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Unisg

Chocolate, gastronomy and Seedy Sunday

The writers and artists at the SWG winter retreat spend a lot of time thinking about food, and chocolate is one of the essential treats we administer to keep us healthy, happy and creative, meditating on all those dark sweet flavonoids as we search the cold white fields for inspiration. With Valentine’s day around the corner, it never hurts to spend time thinking about chocolate: what is it, where is it made and by whom? The industry has a poor record of exploiting producers and depending upon child labour, so if you want  your valentine chocolate to mean what you think it does, you should have a listen to this and ask questions wherever you buy your chocolate. Fair Trade chocolate is always the best choice: if you don’t eat the rest, savour the thought that you are contributing to a better world, one calorie at a time.

Once you have bought the best, most fairly produced chocolate you can, you might like to whip up a little mousse. This one sounds like a good bet, particularly if you are catering for the dairy-intolerant. I was a little surprised to see the recipe credit go to  Hervé This, one of the fathers of molecular gastronomy, as it’s remarkably low tech.

Speaking of gastronomy, I have just come across a 2010 broadcast of The New Gastronomy, from one of my favourite BBC radio shows, The Food Programme. It discusses academic training in gastronomy, starting with the University of Gastronomic Sciences, where I spent 2007 earning a Master’s of Food Culture & Communication (as documented on this blog). It’s an interesting look at the field of gastronomy and how and why it is being taught, though the Italian segment looks only at the three year undergraduate degree rather than the one year master’s that I did. (And I find Sheila Dillon‘s mispronunciation of Alice Waters’ name rather endearing). Other courses in the US and England are also discussed. It gave me a sense of renewed satisfaction that I had done the course.

Seedy Saturday takes place next weekend in Victoria which means winter is on its way out, and locals can start to plan for spring, buying seeds, swapping their home-reared seed and taking in a few talks about gardening. The event, which aims to encourage the sharing of seeds in the interests of protecting our country’s seed diversity, has got bigger every year, and I’ll be sorry to miss it, so am doubly grateful to have made it to the GTUF seed swap last month. GTUF will be at the Victoria event this year, joining other UFs (as we call our community food security groups) in a discussion of urban farming and food security.

Masters of Food Culture

So: we’ve done it, and here’s the proof… with the sad exceptions of Marta, Louisa and Donghyun who could not join us, being in the other three of the four corners of the world.

We’d caught that Colorno bus – here crossing Ponte Caprazucca just for us – one last time yesterday morning…

Climbed the stairs to our second floor hang-out…

And then had a subdued graduation ceremony, probably due to the late night revelries that preceded this particular morning after. There were speeches, from absent friends – Carlo Petrini was in Mexico warming up for the Slow Food world congress…

Unisg’s director Carlo Catani, and Slow Food Italy president Roberto Burdese…

After some frolicking in the garden with our diplomas, taking pictures

and being taken,

we returned to enjoy a Spigaroli buffet –

all our old friends were there, the king of culatello, Massimo Spigaroli himself

and lots of lardo,

a veritable blizzard of that puffy and insubstantial bread of Emilia Romagna…

a complete dearth of vegetable matter… ah, Italia.

So, thus fortified, dispersed to various napping venues where we readied ourselves for the last night party which I left around 1.30 I think, the dancing queens showing how it is possible to keep trim and limber over a year of food studies.

And now it’s all done, and we’ll spend the next few days securing the profitability of Poste Italiane before disappearing into new lives out there in the four corners of the food world.

On the way home this morning from another expensive trip to the post office, I had a farewell visit to my favourite Pugliese specialities shop where I have been buying quantities of taralli over the past few months. It was gratifying to realise I was able, after a year! to exchange a few Italian pleasantries with the shopkeeper. She was thunderstruck when I told her I would miss taralli when I was back in Canada – it hadn’t occurred to her these weren’t a staple food everywhere, I guess. Hers are particularly good so even if I do find a version elsewhere, well, it certainly won’t be the same. There’s the inescapable fact that food just tastes different in different settings: so here, with foodie classmates, in a land with well established food traditions, everything will taste quite different than it might on the most carefully-provisioned table in London or Victoria.

