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Parma

Industrial pasta, arab influences and the spoken word

Phew, a week seems to have got away from me. Wandering round Parma on Sunday the 13th, I came upon a big party right around the corner, on strada Farini, which had been closed to traffic and lined with street vendors, with nearby gardens and galleries open to viewing. All good street parties in Parma seem to involve strategic use of turf, and this one was no exception, going a step further, adding a fountain:

If the week before was visual, last week was, well, audio-visual. We divided most of our time between Barbara Santich, visiting from Adelaide to tell us about Medieval food history, and Simon Parkes, from the BBC Food Programme, visiting from London to talk about food radio.

We kicked off the week with an all-day tour of the Barilla Pasta factory near Parma on Monday. Oh no, we thought, a dreary day of PowerPoint presentations followed by endless trailing around to see more large shiny machines… but happily there was more to it than that.

Though we did commence, as all 21st century students surely do, by sitting helplessly in a room for half an hour or so, watching a series of mildly concerned staff members take turns having a go trying to persuade the projector to talk to the laptop, and when that didn’t work, trying another laptop, another staff member, another cable, and so on. Enough time had fallen off the clock to convince the plucky marketing chap to plunge in, armed only with a box of spaghetti and a head full of company history. He did very well off the cuff, and by the time the technology was awake he’d covered a good chunk of time.

We had technical talks too, which luckily followed a not-too-distant class in pasta technology, so we were old hands at distinguishing common wheat from durum, and were already aware of the legislation requiring the use of durum wheat for Italian dried pasta; we knew about different gluten actions in each, and of course familiar with potential major flaws in dried pasta. We heard about the work of the research department to produce the perfect balance of protein, gluten and yield in its various strains of durum. We heard that Barilla buys a large percentage of Italy’s durum production, and some of the rest from the US, where it has both mill and pasta factory. And we did see some big machines that were churning out a lot of strands of spaghetti, and were treated to a large lunch of pasta.

Back to the halls of learning on Tuesday, in Barbara Santich’s classes we enjoyed a walk through Medieval foods: heard about some of the foods that were prepared for feasts and how banquets began; and reviewed the astonishing number of days set aside each year for fasting and religious observance that affected foods. We looked at some recipes that had made their way down the years from early cooks such as Apicius, and talked about some of the spices that have pretty much disappeared from Italian food, like dill, cumin, mint, coriander and asafoetida; heard about the influence on cuisine from Arab traders who introduced such foods as citrus fruits, buckwheat, cane sugar, spinach, eggplant and lots of spices to the Mediterranean.

Next, Simon Parkes had us work on a six minute radio piece, which was a challenge to complete in two days. One night, really. It involved the use of some sound editing software which worked better for some of us than others but we had fun with it and enjoyed listening to the final products on Thursday afternoon.

And at that point I flew away to London for the weekend.

Journalism, food geography and a mighty fine picnic

We had the entertaining guidance of the Guardian‘s very own Matthew Fort to speak to us last week. I have been to many a talk on how to write and on selling your writing, but it never hurts to have a few stern reminders from a guy at the top, like: you can’t call yourself a writer if you don’t write every day. His chief tip is to try to elicit three reactions from the reader: ‘I never thought of that’; ‘that’s really useful’; and ‘I really enjoyed that’.

One side-comment he made stayed with me: British food shops are shooting themselves in the foot by keeping bankers’ hours; the only food shops open at times when their customers are able to shop are the supermarkets, and so they win the business. A remark that goes for other places as well; but he praised Italian food shops for staying open in the evening so that working shoppers could patronise them on their way home. Here in Parma most shops open between 8.30 and 9.30 and close for a very long lunch (12.30 till as late as 4.30) but then reopen for evening trade, until about 7 or 7.30 – which is indeed convenient, seen in that light. Not the first thought in my mind when I finally emerge to do my shopping on Saturdays around noon, but I guess that’s my choice.

