Just How Good Can Italy Get? -1-
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In the shops along and around Via Drapperie, haunches of cured ham dangle far into the distance. Coils of pork sausage spiral high into the sky. Bologna is the capital of Emilia-Romagna, and the region of Emilia-Romagna sees the beauty in swine, as the affiliation of one of its cities with a world-renowned delicacy makes clear. Here lies the plump mother lode of prosciutto di Parma.
And of Parmesan cheese. Wheels and wedges of it cram Bologna’s food stores, which allowed me to choose among Parmesan aged one year (not enough) or two years (just about perfect) or even five (oops). Looking up from the cheese, I was dazzled by the array of vegetables and fruits, their vividness reflecting how fertile this region is and how finicky its inhabitants are.
Could Italy get any better than this? In fact it could, and it does, if you head west and a bit north and delve into Piedmont, where there’s a humble burg called Barolo and another named Alba, which is as chummy with the white truffle as Parma is with ham.
On a recent week I divided my days almost evenly between these two regions, on a selfless mission to taste and compare the best of both. In my mind’s eye I cast them as contestants in a sort of bake-off, giving each the same opportunities — refined restaurants, rustic ones, marketplaces, vineyards — to show what it could do. Piedmont wound up with the prize.
I pitted the truffle against the pig, Turin’s taglierini against Bologna’s tortellini. I let Piedmont show off its chocolate, often mixed with hazelnuts, a marriage made famous by this region. I let Emilia-Romagna trot out its balsamic vinegar, yet another delicacy it sired.
I repeatedly indulged in vitello tonnato, whose dressing of anchovies and capers melds the salty notes so prominent in Piedmont cooking with the region’s sumptuous veal. I had room and time for only one serving of lasagne verdi, whose layers of béchamel, ground beef and spinach noodles captured the unapologetic heaviness of much of what Emilia-Romagna serves.
Even for someone who had visited them before, the regions held surprises. I had certainly eaten culatello, the Lamborghini of cured ham, produced around the Emilian town of Zibello, along the foggy banks of the Po River. But I had never tried the culatello made by Massimo Spigaroli, a master of the craft, from a special breed of black pigs that frolic in a fenced poplar forest, at least for a while. Once the frolicking is over, as their meat hangs and ages, it develops pinpricks of flavor reminiscent of Parmesan cheese. It’s utterly distinctive and unbelievably good.
Before this trip I was unfamiliar with finanziera, a Piedmont specialty that mingles various kinds of organ meat with butter, Marsala wine and porcini mushrooms, which are abundant in this region. The version of the dish put before me included veal sweetbreads as tender as any I’d come across and veal brain with the consistency and richness of custard. It could make an offal lover of anyone.
| Source: Originally published by New York Time – ©2006 New York Times |
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