Vol. 4 No. 2, October 2009

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SAPORI E SAPERI BLOG
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Welcome to the very occasional Sapori e Saperi Adventures newsletter. This one takes you from the butcher’s shop last December to the new season’s olive oil that I tasted last Sunday. But first an introduction to the new Sapori e Saperi BLOG. It will probably take the place of newsletters; since there’s no mailing list to keep up to date, they are much easier to distribute and I’ll have more time to explore, cook and design exciting new adventures — oh, and to write more blogs about all the wonderful seasonal foodstuffs and new food producers I meet in this hidden corner of Tuscany. There’s the link to the blog just above. If you don’t already know all about how to follow a blog, feeds and RSS, read on to find out how to get each update sent to you as an email. As a tempting taster, my first blog is included below.

Heather / Erica (the Latin and Italian name for the flowering alpine plant)
Director and Slow Food member

Sapori e Saperi in The Times, London
On 6 May I drove to Pisa airport to pick up Tony Turnbull (Wine and Food Editor of The Times), Theo Randall (chef of the Italian Restaurant of the Year in London) and Jon Enoch (photographer). They weren’t coming for one of my slow, relaxing culinary tours. I don’t think chefs or journalists ever slow down, but at least I was going to introduce them to some of my favourite springtime producers and restaurants in the Garfagnana.

Theo helped to cut the cheese curd at Verano Bertagni’s dairy, he admired the meat at Luigi Angelini’s butcher shop (he makes the best biroldo in the Garfagnana), he loved lunch at Andrea Bertucci’s Osteria Il Vecchio Mulino and took notes on recipes at dinner at Buca di Baldabò. I had been a bit apprehensive about taking him to Baldabò, because the dining room is a big barn of a place that has been compared to a Soviet cafeteria. But it’s one of my favourites and I decided to risk it. The cooking is simple and honest; the owners and their staff, warm and welcoming. When Theo says on his website ‘Good food is one of life’s simple pleasures... I hate formality and pretence’, he’s not lying. He loved the place. The next day I returned them to the airport and then waited for Tony to tell me when the piece would appear. Five months later I given up hope when I finally received an email from Tony saying he had had to rewrite the piece to be topical for autumn and it would appear on 10 October. I was relieved I’d taken them to see Peppe’s metato (chestnut-drying hut) even though May was the wrong time for chestnuts. To read Tony’s article, please click here

At the macelleria (butcher shop)
On St Stephen’s day (26 December) some friends and I were planning to walk to Lucchio, along a track we barely knew and had no idea how long it would take us. I offered to provide lunch on our return. Knowing we’d be ravenous when we got back but not knowing when that would be, I decided to do arrosto morto (literally ‘dead roast’), a beef stew that traditionally was left to cook overnight among the dying embers of the kitchen fire. I would leave it at the edge of the kitchen fire while we were out. At the butcher’s I asked for some beef to stew, maybe some shoulder, I suggested. Renato asked what I was making, but he’d never heard of arrosto morto. Either the name is dead too by now, or it’s a Lucca dish and my village is 30 km from Lucca, nearly in another universe. He was stymied. He couldn’t give me my beef if he didn’t know what I was going to do with it. He called Eugenia, his wife, from the adjacent room. I described the dish to her. ‘Ah, brasato’, their faces lit up. Shoulder would be OK, but in her opinion the best cut for brasato is campanello (so called because that particular leg muscle is shaped like a bell) — slow cooking brings out the best in it — molto saporito. She was right. After what turned out to be a six-hour walk even a dry rusk would have tasted good, but the campanello was full of flavour and melted in our mouths.

Nuovo olio
It’s stupendous! Read all about the Festa dell’Olio e della Castagna where I tasted it on my blog!

Almost all you need to know to follow the Sapori e Saperi blog
If you want to hear about what’s going on in the world of artisanal food around Lucca, you can follow our blog. You can also post your own comments, and I’d love to hear from you. The easiest way is to receive the new posts (blogs) automatically as emails (so you don’t have to remember to go to the website). Here’s how:

First, click this link: feed://sapori-e-saperi.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

1. Then, if you use Safari as your browser:
   In the Safari window that opens, click on ‘Subscribe in Mail’ at the bottom of the right column (under ‘Actions’).
2. Mail will open and in the left column near or at the bottom under RSS (I forget what it means), you’ll see ‘Sapori e Saperi Adventures’.
3. Click on ‘Sapori e Saperi Adventures and in the upper window on the right you’ll see the blogs. Click on each to read it.

