Chivasso, October 22, 2010—
BASICALLY WE'VE DONE nothing all day but eat, with the necessary changes of position in between. Of course those accellerations developed their own interesting and time-consuming qualities.
It was our first day at Slow Food's Salone di Gusto in Torino, a few kilometers south. Well, they are few: but they take time to negotiate. I may blog tomorrow or the next day about driving here; if I do, it'll be over at The Eastside View; it doesn't really have that much to do with driving.
Breakfast in the Hotel Europe here — rather an old-fashioned hotel — was a cappuccino, a "brioche" which in Italy is any commercial breakfast pastry, in this case an okay croissant with a little orange marmalade spread on top, a glass of orange juice. There were other things available on the table, but I didn't want any of them; cappuccino and crossant satisfies me.I
The Principessa, as unfortunate L. is generally called here in Italy, got up an hour or so later, and had the same — some of you maQy have seen her on Facebook. Then we drove down to Torino for our first day.
The Salone di Gusto is a commercal food fair, but with the difference that all the entrants are showing things that are really good. They conform to the Slow Food trinity of imperatives: Buono, pulito, e giusto; good; clean (or healthful), and just (or fair, or sustainable — translation from one language to another is mostly a matter of substitution).
We covered a little over half the exhibits today, working from about noon to about six, up one aisle, down the next. The aisles were of course jammed, and the people involved were distracted, friendly, and entranced, often stopping in their tracks, or clustering, or cutting in front of you dragging a two-wheeled shopping cart, or wheeling around with a protrusion of backpack to knock you flat if you're not looking, and you rarely are.
The five pavilions are organized for the most part geographically by country or region. Pavilion One featured the Americas, for example, while Pavilions Two and Three got down to business with Italian regions, because this is Italy after all, and Slow Food was invented here.
So today we ate bits of cheese, preserves, salumi, bread, fish, cheese, preserves, salumi, and bread, washing it down with tastes of wine, water, grappa, wine, water, genepi, wine. We sipped wines from Georgia (former USSR, not southern USA), cheese from Uzbekistan, saffron from Afghanistan, cheese from Netherlands France Italy Poland Romania and elsewhere.
None of this emerged as better than anything else, viewed critically; basically everything was really superb. Of course speaking personally I have my favorites, and I was happy to find a booth featuring Castelmagno, and another with a genepi from a nearby Piemontese valley that seemed even to Lindsey to be extraordinarily good. Perhaps we'll go walking there next week.
We broke for lunch about three o'clock at a little sub-pavilion featuring food from Veneto-Friuli-Giulia. I had a fine plate of cotecchino, that unique loose uncased sausage, with potato purée; L. had some gnocchi that could have been better; afterward we split a cubano — a sort of pannetone — with strucchi — a sort of Friuli-style canneloni; very nice, with a ribbon of zabaglione laced with grappa. This with a glass of okay Pinot grigio made me very happy.
Oddly enough, we were a little hungry when we finally got back to our motel, about nine o'clock. Our hotel has a very simple restaurant with a menu that I'm sure features vacuum-packed servings, but in this country that's not entirely disgusting. I had a pedestrian vitello tonnato (though now I think of it the veal was beefy enough to have been local, not factory), and shared L's herb-laced omelet with nice little local green crunchy lettuce, and her agnelotti, and we split a small plate of overcooked but welcom cabbage, lightly vinegared, e basta così.
Roero Arneis, Cantina del Nebbiolo, 2009
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