The Prosciutto Whisperer

One determined chef is on a quest to make AMERICAN DELICACIES that will impress even the snobbiest ITALIAN CONNOISSEUR.

- Ruth Reichl

You’ve probably never heard of him, but in the world of restaurants few chefs are more beloved than Cesare Casella, a bighearted Tuscan who strolls through life with a smile on his face and a sprig of rosemary in his pocket. “Cesare knows everyone. He knows everything about food, and he’s the most generous guy in the world,” says Patrick Martins, author of The Carnivore’s Manifesto. “When we had the pig catastrophe he was the first person I called. I figured if anyone would know what to do, it would be him.”

Martins, who also runs Heritage Foods USA, the country’s main supplier of ethically raised heritage breed meats, is referring to the 2016 fire in which the Edwards Virginia Smokehouse burned to the ground. The inferno spelled disaster not only for the Edwards family, which had been curing hams for 90 years, but for the farmers who raised the ancient breeds of pig the family required. Unlike commodity pork, which comes from pigs bred in factory farms to grow fat fast, the Edwards family relied on pastured pigs raised as they have been since the beginning of civilization. “You can’t make long-aged ham with commodity meat,” Martins says. “After a few months it just turns to dust. You need good genetics, and one of our Missouri farms has Berkshire pigs with genes going back to Oliver Cromwell’s day. Raising pigs like that takes time, and our farmers had a year’s worth of pigs on the ground. The Edwardses were buying 250 hams a week to cure, and if I couldn’t find another buyer for those pigs, the farmers were going to go broke.”