We finished our week with Colin Sage, an environmental geographer and crusader for raw milk Irish cheeses. He talked to us about food geography, and specifically about some of the regulatory issues around raw milk cheeses that are helping to draw a scientific noose ever more tightly round the food we are able to buy. He referred us to Marion Nestle, a name that’s been coming up in various places and readings, and mentioned a useful article by our hero Michael Pollan about the rise of a whole new evil that goes by the handle of nutritionism. And he left us with the suggestion that maybe it’s time to grow our own food.

He called on us to shift away from thinking of ourselves as simply consumers having our choices limited and being passive recipients of what might be less and less a ‘whole food’ and more and more a nutrition product. We need, he says, to become food citizens with an active role in asserting values and creating an environment for our own sustenance. Increasing transportation costs mean there will be a higher and higher cost for our food: the current system is unsustainable. We need to be responsible and involved in how and where food is sourced, and grow some of our own food if we can. He advocates alternative food networks: perhaps develop small scale cooperatives for sharing food resources. Fair trade needs to go further than chocolate or coffee, and develop in such areas as fruit that we’ll never be able to grow in northern climates.

Oddly enough I had been listening to a Food Programme piece from last February on much the same theme, where the speaker, Colin Tudge, advocated a “world-wide food club” – a cooperative relationship between good farmers who really want to produce good stuff, artisans, bakers and brewers who are prepared to produce good food from it, and people who are willing to pay for good food properly produced.

Colin Sage has also spent time looking at the structures around our food governance, and is uneasy with his findings. The bodies that research and govern our food supply are suspect: there are well publicised funding relationships between business and research (academics and scientists) and government which is problematic for impartiality: when funding determines what is being studied and how the results may be released, that limits what we can truly investigate and report in all that we need to know about our food. The ‘cosy relationship’ that exists between business and regulatory bodies in terms of who heads them (but where do you find the expertise to head regulators if not in the industries they come in to regulate?) can be causing problems again in impartiality. And food sovereignty means that countries that need to feed themselves are using their own resources to grow export crops, which are more lucrative, but create a world in which food is being grown as animal feed or fuel while their own populations suffer hunger and malnourishment. Sobering stuff; the more so when so much of it is literally echoing down this year, repeated with variations by our speakers and in our readings.

With all that on our minds it could have been hard to gather the strength for a Labour Day picnic in the park but we managed. We spread our blankets on a sunny day in a quiet, walled garden overhung by chestnuts in full flower with a few bouncing dogs in the background – and later in the afternoon some curious soundtracks (Frank Sinatra?) coming from the puppet show in the courtyard of the Castello dei Burattini. One by one we set down our wares, explaining why they were not adequate, which ingredients we’d been unable to find or adapt, why the recipes had not worked as we had hoped, why they didn’t look the way they were supposed to; and one by one we ate the offerings with delight and mutual encouragement. Even halfway through our year it can be a scary thing to share humble food among our ever-more gastronomically enlightened selves. But we all agreed we must do it more often.

Bologna, Mantova, Parma


A few more pictures from Bologna, where the walls have faces…


Bologna birthplace of murdered poet and film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini.

On Thursday I thought I should make a little extra effort to get to Mantova/Mantua, which I’d wanted to see for a while. I seem to have managed to time my visit with that of every school aged teen in Northern Italy; the place was thronged, mobbed and ringing with the particular, unrestrained, and unmissable presence of the massed Italian adolescent. A sound that is even more penetrating, I was to discover, when situated inside a palace or town square. Yeesh. Worst of all, whether or not it was down to their presence, I found that the Ducal Palace’s Camera degli Sposi was closed for the day, except to those with reserved tickets. Bummer and a half. I bought the postcard but somehow it was not the same.


I did wander around the pretty garden of the Palazzo d’Arco, and because you cannot go through the rooms alone I had an odd and silently escorted tour of my own. I liked the kitchen, whose walls were covered in pots and pudding molds, and was grateful not to have to think about polishing a collection of that size.


Pizza Primavera, in Mantova: rocket and tomatoes.


Mantova, lots of water.


The other day in Parma. A lot of horse meat on sale here.. what would Peter Pan say?


