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food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

I’d visited Tribunale on Friday, though it has since closed for hols, and had a very tasty and interesting insalata rustica, made with warm cooked onions, slightly pickled, and pancetta.

Tammy and Sue came to visit on the weekend and we did our best to eat our way through the local offerings – what was left of them, as many places have already shut for summer holidays. We were enticed into Osteria del Gesso by fond memories, air conditioning (it was 38 degrees on Friday) and an “open” sign. Always good and often unusual food. Here’s my starter which was a salad of strips of something from the octopus family on a bed of farro (aka spelt or, I have read, more accurately emmer)

Next course for me was a nice bit of lamb with an apple marmelade. My companions had excellent tortelli di erbette – some of the best I’ve tasted.

Ombre Rosse has often served the uni crowd well; it seems to be open when all else is closed, and its 1,500 item wine list is entertaining reading. They have an unusual menu, from which I chose the quail salad with peaches and foie gras – an odd but pleasing combination:

Gatta Matta is always excellent, and we had some wonderful food there. I’ve become a huge fan of tepid octopus salads, and got to have a bit of that here

followed by some lovely steak

and some very boozy zabaglione – I think they’d emptied the Marsala bottle into it (and the effect was not unpleasant, though perhaps I didn’t need a delightful glass of passito on top) served with some excellent quaresimale (almond biscotti)

We finished our weekend with a second lunch at Sorelle Picchi, where my visitors made sure that the tortelli di zucca was in fact as delicious the second time as it had been the first (it was), and I had the triple-barrelled combination of tortelli – zucca, erbette and patate con funghi. All excellent. We washed it down with some inky cold frothy lambrusco. As you do.

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…

I managed to get myself to Bergamo last Friday on a trip of two trains. The first, from Parma to Milan was air conditioned (just) and equipped with curtains to keep out the worst of the heat on a day when the temperature was predicted to reach 41 celsius.

By the time we got to Milan it was, well, very warm out there, and I took my cue from the locals who were huddled in the coolish shelter of the underground passageway beneath the platform, swatting Milanese mosquitoes and waiting until the last moment to rush the trains as they arrived.

When one did, alas it was not air conditioned and you could choose either to pull down the shade or enjoy the hot rush of air from the opened windows, More cruel plastic seats. Fortunately the misery only lasted half an hour or so and then we were in Bergamo, and I fell gratefully into the hospitality of Nancy and Mike who met me at the station and escorted me to my hotel.

They would have helped me to my room as well but when the front desk clerk saw us heading for the elevators, she blanched and demanded to see their passports. I explained they were not staying, but helping me with my bags. After some further officious to-ing and fro-ing she said she simply could not allow three people to occupy a single room even temporarily, it was the law. Ah, Italian rules, How endless, peculiar and insane they are!

We then hopped on a bus and ascended to the citta alta: the prettiest, oldest and highest part of town, with excellent views and lots of wandering streets. We ambled through the pretty piazza with its Venetian fountain

and lions watching us from atop the colonnade of the public library, where Nancy writes on warm days looking out at the hills behind the city. We peered in at a couple of food shops and admired the local specialties on offer, and then sat ourselves down for a cooling beverage on the piazza. We supped at the Agnello d’Oro, including some casonsei, the Bergamo ravioli:

Saturday we ascended by funiculare, which was short but pleasant and had another amble through the warming streets before taking shelter in the church which houses the remarkable Tarsias by Lorenzo Lotto and Donizetti`s tomb with its weeping cherubs:

Then a second funiculare, way up to the top, where we tripped over a very fine lunch, lured in by the red water glasses and the stunning view.

Back down the mountain we went and found ourselves at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo where one of the featured artists was the very relevant Vanessa Beecroft, whose food diary, The Book of Food, was represented visually; she had somehow found the time to document everything she ate between 1983 and 1993. We also enjoyed a film whose name and author I forgot to write down, but which was a bit of visual poetry, white-garbed people creating fire on a disused airstrip in Essex, if memory serves.

