Experience Growth on Your Italian Vacation · Mar 9, 09:47 AM by James Martin
Spring has sprung here in California. It’s a bit of a cold spring, but stuff is popping out of the ground at an alarming rate. If weeds were good to eat, we could feed half of California.
That’s a new Calla Lilly we’ll sink into the soil as soon as the morning temperatures stabilize below freezing.
But you’re not interested in gardening in California, are you? No, you’d rather be sinking a shovel into the ancient soils of Umbria or learning to sort the wild edibles of Italy wouldn’t you?
Well, you can. In fact, for the money, if you’re interested in gardening and are going to be in Umbria, I’d venture to say you’d be nuts not to take a Spring Garden Workshop at the Art Monastery at Casale Santa Bridita. A more beautiful place to garden would be difficult to find, I’m guessing.
I actually don’t have to guess. I’ve been there. The picture on the right shows the little cafe (you know, called a bar in Italy) with some great views of the surrounding rural countryside.
The good news is that the workshop doesn’t cost a lot. Where are you going to get a week of experiential travel for a mere €390? With limoncello tasting. Check it out.
Filed in: Experiential Travel Food
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(Not) Digging Pompeii: Pompeii Food and Drink · Mar 7, 03:52 PM by James Martin
I like the direction archaeology is heading. It used to be that folks looked only for treasure. You found treasure in the vast palaces of the ruler. Maybe also where they buried the sucker. It was fun to dig there. Gold! Grants! Exhibits worldwide!
I’m one of those people for whom the powerful and wealthy hold no particular interest. I mean, can you name even one of those overcompensated Goldman Sachs wonks who brought down the entire economy last time by making gambling instruments out of poor people’s mortgages? I doubt it. They are not interesting people in the least (except to the government, who rewards them with sacks of money so they can try again.)
Archaeologists are wising up to this view. They’re starting to bring alive the more interesting parts of the city; the brothels, the slaughterhouses, the little shops and cafes that fed the people who maintained the fabric of the village core.
And now, for a price, you can join the scholars and learn about the real folk while they do.
Yes, this morning in a flurry of twitterings, I learned from Napoli Unplugged of the Pompeii Food and Drink Project in which you pay “to explore the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, Italy, as a research participant in an ongoing noninvasive (that means no digging) study with a staff of historians, architects, and classicists.”
These kinds of experiences are quite enlightening—with prices commensurate with the degree of potential enlightenment. Expensive, yet you won’t likely get the opportunity to do this kind of thing again in your life without spending four years in school—and you’ll have tales to tell your friends that will make you the envy of your social group, even if it is only made up of people on facebook you haven’t actually met.
Anyway, check out Pompeii Food and Drink Project
I’ve decided to illustrate this post with a picture of nearby Naples, where food is an art practiced not by the elite, but by your ordinary folk who talk mostly with their hands. This is Russortaggi. Who in his right mind would rather shop at Safeway?
Filed in: Food Italy Travel Tips
Italian Food | Italian American Food · Mar 2, 04:53 PM by James Martin
Last Sunday night we headed over to Joe and Eddies in San Francisco. Joe and Eddies offers “Italian Cuisine” like they used to serve in the ’70s. Maybe the ’60s, too.
The thing is, we didn’t expect great, traditional “Italian” food; the draw was the rat pack impersonators, especially Matt Helm as Dean Martin (warning, “Italian” music).
Ok, so the crowd was mostly old farts our age, people who remember Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Joey Bishop, and Sammy Davis Junior with particular (or perhaps peculiar) fondness. We sat in rapt attention as “Dean” crooned the old songs, his “cigarette” glowing with LED redness while the two olives in his “Martini” seemed glued to the glass.
(I likely have used up my quota of quotation marks. When you bring back the dead, expect some virtuosity in manufacturing the “props” (oops).)
So there we were in front of some of what folks used to call Italian food. You know, huge, heaping platters of all manner of meats troweled with tomato sauce so thick you could use what’s left over for Spackle, providing your walls didn’t mind the phosphorescent redness of it.
To be sure what was in front of us was Italian-American food. Now, there’s the rub. How do you review something which, like the performers, was brought back from the dead in an interesting way?
Surely you’d never find a thick, unctuous tomato sauce redolent—NO! REEKING of—garlic in Italy. (If you’ve never been, don’t be disappointed if your taste buds don’t get assaulted by the over-concentrated fumes of such a sauce; this kinda thing is virtually unknown these days in Italy).
