ReallyGoodWriter | Food • Writing • Poetry Iambic Cafe

food & poetry, but mostly the poetry of food

Food • Writing • Poetry

Our first day we left behind three casualties: two recovering from queasiness from the previous night’s tapas feed, and one sore throat.

We drove through the wooded hills – a surprise to many of us, expecting a parched, desert-like landscape – to sausage-maker Fussimanya, which has been operating for 35 years. It started life as a restaurant serving Catalan specialties, and, as we had a chance to discover, is still hugely popular (it was pretty much full on a Monday lunchtime when we left). They began by making sausages for the restaurant but now produce a full range of products which are sold through their own shops on the site and in Vic.

Here we watched the production of brisba, a hefty boiled sausage which comes in white (made from a lot of things you might not wish to see listed here) or black (made from blood, fat and meat).

They also make five varieties of cured sausage: longaniza, churizada, chorizo, fuet and sumaya. This one, fuet, uses 3 grams of pepper per kilo of meat: whole peppercorns inside and ground pepper outside; it’s a firm, dry sausage, very moreish as we discovered in a tasting.

We also got to see how the traditional wine vessels are used:

No wine was spilled, but one knee was grazed, ironically right after negotiating oh so carefully the slippery floor of the factory.

Afterwards we were taken for a look at Vall de Sau Collsacabra – a valley whose centre is a drowned village, its church steeple showing in times of drought – as now – from the middle of the lake. This was part of Franco’s legacy, the translator told us; he wanted to bring water to the country and created a series of artificial lakes through damming rivers and walling in valleys, and drowned more than one village in the process. I’m not sure what the villagers must have thought of it all, but such areas are now rich playgrounds, studded with posh hotels like the one we were standing in front of. Nearby was a former Benedictine monastery (Sant Pere de Casserres) which had been founded in 1005 but abandoned after the 14th century; it was restored in 1998 and is a popular attraction– but we didn’t get to see it.

Instead we headed back to Fussimanya for a long and excessive lunch:

More pan con tomate..

Cold roasted vegetables:

A platter of raw cod:

Some fried mushrooms:

The ever present aoli, called allioli in Catalonia:

Crema Catalana: is it so different from Crème Brûlée? We thought maybe it was not as dense a custard. And served in this characteristic bowl, with the wafer.

After lunch we drove to Santa Maria d’Horta d’Avinyo to visit the winery Bodegues Masia d’Avinyo, home of the Roqueta family, wine producers since the 12th century.

Most of the old bits and pieces from this history of winemaking are now part of a museum. We saw the sunken wine vats, over which were suspended ropes for the grape-treaders; a system of drains then allowed the juice to drain out by gravity. The vats had to be cleaned by hand, but it was very dangerous work, because there could be a lethal build-up of carbon dioxide, and so in a twist on the canary in a mineshaft idea, the winemakers suspended cats inside first; if they died, it wasn’t safe to go in. Lucky for the local felines, they later realised that candles worked just as well.

Here’s an olde worlde kind of way to put corks in your wine bottles:

We had a small lesson in historical market economics as we finished the museum tour. This was always a big wine producing area, and became even more so at the end of the nineteenth century, when phylloxera had devastated the vines of France and stepped up demand for Spanish wine. Many of the French workers moved to Spain. Once the French restored their industry (by grafting their vines onto phylloxera-resistant American root stock), and when phylloxera reached Spain in the 1890s, Spanish wine production dropped still further; with the arrival of the industrial revolution, the winemaking families turned to more reliable factory work, so it became difficult to convince workers to return to the vineyards. But the winery is now producing some 476,000 bottles a year, under the supervision of youthful oenologist Joan Soler.

They produce two labels (Roqueta and Avadal) and we enjoyed a tasting of some of Avadal’s offerings. Here’s the elegant tasting room, lined with barrels that have been autographed by visiting celebrities, including Ferran Adria who we’d be meeting just a few days later.

The wines included Picapoll – a local grape named for a Catalan word meaning how chickens peck. Quite an acidic one. Then a very nice Chardonnay, a couple of Merlots and a Cabernet Franc/Cabernet Sauvignon/Syrah blend.

And then back to Vic, where thanks to a free dinner, and a possible bad reaction to some gazpacho, two more of our classmates would fall to stomach ailments.

Just got back from nine days in northern Spain: a record breaker for the university, I think, as being the sickest stage ever. We racked up the following ailments which affected, if I counted right, 18 out of 24 of us (some people had more than one thing) requiring 4 hospital visits:

3 respiratory tract infections/bronchitis
1 attack of vertigo
1 sinus infection
1 jellyfish sting
1 grazed knee
1 dicky hip
1 stiff neck
7 nausea/vomiting
1 incapacitating hangover
1 sore throat (that stopped there)
5 or 6 colds
1 scary allergic reaction

We arrived in Vic on Canada Day and celebrated with some contemporary tapas (outcome: two sick stomachs). Novelties included a salad with a frozen yogurt dressing:

Delicious cheese flowers: a taste similar to high quality gruyere, and oh so pretty:

Some sausage and the omnipresent Pan con Tomate (tomato bread):

Bacon-wrapped dates:

Not sure why anyone would do this to perfectly nice asparagus, but it looks impressive:

Last weekend, in an attempt to escape the unending heat of Parma, we took a trip to the seaside, in search of cooling breezes and nice chilly marble museums. We found a breeze or two, and a few other things of interest.

We arrived in Massa and hopped a bus to the seaside which was large and developed. While looking for the information office we passed a rabbit park which was, well, hopping with rabbits. And little horses. And a lot of signs, like these ones.

