The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [112]
When inspiration deserts him, Cesare simply shuts the restaurant for a while. He does not have much patience with restaurant critics. When the Michelin guide to Italy—not the proudest achievement of that company—awarded him his first star several years ago, Cesare posted a sign on the front door of his restaurant: IF YOU’RE HERE JUST BECAUSE YOU READ MY NAME IN MICHELIN OR VERONELLI, PLEASE DO NOT ENTER. More pragmatic than Cesare, Silvana put her foot down, and the sign disappeared.
But the critics have been kind to Cesare. He was discovered in 1972 by Nino Bergese, the most celebrated Italian chef of this century and cook to King Umberto; Bergese told Luigi Veronelli, author of the standard guide to the restaurants of Italy, I ristoranti di Veronelli, and soon Cesare became widely known. “Personal, inventive, and refined.… A great cook, at once a faithful interpreter of traditional Langhe cuisine and capable of exceptional new dishes” is how I translate Sandro Doglio’s appraisal in his Mangiare & bere in Piemonte e Valle d’Aosta, the most comprehensive guide to the restaurants of Piedmont. “Inspired … moody … extravagant … at times bizarre” are the adjectives that Faith Willinger applies to Cesare’s cuisine in her indispensable Eating in Italy (Hearst Books, with a much-updated edition expected in early 1998).
We stayed the night in Cesare’s snug little guest house. It was snowing lightly the next morning, and we kept inside, gathering strength for our evening adventures. Cesare had persuaded his friend Bernardo, a retired farmer and a trifulau (a professional truffle hunter) since age ten, to take us along on this evening’s truffle hunt.
By late afternoon, the weather cleared, revealing a vista for miles around—steep green misty hills rising in the middle distance to low mountains and in the far distance, on two sides, the snow-covered Alps, a sparkling pink-lavender in the sunset, a spectacle that makes you gasp. Soon Cesare appeared, bringing us a large, flat package wrapped in butcher’s paper and an excellent bottle of Italian champagne. “For the trifulau,” he laughed as he unwrapped the paper, disclosing a platter of warm crostini—crisp slices of grilled bread brushed with butter and showered with thin slices of white truffle. Their musky pungent perfume filled the room. Then their musky pungent taste filled our mouths. Rossini called them the Mozart of fungi.
Cesare speaks in a mixture of Italian and the Langhe dialect, closer to Provençal than to Italian. There are only twenty-one letters in the Italian alphabet, yet I am proficient in no more than half of them. But as luck would have it, my wife and I had met up with Eugenio Pozzolini, a native Tuscan who manages the importing arm of Dean & DeLuca in New York. Eugenio was traveling through the Piedmont in pursuit of new treats for the people of America to enjoy. He was a fine and selfless translator.
On a dirt road outside town, we found Bernardo and his dog, Lola, and they led us down the slope of a hill and into a hazelnut orchard. From October through January the best white truffles in the world grow under this earth, in the Langhe hills to the south of Alba and the Roero hills just to the north, on the subterranean roots of oak, linden, willow, and hazelnut trees. The pattern and color on the inside of the truffle tell you which kind of tree was its “mother.” (Pink streaks, for example, indicate the root of an oak.) On the outside most tartufi bianchi d’Alba are smooth and light tan and strongly perfumed. Farther north in the Piedmont, in the area around Asti, truffles grow gnarled and pitted because the earth there is densely packed, and the truffles must struggle for room to grow. “Those truffles grow up angry,” Bernardo explained. What did he think about truffles from Tuscany and Umbria? “They are one step up from potatoes.”
We walked slowly from tree to tree. The twilight sky