And what about these guys: before I found them, they went out of business. Parma not ready for Tex Mex pizza?

Easter break

Well it’s nearly over, our two weeks of blissed out sunshiny whateveritwaswedid. Most of my classmates took off for foreign shores: Copenhagen, New York, Istanbul, Montreal, Seoul… I stayed in Parma, mostly, just to be different. And just to have a look round the galleries and museums and churches which I haven’t done, waiting as I’ve been for a visitor to do it with. And I finally had one and here are some of the things we did:

Visited Osteria del Gesso, one of the local thumbs-up dineries. I had a very good meal there, but an even better one a night or two later at Ristorante Mosaika, a little placed I’d walked by a few times and had been wanting to try. We both had selected menus (I had the meat, Meli had the fish) and they were, in our favourite word, celestiale. They started us off gently with some deliriously fresh and beautiful balsamico-drizzled buffalo mozzarella, and delicate rounds of crostini with fresh green pesto; moved us smoothly on into starters (a wonderful rabbit terrine, and a salt cod puree whose salad came with a stunning soy-wasabi dressing) and pasta (gorgeous gnocchi draped with lardo, and a delightful tagliatelle freckled with fresh green herbs and strewn with shellfish)

and mains (tender white sea bass with clams and olives, and for me, meltingly pink lamb);


polished us off with warm, soft chocolate cake…

and for me a nest of perfectly ripe strawberries tossed in citrus and served with gelato.

To work all that off, we went nutria-spotting, checked out some puppets, popped our heads into the Baptistry, the Duomo, and every other church we came upon, except the desanctified ones (which were several); had walks in the Parco Ducale and Parco della Cittadella, sampled gelato from Grom and K2, had a drink in Web ‘n Wine, saw the Aga Khan masterpieces exhibition and peeped round the corner into the Teatro Farnese.

Then a day in Bologna, where we saw the Museo Civico Medievale and the Museo Morandi, the Chiesa San Stefano, the Basilica di San Petronio, and still had time to stumble upon an excellent pizzeria and have a sampling of gelato (from Gelateria Gianni, branches which seemed to materialise at every turning). We expired on a sofa somewhere and had a drink and a few olives before returning to Parma. Where we planned our assault on Milan the following day.

Of course we visited first the Duomo, and then wandered about looking for lunch, which we found at Bellavista Cafe – the food was excellent – the seafood plate disappeared a little too quickly to capture;

the pizzas looked amazing as they went by; the apple cake was delightful.

We then ambled through the Castello Svorzesco for most of the afternoon and never really got to the end of it. Meli had an hour to sprint round the Pinacoteca di Brera while I rested my feet and sipped a spremuta d’arancia.

And then Meli took to the skies from our very own Aeroporto G. Verdi, where the approach roundabout must have the best topiary ever:

Call of the coypu…

… or do I mean Revenge of the Nutria?

Visitors to Florence, I’m told, often remark on the web-footed, beaver-like creatures you can see frolicking in the Arno. Here too in Parma we’d noticed mammals in the river and wondered what they were: nutria, we were told (aka coypu / coipú / kóypu / ragondin / nuture rat / swamp beaver — but not to be confused with the river otter). And as their species name (Myocastor coypus) suggests, beaver-like they are, in many ways.. until you see their tails, and their colourful teeth!

Apparently these little blighters – Argentinian rodents with rat-like tails – were imported into Europe from South America in the 1920s. They arrived in Italy in 1928, brought here by commercial furriers hoping to turn a quick lire. When this didn’t happen, it seemed easiest to just.. set them free. And some of the rest escaped fair and square, and have made a real success of it: since their first sighting in the wild in 1960, they have spread from Italy to Sicily and Sardinia .

Alas for Italy, coypu really like it here and find many nice things to eat in the river systems, to the extent that they have laid waste to a great deal of native vegetation, as well as rice farms, and their burrowing habits weaken irrigation systems and riverbanks, causing tens of millions of euros in damage per year.

