Ossobuco has become one of the most popular meat dishes of Italian cuisine and one of the most imitated in other countries. The ossobuco obsession is such that in 2012 it was included in the traditional dishes that are “protected” by the International Day of Italian Cuisines (IDIC), along with the spaghetti carbonara, Milanese risotto, pasta with pesto, and tagliatelle with Bolognese sauce—the most representative dishes of traditional Italian cuisine in the world.
The Dedication of an American Poet
Ossobuco is an original dish of Lombardy, but no one knows why it was born in this region of northern Italy. The most widely assumed reason is the large number of bovine herds present in the region. The hollow bone full of marrow and the meat surrounding it are obtained from the central fleshy part veal’s hind shank. It is served with risotto or polenta and—with its “gremolata” sauce (meaning ‘minced’ in the Lombard dialect)—it is prepared with garlic, parsley, and lemon peel chopped together.
When this dish is executed well, the soft flesh should fall off the bone with merely a soft touch from a fork. At the center of the bone, there is fatty, creamy, and delicious marrow, which partly melts onto the meat during the cooking process, giving it a very tasty flavor. What remains attached inside the bone is removed with a narrow and thin utensil, which has a scoop on the end ironically called an “exactor.”
Perfect ossobuco meat should be as “tender as the thighs of an angel that has lived a life in flight.” This curious definition is from the American poet Billy Collins who, born 1941 in New York, tailormade a poem entitled precisely “Osso Buco.”
Lemon: The Star of the Sauce
A similar dish was already being enjoyed at banquets of the Middle Ages, but the first time that the dish was described in detail dates from the eighteenth century, when the art of making the gremolada sauce was explained. It specified lemon as the ideal replacement for the many spices that were then considered expensive. Afterward, the plate curiously disappeared completely from specific recipes of the Lombard tradition. It returned over a century later, in 1891, in the great cookbook of the famous Italian gastronome Pellegrino Artusi, whose recipes are used as examples today by world-class chefs.
The Right Wine
Red wines with good intensity are ideal, such as Barbera d’Asti produced in Piedmont, Rosso di Montalcino produced in Tuscany, or Sagrantino of Umbria, a small region of central Italy.
