Tasting Prato · 1 day ago by James Martin
My flight to Zurich, from which I’ll take my buy-back lease car to Italy, happens in a mere couple of weeks. I’m up for it.
So today I hear of Degustando Prato
Degustando Prato is a gastronomic festival dedicated to specialty gourmet products featuring restaurants and estates.
Throughout September experience exquisite typical menus in restaurants and fascinating wine tours in estates scattered in the province territory, with visits to cultivations and local wine tastings.
It’s not only about the tender local gastronomy though, there’s something I’ll miss because it comes on September 8th, less than a week from this post. It’s the display of the Sacred Girdle. I am not at all happy that I will be missing this event.
Any young man who came of age in the early 60s will remember the challenge of the girdle and the age of liberation which came later…and none to soon. But I digress (nevertheless, we heard those heraldic trumpets in our heads upon the sacred removal!…)
The display takes place late in the afternoon, around 6 p.m., when trumpeters, musicians and the historical parade march through the city centre. From the pulpit built in 1400 for the occasion by Donatello and Michelozzo, the bishop, accompanied by the mayor, show the Sacred Girdle to the crowd.
Prato is a nice city. You should go. And eat. And remember girdles. I know I will.
Italy Travel Toolbox
- All About Italy Rail Passes
- How to Ride Italian Trains (video)
- Italy Maps
- Italy Cities Climate and Weather
- Italy Autostrada Map
- Cinque Terre Hiking Map
Italian Recipes · 5 days ago by James Martin
Clifford A. Wright, one of my favorite food writers, has penned one of those oh-so-true articles about our fascination with context-free recipes: A Recipe, Not a Formula in which he argues that the new cookbooks give us recipes without context.
A modern recipe is written like a schematic. Anyone can replicate the author’s dish if you do all the fussy measuring and timing. If you are the typical American, you will say, “oh, this simple recipe would be soooo much better if I added some sugar and some of those peppers growing in the back yard. Since the recipe is simply a formula, it’s easy to do that while loosing the whole history behind the dish. Unless you have context, which the classic cookbooks usually gave you. Once upon a slower time that is.
You see, folks have tried many things before they’ve settled upon a recipe. In places like Italy, people are brutally honest in their assessment of a dish you place before them. You will learn only to make small adjustments in these traditional dishes—or none at all. Unless you’re a glutton—for psychological punishment.
This insistence upon tradition makes perfect sense. You see, over many years, sometimes hundreds or even thousands, folks have diddled with the dish. They’ve come upon some universal conclusions and incorporated them into the basic structure of the dish. They’ve done the work so you don’t have to screw up the dish.
What I“m saying is that without this history, this context, you are likely to get off course fast.
Writers like Wright and Carlo Middione understand context. If you read Middione’s The Food of Southern Italy, you will understand the cultural context of the food. It’s a favorite of mine, although I think it’s out of print. Middione had a restaurant in San Francisco in which the walls were covered in interesting old photos of Italy. Context was everywhere. Middione also played the system like a pro. He said that the health department wouldn’t allow dishes to be served at room temperature, which is certain death to many Italian vegetable and antipasti dishes, but that if your restaurant was implacably clean, they might look the other way…
Wright is a particularly fine food anthropologist. I really enjoy his Real Stew: 300 Recipes for Authentic Home-Cooked Cassoulet, Gumbo, Chili, Curry, Minestrone, Bouillabaise, Stroganoff, Goulash, Chowder, and Much More
And consider the “bad” review of Real Stew:
All cultures have delicious culinary traditions — well, at least most of them do — but to insist that American cooks precisely duplicate the ingredients and cooking conditions necessary for ethnic verisimilitude smacks of snobbery at best and condescension at worst. A little more emphasis on user-friendly and, dare it be said, familiar recipes would have made this book considerably more useful.
I’m a little tired of books that simply give the 5 minute simplified microwave version of a Tunisian stew. Besides, nowhere does the book state that Clifford is gonna come at you with a sharply-honed chef’s knife if you deviate from a traditional, well-researched recipe. But you should know from where your recipe came and how the people who make it every day do it, doncha think? Does honesty count these days? I was stunned at the earthy tastiness of real traditional cooking of Sardinia when I finally visited the island, but only after reading a Gourmet article that was crammed with culinary lies gleaned from chefs who cooked for clueless yacht owners and written while the author lounged on a deck chair on a Costa Smerelda beach. Yuck.
If you want something simplified to oblivion, simply sit on your butt and watch the Food Channel, where everything worth cooking can be done in ten minutes or less and won’t make your kitchen smell of long and lovingly-cooked food. Who’d want that?
Cold Cheese · 9 days ago by James Martin
I was reading an interesting blog post on the come puoi non amarla blog this morning about a fabulous sounding goat cheese producer who also runs an agritruismo near Cuneo in Piemonte.
