The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [115]
For the next hour Cesare frantically jogged around the parking lot, pulling each trifulau off into a corner and collecting as many white truffles as he could before the commercial buyers arrived. His clothes and his van were permeated with the scent of truffles. At seven o’clock the sun was just visible through the mists, and the shops around the market began to open. We stopped in a bar for thirty seconds of coffee and warmth and rushed out again to buy more truffles. The rest of the Ceva market slowly came alive with stalls for game and mushrooms, produce, and dry goods, and Cesare finally turned his attention to huge sacks of walnuts and hazelnuts and flat wooden crates of fresh porcini.
When we returned to Albaretto della Torre for breakfast, Cesare cleaned and weighed his purchases. He had bought 4.6 kilograms of white truffles, about 10 percent of them too small to use in anything but pâtés and sauces. In the past four hours Cesare had worked as feverishly as any commodities trader on the floor of the Chicago exchange. He looked a wreck.
When we left the next morning, our arms filled with Silvana’s jam and a gigantic white truffle sealed in a jar of rice, Cesare invited me back to Albaretto to learn the traditional dishes of the Langhe and some of his inventions as well. The secret of his cookies in the hazelnut branches, though, would remain his alone. “I had a fever for two days after inventing that dish,” Cesare told me.
It was springtime when I returned to Cesare’s remote hilltop. Rows of hazelnut and fruit trees blossomed along the roads, and a patchwork of ancient vines covered the slopes. But Cesare’s life is in the kitchen, and for most of the following week mine was, too, except when I moved to the dining room to eat what we had cooked. Cesare’s young cousin, Bianca, who is proficient in English (and whose father was a famous trifulau), kept us company, interceding whenever my confusion became evident or when Cesare lapsed into the Langhe dialect. “I am a man of Provence,” Cesare inexplicably announces when he has lots to drink. He has successfully refused to learn one word of English.
Cesare began our first morning by collecting the eggs from his hens and a goose, who live behind the restaurant. Back in the kitchen, two of the eggs became my breakfast, along with bread, chestnut-and-thyme honey, and a dark marmalade of sour cherries that Silvana puts up at the beginning of summer. For the next four hours, Cesare was a whirlwind. Fourteen rich Milanese were driving to Albaretto for lunch, and Cesare single-handedly prepared six courses and the broths and sauces that accompanied them, moving urgently between the chopping table, the cold box, and the pots on the crowded stove. Cesare’s final chore before his guests arrived was to cook a lavish bowl of spaghetti with tomato sauce for a Saint Bernard called Freida, one of his four dogs. Freida is a vegetarian.
One day when the restaurant was closed, we climbed into Cesare’s Lancia for a shopping trip that lasted twelve hours and seven hundred kilometers. We raced over the mountains to Recco, beyond Genoa on the Mediterranean coast, to see the Cafarate brothers and their olive press; Cesare ships them olives from Oneglia, an hour up the coast in the direction of Monte Carlo. “How else can I make sure the olives come from Liguria and not from the south or even Spain?” he asks. Cesare dries his own mushrooms, brews his own Barolo vinegar, picks sage and rosemary outside his kitchen door, and manufactures his own salami, cotechino, and coppa. He often visits the farmers who raise his rabbits and vitello albese, a white bovine creature peculiar to Piedmont, halfway between a veal calf and a steer.
When