The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [116]
Q Did Marco Polo really introduce pasta to Italy from China?
A. Of course not. In 827, centuries before Marco Polo may or may not have voyaged to China, the Arabs conquered Sicily and brought noodles with them. Some Sicilian pasta dishes still bear Arabic names.
Los Angeles food writer and linguist Charles Perry has found traces of pasta in ancient Greece, in two Latin words borrowed from the Greek, and in the Talmud. (Are noodles leavened or unleavened?) He concludes that Italy knew the noodle long before the Arabs arrived.
Jane Grigson, the late cookery writer at the London Observer and author of many terrific cookbooks available in this country, believed that the Marco Polo canard had been hatched in the 1920s or 1930s in an advertisement for a Canadian spaghetti company.
We lunched in Portofino, where Cesare spends a few weeks each summer cooking for a Milanese nobleman who winters in Argentina. Then up over the Apennines to Sassuolo, on the outskirts of Modena, where Cesare bargained for Parmesan cheese from a small producer who also sells him prosciutto di Parma cured by a good friend. “You can tell the month Parmesan was made and even the field where the cows grazed when you taste it,” he explained. Not me. On the exhausting ride home from Modena on the autostrada we stopped at a service area, where I bought Cesare a bag of American tortilla chips. He was extremely gracious.
In my last days with Cesare, I was able to slow him down sufficiently to follow what he was doing in the kitchen. His first task each morning is to prepare the fondo bruno, a rich meat broth that underlies so many Piedmontese dishes. It is thin and limpid compared with a French stock: Cesare’s version contains well-browned pieces of vitello albese, to which he adds rosemary and vegetables but no bones, though many Italian broth recipes do. “Bones are for dogs,” he says. After the broth has bubbled away for two hours, Cesare ladles it out whenever he needs it, and as lunch approaches, he slides the pan to the back of the stove, where the heat supports only the barest simmer.
Cesare showed me how to cook a gran bui, or bollito misto, the Piedmontese farmer’s feast of ox, rooster, veal, tongue, cotechino sausage, and half a calf’s head, boiled in three pots and then combined; several risotti (Piedmont grows more rice than Lombardy); a scrumptious apple turnover of pasta sfoglia, Italian puff pastry; and his torte di nocciole. The Langhe is noted for its hazelnuts, intense in flavor but without bitterness, and also for the torte di nocciole made from them—yeasty cakes packed with nuts. Cesare’s version is like a huge cookie, crisp and buttery, the size of a dinner plate.
Cesare is also a master of zabaglione, the most famous dessert of Piedmont—a foam of egg yolks, sugar, and wine, which Cesare makes with Moscato d’Asti, a local sweet sparkling wine with the taste of orange, instead of the familiar Marsala. Zabaglione was invented by felicitous mistake in seventeenth-century Turin and was thus named for San Giovanni Baylon, patron saint of pastry. Cesare learned the technique from a destitute priest, Don Camera, who had only the tiniest church to support him but who made a celestial zabajone, as they call it in the Langhe. The secret, Cesare told me, is to whisk an odd number of egg yolks over a high flame (contrary to every cookbook instruction), not in a bainmarie. Only San Giovanni knows why this works, but it does.
We did not have time to do Cesare’s famous fritto misto with twenty ingredients, but he did teach me four versions of bagna caôda. Three of them contain lots of Barolo (or very old Barbaresco) because they were passed on to Cesare by an eighty-year-old man who was always drunk. Bagna caôda is a hot Piedmontese sauce for raw vegetables, typically made with butter, olive oil, garlic, and anchovies—oil and butter flow together in Piedmont like nowhere else in Italy. It is served in a chafing dish or in individual ceramic candle warmers to keep it slowly bubbling, and you dip raw vegetables into it—cardoons,