A taste of tradition

Our first week in Fidenza was unusually hedonistic, since our daughter, the man she refers to variously as her "insignificant other" and "formidable opponent," and their adorable dog were staying with us. In addition to being good company and possibly even more obsessed with food than we are, they have a car. Which meant that we momentarily had easy access to restaurants out in the countryside, where some of the area's best food is to be found. 

As has been noted previously, Italians tend to be very conservative when it comes to what they eat. Most restaurants around here have more or less the same menu, heavy on regional favorites such as salumi (prosciutto, mortadella, and other cured meats) and filled  pastas. Innovation is not much prized, but I confess it isn't something we're looking for when we dine out in Italy, at least not when we first get here. A menu heavy on tradition, a slightly shabby dining room full of Italian families, staff who look like they all might be relatives--these are hallmarks of the sorts of trattorie we dream about when we're in California. I guess in that respect we are conservatives, too.

As has also been noted, the four-course menu offered by most restaurants in these parts--a hearty antipasto, a pasta primo, a meat-dish secondo (usually accompanied by a vegetable contorno or two), and a dolce--is not what Italians usually eat except when they're attending family holiday feasts. Nor do Danny and I have the capacity to eat this way for any length of time. But after months of our own cooking in California, interspersed with Korean, Vietnamese, Mexican, Pakistani, and Chinese meals from local restaurants there, we become nostalgic for the full Northern Italian dining experience, and suddenly a four-course blow-out seems like a great idea. 

Now we had two young and hungry companions who were eager to indulge in the same thing, and were willing to provide transportation to boot.

So we set off for Trattoria La Frasca, a country bistro Danny and I had gone to years ago with our friends Pam and Romano and that I've been thinking about ever since. They're known for their torta fritta. the bread puffs fried in lard that are a standard, cholesterol-rich accompaniment to a salumi antipasto platter. Therefore we had to have some, accompanied by a variety of pickled and vinegared vegetables and a lovely dry Lambrusco.  

Delicate, delectable, and not at all greasy, the torta fritta lived up to their reputation, and the wine, the salumi, and the vegetables were great, too. 

Next came the primi, the pastas. I chose a dish of potato ravioli sauced with roasted red radicchio and topped with a shower of grated Parmesan. Paradisaical. 
Others at the table had tagliatelle with porcini mushrooms and chicche della nonna (Grandma's goodies), little potato dumplings in a creamy tomato sauce. Sighs of pleasure abounded.

Le chicche--deliziose!

By the time we'd cleaned our plates we were hardly feeling hungry. We often skip the secondi meat courses because they tend to be plain grills or roasts and not very interesting, particularly if you've already ingested several thousand calories of antipasto and pasta. But the dish I remembered most fondly from my previous visit to La Frasca was a rich stew of beans and strips of long-cooked pork skin, and when I saw that it was still on the menu I had to order it. We were also excited to see trippa alla parmigiana, tripe in tomato sauce, so we got an order of that as well, plus some grilled vegetables as a gesture to healthfulness.

Beans and pork skin above, tripe below, and extra cheese in the orange pot.

The tripe was great, if you like tripe, which I do. I've never seen the beans and pork skin on any other menu, and I can't imagine why, since it's indecently good. The beans are creamy, the pork skin is cooked to total silkiness, and the dish is rich but not greasy. I kept having one more bite until I wished I'd stopped a few bites sooner. The young folks topped all this off with tiramisu, but my excesses with the pork skin prevented me from following suit. For which I'm grateful.

The next day we returned to another eatery of blessed memory, Trattoria Campanini in the town of Roncole-Verdi. Some 30 years ago we dined there with Pam and Romano. Danny and I were minor food journalists in those days, but we had no plans to write about what we were eating on our summer vacation. Nevertheless, Romano let Signor Campanini know that we were important American food writers, and as a result our eager host insisted we try virtually everything on the menu. At first we were happy to oblige, since the food was excellent, and back then our gastrointestinal systems were in prime working order. But by the end of the meal we were all feeling dangerously overstuffed. The proprietor insisted we try his homemade grappa, which I was amazed to discover really did work as a kind of digestivo; the shock of the high-proof liquor kicked my liver into action, as if it were a weary horse responding to the whip. 

