The grappa drips from a copper still, young clear spirit
Eagerly dripping through the jug’s glass lip.
Day draws on like a sweet burning sap.
We go walking in the rain past palm and old persimmon,
Nettle patches, little cleavers, sodden olive groves.
Moonlight distills to silver in the shimmering leaves.
Ancient olives are gnarled but fruiting. The grappa maker
Keens to the sound of the sap collecting.
Posting by Patrick
They say here that if you put a chestnut in your pocket in the fall, it will give you good luck all winter long. Last Saturday Aaron and I left Bosco Merrone, a somewhat challenging agriturismo in the region of Campania (read Aaron’s hilarious brochure parody below) where we scurried around cleaning in the kitchen and cabins for a few days. There was a big New Year’s party, a couple subtle scuffles, celebratory kisses, and way too much food (ask the pigs, they ate most of it). We also cleared thorny brush with a perilously jerry-rigged hedge trimmer and tried to go to the circus or nearest house of exorcism (no luck there). Speaking of luck, when two people part in Italy, they wish each other well by saying ‘in bocca a lupo,’ which means ‘in the wolf’s mouth’ (not too far from ‘break a leg!’). Somehow we ended up in Carife, another sub-mountainous town in Campania among rolling verdant vineyard hills and pine-strewn bluffs. It could almost be Ireland. Speaking of lucky.
When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When it gives you lemonade, sip, sip, pass.
So we have followed the Tao of the WWOOFer, which is to take the good with the bad and stay light on your feet. We arrived at Hirpus, a small azienda run by Michele Minieri. Hirpus, I just learned, is a pre-Latinate word for ‘wolf’ used by the pagan mystics who once populated these hills. Michele is a bit of a mystic himself, which I gather from his statements on fire. Fire is a recapitulation of the sun, he says, and that which burns does so because it is close to the sun. Thus oil and wood are close to the sun. At first I baulked at his logic, but later Aaron helped me understand the pagan mind with a scientific reading: It is indeed true that substances like oil and wood store the sun’s energy in packets of hydro-carbon, the breaking of which releases the energy we know as fire. In a sense, then, they share the nearest possible proximity, the complete absorption of one into the other.
In any event, Michele makes the best olive oil I’ve ever tasted, as well as jams and various delicious vegetables conserved in oil (sott’olio = under oil). Michele’s rustic rendition of bruschetta is a freakin’ revelation: toast slices of hearty bread quickly over an open fire (scrape off any burn with a knife eagerly), rub with a raw garlic clove while still piping hot, douse liberally with buttery olive oil, perhaps a sprinkling of homegrown oregano, and eat. Ambrosial.
On our first full day we visited the laboratorio up the street where the fresh oil is transferred into large tanks, later to be filtered and aged. After that, we cut and gathered wood from the closest olive grove to bring back to the house, with the help of Seiji, a Japanese expat who has been working at Hirpus for the past few months. We were the picture of Peace itself with our shoulder-loads of olive boughs bouncing in the fresh breeze. It wouldn’t be bad to live here, I thought. The wars could never touch us. Lunchtime arrived. A meal was prepared for us by Michele’s mum, a feisty 82 year-old who is just as concerned with spirits (and just as loud) as her son. “Then what idol do you pray to when you have need!?” she asked Aaron and me after we had divulged that we are not Catholics. I said I didn’t have an idol, though I wish I’d told her that these days I pray to wolves’ mouths and chestnuts. She has a boatload of them drying on a sheet on her patio. I’m keeping the one she gave me in my pocket.
by Patrick
It’s always the little tired ones who get eaten first. The blueberry that fell off the bush, the fawn with the broken leg, the cheese with an early expiration date.
Today we made Stracchino, a young, soft-ripened cow’s milk cheese with a little acidic tang. It comes from Lombardia. “If cream cheese were a man, Stracchino would be an angel,” says Michael. He just made that up right now on the spot. It’s an inspiring cheese.
*Historical note: “Stracche” means “tired” in the Lombardian dialect. Stracchino (roughly “little tired one”) is so named because it is traditionally made from the milk of cows descending from the Alps after the long, hard mountain season. Everyone’s beat. It develops quickly and only lasts a short time, so it would never work in summer. Regional variations on Stracchino include Crescenza (from Liguria) and the even wetter Squacquerone (from Emilia-Romagna). Surprisingly, Gorgonzola also used to be considered ‘stracchino,’ only later taking on the name of the Lombardian town where people got good at inoculating it with blue molds. (Thanks to Michael for this.)
Below are the basic steps for making Stracchino. Actually, the very important adding of ferments and rennet are omitted through sheer negligence. If you are interested in trying it at home, which you should totally do this winter, contact Michael and me for more details (rennet type, temperatures, times, etc.)