On the other hand, we’re not reviewing “real” or “traditional” Italian food here. We’re looking at a reproduction of what Americans did to the thought of Italian food. They jazzed it up. They boosted the flavors to “heights unknown” as some tarnished TV chef might say. It’s the characteristic that sets America apart, this idea of cramming all manner of food ingredients together until the whole shebang doesn’t just sit placidly on your tongue while you contemplate its honesty and freshness; we feel compelled to transform most food into a goddam buzzbomb going off and rattling your senses. It’s not food, it’s an experience: you can’t taste the pork ribs under that sauce, or differentiate them from the hunk of pork shoulder; blanketed by all that sauce there are simply lumps of different texture, some still with bones. But you know you’ve eaten when you’re done. So does every one else. There’s that raw garlic we love and think the Italians do, too.
So, you know what? I sorta liked it. I wouldn’t want to eat it every day. It would mangle my taste buds into a useless clot within the month. But it was honest, authentic and true to its roots. The concept was clear, unlike places like the Olive Garden, where the food advertises itself as authentic while it’s almost pure American or at least badly tarted-up Italian.
But that’s the thing, isn’t it? In Italy, the cuisine is codified through social controls that allow only for the minuscule modification of traditional recipes. What I’m sayin’ is this: Italians will refuse to eat food you’ve cooked for them if you haven’t salted it right or you’ve let the gnocchi cook a half a millisecond too long. Don’t try this at home if your feelings are easily hurt.
In America, however, the sky is the limit. You can cook just about any damn thing with just about any number of other odd ingredients and folks will say, “golly, that’s, well, interesting!” They will even have a second course if you force it on them. Folks are easy.
Which is why we don’t have a national, codified cuisine. At least we don’t have one not put on our platters by immigrants anyway.
Or maybe the 70s were just a superior time when minimum wage was enough to live on and we went out in our cars with their 400 cubic inch engines just waiting to burn the tread clear offa the tires because tires were cheap and so was gas.
Those were the days, eh? No candy-ass buckling up of them seat belt thingies either.
Which reminds me of Dean Martin:
When I die I want to die peacefully in my sleep just like my father did. I don’t want to go kicking and screaming at the top of my lungs like those other people in the car he was driving.
(There are other ideas of Authenticity in Italian cuisine floating about in the web-o-sphere these days. Try: Food For Thought: Evolving Ideas About Italian Cuisine)
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Strangled Priests and Overindulgent Monks · Feb 24, 10:25 AM by James Martin
One of the things I like about Italians is their public recognition of hypocritical conduct by religious figures, especially around the issues of overindulgence. It’s food all over again.
The picture to the left is a Presepe figure of a monk. It’s my favorite. Tickling him with your mouse and clicking will make him much, much bigger.
Monks, you see, are supposed to live the simple life. They often take vows of poverty and of silence. But in their Christmas cribs, Italians have a way of reflecting life as it is, not as it was supposed to be. Our monk seems to have gotten used to living the good life.
Food itself can be the vehicle for this “knowing wink” of the faithful. I was reminded of this from Serena, who writes of The Priest Stranglers, a gnocchi dish allegedly given the name gli Strozzapreti because of the fervor with which a parishioner’s gnocchi were consumed by a visiting priest, who might shove enough of the free food down his greedy gullet to choke himself to death. Sure is a more colorful name for a dish than “Spinach Dumplings with Herbs” in any case.
In America, we accept greed as part of a modern “Christianity” which seems to have been built solely around selective misreadings of Leviticus. On television, religious figures sit on golden thrones, dispensing their vindictive advice to all who can stomach it. Whatever happened to the simple life, the turning of the other cheek, the love of neighbors?
In Italy, it’s all in the gnocchi.
Filed in: Food Living in Italy
Lunigiana Honey is Best · Feb 19, 10:31 AM by James Martin
I was happy to hear recently that The best honey in Italy comes from Lunigiana. My neighbor makes some dynamite chestnut honey just outside my window. His hives look like, well, that’s them over there to the right (click to see them bigger).
The only DOP honey in all of Italy comes from the Lunigiana.
Italy is the only country in the world able to produce, thanks to its geographic position and its orography that determine particular climatic conditions, more than 30 different types of valuable honey. The only honey to have obtained the Dop label is the honey of the Lunigiana. ~ Many types of honey
The two DOP types of honey, acacia honey and chestnut honey, are at opposite ends of the color and taste scales. Last spring I was able to taste for the first time the Lunigiana DOP acacia honey. It’s light in color and has a delicate vanilla and flowers taste. Italians, the seller told me, take spoons of it for their health. In earlier times it was used as a general sweetener.
Chestnut honey is dark, rich, and fuller flavored, with a slightly bitter aftertaste. I like it drizzled over my Greek style yogurt in the morning.
Head over to the Lunigiana for some honey. Stay for some castles and maybe a worker’s lunch at one of our favorite restaurants.
