Why Italians Love to Talk About Food (18 page)

By Margherita Bourtsev

Like the majority of cities in the north and in particular like nearby Aosta, Turin, founded by the Romans, was originally named after ancient families, in this case the Julian and Augustan clan: Julia Augusta Taurinorum. But the nickname
taurino
, alluding to an obstinate bull (
taurus
), prevailed, and in the annals of history the city was left with simply the name Turin.

Turin was the capital of two kingdoms: the kingdom of Sardinia from 1713, and later the kingdom of Italy from 1849 to 1861. No other city besides Naples has played this role in Italy's history—it was capital of the kingdom of Naples from 1282 to 1815 and capital of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies from 1816 to 1860. Other cities might be capitals of counties, duchies, marquisates, or independent republics,
but there have been no other capitals in Italy with such mythic and symbolic associations. These cities are famously home to objects venerated in Christianity, namely, the Shroud of Turin and the blood of San Gennaro in Naples.

The Shroud figures quite frequently in literary texts. A fictionalized version of its apparition is presented in the novel
Baudolino
by Umberto Eco. What is known about it for certain is that in 1349, in France, the knight Geoffroi de Charny claimed to possess a sheet of unknown provenance on which the features of a human figure (presumably Christ) were stamped. Louis I of Savoy acquired the Shroud in 1453. Since that time the relic has been preserved in the city of Turin.

It was from Turin, capital of the only state in the Apennine Peninsula free of foreign rulers, that the impetus for the unification of Italy came, beginning in 1848 (with the first war of independence). It was here that the national intelligentsia was forged in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that was able to define Italy's cultural and political visage. Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, organizer of the struggle for national unity and an astute diplomat, was 100 percent Turinese—confirming the current designation (abrupt and simplistic to be sure):
torinesi falsi e cortesi
(Turinese: deceitful and polite). Not only that, he was irreversibly Piedmontese, to such an extent that he wrote his political works in French.

The Francophone Cavour was a living illustration of another Italian saying, which could serve as a slogan for this book:
Parla come mangi!
(Speak the language of your food). Cavour expressed himself in French both in his daily life and in politics, and as a gastronomic Francophile. The menu of his dinners is still offered today at the Ristorante del Cambio, a historical restaurant where a customer arrives and is seated on a crimson settee at a Baroque table adorned with a small tricolor flag, in a private alcove. There he is served just as they used to serve Cavour, and with the same dishes. The menus reflect the Continental, rather than Mediterranean, coloring of Cavour's culinary preferences, and even an anti-Mediterranean note. Dishes “with a French accent” are widespread in Piedmontese cuisine (and have been since antiquity, as we know from an eighteenth-century treatise on cooking,
Il cuoco piemontese perfezionato a Parigi
, The Piedmontese chef trained in Paris, 1766).

An example of this is the
finanziera
, a dish well-loved by Cavour. It is made of beef entrails and genitals, boiled in a mixture of vinegar and Marsala wine and flavored with the local Barolo wine. The canonical recipe also calls for kidney, calf's brain, chicken livers, sweetbreads, cock's combs, and mushrooms, all served in flaky pastry shells (vol-au-vents) or accompanied by plain risotto.

As in Lombardy, the spinal marrow of cattle is readily included in recipes in Piedmont, though here it is called
filone
, not
midollo
as in the rest of Italy. The substance of the marrow is incredibly fatty and is used for browning roasts, pork shanks, and porcini mushrooms. Bone marrow is also included in the recipe for
frisse
, meatballs of chopped lung, heart, and liver. An exclusive meat is obtained in Piedmont from the so-called fat ox (
bue grasso
); the meat can be recognized at a glance since it is
marezzata
, or veined with fat (what other countries call “marbled meat” for assonance and because of its external appearance).

The fat ox is bred in Carrù (Cuneo) and in Fassone, not far from Asti. It is a special Piedmontese white breed, fed with bran, whey, wheat, sugar beets, and often even zabaglione to increase muscle mass. These oxen can weigh as much as 1,250 kilograms and are not able to walk on their own. The Fat Ox Festival has been held in the village of Carrù since 1910, two Thursdays before Christmas (see “The
Sagra
”). A marble monument, entitled
Il Belvedere di Carrù
(the Apollo di Belvedere of Carrù), the work of sculptor Raffaele Mondazzi, has been erected to these titans in Carrù; on its base, six bas-reliefs immortalize the ox's brief journey from cowshed to slaughterhouse to celebratory table.