The cards of good fortune fell in our favor last weekend as we journeyed to the Northwester coastline of Italy. Extending to the east from the Cote de Azur in Southern France, then arking southward towards Tuscany is the crescent of land know by Italians as Liguria. Characterized by steep forested mountains diving directly into the mediteranean sea with small hamlets of brightly colored buildings and ancient castles clinging to the rocks, Liguria is far closer to my original image of Italy than the flat central valley of the Piedmont that is currently our home. Inbetween two weeks of rainy weather we scored a day and a half of dry and partially sunny weather on the coast. The air smelt of jasmine and sea salt reminding me of Santa Barbara. Song birds, the first I’d heard since coming here, serenaded us from the olive orchards as we stepped off the train in San Stefano de Magra. The sun setting over the water plucked on my heart cords a song of homesickness.
Most of the photos from our trip were taken on a day long hiking journey through the Cinque Terre region of southern Liguria were five small fishing villages are liked by foot paths that traverse the steep hillsides above rocky cliffs and coves of aqua blue seascapes. Laura came down from the Alps to join in the fun and our friend Dorina, a Ligurian native, met up with us for the scenic hike. If our weekend could be equated to a decadent banana split addorned with tasty prosciutto, gellato, fine wines and warm weather, then the base of our desert, providing a solid foundation for all the sweets would be Dave and Ingrid, our lovely hosts. These two wonderful ex-pats whom we knew of through Patrick, put us up in their beautiful home, fed us wine and Swedish pasteries, and showed us around the towns that they’ve called home for the past two years. Enough with the rambling, here are the goods:
This weekend we’re heading into the Alps for the first time to visit Mikes girlfriend Laura. It will be good to get a change of scenery and finally get to explore the jagged backdrop that surrounds our lives down here in the valley. Meat class is going OK. The two students in our meat course who have a few years of butchering experience under their belts are right up there with the teachers hogging all the action. It seems that people who are into cutting up dead animals are REALLY into cutting up dead animals and have a hard time sharing the fun. They get this glazed over, drooling-from-the-corner-of-their-mouth look on their faces like a dog protectively gnawing on a hambone, that really makes me think twice about approaching them for a piece of the action. With hands like bear paws, gripping knives of unspeakable sharpness, you’d be apt to just stand back and watch at a safe distance too. We’ve had a few successful batches of salami, cotechini, and sausage and a few that turned out smelling like year- old, unwashed, gym shorts meets an egg factory dumpster-diver.
The good news is that we’ve seen the last of the Health and Safety professor how didn’t really breath so much as inhale Italian and exhale a Piedmontese dialect at the exact same, or greater, velocity of an FDV-approved, 5 kilo fire extinguisher. Also my Italian has gotten good enough so that I feel comfortable asking questions in class. Unfortunately, even though EVERY SINGLE other student seems to understand exactly what i’m asking, the professor cannot, or will not, acknowledge my questions directly and continues to defer to my classmates who repeat to him everything that i’ve said with the proper tonal inflections. The subtleties of some of the lessons and techniques in lab are still lost in translation, but I continue to tell myself I’ll figure it all out some how, thus reinforcing my notion that paying $10,000 for the American version of this crash course in butchery still isn’t worth the money.
For now it’s back to the kitchen where Salvatore is cooking up a dinner of wild rabbit (lepra) and polenta.
By Michael Kalish
After a week of lectures on theory and hygiene, we were all ready to jump into our lab coats and rubber boots in the caseificio (“cheese room”). Adjacent to the old cathedral, the caseificio is shaped like a long train car. A movie line of machines and vats leads to two, temperature-controlled aging cells. At the door, we change our shoes and wash our hands. The raw milk sits outside the gate to the church yard, which we drag in from the cold and over the floor to the large “swiss” vat, capable of holding over 1200 liters. Damiano and Mattia, two farm-raised boys from Trentino, Italy, lift the milk cans and pour a good 100 liters into the vat, which sloshes around at 6 degrees celsius (ca. 43 degrees fahrenheit). Our professor, Signore Guido Talone, spins the vapor line open to heat the cold water jacket and Patrick sits on the digital thermometer until it reaches 70 degrees celsius (ca. 21) for a quick heat treatment.
The cheese of the day is Tomino, a soft, fresh, cow milk cheese, which is made with milk, salt, and a lot of rennet. No loving from lactic bacteria. Normally, my love for cheese is for lactic curds, which involve a long, slow acidification of the milk (12 to 24 hours) at a low temperature (more or less at 20 degrees celsius, or 68 degrees fahrenheit) with a drop of rennet to help knit the final set of the curd. These lactic cheeses then can be dried out, coated with ash, brined, or washed down to make some Dr. Jeckly and Mr. Hyde mold and yeast configurations that can radically alter the taste and consistency of the final product.
