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Le Marche – Our Day of Pork


View from a Trattoria.

The topic of vegetarianism has been well discussed by all of us on this pork-fest we call food school. This is repeatedly no course for vegetarians; even as the borderline veggies among us are starting to scramble back to the clean side of the line, the omnivores are talking more and more obsessively about vegetables, between bites of whatever part of the pig we’re eating this meal. It was all taken to extremes on Wednesday when we had a food history lecture on pork, followed by a bit of salumi, followed by a six course meal of… pork.


Salumi, including (I hope I have these right): Ciavuscolo, a soft, spreadable salami flavoured with garlic; Salame di Fabriano, a knife-cut salami with whole peppercorns; and Testa in Cassetta, or head-cheese, this one including olives and almonds.

The lecture, by Prof. Hermes Ercoli, Università degli Studi di Macerata, took place in the breathtaking (view as well as temperature, which slowly plummeted through the afternoon) hilltop setting of Trattoria Damiani e Rossi.


First course: Filetto di maiale farcito con il suo fegato e pistacchi, salsa di bergamotto (the bergamot is what looks here like lemon rind but tastes like, well, Earl Grey tea!)

We watched the sun set over the Sibilline Mountains while we heard about the pig’s rise and fall in myth, religion and practical matters of the table (an excellent post-script for me, having listened only last week to Barbara Klar’s similarly broad-ranging treatment in Swine Before Pearls on CBC).


Second course: Maccheroni con il sugo delle costine.

We heard about the ‘intolerance soup‘ made of pork that was served in a far-right sponsored soup kitchen in Paris only last year, which sought to divide the hungry – through religious dietary observance – into the ‘real French’ and those who the group sought to exclude through a culture of food.


Third course: Zuppetta di trippa di mailale con fagiolina del lago Trasimeno (tripe soup: who knew it could be so delicate?)

Then on to the pig’s misfortunes which begin in etymology, its name tangling with the human body in Latin languages; in Italian, porco/corpo; in Latin, porcus/corpus; in French, porc/corp; and so on.


Fourth course: Polenta con sangue di maiale al profumo di arance. (Blood flavoured with oranges; we couldn’t quite work out, even after eating, which part was blood)

A forest-dwelling creature, and one whose diet makes it a competitor for food with a hungry human population, the pig’s fortunes suffered with the historical rise in agriculture and the reduction of its habitat. And religion stuck its oar in. St. Clement of Alexandria bad-mouthed it for its omnivorous and unwholesome appetites which might contaminate those who ate it with similar behaviours, and advised that a pure life is one without pork. Unfortunately for believers in pure theory, at the end of the Roman Empire, with Goths battling the Byzantines all over Le Marche, the area suffered a 98% reduction in its population, with whole villages committing suicide in times of imminent starvation. So the hungry inhabitants turned back to more practical pagan worship which at least allowed them to eat something that was gaining ground as the forest began to reclaim agricultural land.


Course five: Sella di Maiale arrostita con castagne e tartufo nero (with —ahh, even a bit of crackling, Italian style).

Needing to restore control, the pragmatists in the Christian church had to think of something. In accordance with the long tradition of Christian colonisation of pagan festivals, Feriae Sementivae, the winter feast of Ceres (Cerere / Demeter), the Roman goddess of grain, to whom swine were sacrificed, morphed into the feast of St. Anthony, who picked up the Christian thread and became friend to swine. At his feast there might be blessing of the animals, or the serving of bread, the crumbs of which would be taken home for the animals.


And finally, dessert: Savarin con gelato di pistacchi salata (as far as we could see, pork-free, but I’m not betting my life on that)

There is much more pig mythology we didn’t get into, and much more to say about pigs in general than can be reported here, but our speaker left us with a few tantalising thoughts: pigs helped us to reinvent our world, he suggested; should the American flag not more appropriately feature the hot dog rather than the stars or stripes?

A week in Le Marche – Olives


Ok, so I had never heard of Le Marche before I came to Italy. Well I had, I just didn’t know what “The Marches” meant – it was a phrase out of turn of the century literature, I thought; and if I’d thought about it I probably would have believed it was an old demarcation that no longer existed. And in fact the term, meaning “borders” or “boundaries” has been used to describe the margins of many different countries.

