The Man Who Ate Everything (33 page)

One day when the restaurant was closed, we climbed into Cesare’s Lancia for a shopping trip that lasted twelve hours and seven hundred kilometers. We raced over the mountains to Recco, beyond Genoa on the Mediterranean coast, to see the Cafarate brothers and their olive press; Cesare ships them olives from Oneglia, an hour up the coast in the direction of Monte Carlo. “How else can I make sure the olives come from Liguria
and not from the south or even Spain?” he asks. Cesare dries his own mushrooms, brews his own Barolo vinegar, picks sage and rosemary outside his kitchen door, and manufactures his own salami,
cotechino,
and
coppa.
He often visits the farmers who raise his rabbits and
vitdlo albese,
a white bovine creature peculiar to
P
iedmont, halfway between a veal calf and a steer.

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
pros
ci
utto 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 bain-marie. 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 c
au
da.
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 ca
u
da
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, bell peppers, celery, cabbage, and fennel—holding a piece of bread underneath to catch the drippings on the journey to your mouth. Then you eat the bread.

Cesare’s favorite recipes for
bagna ca
u
da;fondo bruno,
the wonderful, deeply flavored meat broth he uses in many sauces and soups; and his
sugo d’arrosto,
that brothlike sauce used in Piedmont with many pastas, follow. First I will give you a fine recipe for
tajarin
noodles with white truffles, which I have finally got right. The finest way to enjoy white truffles, and no more difficult to make than any other pasta,
tajarin
are prepared daily in nearly every Piedmontese restaurant I have visited. I have never found
them in the United States, even at the most expensive and pretentious Italian restaurants that are proud to serve the first white truffles of the season. The sauce is simple and mild, so that it does not detract from the truffles.

Tajarin al Burro e Salvia con Tartufi Bianchi

All-Egg-Yolk Pasta with Butter, Sage, and White Truffles

White truffles are available between November and late January. Squeeze and smell your truffle before you buy it. Fresh truffles are
very firm
and aromatic. Spongy truffles are old and tired. Many fans believe that large specimens have a more stupendous taste than little ones. Strong aroma is no guarantee of flavor, but if you know of a fancy-food store that lets you taste your
tartufo
before paying for it, please let me know.

Tajarin
is Piedmontese dialect for the most rich and delicious tagliarini noodles made with egg yolks instead of the whole eggs used in the rest of Italy (though some Piedmontese cooks mix yolks and whole eggs). They are best consumed after your routine cholesterol test, not before. In Alba they are rolled with a wooden dowel and hand-cut an eighth inch wide. I have found nothing like them, fresh or dried, in any pasta store I know. The Piedmontese refer to the “red” of an egg, not the yellow, because their egg yolks are orange-red and their
tajarin
are a deep golden color. Yours will be paler.

Hand-rolled noodles are generally made with unbleached white flour rather than semolina because its high gluten content makes semolina hard to work by hand. The method given here uses a pasta-rolling
machine for thinning the dough and a knife for cutting it into noodles. If you are good at hand-rolling pasta, which I am not, by all means try it; the results will be lighter and more tender. But remember that hand-rolling is not like making pie pastry. The dough must be stretched, not compressed, into a thin sheet. If your hand-rolling technique merely compresses the dough, you may as well use a machine. Those expensive square white electric pasta extruders with the plastic templates are completely out of bounds.

The sauce combines butter browned with sage, uncooked butter used for its fresh taste, and just enough Parmesan and meat broth to add a savory undertone that intensifies the taste of the white truffle. If you can easily identify the Parmesan or the meat broth, you have used too much.

1 pound unbleached white flour

Salt

20 yolks from extra-large eggs

12 tablespoons sweet butter, softened at room temperature

12 large sage leaves, roughly chopped, plus 6 to 8 more for
decoration

Freshly ground white pepper

1 tablespoon well-packed freshly grated Parmesan cheese

2 tablespoons meat broth (Cesare’s recipe is given on page 267)

2 ounces white truffles

Put all but 1 cup of the flour on the counter (or, into a wide shallow bowl, if you are wary of repeating my disastrous first try), sprinkle with a half tablespoon of salt, make a depression in the center, and pour in the egg yolks. Stir the yolks with a fork, gradually incorporating all the flour that surrounds them, until you have a sticky mass of dough. With the reserved cup,
heavily flour your hands and work surface, and knead the dough, adding flour as necessary, until you have a smooth, soft ball that no longer sticks to your fingers. Cover it with a towel and let it relax for 30 minutes. You can also use a food processor until the dough forms a ball and finish the kneading by hand.