But the cheese today does not lend itself to any artful manipulations or character transformations. Au contraire, the cheese retains its milk flavors and all acidity development is avoided. The recipe is a common one in the Piedmont. No glorious history or fame is associated with it, though it has been around for perhaps millenia. It has little character and no interest in gold or fame like the rising star from cooperatives in Valle d’Aosta, Fontina, or the Pavarotti of cheeses, Parmiggiano Reggiano. It is pale, small, and insipid, and sits shyly in the cold deli cases still sweating in its plastic moulds for a week, at most. So why make this cheese? Because a cheese can’t always steal the show.
It is sweet, mild, and cuts into charmingly triangular wedges without losing its shape. The quality of the Tomino matches the quality of the milk, which makes it perfect for small farms with superior pastures. It is fitting as a snack or chopped coarsely to put in a salad or served as a dessert with a spread of jam or a drip of honey. The quality of the cheese evokes, for me, the feeling of a good home cooked meal, over one bought and served at an extraordinary restaurant. There is no need to rove your palate for nuance or complex flavors or to tongue and savor the last grains or residue. It stands up to the occassion of good eating, though it may not stand tall or dashing. It stands up as straight and delicious as milk can stand.
After dropping the temperature to 40 degrees celsius (104 degrees fahrenheit), we add the rennet and wait for the curd to set. After 15 minutes or so, Guido dips a beaker into the vat and swirls around a small sample of milk. Little nodes cling to the walls of the beaker, which indicate the first sign of a coagulation. After another 55 minutes or so, Guido sets his knuckles on the curd to see if curd has set to a satisfactory firmness. He dips his finger into the curd and lifts it. The curd splits down both sides of his finger without leaving a trace of residue. Pronto! He takes the spada (“sword”) and cuts the curd very gently to avoid the loss of fat particles (which form whitish clouds in the whey). Once the curds are cut in a grid-like fashion, Guido spins his guittara (“guitar”) through the curd. The moulds, shaped like perforated bowl, are set on the table, filled liberally, and left to drain in a cool environment to avoid the development of acidity (heat = bacterial activity = possible lactic acid development).
Once we had eaten a few spare curds, our class of twenty manned the hoses and brushes and began to scrub down. After thirty minutes, we took off our boots and stuck the tomini in the refrigerator. Tomorrow they will be on the lunch table. And suddenly, a little cheese in a little town in the Piedmont had everyones attention.
Today the Piemontese fog was as thick as marzapan. We walked along the eerie road to Villafranca and detoured into the nebulous fields looking for mushrooms. Our shoes leaked and the fog seemed to just grow thicker. But we are less concerned with the outdoor conditions than with dinner these days. Our kitchen has a sort of weather system, a culinary one with precipitation, heat waves, and fog of its own. Wiggle your nose into a boiling pot of prosciutto and veal ravioli and you too will know the feeling of “a dewer” in the Piedmont.
Here’s a few more pictures from handmade dinners over the last couple weeks. It’s all good.
-Patrick
Having grown up beside a land grant university with large bovine and swine research programs, I am thoroughly familiar with the windswept smells issuing from Porkchop and Buttercup. Today being Sunday, Aaron and I walked out of Moretta in search of exactly what we didn’t know. The wafting scent of confined ruminant and ungulate chased us to the very frontier, which lies just a few minutes from our doorstep on a two-lane highway stretching across this flat Italian heath like a shot. A gray bullet through gray water.
Once we crossed out of Moretta the dietary smell dissapated and the sight of the next town, Villafranca, came into view. Aaron found hops growing in the blackberry-brambled ditches while I jagged my thumb at passing cars. A friend recently asked me if Italians are kind to hitchhikers, and now I believe that they aren’t, so long as you’re in view of a church spire or water tower. (It seems that these landmarks of civilization close at hand dampen the driver’s sympathy toward outliers.) This likely describes 90% of the Italian landscape–no virgin Wests here–thereby proving that settlement patterns influence passengership by way of geography. Zounds! We’ll have to test our theory someday in the Aostan outskirts.
Good stories often start on country roads, like the Thomas Hardy novels that have biased me to see any flat, grayish landscape through the otherworldly lens of his Wessex heath. Technically, Aaron and I were walking a much more verdant and cultivated earth today. Whole lettuces survived in patches abutted by fields of dry shucks where old men sat around drinking whiskey from a still (this last part taken from Aaron’s imagination).
In bustling Villafranca we turned down a piece of 18th century crockery from a spry octogenarian vendor at an antiques market before heading to a cafe to split a beer. I looked for a job in the classifieds while Aaron went outside and got in a heated, mud-slinging soccer match with some local ragazzi (this last part from my imagination). Upon paying, we fell into conversation with the cafe’s beautifully brunette, proprietary cougar, she describing to us the wonders of Torino’s catacombs and the splendidness of Tuscany in summertime. “The city he left behind has seven months of dreary winter,” I offered in counterpoint, jagging my thumb towards Aaron. “Oh,” said the cougar, “I thought that America was sunny all year long. We Italians think that.” I replied that some Americans have the same misconception about Italy. “We are all foreigners,” I concluded. “Indeed,” said the dark-haired woman with beautiful eyes.