In Italy, the name was bandied around through history due to this area’s position between the north and south of Italy, which at one time marked the border of the Holy Roman Empire. It has been settled since paleolithic times, changing hands at intervals as the Picini gave way to the Romans who gave way to the Goths who gave way to alternating spheres of ownership by emperors and the papacy, until the fiefdoms gave way to free communes, and the area joined the kingdom of Italy in 1860 and that gave way to the republic in 1946. Now here we are in the modern era, watching successive colonisations by various armies of tourist and agribusiness.

We stayed pretty firmly in the central province of Ancona for our visit, named by previous owners for the “elbow” (agkonas)/Ancona, the eponymous industrial port that sits above Monte Conero, but caught glimpses of the others. Facing the Dalmation coast, Ancona is a big chunk of mountainous land well-provided with beaches for summer visitors.

Our hotel was in Porto San Giorgio, an off-season seaside town if ever there was one, the fronds of its palm trees bound up in bamboo against the winter storms, shutters drawn, shops and restaurants closed for the season. Or maybe not, since there are apparently a lot of out-of-towners from Rome and elsewhere with a proprietorial toe in the Adriatic who come up for weekends.


Among the many delights we tasted over the week, olive ascolane deserve special mention. These Italian equivalents of scotch eggs are made from olives (originally the nice big juicy Ascolana olives, of course) stuffed with or around meat filling, then breaded and fried. Lesser versions can be found in almost any supermarket in Italy, and there are many home-made versions. The ones we had were particularly fresh and tasty, so we’re spoiled (yet again) for life.


We managed to hit a warm, breezy day for our tour round the 25 hectare olive grove at Azienda del Carmine, where they grow Ascolana (the first to ripen, in May), Leccino (a smaller olive), Frantoio (the name means ‘olive press’ we learned), and other varietals.

Our translator explains the use of pheromone traps which the growers use to check the progress of the Bactrocera oleae, the olive fruit fly which is the main pest for olive growers. It lays eggs in the olives which not only destroy the fruit but make the crop unpalatable for use in olive oil; because of the volume of olives you need to put through the press, it’s impractical to try to sort the damaged olives, so prevention and chemicals are the only weapons there are. Instead of routinely treating their trees with pesticides as some of their neighbours do, these growers check the trees and fruit for flies and then treat only infested trees. Unfortunately it’s been a bad year for them this year.


Every ten years, the olive trees need a rigorous pruning, which takes them a year or two to recover from, so the grove is pruned in sequence, 5 hectares at a time.

After a welcome opportunity renewing and showing off our olive oil-tasting skills on a couple of their top oils, we were treated to a big spread of breads, cheeses, salumi and salads.

Yep, marvellous mozzarella – and a couple of different pecorinos, a young one (fresco) and a stagionato, all delicious with splodges of condiments which included a peperoncino jelly. The revelation for many of us was the wonderful combination of top quality olive oil taken in a single lingering mouthful with a chocolate shot cup, and an equally surprising and equally fine idea: drizzled over vanilla gelato.

The weekend in review

It was a busy old weekend. Our class pretty much split into two: half of us spent the weekend in Pollenzo, checking out the other campus of our uni and attending a meeting of the Slow Food offices, while the other half larked about at Carnivale in Venice. I couldn’t tell you who had more fun!?

The group I joined got a grand tour of our big brother campus. Our campus at Colorno is the small and newer half of the university which began in Piedmont, in the village of Pollenzo, about ten minutes from Bra where the headquarters for Slow Food has its offices. Amazing things have been done to transform Pollenzo’s campus – the Agenzia di Pollenzo, a neo–gothic estate built in 1833 as a model farm by King Carlo Alberto of Savoy – into a sparkly new facility that can hold up to 180 students enrolled in cohorts of 60 in a three-year program that takes them on field trips literally around the world: they’ve had stages in the UK, Japan, Australia, India and Africa. Pollenzo’s much smaller (pop. 800) than Colorno (8,000); and Bra (pop. 28,000) where most of the students live is much smaller than Parma (pop. 177,000) where most of us do.


One of the interesting features of the Pollenzo campus is the Wine Bank, in the historic wine cellars of the Agenzia di Pollenzo, where producers can lodge their products in a centre for oenological teaching and present – for study or tasting (but not, alas, by us this time) – a selection of specially selected Italian wines of many vintages.

Back in the meeting room, I enjoyed the business discussions, and the mealtime schmoozing that went on with the 50-odd Slow Foodies from Italy, Germany, France, Switzerland, the US, the UK, Australia, Ireland, Argentina, Canada and the Netherlands. We enjoyed good and interesting foods at lunchtimes: cured meats, varied cheeses, salads; there were of course some Presidia and local food products… including wonderful gelato.

