Giaglioni, 1: Cena Piemontese

Giaglioni (Piemonte), October 28, 2010

MAMMA MIA, SIAMO ancora in Italia, we're back in Italy. I liked the food in Lanslebourg: hearty mountain rustic French fare. But Italy, well, Italy's another matter. We ate just as locally, in an agriturismo we found by chance; but the locale is devoted to a bigger range, a more tellingly considered, a more finely executed cuisine.


And this is what we had:

Vitello tonnato
Frittata di erbellina e carote
Capelleti al prosciutto e ricotta
Arrosto di vitello con spinaci
Formaggii
Torta di castagna

Everything made in the kitchen; everything grown in the garden or raised in the adjacent pasture. The cheese was perhaps not of this very house, but was certainly of the neighborhood. The grissini and the bread, even, were made here. I wouldn't be surprised if you told me its wheat had been grown here, though I haven't seen any wheatfields hereabouts.

The tonnato was exceptional, not at all from a delicatessen, a small dollop of wonderful tuna sauce centered on each thin slice of perfectly cooked veal. The capeletti were made of potato and were in fact gnocchi in the semicircular shape of cappeletti; the filling was refined and perfectly balanced between prosciutto, ricotta, and sage flavors, and the texture very delicate and soft.


The roast veal was nicely salted, sliced very thin with the grain, and set off by sweet fresh spinach with very light butter flavor. The cheese was the least exceptional course, but welcome; and the torta was everything a chestnut-lover could ask, dense but not at all heavy, with a very interesting, rewarding texture, a rich chocolate sauce at one end, smooth cream at the other.



It was, in fact, perhaps the most satisfying meal of the trip so far, and a memorable one.

Seven grappas were offered; I contented myself with one, the genepì, as good as I've tasted anywhere, and I've tasted my share. Lindsey's Fragolina was delicately flavored with raspberries; the straight dry grappa was pure, refined, and delicious. All from the em>proprietà.

Zal blanc, Chardonnay and local white grapes, Azienda Agricola Martina (Piemonte), 2009; Dolcetto, Azienda Agricola Martina (Piemonte), 2009; Cré Seren (Pinot nero and local red grapes), Azienda Agricola Martina (Piemonte), 2009; grappe: genepì; alla frutta secca

Agriturismo Crè Seren, , Frazione San Rocco, 10, Giaglione; tel. 335.608.3966

Lanslebourg, 3: filet de boeuf

Lanslebourg, October 27, 2010—

WE TOOK A CLOSER look at the menu today, and noticed the cuisine and patisserie were both credited to Pierre Gagnaire. He's a little too important to spend much time in Lanslebourg, I think, so we must have been eating sous-vide, vacuum-packed stuff from a central kitchen god knows where. We eat it gratefully, of course; it's about the only show in town, and we do get hungry.



Tonight I began with a cheese tarte with a mixed salad, thankfully lacking beets tonight, and went on to a beef filet in peppercorn sauce, with broccoli en velouté. Dessert was a tarte à myrtilles, the dish that attracted me to this hotel two years ago, and it was exactly like the cheese tarte, a rectangle of puff-pastry, berries instead of cheese.

Mondeuse, 2009

Lanslebourg, 2: Raclette

Lanslebourg, Savoie, October 26, 2010—

SOME OF YOU WONDERED about the video I uploaded to Facebook a few hours ago, Street Cows. (It's also on YouTube, but I don't know how to tell you where exactly.)

There are cows in Savoie, and their job is to eat grass (and flowers when they find them), and to give milk. They go to work in the morning and come home in the evening, and that's when I made the video of them yesterday.

The milk is made into cheese: Reblochon, Tomme, Beaufort. And more ordinary cheeses, perhaps at this time of year when pasturage isn't nearly as fragrant.

Tonight we had Raclette, the other main dish of Savoie — the first being Tartiflette, as far as I'm concerned its superior. Tartiflette is one of my Hundred Plates, though I can't tag it properly until I'm back at a computer; Raclette is amusing, substantial, pleasing on a cold night, but not one of the Hundred Plates.

After a generous serving of mixed salad and charcuterie Madame the hotelkeeper brought steamed potatoes and a platter of cheese — three kinds: Tomme de Savoie, something she said was not Reblochon but very like Reblochon, and Raclette, probably a quite ordinary cheese suitable for cooking. (Of course what's quite ordinary here would cost a pretty penny at home in California.)

Also on the table was a curious flat disc held up by three legs. It was plugged in, which required our moving from last night's table to another closer to a socket. We put slices of cheese on its non-stick surface, watched them bubble, paddled them around with little wooden sticks, and took them up with forkfuls of potato or slices of baguette. They were, of course, delicious.

Roussette de Savoie, "Altesse", Edmond Jaquin et fils, 2009

Lanslebourg: Tartiflette!