The
gran bollito
(boiled meats platter), a favorite dish of Vittorio Emanuele II, is accounted for by “the rule of seven”: seven cuts of meat, seven “ornaments,” seven dipping sauces, and seven vegetable side dishes. The seven cuts are
tenerone
, or chuck; shank; ribs; butt end; rump; rump tip; and rolled breast (boneless breast rolled up and tied around a filling of salt pork or prosciutto, cooked salami, two eggs, a whole carrot, herbs, and pepper, which is then cut into slices). The seven “ornaments,” which are also meat, are cooked in separate pots. These constitute the true essence of the typical
bollito
: calf's head (complete with snout), veal's tongue, calf's foot, calf's tail, a chicken, a
cotechino
sausage, and a loin sausage (the plump boneless breast rolled around herbs and roasted at a high temperature is the only roasted piece that is part of the
bollito
). And that's still not all! To this marvel, seven side dishes must be added: boiled potatoes, spinach, red onions boiled in vinegar, turnips, carrots, celery, and leeks. Finally, this culinary madness is brought to the table with seven sauces: first a green sauce, then a red one, then a honey sauce, as well as a sauce of
cougna
(grape must jam) with raisins, a horseradish sauce, Cremona
mostarda
, and mustard.

Sometimes the meat is actually seasoned with fish, as in the case of
vitello tonnato
(veal in tuna sauce), a surprising combination of boiled veal with preserved tuna. The slices of veal are arranged on a plate and topped with the tuna sauce (fresh mayonnaise mixed with flaked tuna, hard-boiled eggs, capers, and anchovies).

Autumn is Piedmont's characteristic season. At that time, while a dense low fog spreads throughout the region, the first young wine is uncorked. Umberto Eco, who is originally from Alessandria, has given his readers incomparable descriptions of Piedmont's landscapes. The best-loved places in Eco's novels (such as the monastery in
The Name of the Rose
) and their best-loved characters (Jacopo Belbo, Roberto de la Grive, Baudolino) belong to Piedmont. Here is how these places familiar to the writer are described through the words of his medieval hero Baudolino:

 

“Halfway between these two cities there are two rivers, the Tanaro and the Bormida, and between the two there is a plain that, when it isn't hot enough to cook eggs on a stone, there is fog, when there isn't fog, there's snow, when there isn't snow, there's ice, and when there isn't ice, it's cold all the same. That's where I was born, in a place called the Frascheta Marincana, which is also a swamp between the two rivers. It's not exactly like the banks of the Propontis.”

“I can imagine.”

“But I liked it. The air keeps you company. I have done much traveling, Master Niketas, maybe even as far as Greater India . . .”

“Are you sure?”

“No, I don't really know where I got to. It was the place where I saw some men with horns and others with their mouth on their belly. I spent weeks in endless deserts, on plains that stretched as far as the eye could see, and I always felt like a prisoner of something that surpassed the powers of my imagination. In my parts, when you walk through the woods in the fog, you feel like you're still inside your mother's belly, you're not afraid of anything, and you feel free. Even when there's no fog, when you're walking along and you're thirsty, you break off an icicle from a tree, and you blow on your fingers because they're covered with chilblains.”
¹

 

And it is in autumn that the hunt for the first truffles begins. The white truffle of Alba (
Tuber magnatum pico
) is the badge of Piedmont's gastronomical opulence. According to legend, Alba, the truffle capital, also took its name from it (
alba
is Latin for “white”). A black truffle is also found in Italy (
Tuber melanosporum
, the Perigord black truffle), but is much less prized.

In his
Physiologie du gout
(
Physiology of Taste
), 1825, the celebrated gastronome Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1755–1826) described the white truffle (despite its monstrous appearance) as the “diamond of the kitchen.”
²
Savarin assigned a very precise meaning to his words: according to him, the truffle “is a positive aphrodisiac, and
under certain circumstances makes women kinder, and men more amiable.”
³
The comparison to the diamond is fully justified by both the truffle's quality and its market price. The white truffle of Città di Castello costs between ten and fifteen thousand euros per kilogram; the black truffle of Norcia five thousand euros. In 1954 the largest white truffle in the world (540 grams) was presented by the city of Alba to President Truman. It was a precious gift, the best Italy could offer to the American president in gratitude for humanitarian aid at the time of the Marshall Plan.

