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Vol. 2 No. 1, January 2007

Contents

• Sapori e Saperi goes to Dallas, Texas
• Chestnuts from tree to table (with a recipe)
• The mechanical cow

Sapori e Saperi goes to Dallas, Texas

On 25 January I’ll be in Dallas with Harold D. Partain at Café Madrid to celebrate the first event of our new association: an evening devoted to the wonders and delights of Lucca and the Garfagnana. After many years in the travel business, Harold is following his passion for food and wine and has selected Sapori e Saperi to be part of his new venture Epicopia: A Collection of Food and Wine Travel Experiences.To join the fun and find out all about the hottest region in Tuscany RSVP to:

Harold Partain (HPpilgrim@aol.com)
972 771 3510

Thursday, 25 January at 7.00 pm
Café Madrid, 4501 Travis Street, Dallas

Chestnuts from tree to table at Casabasciana

The ‘gold rush’ to the woods for porcini mushrooms is only just petering out in early October when chestnuts begin to steal the limelight and receive top billing for a full two months until the sweet flour is in the sacks at the beginning of December. Only then can thoughts turn to Christmas. The chestnuts of the Garfagnana are small and, although some are roasted or boiled and eaten whole, most are dried and ground into flour. By the middle of October chestnuts are cascading to the ground, the prickly outer covering is bursting open and almost every day someone asks me whether I’ve gathered my chestnuts yet. But I’m curious about how you can get enough to make it commercially viable and join Marco for a day with his chestnut ‘vacuum cleaner’, a lumbering, snorting homemade elephant of a machine that sucks up chestnuts, dead leaves and sticks from the forest floor and drops the heavy nuts through one hatch while blowing the light debris out through another. He reckons he can harvest at least three times as many in a day as a person doing it by hand. Basket after basket of shiny brown chestnuts are added to the load on the back of the tractor, which look good enough to eat immediately until I notice a slight shuddering among the nuts which turns out to be a platoon of larvae of the chestnut moth that lays its eggs in the flowers in late June and early July — marching off while the going is good. Now I’m introduced to the time-consuming part of harvesting: Marco hasn’t yet invented a Geiger counter for larvae and we must sort through the chestnuts by hand, separating out all those with small holes indicating the presence (or recent escape) of a larva. These rejects are a delicacy for Marco’s cinta senese pigs. The perfect ones go into sacks which are loaded back onto the tractor, and we set off on the steep, bumpy forest track to the metato (left), a two-storey chestnut-drying hut almost invariably set into a hillside so you can stand at ground level at the back door while pouring the chestnuts onto the slats of the top floor (below) and, from the front door on the lower floor, keep the chestnut-wood fire smouldering for 40 days and nights. Beppe, the owner of the metato where all the villagers pool their chestnuts for drying, even sleeps at the metato some nights in order to be on hand for the midnight stoking of the fire. After 20 days, the chestnuts are turned, and when enough moisture has been driven off so that the layer of chestnuts is just one-third the original depth, the fire is extinguished.

On a bright, sunny Sunday at the end of November I join the villagers to find out how they remove the brown shells and inner skins. A different homemade machine makes the round of the villages and has come across the valley from San Cassiano. This morning all the action takes place at the lower front level of the metato. The full team consists of eight men, one woman, three children and two kittens. The men inside the hut shovel the dry chestnuts, which have been pushed through a trap door in the upper floor into a bin on the lower floor, into plastic buckets. Another man carries the buckets from the doorway and tips the chestnuts into a hopper at the top of the 2 metre tall machine. One man sits on a stool by a chute watching the clean chestnuts emerge and removing burnt ones. The men working around the machine wear masks and hats, and I notice that the lower branches of nearby trees are coated in beige chestnut dust; if it weren’t so warm, I’d have mistaken it for old snow. From time to time one of the men picks up a shovel and tidies up the heap of chestnut shells and inner skins that is being deposited behind the machine. Someone checks there’s still enough petrol in the motor. It’s leisurely work; they have to keep up with the machine, but its internal toothed drum rotates at a human speed. Just before 11.00, Franca, Beppe’s wife, spreads a tablecloth on the table where the children have been poring over a book of word games. Like a magician pulling rabbits from a hat, she conjures up a feast of ham, salami, mortadella, cheese, bread, fruit, wine and coffee from a few plastic sacks. Everyone gathers round for the merenda, with the scraps going to the kittens. Work resumes at 11.30 sharp, and by lunchtime the clean chestnuts are stowed in handsome linen sacks, embroidered with the initials of their owners, and deposited in the schoolhouse, now used as a community centre, in readiness for the next stage of the process.