Note: The Lunigiana produces great honey in part due to the lack of pollution. That is, there’s none of that icky, smoggy stuff and there’s very little of that other, unspoken pollution, the invasion of the corporate crap products like the Bayer CropScience AG’s insecticide Proteus that’s killing France’s bees
Filed in: The Lunigiana Food
Italian Music: Creuza de Mä and Roof Tile Rabbits · Feb 18, 03:15 PM by James Martin
Odd what connections come up when you blog about beloved and furry pets masquerading as food for the down and out (see On Tuscans Eating Cat if you can stomach it). Mike, a reader who keeps me from reasonable hours of sleep by twisting together new paths in my neural network (or something), brings up the song Creuza de Ma by the Genoese cantautore Fabrizio De Andre. It’s a beautiful song in Genoa dialect that mentions going into a tavern to eat a dish characterized by “an apparently widely known phrase (in Italian), ‘Lepre di Tegole’ – rabbit of the roof tiles, i.e. cat.”
Whatever you think of De Andre’s pasticcio in agrodolce di lepre di tegole—baked tubes of pasta with sweet-sour “hare of the roof tiles” or cat—the song is a fabulously meaty one about those odd intersections—between the sea and land, between the normal and the odd, between the endless voyages of the mariner and “normal folk”. So the food the mariner imagines sitting down to at the casa dell’Andrea alternates between normal and odd:
fried little fishes
sheep brains
lasagna with 4 sauces
baked pasta with cat
which reflect the oddness of the life of the mariner, the endless traveler trying to return to his roots, or trying, at least, to ferret out what is normal about those imagined roots. I go through it every time I return to my ancestral home, Illinois, from Italy. The food is certainly a bit different there. And white. Very, very white. And the meals are wineless. All very odd.
In any case, hear the song sung in the Genoese dialect: italian music: creuza de mä
On Tuscans Eating Cat · Feb 17, 10:25 AM by James Martin
Perhaps you have heard of the latest incident of Politically Incorrectness that has raised the hackles of Italians. It involves a television host who dared reveal the traditional eating of cats by those who didn’t have other meat to fry at carnevale time. By traditional I mean 60 years ago. Lean times in Tuscany. And the carne in carnevale means meat, remember, so these folks were being left out of the party.
(Yes, even Italians tend to kill the messenger, the storyteller. Shame. What will become of us?)
I have personally had dealings with cat-related eating issues. I made the mistake of inviting my Italian neighbors over for gumbo last fall. I didn’t want to make anything with seafood because one of them didn’t eat it. So I thought of rabbit. Rabbit is plentiful in Tuscan markets, so I went to the market and bought one.
Now, you certainly know by now that when Italians speak of food, they don’t hold anything back. By the time I was ready to dip the ladle into the gumbo, we had already had the discussion about rabbits…and cats.
You see, we were informed that the locals sourced their rabbit carefully, otherwise one might go home with something anatomically similar. Like a cat.
Of course, I remembered the old days, when any rabbit you might buy came with an intact, furry head with ears. If you even wondered why, now you know.
Modern folks, especially city folks who are getting more and more divorced from the source of what they eat, don’t like knowing that they’re eating rabbit or any other “cute” animal. So, the practice that assured them they were getting rabbit went away so more rabbit could be sold. But then it was much easier and more profitable to sell cat, I suppose, and Italy has more private entrepreneurs than you can ever imagine…
Returning to the original story, the television host was fired for revealing a tradition popular 60 years ago. Odd, isn’t it? But the video showing this unspeakable transgression is online, translated, and quite entertaining. You must see it: Italy and its gastrocraze over the tuscan cat expression
Buon Appetito!
Filed in: Food Living in Italy
Lampredotto: Cow Stomach Eaten from Trucks in Florence · Feb 15, 08:52 AM by James Martin
Why is it that the world’s best food is cooked inside a truck or van? It is the fact that true competition at a small level produces better products? The big boys, after all, eliminate competition economically, by buying up the competition, or out-advertising them (not with facts, but with simple math: bigger boobs = greater sales).
When I’m in California I can hardly resist the urge to eat at a “taco truck”. It’s where you get real Mexican grub. The tacos can hardly be compared to the bland, one size fits all slop served by the chains.
In Florence, I can always find the fortitude to forgo the Renaissance in favor of the Lampredotto stands that dot the landscape. Yes, Lampredotto is one of the more refined stomachs of the cow, the last one, or fourth on the butcher chart. You cook it slowly. It softens to a sensuous silkiness. You spike it up with green sauce.
I couldn’t resist taking a picture of the Lampredotto stand in Florence’s Borgo San Frediano When Kyle Phillips of Italian Cuisine took me there for a panino which was to become the first course of a full Italian meal. Wow.
This is the internet age, and now it’s easier than ever to find these stands because of the tireless work of folks like Dan Woodford, who has mapped Florence’s lampredotto and trippa stands
Filed in: Food Italy Travel Tips