Divide the dough into six roughly equal pieces and roll each one eight or nine times through a pasta machine with the rollers at the widest setting, folding the dough and turning it after each pass. Thin each piece of dough at increasingly narrow settings until you have sheets a bit thicker than ordinary pasta (usually setting 5) and about 20 inches long. Place the sheets flat on a very lightly floured surface, dust with a little flour, and let them dry until their surface begins to resemble leather but before they become brittle. Turn them over to dry the other side. Total drying time will be 15 to 30 minutes.

Working with the sheets of dough one at a time, fold from one short end to the other several times into a compact shape 3 inches long; trim the ragged edges with a flat-bladed knife, then cut into 1/8-inch strips. Unfold the noodles and let them dry as you work on the other sheets. Then let them dry further, for up to a half day.

Just before dinnertime, put 6 quarts of cold water in a large covered pot over a high flame. Melt 8 tablespoons of the butter (one stick) in a small skillet over medium heat and, when it stops sizzling, turn the flame to low and add the chopped sage. Let the butter infuse for 20 minutes as it lightly browns. Strain out the sage. Add 1 teaspoon of salt, two or three grindings of white pepper, the Parmesan, and the meat broth, and keep warm. Warm a large heatproof bowl and your pasta plates in a low oven.

When the water comes to a boil, add 4 tablespoons
of salt, let the water come to the boil again, and add all the noodles at once, stirring until the water boils again. Cook the noodles at a full boil until they lose their rubbery texture but are still resistant to the bite—as long as 5 minutes, depending on how long you have let them dry. After 2 minutes, test them every 30 seconds by fishing out a noodle and eating it.

Drain the pasta very well, and put it into the large warm bowl. Pour the sauce over the pasta and toss. Cut the remaining 4 tablespoons of softened butter into small pieces, add to the pasta, and toss. Divide the pasta among 6 to 8 warm plates, decorate each serving with a sage leaf, and quickly shave the truffles over each serving in paper-thin slices using either a truffle grater or the wide blade on a four-sided vegetable grater. Serves 6 to 8.

Cesare’s Favorite
Bagna Ca
u
da

This famous sauce of the Piedmont is kept bubbling at the table and used for dipping vegetables. Many restaurants in the Piedmont serve
bagna ca
u
da
spooned over wide strips of roasted, peeled red and yellow bell peppers.

Divide a large head of garlic (about 3 ounces) into cloves. Peel and trim the garlic cloves, and cut them crosswise into Vs-inch slices. In a small saucepan, bring 1 cup of Barolo to the boil, add the garlic, and simmer for 2 minutes. Add l
1
/2 ounces of anchovy fillets (8 to 10 of them) and
1
/2
cup of extra-virgin olive oil, and simmer for a moment or two more. Add 4 tablespoons of butter and simmer very slowly for 45 minutes, until the anchovies dissolve. You can prepare
this
bagna caoda
in advance, but do not refrigerate it. Simply reheat it at the table.

Cesare makes a milder version by simmering the garlic slices in 1 cup of milk for 2 minutes and straining out the milk before adding the Barolo, anchovies, oil, and butter. This is the Dei Cacciatori House Special.

Sugo d’Arrosto

Sage and Meat Sauce for
Tagliarini, Agnolotti,
and Other Pastas

Melt 1 tablespoon of butter in a skillet, add 6 large fresh sage leaves and a peeled garlic clove, and lightly brown the butter over medium heat. Remove the garlic, add 1
1
/2
cups of meat broth, simmer for a moment, and remove from heat. Cook enough pasta for 6 people (
3
/4 to 1 pound as a light appetizer) in ample boiling salted water until it is just al dente—it will cook further in the sauce. Bring the sauce back to simmer, add the pasta and 1 cup of freshly grated Parmesan very loosely packed, and cook for 3 or 4 minutes, tossing until the cheese has disappeared and the pasta is hot. Divide the pasta among 6 warm plates, grate a little Parmesan over each (including the rim, if you wish), and serve. Serves 6.