Lanslebourg, France, Oct. 25, 2010—

WE ARRIVED HERE today after a snowy crossing of the Montcenis pass from Italy. I've written a bit about the trip, and this area, at The Eastside View, and won't repeat here: let me just say I'm back in tartiflette country after a little over two years, and happy to share it with Lindsey.

After a cold afternoon of touring we settled down in front of the hearth with a bottle of Apremont, then went into the hotel restaurant for

salad with cheese packets in fyllo dough
tartiflette
mousse au chocolat

and all was exactly as it should be. I love these provincial hotel-restaurants: the cuisine's far from great, but it sure is satisfying.

Oh: tartiflette is baked cheese with sliced potatoes, but you have to have the right cheese. One of the Hundred Plates.

Apremont, Mireille Cartier, ?2009

Hotel-Restaurant 2 Cols, 66 rue du Mont Cenis, Lanslebourg Mt. Cenis; tel. 04.79.05.20.64

Torino, 4: Eating on the fly

Chivasso, October 25—

WELL, NOT LITERALLY; we did that a few days ago. We weren't in an airplane yesterday; we once again and for the third day running on our feet, almost every minute; it was our last day at the Salone di Gusto. Only when we looked in at Terra Madre did we sit down for an hour.

But we nibbled less. We'd tasted the anchovies, cheeses, mortadellas, prosciutti, celery, and endless breads, cookies, and cakes the previous days; by yesterday we were nodding familiarly to the woman threading cherry tomatoes into clusters, the man with the delicious olive paste, the dark bee lady, and so on. Yesterday was more a day for conversation, and for futile searches for things vaguely recalled, given insufficient attention.

So the principal meal was a sit-down affair in the enormous shopping mall installed in the former automobile factory at Lingotto, where we split a huge salad of lettuces, arugula, carrot, and tomato; and a ham-and-cheese toast (one of the hundred plates, you'll recall); and I had a plate of slightly undercooked fusilli alla puttanesca.

Earlier, though, we'd had a wonderful sandwich, completey unthought before: chopped lettuce spotted with bagna cauda, on a soft roll. Mine had also a little ricotta. We'll do this again, next time we have leftover bagna cauda.

Undistinguished Chardonnay (Italy?)

Torino, 3: Tuscany, Sardinia, Piemonte

OH, BASTA COLLA TOSCANA! Enough with Tuscany, the woman said, with very strong emotion. I was in Sardinia — more accurately, at a booth in the half-aisle devoted to that island in one of the three vast pavilions at Slow Food, where artisinal food products from all around the world are shown.

Pavilion Two and much of Three are dedicated to Italian products — olive oil, wine, pastries, jams and jellies, liqueurs, meats, and dozens of other products. Many regions spill over into two aisles: among them, Sicily, which gets an aisle and a half. Sardinia, in all its complexity and rich tradition, has perhaps the smallest presence. I don't know why that should be.

I had made the mistake of saying, on tasting a particularly intesely spiced cookie, that it made me think of Siena. Oh, basta colla Toscana, the woman retorted. Tuscany has only two or three specialties, she said, and mostly even they aren't made very authentically. They use California almonds, inferior butter, eggs from God knows where. (I thought of our Dutch friend Hans, who runs a factory egg-farm in Bulgaria.) We use lard, only a tiny bit, never butter; we use our own almonds, never California almonds.

I explained to her that the problem wasn't California, it was the scale of global commercialism. Even in California, I said, we have our Sardinia and our Tuscany. We have very good almonds, though perhaps not exactly like yours in Sardinia, and perhaps not quite that good. But the ones we export, in such huge quantity, are not the best.

They're too thin, she objected, and don't have any oil. They last longer that way, I pointed out; they don't go rancid. Exactly, she responded, all you think of is shelf life; we want our amaretti to be eaten, not left on a shelf.

---

Ironically, after nibbling all day, lunching on lardo and sliced onions, sitting with a cold wheat-beer and a plate of salumi and cheese at tea-time, we dined back in Chivasso at a restaurant featuring as its daily menu food from Tuscany.



Oh well: we're here for Piemontese cuisine, but we take what comes. What came was

Tortino di carciofi
Crostini alla Toscana
Fettuccine con ragù di cinghiale
Totani all'inzimino
Torta pattone

The appetizers were fine: a rich, dense artichoke omelet in the form of a rissole, a crostini with sun-dried tomato on a bed of liver paté. The ragù was rich and deep, the fettucini apparently house-made, square-cut, eggy. Totani turned out to be little squid in a piquant tomato sauce, full of flavor. Only the chestnut torte seemed to let us down: it was too cold, too dense. But I like chestnuts, and was happy enough with it.

Chardonnay di Piemonte in carafe

L'Antichissimo, Via Portis, 4, Chivasso; tel. 011.917.2000

Torino, 2: Il Salone di Gusto

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