It is now a rather well-known dish, an authentic evergreen of Tuscan cuisine appreciated by residents and tourists. Those coming from outside, however, often do not imagine that Ser Filippo Brunelleschi was behind the birth of the Impruneta peposo and that the occasion was the construction of the dome of the Cathedral of Florence. For almost six hundred years, in fact, a legend has it that Filippo Brunelleschi used “peposo” to feed and heat his artisans who worked at the Santa Maria del Fiore factory.
In particular, in the early 1400s hundreds of workers – massively hungry people, exhausted by fatigue and cold from the night frost – were working on the construction of the dome. There were obviously those who had been in charge of preparing lunch, and one day someone had the idea of using the small furnaces of Impruneta and Greve (the “fornacini” workers, in fact) to cook over a low heat, together with the tiles , also beautiful pieces of meat which were placed at the mouth of the oven in special pans and sprinkled with wine from the hills to add flavour.
Legend has it that one day Ser Filippo Brunelleschi passed by and was struck by the dish that the fornacini were preparing. He came closer, tasted it and said: “Let’s meet here tomorrow at this same time, I will teach you how to enrich this dish.” In fact, the workers’ recipe lacked spices, which came from far away and were quite expensive at that time. They couldn’t afford them, but Brunelleschi could. The next day he arrived with a bag of pepper and other spices, and used it to season the meat.
