, because the slices, together with the container, are already separated by plastics to be able to extract them whole.
One by one they turn out tasteless, and you have to dump the entire package on the bread so that the sandwich or sandwich tastes like something.
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If you change the phenomenon of pseudo cooked ham for a
vacuum-packed meat
carpaccio
, the same will happen to you.
Although yes, you will feel super cosmopolitan.
The success of the dish is explained by three keys: the intelligence of the Italians, the social curse of fat and the hotelier setting of the scandal.
Apart, of course, that all famous chefs have incorporated it into their menus at some point.
But let's go in parts.
And sliced, not sliced.
The invention of the dish is credited to Giuseppe Cipriani, owner of Harry's Bar in Venice, where the gooey Bellini cocktail of prosecco and peach was also born.
One day in 1950, Countess Amalia Nani Moncenigo sat at Harry's apologetic that doctors only allowed her to eat raw meat, one of those rare deficiencies of aristocrats and zombies.
Cipriani, smart as a Phoenician, answered solicitously that he was immediately preparing a raw delicacy for him.
In just a quarter of an hour - probably with half left over and laughing the other half in the kitchen like Pepe Smiles - she served him a plate with slices of beef dressed with mayonnaise, lemon and Worcestershire sauce.
The guy did not even bother to prepare a
steak tartare
, which is the same, but currado and a little macerated.
When the aforementioned Countess, who is not known for anything other than her stomach upset, asked Cipriani what that sort of raw salad he had planted was, the host improvised: "A
carpaccio
", because the colors of the dish they sounded like the paintings of the Renaissance Vittore Carpaccio, born five centuries earlier and of whom an exhibition was held in Venice in 1950.
Do you know what is the difference between Italy and Spain?
That if this anecdote happened here, in the middle of the 20th century, the owner of the inn would have told the lady that the dish was called "Veteacascarla", laughing between the toothpick of his ignorance.
This is how marketing is explained, friends, that which makes our oil and our cheeses a few seconds compared to
olio
and
burrata
, while Italians are geniuses selling their mamma.
Fine, but not so fine.
MÒNICA ESCUDERO
The
traditional
carpaccio
has to be prepared with a lean meat and freed from the fat around it, as well as nerves, calves and any element of uncomfortable texture.
However, the
most common
carpaccio
is beef, red meat with infiltrated fat and therefore more flavorful.
The same fattened beef that is marketed under the name of an animal that hardly exists any more - a bull castrated for farming - and whose huge cuts have become the cool decoration of so many restaurants, with their cameras displayed like a Francis Bacon slaughtering exhibition .
Sometimes you walk into a room and don't know whether to train for the next fight or run screaming before Leatherface appears: the same fascination produced by the corpses of Bacon, whose surname it seems he chose.
Our relationship with fat reveals a disorder similar to that transmitted by the paintings of the English painter: we are fascinated by their voluptuousness as much as it frightens us.
Fat as the epitome of culinary pleasure and, at the same time, of the health problems that its abuse entails: in this sense,
carpaccio
is the complex recipe of a gastronomic unicorn, the ox, of an animal that we have turned into a myth .
However, raw beef, even the greasiest, requires volume to appreciate, just as it requires dressings to enhance it.
And that is where the third
quid
of
carpaccio comes in
: the generosity of each cook.
It's not about the number of slices, but about being served thin steaks instead of slices.
In the same way that the
steak tartare
works by abundance, compacting a good piece of sirloin into cubes carefully divided, the carpaccio requires a minimum thickness to appreciate the quality of the main ingredient.
Otherwise it dies buried in the flavor of the oil and cheese.
The
carpaccio
precise knife, never cutter.
The Japanese, who sharpen samurai blades and eat the first thing they catch raw, prepare
sliced
sashimi
, the size of which also depends on the fish.
On the other hand, we apply the cutlery logic of Iberian ham to the carpaccio, which is enjoyed very thin because, apart from being cured, it has as much meat as bacon.
And because that way it spreads more, like when my mother at Christmas dinner tells us that we are playing three prawns and four croquettes per head.
With mushrooms, if they keep the power of the bush and are the kind that can be eaten raw, the
ultralight
carpaccio
still has a pass, but when the slicer is applied to a shrimp, an octopus or a zucchini I usually get up from the table and start howling like an old man who has been served a plate of hair without soup.
It makes me want to pile up the plates, to reconstruct the animal or vegetable, and carry it to the kitchen in my hand like a consecrated host asking what has happened to the rest.
What have you done with the bug? Where do you keep the plant, bastard?
We have also made them with vegetables.
MIKEL LÓPEZ ITURRIAGA
Delicacy is not a unit of measurement;
elegance does not depend on money.
But in this world obsessed with thinness, the slice has been as outlawed as parrots, when pleasure is found precisely in soft meat.
Love bounces, as does the bite.
My adored Jamie Oliver, prophet of the rustic, recommends in his recipe for
carpaccio
-which he presents as a salad- to quickly brown the meat taco so that the flavor combines two intensities.
And then cut it fat: it says that half a kilo of good cow is enough for you, the animalic;
and for me, tears come to my eyes.