Reference was made a moment ago to the farmhouse pig. This, of course, was not reared in large feedlots as is the industrial fashion of our times, but in the skilled ways of yore. The one or two pigs each family kept were not a source of income. On the other hand they furnished a good source of extra food for the best part of the year in the form of sausages and salamis of various kinds: the great cooked salame, the "cacciatorino dolce" (very much a part of Piedmont), which was made of raw meat chopped up
fresh with garlic and Barbera, and the cotechino of the Monferrato and Langhe district, soft and very tasty, to be eaten hot after a long period of cooking, accompanied by beans a la vignaiola made with tomato, sage and red wine, or on less elegant tables, Piedmontese "fonduta" or a puree of white mountain potatoes.
Above all, the family "pig" supplied fine streaky flank cuts, eaten open or rolled up, but always with a fine, soft texture, in the company of garlic and aromatic herbs, as well as the condiments for every meal, namely lard, suet or dripping, the poor and tasty relatives of their richer cousin, cow's milk butter.It is important to remember that with the passage of time the day the pig was slaughtered in the farmyard became the occasion of one of the years's most important feast-days, and ritual meals, alon
g with the day when the wheat was threshed (oceans of Barbera and "la minestra de bati il gran"), or when the wine was drawn from the vats to the accompaniments of a huge communal dish of "bagna cauda", consumed in great joyfulness with oceans of wine.
These gave rise to series of fabulous dishes, such as "pig soup" (made with chick-peas, large white beans from the Langa, along with the animal's head, ears, snout and tail, garnished with the classic lightly fried assortment of onions, garlic, sage and rosemary chopped up with lard or bacon: a great steaming, beguilingly scented oven containing the soup and the main dish together; the "grive", "flisse" or "griselle" (pig's liver roughly chopped up with sausage meat and sometimes brain, flavoured with bay
leaves, black pepper and umper berries, and made richer with yolk of egg and parmesan cheese, the whole prepared in balls as large as an egg, enfolded in a piece of the animal's belly lining, well salted and gently fried in oil and butter); the trotters turned into "batsoa" (bas de soie), in other words, as fine as silk stockings by boiling in a(court bouillon or stock composed of one-third red wine, one-third vinegar made from the same wine, and one-third water with salt, bay, black peppercorns, cloves,
cinnamon and yellow lemon peel, then crumbed in egg and fine, sieved maize flour fried quickly in oil and butter so as to produce a delicious, dark golden crust.
Indeed, the Piedmontese mixed fry that finds such favour with local and visiting gourmets alike in every restaurant and country tavern is certainly not a dish dating back to the time of Emanuel Philbert. Nor is it even relatively old, like that of Tuscany.
Instead, it was derived between the 18th and 19th centuries straight from the peasant's "day of the pig" repast which used to include (and for the purist still includes) the batsoa, fresh sausage, grive, black sausages ("brod") with onions, or spoonfuls
of a cake of blood curdled with milk, slices of heart sweetbreads and brain, and then liver ("black fry") and lung ("white fry"), along with thin escallops of loin well crumbed in egg and grated bread, and, as the vegetable, the inevitable yellow carrots cut lengthwise and fried in butter. It was the core of this farmhouse fry that became a city dweller and adopted by fine hosts and traiteurs alike.
As time went on, it rounded itself out and enriched its appeal with soft semolinas veal chitterlings, and crumbed greens. This was also an outcome of a strong influence from Florence, particularly between 1860 and 1870, when plebiscites and annexations, followed by the transfer of the Court and its ministers from Turin to Florence, did much to mingle the experiences and customs of the two regions with the result that much of the Tuscan cuisine found its way into Piedmontese cooking, both in those years and
later.
And so there is an Italian fry hinged on the taste of olive oil and the delicate batter to be covered with a crisp patina of vegetables, with the soft flesh of chicken, rabbit, duck and lamb, less frequently meat, and pig or veal chitterlings, whose historical ancestor is the noble Florentine fry, whereas today's Piedmontese fry, coated in egg and grated bread, accompanied by oil and butter, has only in part drawn on its common ancestor, since its roots strike deep, stretching back, as we have saidto the r
ustic feast held when the family pig was slaughtered.
When it was first introduced "polenta", a fine-tasting, sun-yellow maize meal, seemed to be a great improvement in the meagre diet of the poorer peasants, even in Piedmont.To be continued
Last updated 30-Jun-97
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