So, I prepare to leave with the sadness I’d feel leaving anywhere I’ve lived for a year. Lots to miss in the new food habits I’ve been cultivating. We’ve all noticed dramatic increases in the quantity of olive oil we consume. I’ve developed quite an Acacia honey habit. The fresh buffalo mozzarella, oh what can compare? And here’s one of my absolute delights: Visner di Pergola:

We had something like this in Le Marche, called Visciolato, a dark cherry wine made from the local sour cherries, Visciole. I would love the chance to taste that wine side-by-side with this one, which is absolutely delicious. It tastes like pure cherry juice, with a little kick of alcohol to warm it all the way down. Oh my my my my my.

And, yes, the taralli, oh the taralli.

What’s cookin in Parma?

Eerie symbolism or lighthearted public art? These appeared in the Piazzale della Pace just before our graduation. Turns out they are part of a gastronomic festival…

Yesterday was a long long long day for everyone at Unisg but particularly for the academic panel who had to sit through 24 oral presentations, including 3 of them by video link, using skype. The scope of what we had all done for our internships was huge, and it would have been entertaining had it not been so gruelling. Handicapped by a 45 minute late start, by lunchtime what with one thing and another we were running about 2 hours late, and we started a further half hour late after the break. By the time I started my presentation at 5.55pm (scheduled start time: 2.40) the panel and the unfortunates farther down the alphabet were looking decidedly peaky.

Those of us who were finished just barely in time to catch the last bus to Parma (6.15) ran down the stairs, our gleeful bubble rudely popped when we found the gates to the courtyard chained and padlocked, with no escape, cruelly in sight of the bus stop, where our orange beauty sat idling. Luckily, someone with keys emerged just then for a smoke and released us. We sprinted across the cobblestones to the bus’s shut door; we knocked and waved at the driver. He waved back. A comedian, just what you want after a blinding day of over-running presentations…

We did eventually get back to Parma, and had an over-indulgent meal at La Filoma which I’d been wanting to revisit since my first meal there just about a year ago. Here’s my seasonal booty, faraona, guinea fowl with, if memory serves, a bit of culatello in the middle and some buttery mushrooms next door.

Then followed an overindulgent farewell to Tabarro, our class winebar, opened to us for a private party:

Speaking of overindulgence, we made a farewell reunion celebratory finale visit to Ristorante Mosaiko on Saturday, where I sank into bliss with some foie gras on ricotta pancakes….

and ended up with just too much to choose from for dessert: a pear and almond slice, a chocolate of all chocolate tarts and a smidgen of heavenly tiramisu.

Friday in Parma

Happy to say the weather has continued to be bearable – verging on glorious. Amazing what a couple of weeks of devastating heat can do to your standards of what is ‘hot’. It does help not to have to get on a sweltering bus twice a day as well, of course.

It’s been a week of catching up – on sleep, on correspondence, and cleaning and packing up ready for what lies ahead. We are all heading towards our internships: a couple of months of assorted projects. Some will go to Slow Food, others to Eataly, another to the Barcelona markets; others will be slinging curds at Murray’s Cheese or bopping round Bordeaux Quay. Me, I’ll be back in London, and working at London Food Link.

Meanwhile, a couple of lost friends reappeared in various guises: like Aileen Downey, a fabulous voiceover actress whose history has included a role as a rabble-rousing Russian revolutionary at the ill-fated London MOMI, as well as time spent slaving over database entries. (Some of you will be able to guess which of those career highlights converged with mine.)

I filled in my registration form for the Food & Morality conference in Oxford, and looked over the offerings at the Bristol Poetry Festival. I’m doing a reading in Bath in September and sniffing round for others, though it’s probably too late to set anything more up at this point.

Cousin Tina sent me to this article about losing your parents in adulthood, which I share now with my fellow orphans. I liked this bit:

While the fact of your parents’ death ceases, with time, to be your first waking thought, the map of grief has many roads which, I suspect, one travels in some form or another for the rest of one’s life.