Then back up the hill for some sups in a beautifully located but somewhat disappointing place, Antica Trattoria Colombina, recently given a thumbs-up by the Guardian which maybe spoiled it. Or maybe the chef was on hols. Or who knows. Anyway we enjoyed being out under the arbour of grapes and long beans…

Then it was Sunday and we managed a tour of Accademia Carrara, after which we were overcome by art, heat, sloth and hunger, and retired to casa Nancy e Mike where we lunched, napped, supped and slept. Before supper we had a reviving stroll in the cooling air and looked back at the citta alta in the sunset. The next morning I woke at 5.30 and began my journey back to Parma, which took till nearly 11 because of train problems. The problem, according the man sitting next to me and frowning into a fat book of train timetables, was that all the trains were late: the hot temperatures had deformed the rails. (Did it have anything to do with Sunday’s train strike? We will never know.)

I was thinking for a while there that the Parmigiani simply didn’t have sweat glands. Day after day we tender stranieri have been glowing fiercely morning and afternoon on the bus, while Italians of all ages dart here and there on bicycles, hatless, dry-skinned; on one shocking and typically overheated lunchtime we even witnessed one of the Italian students in a cardigan in the dining room. But yesterday’s trip home on the curtainless air conditionless bus, the afternoon sun slamming in through the big windows, we were all dripping and miserable. One might even think, on seeing passengers disembark, that we had all been afflicted by some mass incontinence. It is unbearable.

There, I feel much better, sitting at my steaming laptop, a wet towel draped over my shoulders.

We had a mixed week, a food culture/history exam, some branding, some sociology, but my personal highlight was a talk on the technologies of development, from Ugo Vallauri, who is ex-Slow Food and now works for Computer Aid in Nairobi, where he has been exploring means of development aid publicity using high and low technologies. He told us about the difficulties of using computers let alone internet in an environment where power supplies are patchy at best, and where internet access is prohibitively expensive even where it is available. The telephone and cabling infrastructure doesn’t exist, and so what access there is tends to use, like the much more influential medium of mobile phones, satellite technology.

Off to find some slightly cooler air in Bergamo now. As you’ll see, I’m crawling through back-filling my Spanish postings. Only a couple more days to go. Maybe I’ll finish next week.

Reports, exams and internet problems have been interfering with this blog. More to come on Spain, but maybe not for a couple of days. Meanwhile, back in Parma…

We are counting down now. Ten more days of classes and we’re done, ready to scatter for the summer and then for two months of internships.

Odd to think that after months and months of constant contact we won’t be seeing one another until graduation in November. Good and bad it’s been, and I when I heard Leonard Cohen talking about monastic life in a recent BBC interview, it struck a chord:

“People think of this activity as somehow remote, isolated and serene, whereas it’s much more abrasive than ordinary civilian life. In ordinary civilian life you close your doors at the end of the day and more or less you’re alone with your television set, but in a monastery.. there’s a zen saying: like pebbles in a bag, the monks polish one another.“

We are, I think, well polished gastro-pebbles by now.

It’s been a steamy week in Parma with the temperature set to rise and rise into next week; I can’t say I’ll miss the weather here (damp and cold in the winter; hot and humid in the summer, just the way the prosciutti like it). Nor will I miss my visits to supermercato Standa, where you can enjoy spiritual debasement with the rest of the long-suffering Oltretorrentini: standing in long, tedious queues which may randomly end with a terse “E chiuso” from the attending demon, at which point we all shuffle into another long, dispirited queue, and are then hectored into giving up complicated combinations of coins because from all appearances the check-out cashiers are charged for their change floats.

So here we melt. By night we toss in our hot rooms, only to rise welted and itchy from insect bites: spiders, mosquitoes, who knows. To judge by the volume of chittering along the river, the frogs are doing their best to control the numbers; the rondini (swallows) who took on the springtime airborne have all left for what I assume are cooler climates. There’s an abandoned bird nest in the air vent in our kitchen that only coughs a bit of dust on the floor these days, no more face to face confrontation with the parents who for a couple of weeks hovered fiercely at the window, moths in beak, to demand what we were doing so near their home.

This week, several of those who didn’t fall to Spanish ailments began to drop, and our numbers were reduced by nearly half for most of our classes. The end of Consumption Psychology: no more than a recap really of what we talked about before we left for Spain – who we are and our social circumstances influence what we eat and how we think about food – nothing too new there. Then Sociology of Food Consumption, where we talked about branding and advertising techniques as applied to food. Mostly it felt like a depressing recount of mergers and aquisitions among the likes of PepsiCo and Coca-Cola, with less to do with artisanal brands or alternative markets. Then we had two delightful final tastings with Sandro Bosticco, who led us through discussions about the role of oxygen in winemaking, with a finale that featured four Pinot Noirs (three from Burgundy and one from New Zealand) and then group tastings of sparkling (Prosecco), red (Amarone) and sweet (Moscato – passito) wines.