Anna Savino happened to sample the cheeses there and came away with a few tips. One of them was interesting and fundamental. It was about temperature, which is very, very important to Italians and to the enjoyment of food in general. It is this:
We eat cheese TOO COLD! He said as soon as we called in the morning to book they put all the cheese out on the table for us.
Yes, we do. One’s tongue doesn’t receive much taste when it is being frozen by the food—and it’s a sin not to taste something so you miss out on rejoicing in its laborious creation. One of the things I miss about Italy (or France, Spain, Portugal…) is the cheese course. I mean, when I ask for cheese at a California restaurant and they plop down an ice cold block of Monterey Jack on an ice cold plate in front of me, I dream of flinging the whole deal like a destructive Frisbee back to the kitchen, hoping without hope it will knock some sense into whoever thought it was a good idea to serve mediocre cheese at freezing temperatures. The thing is this: digging into a cold block of Monterey Jack is as close to eating a block of wax as you’ll ever get—blech! (unless you happen to have a candle-eating fetish.)
Piemonte has over 160 cheeses they told me when I was there, but I would have to guess that there are way more than that. In Italy, you don’t have to make cheese like everyone else makes it, so I bet there are folks just making something they’ve always called “formaggio” who haven’t had their style of cheese counted. After all, I used to think that Tuscany meant pecorino and basta! until I discovered the many cheesy delights of Naturalmente Lunigiana.
In any case, you want a link with pictures to the joint that makes and serves goat cheese right, eh? Here: Az.Agrituristica Lo Puy. The page is in Italian but the pictures are nice and will suck you in. They did me, anyway. You must reserve; they’re open Thursday through Sunday. Saturday is interesting:
Sabato sera (dalle 19,30): Piatti di capra o di capretto ispirati a ricette delle varie tradizioni pastorali.
We’re talkin’ ‘bout goat or kid with recipes inspired by the traditions of the shepherds here. Mmmm.
There’s also a blog
Andiamo! Throw down your American poison eggs and pack your bags!
[Related: Can you save a dying cheese tradition by taking a fab vacation in Portugal? Well, maybe. See Visiting Serra da Estrela: Saving Queijo do Serra]
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Vinegar · 10 days ago by James Martin
If you’ve been to Spilamberto, then there’s a good chance you’ve been to the Museo del Balsamico Tradizionale di Spilamberto. Such a pilgrimage will give you a good feel for the excruciatingly long process involved in making real balsamic vinegar. It takes at least 12 years; and that’s for a young-un.
The reason I mention this is that there was a heated discussion on the web recently about how many of us hated it when fake balsamic was presented to us to use to dress a simple salad. It was just another “oh, what has the stupid world come to now” whining session until my hero Marcella Hazan weighed in. She called vinegar “nobile”. Not balsamic, the regular stuff. She hates fake balsamic, too.
And that got me to thinking. I use vinegar quite a lot. One of the best uses is in Marchella Hazan’s own recipe, “Lamb stew with vinegar and green beans.” Yes, you throw some lamb, some green beans and some onion in a pot and stew them in vinegar. Ordinary vinegar. And it’s good. Besides, it’s real Italian.
You know, when you rent a house for a week in Italy, sometimes you get a house whose owner is stingy with the accouterments, especially with the pots and pans. Maybe there’s a two burner stove and a single pot that’s so darned beaten up it seems to have been used to transfer huge rocks out of the driveway. You think, “how in the world am I gonna cook dinner in that?
Then Marcella’s recipe flutters into your mind. A one-pot meal. Four basic ingredients easily procured in Italy. And, believe me, the smells this combo produces will amaze and astound you.
I use vinegar in other ways in Italy, too. I’ve heard that some Americans crave the barbecue sauce they can’t buy in Italian stores. Heck, that’s easy. I just get one of those squeeze tubes of ultra-reduced tomato paste and some vinegar. That’s the basis of the sauce. You need something, of course, to balance out the sour, so it’s gotta be sweet. My neighbor’s honey will do. Some pepper flakes and black pepper to give it some kick, and there you go. You saute some garlic and the pepper flakes in oil with a big ‘ol squeeze of the tomato paste so it browns together, then add a bit of the honey and some salt—always tasting like you do in cooking school—and you thin it with some ‘o the wine you’re drinking until it gets to the right consistency, then salt to taste. Basta, five minutes and you’re done. I mean with the barbecue sauce. It might take longer to drain the bottle of wine.
In ancient times women considered vinegar a healing liquid. There’s some evidence that it has an antiglycemic effect. Heck, you can clean windows with it, too.
Noble. Yup, that’s for sure.
*You might consider looking in your used bookstore for Marcella Hazan’s “More Classic Italian Cooking” in paperback. It’s better than the 1995 re-issue, which caves to American tastes. Mine is tore right in two, at our most used recipe for Chicken Fricassee with Red Cabbage. Mmmm, I gotta do that one again.