They were introduced to Britain as well, where they caused a lot of agricultural damage, but Britain embarked on an eradication campaign, employing 24 trappers who managed to eradicate the species there in just under a decade, by 1989 (… or did they?).

They are still raised in France for fur, and other products including soap, pate and even jewellery (those lovely teeth, just the colour of Mimolette, alors). Here are a couple of recipes in case you want to make your own pate or ragout. (Lucky for the nutria, animal rights activists at Bite Back are hard at work liberating these giant rodents into the French countryside.)

The French are not the only connaiseurs: apparently the meat is lean and low in cholesterol (well, they are herbivoires) and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries is aiming to get locals to help eradicate them through fine dining, and has helpfully posted some other recipes. If you need some visual prompts, here’s a YouTube video – sponsored by LDWF – to show you how it’s done.

Ironically, just as they are really making a nuisance of themselves by busting loose wherever they were imported, their numbers in the rivers and streams of Argentina appear to have been dwindling.

Milk prices, wine history, more olive oil


We had a beautiful weekend in Parma: a cool and clear Sunday, ideal for a stroll by the river, after a sprinkling of snow on Friday. That was a meteorological Australia Day gift for our Ozzie colleague, who’d graced us that afternoon with bone fide Vegemite sandwiches, Mintos and Fantales. Friday night several of us checked out Shri Ganesh,the Indian restaurant in town, and it was good: wonderful tandoori chicken, dhal and samosas, and lots of other things too.

Meli has passed along a timely story from BBC News about milk prices and farmer underpayment: A woman sat in a bath of cold milk outside Parliament in protest at the price per litre dairy farmers are paid. (And if you want to support dairy farmers in a real way, you might like to pick one off your morning pint, if you’re lucky enough to get the ones with the lonely hearts ads on them.)

Meanwhile, more classes since the great pig farm visit of ’07. Since Wednesday, we’ve had some wine history, wine technology, sensory analysis, more olive oil tasting, and a dash of semiotics. Phew. Here are some highlights.

Wine history: I was delighted to hear Allen Grieco speak in support of Retsina, the Greek wine that was born from an ancient quest for preservatives – and one turned out to be pine resin, which led to a characteristic aroma and flavour, which nurtured a taste, which only began to die when foreign tourists started to swamp the tastes and production values in Greece within the last thirty years.

In my experience you are either born a retsina drinker or not. Our family was divided on that point. I’d like to suggest maybe it’s a genetic thing, like tongue-rolling? Anyway it made me look forward to visiting Crete again, as I remember well the delightful bottles of retsina made in Chania that perished on my last visit.

Sensory analysis… more statistics. Horrible stuff. And discretion forbids me from saying anything more about the nature of the class; indeed, the very need for discretion says all that should possibly be said about that.

And I would have thought that all that kind of complex thinking about communication in the form of signs (present through their absence) should have made me ready for yesterday’s start in semiotics. But not.

I prefer the oil and wine studies.

Oil tasting was, as always, delightful in every way. We had Greek olive oil day yesterday. The mystery factor was a second tasting of one of the oils after it had been heated to below the smoking point (which no doubt everyone but me always knew was 180 degrees c, right?). So even though it was just heated and cooled, with nothing cooked in it, the flavour was totally gone. It had none of the aroma of the original wine, and smelled and tasted a bit like popcorn. A helpful reminder about (a) keeping your olive oil cool, dark and away from exposure to oxygen; and (b) don’t cook with the good stuff! It’s meant to be added as a condiment after the cooking’s finished. Heat will bring out its flavours, but cooking it will only kill them. A fine line.

You can make it into mayonnaise, if it’s not too bitter or peppery: very pretty. (Guess which one was made – not from olive oil – by Kraft?)

Another useful tip for those of us maybe schlepping wondrous bottles of extra virgin olive oil thither and yon, fresh from some exquisite pressing in far-flung places: you can freeze it if you need to. But once you thaw it, use it up faster than you would fresh, as it will be that much more fragile. As we never tire of hearing, olive oil does not improve with age: its power, aroma and flavours dissipate as time goes by.