Slightly cooler and ever so much nicer in Parma

It’s a mercifully cooler day here in Parma, and I’m sitting with my windows boldly open at 11.30 in the morning, fans off, enjoying a breeze. I can honestly say that’s a sentence I haven’t been able to write for months, and I’m grateful to be able to do it now.

Last night we had another farewell gathering: they get smaller and smaller as people take off for their summers ‘n stages. About half a dozen of us were having a glass of wine together around 9pm when our chairs began to shake gently. We’d been talking about fast food, and although at first we suspected it was the Wrath of Carlini, we swiftly arrived at the conclusion we’d just experienced a mild earthquake (measuring 4.6, as it happens).

Oddly enough, I had been reading only on Sunday in my guidebook which told me that Parma’s duomo was

“erected on the present site by heretic bishop Cadalus, who later became antipope Honorius II, but was destroyed by the violent earthquake of 1117 that shook the whole Po valley and left only parts of the apses standing.”

We finished our glasses and headed into a breezy, almost chilly, evening and washed up at Sorelle Picchi, where I’d had my lunch, and this time ordered a big bowl of cappelletti in brodo, which were absolutely delicious.

While we were waiting for our food, we saw a man who’d stopped us on the street to ask if we’d felt the earthquake. He was in his seventies, I’d guess, and had his white table napkin draped around his neck: he and his wife, who hovered in the background, had been eating supper in their fourth floor apartment when they felt the vibrations and fled into the street, thinking Parma must be at the epicentre of some awful disaster, and were too afraid to go back inside. He paced up and down stopping everyone – passers-by, tourists, policemen – looking for some kind of reassurance. he disappeared eventually, but I saw him out on the street again this morning, still anxious but lacking his napkin.

Meanwhile I was spending some time today looking at YouTube videos and happened upon one for Unisg. It starts off well but then gets a little draggy with fuzzy tourist shots of Delhi and chops off suddenly at the end. But it was a delightful surprise:

We can’t believe…

How did it happen? A year flits by and all of a sudden it’s tearful farewells and no more pig farms, Unisg cheers, bus rides, charter airlines, wine tastings… how will we cope in the months to come?

The final week shaped up kind of like last week’s, commencing with an exam and then moving swiftly through food marketing, journalism and a great big party. We had lunch on a riverboat on the Po


(photo from Andy)

with Carlo Petrini and our university staff and dignitaries.

After the food we had a little wisdom from the brow of Petrini,

and then some goofy awards and another gem of a slideshow (so there WAS a reason for taking those – must be literally millions of frames – cameras everywhere we turned all year) by our animators Don and Marta.

Next stop was Polesine Parmense, where we revisited the scene of last winter’s visit when we learned about culatello di zibello.


(Photo from Andy)

We were attending the annual Spigaroli Awards (to local food heroes of various kinds) at the beautifully refurbished Antica Corte Pallavicina, which was about half finished on our last visit. It’s now ready to roll as a swanky agriturismo for visitors who want a short and scenic walk to their dinner at Al Cavallino Bianco.

But on Wednesday tables had been set up around the perimeter of the courtyard and the Spigaroli brothers, Massimo and Luciano, were busy seeing to the comfort of their hundreds of guests. The hay bale corral in the middle holds a flock of black piglets who made up part of the award, one for each recipient: the Spigarolis would raise, slaughter and cure them, so the prize – in good Slow Food form – would be years in the making. We had some wonderful culatello, of course, including two kinds made from white and black pigs, each culatello aged 36 months.

And a wonderful tortelli in brodo with some exquisite cheese filled pastas in a light and warming broth – bliss to be in the cooling air eating such things. Fortified, the guests then enjoyed the awards ceremony, which included a special prize for Carlo Petrini.

And then it was the last couple of classes – marketing and wine tasting from Matteo Baldi, journalism from Clodagh McKenna, the last lunch together,

the last bus home,

the last visit to Tabarro,


rounds of signings (our brand new copies of Slow Food Nation, serving as school autograph albums)

and some emotional farewells…