Friday, May 26, 2006

Seeing Snails

Our class is going to France, and I can hardly stand it. We are scheduled to leave Sunday but I am leaving this afternoon with a classmate who is from Paris. We'll stay at her parent's house for a couple of nights then meet the class in Dijon (yes the home of the mustard) for dinner Sunday night. This is my first time to the country and I can't wait to order "Freedom Fries." Of course, I joke.
We will have several lectues at a food university on the topic of wine in the Burgundy region. And while few things could make me happier than that - there is one highlight of particular importance for me. We will visit an escargot farm. Yes. Snails. I love them and have loved them for many of my 34 years. I might have eaten them the moment I cut teeth had they been available from Gerber but my earliest memories are of the special stainless steel plates with six cups for the individual escargots served in the shell at Stephenson's Old Apple Orchard in Kansas City, Missouri. It was my special request whenever my special birthday dinner came around every July from the year I turned eight. Most kids went to Chuckey Cheese (sic? likely) but I was a little odd in my taste as a kid and didn't much care for pizza. Besides, after a pizza all that's left is grease from pepperoni and cheap cheese. Once you've successfully removed your appetizer from its shell, eaten the fruit of your labor and tossed the shell, there is still the plateful of garlicky butter with a bit of chopped parsley floating in the prescious fluid. By twelve, I was an expert at sopping. You take one of the famous Stephensons light rolls and dip bottom end first into one of the concave snail holsters and press. Over conversation you patiently wait for the roll to spring back up and your bite is ready. The roll is filled with goodness and the bite needs to be taken with care so as not to squeeze and release all the hard-earned escargot spiked garlic-butter down your chin and onto your lap. I've done it, and it's not pretty. You have to pay attention and remember to thoroughly enjoy every bit because every time I have escargots I never think I get enough. It is one food I could founder on and there is a reason I know there are six on a plate at Stephenson's. I would dole them out like a drill sergeant in order to ensure no one was short-changed- particularly me.
So, I will keep everyone updated on the snail farm. I think they're free range but you can be certain I will fight the good fight for the rights of sails everywhere if I hear of any injustice inflicted on my beloved escargots.

Thursday, May 25, 2006

A Hermit's Feast

This is a paper I wrote for one of my classes: I haven't updated in forever- or ever, so I figured I would put this on....hope you like it.


