25 Forgotten Italian Tricks That Make Cheap Meat Tender

There were things a family with money never had to learn, and there were things the rest of us knew by the time we were old enough to hold a knife at the counter beside our mothers. If there was money in the house, you bought the tender cut, the fillet, the loin, and you never once had to think about why it was soft. But if the money was tight, and in my mother's kitchen it was always tight, you learned a hundred small ways to take the cheapest, toughest piece of meat on the counter and turn it, by patience and by knowing, into something that fell apart on the fork. My name is Assunta, and these are the twenty-five kitchen tricks that only the poorer Italian families really knew, because they were the only ones who ever needed them, and there is no shame in a single one of them. No products to sell you, no jar to push, only the plain knowing that used to pass from a mother to a daughter and has quietly gotten lost. Some of you grew up with these. The thump of a mallet against a cutting board, the smell of a ragù that had been simmering since before you woke, the one heavy pot that turned the cheapest cut in the shop into Sunday's dinner. We did not have much, but heaven knows our tables were fed, and there is a story in that I want to tell you by the time we reach the end. So stay with me, because number nine sounds almost mad, a spoonful of mashed kiwi rubbed onto meat before it ever saw the pan, and I will show you why it worked. And number one is not a trick at all. It is the real reason the toughest cut in the shop always, eventually, gave in on my mother's table, and it might be the proudest thing I tell you all week. Give this a like if it brings back a memory for you, and tell me down in the comments which of these your own family already did. Right, let us get into it. Starting at number twenty-five.