If you use Firefox as your browser:

1. In the Firefox window that opens, at the top you’ll see ‘Subscribe to this feed using Live Bookmarks’.
2. Click on the drop-down menu where ‘Live Bookmarks’ is written and choose ‘Choose application’.
3. In the window that opens navigate to your email application and double click it.
4. The name of the email application appears on the drop-down menu.
5. Click the ‘Subscribe Now’ button.

If you use a different internet browser, I can’t give you specific instructions, but I hope you can figure it out based on these two.

Another option is to join the Sapori e Saperi Yahoo group. Everyone who is a member will receive blog updates by email.

High Pastures
Last Thursday (14 September) Cristina, who owns the restaurant the Antico Uliveto in Pozzi di Seravezza, and I walked up to the high pastures of the Alpi Apuane in northern Tuscany to visit a couple who are among the very few who still take their flock of sheep up to the mountain tops in summer. They live in a house powered only by a single solar panel and cook over an open fire in the large kitchen fireplace. Our lunch was composed almost entirely of their own produce. It included a porcupine that had been eating their squashes and melons and which Siria, the wife, had made into a delicious stew with their own tomatoes and a few olives brought up from the valley. When we arrived she was just beginning to fry some of the potatoes they grow, and soon had a huge pot of water hanging from a hook over the fire. As soon as it boiled, she added handfuls of maize flour (she apologized for it's being last year's — they've harvested this year's maize but haven't been down to have it ground) and we took turns stirring until it thickened into a soft polenta. It didn't matter at all about it's being a year old; it was Maranino maize and tasted like the corn it came from, unlike the tasteless polenta flour you buy in a supermarket, or even most Italian delicatessens.

We washed it all down with a very drinkable red wine made by the husband Pacifico. The meal ended with Siria's pecorino cheese and sweet juicy plums from their orchard. After a cup of coffee and walnut liqueur, also made by them, Pacifico took us to see La Fannia, a beech tree at the top of the ridge that is said to be over 500 years old, and an abandoned silver mine, now the refuge of some red-bellied salamanders. We walked down as the sun set over the sea at Forte dei Marmi lighting up Monte Forato behind us. A day with Siria and Pacifico will definitely be on offer to gastronomic tour guests next summer.

Adventures for 2009 & 2010

You can join me for a personalized adventure for you or your group. Come for an in-depth exploration of a few seasonal foods or for a day or two as you’re passing through. Whatever the season, there’s always something exciting happening behind the scenes. Here are a couple of fixed-date packages for the next two months:

Bare Oil Plus: 4 - 9 November 2009

• Oil: pick olives, take them to the olive press, take a bottle of your own oil home with you and have a cooking lesson using the new oil
• Chestnuts: visit a chestnut drying hut, a water mill where the chestnuts are ground into flour and a village chestnut festival
• Price per person: €1,190 (minimum 8 people, maximum 10)

Chocolate, Chestnuts + Christmas Shopping: 4 – 9 December 2009

• Chocolate: visit chocolate festival (chocoholics cravings will be satisfied)
• Chestnuts: visit a chestnut drying hut and chestnut festival, and have a cooking lesson using the new season’s chestnut flour
• Christmas shopping: a day in Lucca including Il Desco, the seasonal market filled with artisanal food, arts and crafts
• Price per person: €1,000 (minimum 8 people, maximum 10)

In the pipeline
Advanced salumi (cured pork) course:
A 3-day course for professionals and keen amateurs taking you from pig to salami (Jan / Feb 2010)

Autumn flavours:
The first fruits of our research in Versilia (the part of Lucca province that includes Viareggio, Forte di Marmi and Carrara). It will be based in the sculptors’ town of Pietrasanta and will include those Lucca staples of olive oil, wine and chestnuts, but there will also be some surprises.

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