**I didn’t write about Marcella Hazan just because she friended me on facebook either. The fact she wrote “Welcome. Thank you for the kind words. You have a keen palate. My best, Marcella” is just icing on a big fat ego cake for me. Really. Buy her book and see for yourself. You’ll discover that she’s my hero for good reason; she cooks real Italian, and tells you how to structure the meal besides.
Artisans and Pigs · 13 days ago by James Martin
There is an interesting article over on Michael Ruhlman’s site called Artisan Butchers that got me thinking about the folks who I had the privileged of watching break down a pig last winter. I’m pretty sure they don’t call themselves artisans, although the word comes from the Italian artigiano, I’m told.
Ruhlman says:
Artisan means: a worker skilled in a trade; craftsman (this from my Webster). It does not mean artist. I love the idea that a sign painter is an artisan. I hate the idea that any butcher would call himself or herself “an artisan butcher.”
Ok, so it’s true: it’s darn pretentious for someone to call himself an artisan. The guy up there to the right is just doing what he does, running various hand tools (and his hands) over a pig until it’s broken into the parts that make meat and salumi.
It’s not an automatic process you do like a factory worker. Adjustments are made on the fly.
Pig Owner (Armando): “The chops need more fat. Last year they didn’t have enough fat around them.”
Butcher: “You won’t get as much lardo you know!” (remember that lardo is one of Armando’s specialties.)
Armando: “Yeah, I know. More fat on the chops.”
The butcher straightens up, then slides an evilly sharp knife into the soft and pillowy white flesh and carves out the rack of chops lickety split. If there ever was an artisan moment that went by in a flash, this was it. Amazing accuracy, the line of fat surrounding the chops was as uniform as you could wish for.
As I watched I saw every last bit of the pig sliced and cleaned for use later, like the intestines you see over there—casings for Armando’s Lunigiana mortadella and the salame Toscana.
Which brings me to the next point about “artisan.” We, the consumer, need a signifier to clue us in to where we might find a butcher like this, one who doesn’t just run everything through a band saw and put the cubes of it into Styrofoam trays. We have chosen to use the word “artisan” for that. (Or at least I have—and I’ve watched as a local Californian “butcher” sawed my rack of ribs in half, not by cutting between the middle bones, but by running the saw over the bones lengthwise. He was not an artisan.)
According to Ruhlman:
Artisan and artisanal are indeed over used to the point that they’ve been co-opted by big business and turned into marketing terms.
I disagree, not with the outcome, but with the idea that it takes overuse for big business to co-opt a concept that will make them ever more money. This is a process that’s been going on for a long time (the Christians did it to the Pagans, remember) and has simply been happening faster and faster as industrial crap food gets ever more dangerous and tasteless.
I watched the guys on the right work in an unheated garage on marble slabs. And I still trust what comes out of the garage more than I’d trust an American industrial egg that you have to fry for an hour and a half so it doesn’t kill you. They didn’t taste the salami they were making by frying a little up and trying it, then adjusting the seasonings—they just pinched some of the raw mix off and down it went.
They’re still alive.
So let’s stop blaming ourselves when the sign hanging over the pimply-faced kid’s head at the Safeway says “Artisan Butcher”. Just smile and back off—and promise you’ll use the meaningful version of the word when you pass on to other discerning folks the name of the artisan butcher you find in your area. (Although I also like the term “master butcher” as suggested by Judy Witts Francini, too.)
Anyway, read Ruhlman’s blog. There’s some good stuff in there about food and how to put it together without all that fuss that’s collected over the years in American kitchens.
Rome in Black and White, with Bourdain · 17 days ago by James Martin
If you missed Antony Bourdain’s Travel Channel show on Rome last night I suggest you find out when it will air again and watch it, preferably with a plate of Penne al’Amatriciana in front of you as I did (don’t skimp on the guanciale, it makes a difference).
Fab show. Supposedly a tribute to Fellini. I dunno, but visually entrancing. I don’t know what they did with all the people, but Rome looks stunningly working-class in black and white (they did let some color leak into the food shots though). Tony in a suit and tie provides the contrast to crumbly Rome. Like puntarella to roast lamb.
There’s just something different about Rome. Tony mentions “The improbable awesomeness” of the city. When you think about it, in most foodie cities folks develop a snobbish attitude and eat things fashioned by touted chefs who twist and bend food items until a signature dish is extruded. Rome isn’t really like that. Tradition rules—and there’s nothing wrong with that. Sometimes though, you really expect a fight to break out, then reconciliation col vino and all is better than before.
You can’t always get good food in Rome. In fact, it’s probably harder to get a great meal there than in other cities in Italy. The problem is—the places tourists go are the most interesting places you don’t want to miss—and there is where the rip-off crap food congregates.