There is also a “summer” truffle, less esteemed, that costs only eighty to a hundred euros per kilogram. It is called
scorzone
and is used for industrial preparations and to flavor sauces. Inexperienced buyers—the culinary nouveaux riches—often jump at this second-choice luxury item and buy it up, mistaking it for a truffle of higher quality. The main problems that truffle buyers must be wary of are cheaters and swindlers. Some purveyors have been known to store ten Acqualagna truffles (of inferior quality) with one from Alba (diamondlike) together; the cheaper truffles become permeated with the aroma of the more expensive one, to a point where distinguishing them is almost impossible. Only later on, when they're eaten, will the less prized truffles give off a completely different scent. Does a truffle really come from Alba, or has it simply been stored with one that does? It's a good question, and the only safeguard against it is a personal relationship with the vendor and the good reputation of that particular truffle broker.

A romantic legend has it that truffles grow as a result of moonlight on frosty nights, when light filters through the cold, damp earth to the roots of the trees. Another legend says that they are formed from drops of stag sperm. Or according to an ancient belief, they grow in places where, in autumn, a lightning bolt strikes the ground near a tree root.

Truffles are sought using dogs, who can sniff them out better at night. The cost of a trained dog can be as high as twenty thousand euros. Pigs are famously known for truffle hunting, too. In Italy, however, it is not customary to entrust the job to swine, which are quite capable of not only finding the truffle but eating it, thereby consuming ten to fifteen thousand euros in one gulp. The French, on the other hand, do use pigs: for some reason French pigs behave more responsibly and do not devour the exquisite find.

In order to be displayed in all of its magnificence, the white truffle requires the most intense heat during cooking. Those few readers who may find themselves in possession of such a rarity and wonder what to do with it will probably be grateful for
the following advice: Truffles must be heated in a frying pan of 999.6 silver, the purest, with a titanium handle (such frying pans have the highest thermal conductivity of all types of cooking utensils). In
Directions to Servants
, Jonathan Swift offered some judicious observations on the cleaning and care of silver frying pans for truffles. The best way to eat a truffle is to savor it heated, after slicing it, on simple, toasted homemade bread, and drizzling several milliliters of extra-virgin olive oil over it, provided that the oil is Umbrian: the latter has a taste that is not too pronounced, while Tuscan oil has a fruity scent that is too strong and Sicilian olive oil is too aromatic. Over the sliced truffle drizzled with oil, we suggest sprinkling several crystals of coarse sea salt (fine salt has no place in the distinguished recipes of Italian cuisine).

Truffle lovers should also keep in mind a sad rule. A given season is never propitious to truffles and wine simultaneously: truffles are good in autumn after a rainy summer; wine, on the other hand, after a dry, hot summer.

Alba does not hold an absolute monopoly over white truffles. Excellent ones are also found in the Marches, in the village of Sant'Agata Feltria, and in Tuscany, in the vicinity of San Miniato. Sometimes you come across a fortunate specimen in the most remote corners of the Molise. Successful truffle hunting also occurs farther south: it is difficult to imagine, but apparently white truffles sometimes grow even in Calabria.

The “war of the truffle” between Alba and Asti has been going on for years. Asti wants to begin selling as early as August 15 and sometimes manages to do so, while Alba is inclined to move the date toward autumn, because the later it is, the better the quality of the product. The calendar is established by the Order of the Knights of the Truffle and Wines of Alba (the same group that organized the museum of ancient farming tools at the Castello di Grinzane Cavour and reprinted
De Tuberibus
, a work by the sixteenth-century physician Alfonso Ciccarelli).
⁴
The Truffle Fair in Alba takes place the first Sunday in October. In a procession that recalls a Roman triumphal march, participants carry the best examples of the white truffle of Alba, renowned throughout the world. A wagon parade, a donkey race, and the selection of a beauty queen—the Bela Trifolera (the beautiful truffle-seeker)—follow. The clergymen of this cult are no strangers to beneficent impulses. Each year the Trifolau Association of Alba assigns the proceeds from the ten best specimens to some worthy cause.