At about 9.00 am on Monday I wander into the schoolhouse and find Beppe, Franca and three other women bent over a rectangular box sieve, about a metre and a half long and two-thirds of a metre wide supported by legs at the four corners, sorting chestnuts. They’ve been here since 7.00 am and will stay at their posts until 7.00 pm every day this week, taking only a two-hour lunch break. Beppe stands at the head of the sieve, from time to time topping it up from the sacks; 83-year-old Olga is on guard at the bottom where it narrows to a spout under which sits a bucket; no burnt or wormy chestnut escapes her eagle eye. In between Beppe and Olga one or two of us stand on either side of the sieve removing sub-standard nuts, destined for pigs and chickens. From time to time one of the owners of the chestnuts arrives with her saucepan, picks out some of the best chestnuts, weighs them, makes a note of how much she’s taken and goes home to boil them in water as a treat for lunch. I’m dubious, so they insist I taste a sample and I have to admit they’re delicious. On Friday Beppe’s son drives the perfect chestnuts to the water mill at Fabbriche di Vallico about 20 km away on the other side of the Serchio river valley. Within living memory there were many more functional water mills in the Garfagnana and the chestnuts only had to be carted down the mule track to the river at the bottom of the hill.

The following week I see Marco’s flour in a shop in Lucca, labelled in large letters as this year’s new chestnut flour from Casabasciana, and the next day the village shopkeepers tell me that the miller at Fabbriche has pronounced Casabasciana’s flour the best and sweetest he’s ever tasted. I’ve done enough work to merit a kilo of this gold dust, and feel under an obligation to try to bake castagnaccio, a sort of chestnut cake which I think I loathe on the basis of last year’s evidence. I ask Eugenia and Dalida in the shop for the Casabasciana recipe (very austere) and pool it with opulent urban trimmings described to me by a taxi driver from nearer Lucca. I take a sample to the shop for a verdict: too luxurious for them, but I notice Renato keeps eating it. My non-Italian friends hesitate to taste it, but are instantly converted, and a Swedish ‘foodie’ describes it as a Platonic ideal he’d always imagined but never found. The ultimate compliment, however, comes from an Italian friend whose father usually makes the castagnaccio in his family. He wants to take a piece home to babbo so he can taste how it should be made — perhaps not a wise idea. Here’s the recipe:

• 150g best chestnut flour
• a good pinch of salt
• 2 tbsp (+ extra to oil the baking tin) extra virgin olive oil (preferably this year’s vintage)
• grated rind and juice of 1 orange
• about 230ml water
• a handful of sultanas soaked in dry or semi-dry Marsala
• 1 heaped tbsp fresh rosemary leaves
• 30g pinenuts
• 30g walnut pieces
• Optional: fresh ricotta

Preheat oven to 230 degrees centigrade.

Sift the flour and salt into a bowl and stir in the grated orange rind. Make a well in the centre and pour in the oil, orange juice and Marsala drained from the sultanas. Slowly incorporate the flour into the liquid in the middle, gradually adding water and stirring carefully to avoid lumps until the batter is the consistency of single cream. If the batter is too dense, the castagnaccio will be heavy.

Liberally oil a round baking tin (25cm diameter) and pour in the batter. It should be no thicker than a centimetre, and preferably a bit less. Sprinkle the top with the rosemary leaves and nuts and bake in the oven for about 20 minutes, or until the surface begins to crack and the edges are crisp. Remove from the oven and cut into wedges. Serve lukewarm or at room temperature, with a dollop of fresh ricotta if you can get it.Serves 4–8 depending on greediness.

The mechanical cow

You know those soft drink machines that roost everywhere these days including in schools? Well, watch out guys! There’s competition. This milk dispenser calls itself ‘My Milk straight from the cow’ (Il Mio Latte appena munto), and at 6 pm on a Monday evening there is a steady stream of clients. A signora of uncertain years fills her glass bottle ahead of me. While I’m struggling to figure out why the milk isn’t pouring into my own bottle, the 20-something-year-old girl in a skimpy skirt behind me offers assistance by pointing out the ‘stop/start’ button and a man in his late 30s joins the queue. As I depart a man in his 50s is climbing out of his car with an enormous empty whisky bottle. A reformed character?

Strategically located adjacent to the huge LeClerc supermarket at Gallicano, which must be suffering a sudden drop in milk sales, in a weedy corner plot providing ample parking space, is a small wooden hut sheltering two gleaming dispensing machines. From the one on the right you can buy a plastic bottle for 20 cents (in case you’ve forgotten to bring a reusable glass one from home). The machine on the left is the mechanized cow with a slot for coins and a single teat. A sign tells us that the machine is refilled twice daily. This milk is freschissimo. You can buy it in units of 100ml at a rate of 1 euro per litre and only pay for the amount you want — very sensible for a product whose shelf life hasn’t been artificially prolonged by pasteurization and filtration and for dairy farmers more interested in quality than quantity.

The brochure describes the milk as ‘the healthy and genuine product, as drunk traditionally in the Garfagnana’. For full traceability and accountability, it gives the names and phone numbers of the three dairy farms that provide the milk: one at Molazzana, one at Castelnuovo and the third at Camporgiano. The project is supported by the Comunità Montana Garfagnana and APA Lucca. I think they’re onto a good thing.