Meanwhile, news from home today made me sad: I hear that Fanny Bay Oysters – locally owned for 22 years, described as the largest oyster farm on Vancouver Island, and one of the largest shellfish producers on the B.C. Coast, has just been sold to a U.S. (Washington state) company. Of course the public promise is that all will remain as it was as far as the running of the company goes, but there was also an uneasy paragraph in the news story I read that mentioned the U.S. firm’s interest had stemmed in part from its lack of a processing plant in B.C. Which suggests that change is inevitable, and that the change will involve some kind of increased processing activity. Anyway, it’s always a sad thing to see business ownership leave the neighbourhood, particularly one where there isn’t a lot of steady employment. However you cut it, it’s local cash leaving the local area, and in this case the country.

Painting with light and tasting with wine

One of this week’s visiting lecturers was Alberto Cocchi, a Parma photographer who works out of his studio in Bologna. His American accent threw us at first – he spent some years in the US studying and working – but he was all Italian when it came to style and attitude to food – his photos were inventive and gorgeous. He revealed that the very etymology of “photography” comes from Greek roots, and means painting with light, before walking us through the technical stuff, the f-stops and the ISO settings, the digital vs film debate.

Depth of field, he said, is where it all begins when you’re talking about food. Or talking, more specifically, about food porn (a term last year’s students had taught him and which, since we’re getting technical here, I feel obliged to reveal was originally gastroporn, discussed in print as long ago as 1984, in The Official Foodie’s Handbook). He showed us some examples of his work with depth of field: selectively using focus to group objects, and using light to create interest and even a bit of mystery. We had a quick preview of his recent shoot in Scotland where he photographed whiskey, oysters and Black Angus (on and off the hoof).

Yesterday we had a photo shoot in the classroom where he worked magic on a couple of dishes, showing us the difference between natural light, side lighting, fill-in techniques (using plastic mirrors or even cosmetic mirrors) and more complicated stuff with softboxes, umbrellas and flashes. We got to watch the photos evolve on the screen. We’re looking forward to seeing him on one of our field trips later this year, when he’ll take us out and let us test what he showed us.

And we had an informal wine tasting. Some Barolo, Brunello di Montalcino, Amarone, Nero D’Avola, Cabernet and Pinot Nero passed beneath our noses and across our palates in quick succession, and then we had to run for the last bus home and – those of us attending – get ready for our Valentine’s Day dinner. It was red and white food, which included radishes & salt, cream cheese with red pepper jelly, pasta, roasted baby red potatoes, rice pudding and strawberries (in chocolate!). Oh, and red and white wine I guess. The Valentine’s cocktail was prosecco with pomegranate seeds, very pretty.

Chocolate finale

How do you make 24 foodie students happy? So easy. Make their last class on Friday afternoon a chocolate tasting session. We were reunited with our affable guide through cured meats, Mirco Marconi, who confessed his passion for artisanal chocolate, and treated us to a sampling of 23 different varieties.

We learned a bit about the history of cacao – its discovery by the Olmecs and its appreciation by the Mayans who consumed it as a liquid, relishing the foam. He showed us a picture of the Mexican chocolate whisk, the molinillo, which was actually a contribution by the Spaniards.

The New Taste of Chocolate by Spanish writer Maricel Presilla is, he says, the best book he’s read on chocolate. There seemed to be interest among my long-suffering classmates in doing more of the onerous research required to master this subject: there are chocolate festivals enough to keep us happy: CioccolaTO in Turin next month; the recently elapsed but highly recommended purists’ festival, Cioccolasita; and one to look forward to, Le Salon du Chocolat in Paris, from October 19-22, 2007.


We heard about the chocolate making process, from harvest through fermentation and drying, to refining, conching and tempering. We tasted chocolate beans, unsweetened chocolate, liquid chocolate, and ‘grand cru’ chocolates from Venezuela; we tried chuao and porcelana; criollo, forestero and trinitano. Bewildering varieties and many epiphanies of taste and texture.

