The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [111]
It was a rainy November evening when I had my first meal at Cesare’s. The dining room was rough and warm, dark wood against stucco walls and tall shelves of wine bottles begging to be opened. In the stone fireplace at one end of the room, a sizzling joint of meat turned slowly over a wood fire. The frenzy of the white truffle season was upon us, and the room was packed beyond its usual capacity of twenty-five guests.
Cesare’s children, Elisa and Filippo, brought us plates of tripe and fresh porcini and a tiny green the size of clover, all hidden under paper-thin slices of white truffle. A wild-duck breast followed, flavored with a sweet sauce of chestnuts and white truffles, and a large onion baked on a bed of salt, scooped out and filled with white truffles, meat broth, pureed onions, and cheese. Each course was Cesare’s variation on a Piedmontese theme, robust and refined at the same time, the fantasy food of a country boy. Cesare (pronounced “CHEH-za-ray”) is forty-two, with thinning chestnut hair, an ample nose, a full mustache, and sharp gray eyes. He is the son of a farmer who owned the original Dei Cacciatori down the road from Cesare’s current place—Cesare has turned it into a guest house—and who cut hair as a sideline. “I would simply like to be thought of as a good cook who continued the traditions of his region with his own imagination,” Cesare says. Some consider Cesare the best cook in the Piedmont, one of the best in all of Italy. “Cesare is also a few crazy,” I was told by a great wine maker whose vineyards are nearby and who first introduced me to Dei Cacciatori. “But what can you expect of a genius?”
Cesare’s wife, Silvana, brought us a baked potato drenched in grappa and a cream of hare with white truffles—somewhere between a mousse and a pâté—and asked us if we would like to start our meal. We were baffled until etymology came to the rescue: “antipasto” literally means “before the meal” or “repast” (not “before the pasta”). Piedmont is famous for its antipasti; one local restaurant brings you a procession of seventeen, each served separately or in little groups, never crammed together on a huge platter.
The repast started with a variety of traditional Piedmontese pastas. Some of us had tajarin, an incredible type of tagliatelle or tagliarini noodle typically made with only the deep orange yolks of local eggs. Others chose agnolotti, tiny ravioli stuffed with meat and cabbage or spinach (or, as tonight, stuffed with pumpkin) and pinched together by hand. Both were moistened with sugo d’arrosto, a thin sauce of browned butter, sage, and meat broth, and both were showered with white truffles.
Next we had to choose between oven-roasted wild boar, a guinea hen baked in clay scooped up from Cesare’s land, or a spit-roasted leg of kid just taken from the fireplace. The kid was the most perfect piece of meat ever to enter my mouth. The outside was dark and crisp and pungent with herbs and smoke from the acacia-wood fire; the inside was sweet and succulent and practically falling apart, something like the best North Carolina pork barbecue. Now I understand why James Beard once wrote that spit-roasting over wood is the ideal way to cook meat. (Cesare, who typically shows contempt for precise measurement in the kitchen, insists that the bed of the fire must be exactly forty centimeters below the spit. He uses acacia wood because he bought a vast amount of it last year when the government put a road through his friend’s property, but says that oak and vine cuttings would be preferable.) I have become obsessed by the concept of spit-roasting, and I am thinking of moving to an apartment where I can set up a motorized spit in a wood-burning fireplace, even if the place lacks windows and running water.
Dessert was a pear poached in Barolo with a sauce of mirtilli (whortleberries or tiny blueberries) and a puzzling platter of leafy hazelnut branches. The leaves were pretty enough, though the hour seemed late for a change in the table decoration, and the