The drive seemed to go on forever, but the fog was as thick and white as cream; it even managed to white out road signs along our way. All I knew was that I was in a taxi bound for the mountains outside of Parma for lunch and wine at a friend of Luca's. His former professor of mathematics to be exact.
Luca is a taxi driver in Parma whom I barely know through bits of my bad Italian and his broken English. I managed to communicate that I was a student at the University of Gastronomic Sciences. From here he launched into a reverent description of his friend; a legendary intellectual, conversationalist, and most importantly a cook. He happened to be going to this friends mountain home the next day for lunch and would I like to come? Of course I found this offer to be golden- an invitation into the home of an esteemed cook. I'm in. See you tomorrow at eleven.
Luca's hulking friend Bruno is also a cabbie and I was surprised to see him occupying the front passenger seat when they pulled up outside my apartment in- what else- a taxi. I hop in the back seat next to two bottles of wine, a salumi, and a smoked calciocavallo cheese which I am instructed not to eat because it is for later. Just outside of Parma the fog awaited us and we didn't escape it until we climbed above it onto the mountain. We emerged into a different world from the one we left- it was snow covered, the trees were tall and pine, and the silence of the snowy road completed the otherness of our new location. We finally stop in possibly the smallest town in Italy where the math professor would have to come down and pick us up in his four-wheel-drive since the taxi wouldn't fare well higher on the mountain. It took about ten minutes for the vehicle to climb down, during which Luca and Bruno smoked four cigarettes each and chatted with great velocity in Italian. It starts to creep into my mind that I will have difficulty following conversation. The four-wheel-drive appears. It is about twenty years old, shedding upholstery, and reeking of wet dog and old cigarettes. The car's owner, Artimedes speaks no English either, so my feeling that my sense of hearing would be useless today became a hard fact. However my sense of taste would be enough.
We climb further into nowhere for fifteen minutes and Artimedes' dog appears- the sentry of the hermitage. The huge white guard almost blocks the view of the house sitting serenely in the snow with a chimney benignly puffing smoke into the crisp air. We attempt to exchange pleasantries as the wine is opened, the salumi sliced, and the water set to boil, but language is difficult and I just smile a lot. To be generous, the kitchen is Spartan. It clearly is the home of a straight man living alone for a long time. The necessities are all there, with no décor and little attention to tidiness. Artimedes reaches into his tiny freezer and grabs an unlabeled, indistinct jar half filled with a brownish-black grainy paste. Within ten minutes there is a steaming plate of linguine with black olive pesto sitting in front of me. As is typical in Italy, I'm encouraged to eat immediately and not wait for the others to be served. “It's hot now so eat while it's at its best.” This is a cultural phenomenon I wish the rest of the world would accept. I take a bite and it is phenomenal. The pasta is al dente to the point of being uncooked, but its firmness played off the squishy minced olives in a partnership my mouth admired. While my teeth worked the strong linguine noodles, my tongue had time to swirl and savor the delicate black-ripe olives in oil. He salted the water, but not the sauce, since the olives took care of that. The ingredients were as few as the accoutrements to the man's home, and that allowed each to shine. If a taste bud can sense the care with which a dish is prepared, mine knew immediately that Artimedes loved his olives. The pesto was prepared last fall when the olives were at their best, and the olive oil came from the same farm as the olives- a farm that a friend owns in Tuscany. It took about a half hour of conversation and references to my dizionario for me to understand this small fact- but I became much more interested in this loner on a mountain after the first bite.
A diminuitive man of about fifty years, Artimedes is a chain smoking life-long bachelor whose love of food seems to be in the blood of many people I've met in Italy. He is a man with thinning hair but admirable charisma, which is easy to see in any language. The way he held court with the two young taxi drivers reminds me of a sage in a cave taking occasional visitors to bask in his enlightenment. We sat in uncomfortable ladder-backed chairs around an indistinct Formica table for hours. Nine hours. And we enjoyed it. After the pasta was the contorni of olives marinated with peppers or onions, bread, oil and more wine. Then the cheese; the calciocavallo Luca brought, and a peccorino Artimedes had purchased for the occasion. And then, after a Tuscan cigar, came the dolce.
Artimedes prepared for us what is to this day among the best desserts I have had in Italy. It was a simple torta of apple and raisins. This is not something I would usually care for, but his crust was not the paste-like substance that often passes for crust in Italian bakeries. It was sweet, crumbly and buttery and wasn't heavy on the stomach. It also had a reasonable amount of fruit and accompanying caramelized juice to remind you that it is, in fact, the star of the dessert. The raisins had been soaked in an unidentifiable low-alcohol liquor and so were revived to juiciness. The apples were substantial in texture balancing on the precipice between undercooked and mush. The juice which respected the boundary of the crust was thick and just sweet enough. Artimedes was proud as we all went in for seconds. He brought out last year's Nocino, a dark brown home-made liquor made from nuts. I didn't understand which nuts, but after a couple cordials and a caffe corretto with grappa I found the Nocino's chewy sediment a little charming at the base of a glass coated in the syrupy residue. Also newly charming were the two cab drivers who suddenly felt they could sing Frank Sinatra and re-enact action scenes from the movies. When Bruno did a startling realistic death scene after being shot by an invisible bullet in the chest, I didn't flinch. My trepidation from the morning hours had vanished. I glanced at Artimedes through a cloud of smoke from his latest Tuscan cigar and ran to the side of Bruno in his death throes acting as the bereaved widow-to-be.