My favourites were Guido Gobino’s Cialdine lemon and ginger – a chocolate covered nugget of exquisite candied fruit; Ravera‘s Baci di Cherasco – a crunchy fusion of fine chocolate and top quality hazelnuts (nocciola from Langhe); and Château Domori Porcelana – a silky bite of Venezuelan (70%) criollo — from a company evidently run by a chocophilic poet!? Marconi even brought us a special treat from his personal collection – a Bodrato cherry chocolate, the kind of treat he’d adored as a child and which is now produced with high quality cherries (la ciliegia d.o.p. di Vignola) which, bathed whole in grappa, are encased in a fabulous dark chocolate.

As we were picking and chewing I couldn’t help but think if we’d been served any one of the sampling – unsweetened versions aside – we’d probably have been overjoyed. Taken together, of course, you really notice the differences.

There were three artisan producers named from the US, Scharffen Berger (which has been bought out by a multinational since he’d first encountered them), Ghirardelli and E. Guittard. I’m eager to get back to Hot Chocolates in Courtenay and do a little taste-testing to see how they measure up now…

Belgian cuisine to kitchen gardens

We said a fond farewell to Peter Schollier on Wednesday, after an entertaining journey through Belgian cuisine and the poles of food neophilia and neophobia.

Belgian cuisine, which for most of us (who might think of it) means moules et frites, or Belgian waffles, or perhaps even waterzooi, has been subjected to scrutiny and refinement by modern Belgians and is now a large and growing and diverse – and as we might expect, somewhat regional – gastroterritory. Which is what you get from a country that only achieved independence in 1839, after centuries of wandering borders and serial occupation by and influence from the big guys on every side. Anyway, the only Belgian restaurant I know of outside Belgium is Belgo in London (its founders were a Belgian and a Canadian!); Schollier says that the incomparable Leon’s now has branches in Paris.

He then stepped carefully through the history of post-WW2 dining habits in Germany and Italy, building a case to compare the relative adventurousness of the Germans with the nationalistic, if not regionalistic preferences of the Italians. It was a story we’ve certainly seen played out ourselves in Italian restaurants and markets: no foreign dishes or products besmirch the menus of local eateries, and it is fiendishly difficult to find ‘foreign’ ingredients in traditional food retailers, including the open air markets. Which makes sense in many ways; it is absolutely consistent with the vision of Slow Food, for example, which advocates the preservation of local cuisines. But a tough course to follow with today’s international appetites: even in Italy the workforce is swimming with foreign labour which will surely have some kind of effect down the line.

I was curious about the kitchen garden (potager in French) class as I remembered the term from living in England. In Canada I think we exclusively used the more prosaic term ‘vegetable garden’. Which to the niggler doesn’t completely describe something that typically includes fruits and herbs.

Antoine Jacobsohn, from Le Potager du Roi, Versailles, is a specialist in the history of food and horticulture and he shared a bit of his ethnographic research into gardeners and gardening.

In one sesson, he gave us what must be a preview of the paper called “Hot Bed Techniques and Morals: Out of Season Produce in Early Modern France” which he’ll be delivering at a conference in Glasgow March 15-17 (Gardening: Histories of Horticultural Practice). He told us about hot beds which were used by Parisian market gardeners (and others, but Paris was our focus) to force vegetables out of season, with the aid of bell jars (aka cloches) and frames. Pretty much the same tricks used by home and allotment gardeners today. The morality discussion about out of season produce – is it right to trick nature into producing greater yield which, by nature, is less flavourful than seasonal produce? – is, he argued, not a contemporary one, but actually started sometime around 1600.

We learned that, for Parisians, the split between production and consumption only really happened in the 1960s when Les Halles, the vast central market, as well as the city’s slaughterhouse (from where the science museum, La Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie now sits) were moved out of town. A good idea in many ways – traffic congestion and hygiene among them – but it did remove food’s origins from the lives and sight of the population who were buying it. The central market used to be a popular meeting and social place outside market hours (which were few as they only traded for four hours in the early morning). The new market at Rungis is ringed by roads suitable for road transport and is not particularly open to visitors, although a determined punter can get there by bus and perhaps manage to pay an entry toll for a look round.

He concluded with an overview of his oral history project, discussing with food producers around Paris their views on the food products of today. He surprised most of us, I think, by reporting that the people he spoke to are by and large pleased and proud of the food they produce, and consider it better in many ways than what was grown in the past, in terms of hygiene, cultivation methods, nutritional value and yield. They did not always evaluate it in terms of flavour, but those who did were able to state that what had tasted best in the past was also the trickiest to sell in high volume. Quality is a perishable commodity, and that’s what makes it hard to produce, difficult to distribute, and of course expensive to buy.