I liked the raucous scenes in Il Timoniere. It’s off the beaten track. You really don’t have to go that far off the beaten track though, to get good Roman food. I like Al Pompiere, not a bad walk from the Piazza Farnese, which is how I got there. That’s a picture of the fried artichoke over there on the left.
But then, behind the artichoke plate is the salad. It’s a puntarella salad. You only get this in late winter/early spring. Puntarella is the absolutely perfect foil to fried dishes—or the heavy dishes of winter. Dressed with a little anchovy to lend a salty bite and it’s the perfect palate cleanser. It whispers “spring is coming” to your deprived palate. You can have a foodgasm if you’re not careful.
You need some fast food? Hey, just walk over to the famous Campo dei Fiore and look in the buckets. There it is—all chopped and cleaned for you. How hard is that? Maybe the bucket makes you suspicious, but if that’s the case you’re way too afraid of a little dirt and probably your immune system is all the worse for it. You gotta feed that, too.
Say what you will about the Campo dei Fiori, but there are some good things there for the tourist who has had the good sense to get an apartment in the center of Rome. Good things I mean like Puntarella—or all the rest of the great greens ready for a squeeze of lemon and a thin coat of great olive oil.
Still looking for places to eat in Rome? I’ve found a wonderfully informative post from Food Lover Kathy, who volunteers to get you through the primo course with her favorite Roman pasta dishes (and osterie): Roman Pasta Dishes and 10 Places to Eat them in Rome
Traditional Cooking, Traditional Work · 19 days ago by James Martin
Ferragosto, the stop-work day in the middle of August when Italians get in their cars and go somewhere—if they’re lucky enough to get a decent slice of autostrada to fit a tiny Italian car in—seems a fine time to talk about some interesting things that have hit my radar lately.
First, the divine Divina Cucina is heading to one of my favorite food places on the planet, Sicily, to explain to you all about the old-world charm in the markets and cooking pots of the local population. The tour comes at a reasonable cost, and explores places lots of people wouldn’t get to on their own. See: Divina Cucina: Secrets of My Sicilian Kitchen.
If you’d like to see Judy, AKA Divina Cucina at her cook book signing at the Antica Macelleria Cecchini, see the video.
Then Gloria of “At Home in Tuscany” writes of an interesting development in Tuscany: the creation of a guild sorta thing for folks who practice the old trades. Pretty much all of the people of my village would have to be included, I’m thinkin’. (I looked into replacing my front door recently, and came up with a price of 3000 Euros. It’s not a door to a palace, it’s just a standard front door. Sheesh.) Artisans aren’t cheap, so they deserve a guild, or at least a “registry” as they call it. See: Antichi Mestieri: Old Trades in Tuscany
The reason I say that many folks in my village would probably qualify for the registry are the plethora monuments to antiquity still in use within the city limits, like the one in the picture on the right (click to see it larger). It’s the water power controls for an old mill, used to this day to grind corn for polenta. Let the water flow and wham! the wheels start turning and you turn your dried corn into polenta for putting wild bore sauce on.
Even by itself, the rustic engineering here is a pretty thing, isn’t it?
An Italian Odyssey: Culture and Cuisine along the Via Francigena · 22 days ago by James Martin
As you know if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, I spend nearly half a year in a small village just off the Via Francigena in the Lunigiana region of Tuscany. The Via Francigena (map of the Via Francigena in Italy) is a pilgrimage trail like the way-better-known Camino de Santiago de Compostela. But there’s a difference, the Camino de Santiago is the wide and distinct superhighway of pilgrimage trails. Thousands walk it, sleeping (and partying) in the hostels along the road. By contrast, the Via Francigena is the squiggly line on the map, indistinct in some places, a road you don’t expect to have signs. Or hostels.
As for me—the contrarian—give me a squiggly line on a map any day.
In any case, the reason for all this preamble is that I am anxiously awaiting my review copy of the book An Italian Odyssey: One Couple’s Culinary and Cultural Pilgrimage. My mouth waters, my brain tells me I should have gotten off my duff and walked the darn thing and wrote a book on the food along the way first, before Julie Burk and Neville Tencer had a chance to write their version.
But that’s water under the bridge. There are fascinating cities along the way, all gaining in importance, especially in the 12th and thirteenth centuries, because of the commerce and the safety of crowds that pilgrimage afforded. I can’t wait to hear the stories and read of the amazing regional cuisine I’m sure Julie and Neville found along the way.
You can follow them, by the way, on the blog called Little Green Tracs.
And just in case you can’t wait for my review, the book is published by little Verdera Media, and is available from Amazon: An Italian Odyssey: One Couple’s Culinary and Cultural Pilgrimage
And remember: there is no better way to discover a place than by walking it.