A half hour or so in the information office was enough to convince us we didn’t need to stay in Massa, and while searching for other diversions, we spotted a castle in Aulla, which if all else failed was at least on the way back to Parma. And indeed it was a castle, the Brunella Fortress. Its address is number 3 Via Fortezza (why not number 1??) and within it we found a small natural history museum, with a few items of interest including a collection of rather sad looking stuffed animals. Nice views, though.

We walked up the hill and then down the hill. We passed a nifty looking fence.

And then in town, I made the acquaintance of a poet, Ceccardo Roccatagliata Ceccardi (1871-1919), who touched down for a few formative years in Massa (but not as far as I can make out in Aulla) during his life of poverty and peregrination. It was some consolation to having missed the Parma poetry festival…

We escaped back to Parma having found only this in the way of sustenance: is it Italy’s answer to Cheez Whiz?

After that, mercifully, it cooled down for a few days in Parma. We had our wine tutor Sandro Bosticco back for some informative tastings, and then spent the rest of the week alternately in a journalism workshop with Corby Kummer and learning about consumer psychology from Nadia Olivero.

Last night, a return visit to Ristorante Mosaiko: very nice indeed. We talked to chef Davide who told us his training route included France, England, Japan and Australia, and before that enjoyed the tasting menus: seafood for me, including in-house smoked salmon (with a touch of wasabi), followed by a mosaic of octopus on a tart nicoisey salad of green beans, potatoes, carrots, capers and more:

followed by some awesomely artfully seared tuna with fennel, oranges, olives and tomatoes and a tantalising pinch of je ne sais quois:

and what do you do when you can’t decide which dessert to have? Have them all of course. That Piemonte classic, bounet, like a chocolate/nut creme caramel as Corrie so rightly observed:

Tart lemon tart:

And the winner was… simple is best? delicious strawberries laced with citrus and topped with yogurt gelato:

And with that it will be over and out, for a while, as we head to Catalunya tomorrow.

Just back from a sprint round northern Italy.

Meanwhile, a couple of journals we’ve been pointed towards. Food For Thought, self-described (in the spirit of nose to tail gastronomic studies?) as the Organ of the University of Gastronomic Sciences, is a beautiful thing, like all the Slow Food publications. Helpful in many ways to be part of an organisation started by writers.

And Anthropology of Food is a webjournal produced by a network of European food academics.

We spent our last day touring Torino‘s ethnic markets with Vittorio Castellani, journalist, broadcaster and self-declared gastronomad, known locally as Chef Kumalé. An anthropologist by training, he has put his background to good use in communicating the issues, circumstances and foods of Torino’s ethnic communities. He’s a writer as well, and worked with our friends at Lavazzo to write Coffee Roots. He was kind enough to agree to an impromptu book signing at our meeting point, outside the Hamam, which originally served as the bath house to Torino’s immigrant workers. We toured the facility later: abandoned for 20 years, it’s been refurbished and offers meeting spaces, a cool and tempting basement restaurant and a turkish bath open on alternating days to men and women.

These are the tenements where the workers lived, above the market. Abandoned now, they held workers from the south of Italy and from many immigrant communities; they still host occasional squatters, many these days coming from China.

The food market is large and varied and sprawls across many streets and buildings: this is the farmer’s market section, an unusual feature in Italy where the food markets nowadays tend to be straight retail operations selling imported produce. One of Slow Food’s projects is to try to develop a network of farmer’s markets around the country.

The market changes to reflect the communities it serves. In the enclosed section of the food market, Italian traditional producers now also sell cheeses and salumi tailored to Romanian tastes. There are areas of the market for all the different regions of Italy as well: we passed a little slice of Puglia, way up here in the north.

From an Asian-run stand, you can buy a bit of pork tongue or veal nerves. Why not?

We checked out a local Moroccan bakery, serving that community’s needs for pastries and sweets. These are part of its culture; a social currency as well as a food tied to religious observance. When breaking Ramadan fast, sweets and pastries are some of the allowed items. Packed with dates, nuts and honey they are a quick, effective source of energy to bodies depleted by fasting.

In the courtyard at Torino’s mosque. It’s the simple grey door left of centre in the photo, situated in the courtyard of a tenement well hung with laundry and plastic sheeting. There were 24 of us there, which was comfortable; every Friday afternoon 20,000 moslems head in here for worship, aiming for one of the 200 spaces inside. The ensuing tension and conflict are widely reported, but nobody seems to know what to do about it.

After we parted from Vittorio, we leapt back into the bus and sped off to Eataly for lunch. Built in a former vermouth factory, it’s a large and impressive edifice, one of the new wave of groceries (not unlike Whole Foods?) promising products for all budgets and offering a whole consumer experience. We started our day there with very good bread and lovely pizza (mine had fresh tomatoes, ham, anchovies and burrata – a fresh mozzarella with cream).

We travelled round the facility with Sebastiano Sardo, Slow Food’s man in Eataly. He shows us a whole lot of beer. Unusual for Italy.

A whole lot of wine. Not so unusual.

A Spanish wood fired oven explained in part why the bread and pizza were so good…

Education is a big part of the picture: the seasonal wheel shows families, as they enter the store, what’s in season here.

The store has a library where you can browse food guides, surf the internet and even buy books and Slow Food paraphernalia.

The foods of Piemonte, a special display which gives a bit of history and background to the foods of the area.

Paying tribute to the building’s origins, there’s a vermouth museum on the top floor, with these cool copper sniffing devices which give you a sense of the relevant aromas.