Back in Moretta, Aaron and I made cappellini from scratch and ate it with a garlic, butter and rosemary sauce. We feel well here in Smellsville.
-Patrick
“Good living is an act of belligerence, by which we choose things which have an agreeable taste rather than those which do not.” – Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin
This quotation from the famous 18th-century French gastronome is erroneous, based on my own chance misreading of the word ‘intelligence’ as ‘belligerence.’ I have decided it was a good mistake. Because it is true that good living depends on private acts of warlike determination, which, if not exactly belligerent, are at least fired by a violent aversion to bad living. One way I see this experience in Italy, which I hope to communicate on the blog, is an opportunity to parse my own definitions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ living.
A brief story from my first twelve hours in Moretta serves to illustrate. Due to a delay in my flight from Chicago to Milan, I arrived at the school so late on Thursday evening that no one was awake to let me inside. I looked around the front lawn of the 17th-century sanctuary, where our school is located, as fog crept up into the portico and seemed to occlude any possibility of a good night’s rest. The little town was silent except for an occasional car speeding through. I had no choice but to bundle up in sweaters and long johns and lie down on a bench near the door until morning, breathing the clammy air through my flannel and listening to the trickle from an old gargoyle’s mouth.
At five o’clock I shook myself off the bench in a fit of pointless belligerence. I stumbled through town looking for a cafe, finding one on the main road that was just opening. In spite of my mood, it felt good to get my muscles moving. The woman inside the cafe served me a cappuccino and invited me to take a hot chocolate croissant, which I immediately obliged her in. Then I sat at one of the tables and read from the newspaper while early birds slowly filed in and the fog seeped out of my toes. Outside, the street lights blinked off. I felt like agreeable tastes were making life good again.
I chose that cafe to warm up in, so by Brillat-Savarin’s definition I had exercised some kind of intelligence in pursuit of the good life. But where else was I going to go? What kind of creature would choose a cold lonely bench over warmth, company and coffee? All I can say is, sometimes life just seems to get good on its own. We just have to be belligerent enough to hang on through the cold spots.
-Patrick
Life is full of introductions. My parents are lawyers, I grew up in the suburbs of San Francisco, and I graduated a philosophy major a few years ago from UC Santa Barbara. Since then, I have been a traveling apprentice of various trades in the artisan food world. How I got to the Piedmont, Italy, to study cheese making at the l’istituto lattiero caseario e delle tecnologie agroalimentari was long road of introductions and farewells.
I saved up some money bee keeping, catering, substitute teaching, cheese selling, winemaking, and giving a hand at an artisan cheese farm. Next, I picked up my back pack and left to France to fill an apprenticeship position on a cheese-making, cooperative farm. I picked up enough French to write letters to cheese makers in the Alps. Forty hand written letters for work got me a peut-etre (“maybe”) in Gruyeres, Switzerland with an alpine cheese maker and his family in a little chalet above Gruyere castle. After two months of hard labor, I wandered down into the Italian Alps and walked the mountain and valley roads asking for work. I searched for six days until I found work as a shepherd and cheese maker for a family an eye shot from Mont Blanc, Val d’Aosta, Italy. Several months later, the season closed and I was asked to visit friends of the Italian farmers in Turin. One young woman promised she would take me to the old home of Friedrich Nietzsche. We are still together.
In a market in Turin, I struck up conversation with a woman selling salami, who told me that I ought to look into a cheese school in the little town of Moretta. I paid a visit the first day of school and found no vacancy in the cheese course, but just enough room in the meat course. I didn’t speak any Italian quite yet, but just being surrounded by young faces, chatter, and books again was convincing enough to stay. After eight months of classes and apprenticeship with butchers, I took my certificate after passing my Italian, oral examination and called my parents to say that I was coming home. On my return, I asked my friends, Aaron Gilliam and Patrick Kiley, if they were interested in returning to Italy to study cured meats and cheese.
Aaron is currently enrolled in the meat class, Il Corso di Carne, and Patrick is enrolled with me in the cheese class, Il Corso di Latte. Last week, I picked Aaron up in Turin and returned to Moretta in the morning to find Patrick had made it to the door of the school at midnight and fell asleep outdoors. We have since moved into an apartment with two Italians, Alessandro and Salvatore. Alessandro is a fledgling cook from Turin (enrolled with Patrick and me) and Salvatore is a young, Sicilian butcher and cowboy enrolled with Aaron.
This blog is a record of Aaron, Patrick, and my experience cooking and studying in the gastronomic realm of giants.
By Michael Kalish