Friday we got on our stage bus for the last time, leaving behind a host of fallen comrades (some suffering from late-breaking flu and others perhaps from a mild case of Friday nightis), to study balsamic vinegar production from industrial prosciutto makers Ferrarini, who as a family have the slightly surprising hobby of artisanal vinegar making. As balsamico derives its name from ‘balsam’ – as in healing substance – it was a shame we couldn’t all be there to breathe the purifying perfumes, and taste the rapture, spoon by blessed spoon.

We learned about the rather lax standards for the substance known as Aceto Balsamico di Modena (“Modena Balsamic Vinegar”) – which require that it be of a minimum acidity of 6%, made from grape must (minimum 20%) and vinegar, caramel (maximum 2%, for colour and flavour), with a minimum 60 days aging. Ferrarini make a higher quality product which is aged a minimum of 8 to 10 years, but on the grocery shelf, consumers won’t understand the difference (other than price) when it’s ranked against the lower end products. This version is the balsamico you use for cooking and salad dressings. The more precious condiment is another story entirely.

What we may think we’re getting when we see the words balsamico and Modena and vinegar on a label is in fact correctly known as Tradizionale Balsamico, and there are two strains of it, one from Reggio-Emilia and one from Modena, made in more or less the same way but with a different balance of density and acidity, and bottled in different areas. They also have different quality standards: there are three quality levels for Tradizionale Balsamico di Reggio Emilia (red, silver and gold) and two for Tradizionale Balsamico di Modena. This is the highest end product, a thick, sticky goo that takes at least 12 years to make and should be doled out by the drop, as a condiment on strawberries or parmigiano-reggiano cheese, or even drunk from thimble-sized glasses after a meal or, according to Anna del Conte, diluted with ice and sweetened with a little sugar.

Before you get to that point, though, the stuff has to be made. According to tradition and regulation, it’s made only from grape must: local grapes are crushed and cooked until the volume has reduced by 50-60%, leaving a high density, sweet syrup. It’s fermented in barrels with only natural yeasts (present in air or the grapes themselves) for company. At the end of the year it will have reached about 6 or 7% alcohol, with lots and lots of residual sugars. A small quantity of older balsamico is added, containing live bacteria, and another two years or so go by while these bacteria carry out the acidification process which transforms the alcohol into acid.

Then the real fun begins, when it’s decanted into a series of barrels of diminishing size, made of different woods: chestnut, oak, ash, mulberry, cherry and locust wood, which all add different flavours. There will be at least three but not more than ten casks, which are not sealed, the opening on the top covered with muslin to allow the liquid to thicken through evaporation. They are stored in vaults where the local climate can play its part: the cold winters concentrating the flavours, the hot summers evaporating the water content.

The barrels lose about a litre a year, so they are topped up in a formal process: the smallest barrel gets a litre from the next largest; that one gets two litres from its neighbour, and so on up the chain until the largest barrel receives about 30 to 40% newly acidified balsamico. This chain continues for between 12 and 25 years, at which point between 5-10% of the smallest barrel’s content is decanted and sent to the consortium for testing.

The consortium determines which of the three levels the balsamico will be sold as. These are related to age, but not completely determined by it, as the tasting is the final arbiter. The “lobster red” labelled balsamico is at least 12 years old; the silver is 12-25 years; and the gold is at least 25 years old.

Because vinegar is a preservative, once you’ve invested your money (at least 30 euros for the red label, and upwards of 75 euros for the gold – in Italy; more if you buy it in other countries), you won’t ever have to worry about it going off (perhaps you’d like to pass a bottle down to your grandchildren?). It does behave much like honey though, and has a tendency to crystallise; but, like honey, it can be restored to liquid state by gently heating the bottle in water.

We got back to sticky Parma in time to rest up before supper. A group of us went to see chef Davide at Ristorante Mosaiko and ate ourselves into a happy stupour, with my favourites being an outstanding guinea fowl salad, dreamy gnocchetti topped with amazing mozzarella, and an even better than last time slice of bonet for dessert. I’m still digesting today…