Afterwards we staggered off to our hotel at one end of the town, while Pam and Romano retired to their apartment, and we all soon feel asleep.  But at three in the morning Danny and I both woke up feeling all kinds of awful. Not knowing what else to do, we got dressed and went out for a walk in the sleeping town. After a few minutes we spotted another couple, also taking a middle-of-the-night constitutional. It was, of course, Pam and Romano.

Emotionally scarred by the consequences of our own gluttony, we'd never gone back to the trattoria, even though the food there had been terrific. Now we decided it was time to return, and we invited Pam and Romano to accompany us--but only after he promised to say nothing to anyone at the restaurant about food writing. 

We ordered torta fritta again, but, chastened by past experience and our dinner the night before, we got a helping for one, meaning just one torta per person, along with a single-serving platter of spalla cotta, a local specialty that's a slightly more refined version of corned beef. 

I let someone else have mine, so I can't say how they compared to La Frasca's. Of course we had to get some pickled onions, giardiniera, and Russian salad to go with. You've got to have your vegetables!

The butter was presumably for those worried about low cholesterol.

For our primi we ordered a tris of filled pastas, a selection of three different kinds of tortelli, the plump, locally hegemonic pasta shape:

Tortelli with goat cheese filling.

Tortelli with porcini.

Green tortelli with ricotta in walnut sauce.

Those last were my favorite, but all three were wonderful--so yielding and satisfying in the mouth, so full of flavor, offering so much pleasure in every bite. 

We decided to share a few secondi: boiled mariola, a local pork sausage; veal cheeks; and swine cheeklets. They were very tasty but rich, and we were running out of stomach space, as well as the energy to take photographs. I don't think anyone had the courage to order dessert. But as far as I know none of us ended up walking the streets at three in the morning, either.

We were saved from another such meal by the fact that the next day was Easter Sunday, a holiday that Italians celebrate by taking the extended family out for a big restaurant meal. There was not a restaurant reservation to be had anywhere in the area, and anyway we were ready for some home cooking. Our daughter made a wonderful lamb ragu to go with some extra-long spaghetti she'd brought us from our ancestral region of Molise, her compagno whipped up a dressing for the salad, I boiled some artichokes from the market and Danny made mayonnaise to go with them, and we finished with fresh strawberries and gelato.

A little health food.

Not exactly spa cuisine, but  at least no torta fritta were involved.

We still had one more restaurant we wanted to go to while we had access to a car, and we'd managed to get a reservation on Monday--which is also a holiday here, known as Pasquetta, or little Easter. The place was a favorite spot of ours, Osteria Ardenga. Although we'd lost the will to gorge, we still started out with a small antipasto of fried cubes of polenta, little anchovy pastries, an array of lightly pickled vegetables, and--once again--a platter of spalla cotta, accompanied by--once again--a dry Lambrusco. 

It was a gorgeous array of flavors and textures. Enzo, our grand-dog, was on hand, too (you can bring dogs to restaurants here), and he was extraordinarily well-behaved, much more so than the baby at the next table, even though he didn't get to eat any of the delicacies the rest of us were enjoying.

Danny followed up with a secondo of roasted baby goat, while the rest of us went for pasta. I couldn't resist the casonsei, a hyperlocal, rather blintz-like pasta shape, stuffed with breadcrumbs and cheese and served with little bits of sausage in a truffle cream sauce. 

Boy, was it good. And boy, was I glad I didn't have anything more to eat before we went home for a nap.

The next day our guests were ready to get on the road, but they wanted to fuel up before departing. By this point we'd had enough of restaurant meals. For a quick lunch we turned to another, albeit more recent, Italian custom: getting takeout from a local kebaberia. I had chicken wings, Danny had a kebab wrap, our daughter had falafel, and her partner chose the most authentically nuovo-Italian lunch of all: a kebab pizza, topped with French fries. 

He said it was delicious and ate every bite. Which perhaps just shows that what seems gross to one generation can become another's cherished tradition. 

Situation report

Yes, we are back in Italy, as we optimistically resume our half-and-half existence shuttling between Fidenza and California. We arrived a week ago, late in the evening, and here's the view that greeted me when I came out onto our balcony early the next morning.

The neighbors are lucky I didn't burst into song.

In some ways things here don't seem to have changed much. People are still waiting in line to go into stores, to maintain social distancing, and they're still wearing masks indoors and at the big outdoor market. When you enter a restaurant--masked, please--you have to show your "super green pass" proving that you're not only vaccinated but have been boosted at least once. (Luckily everyone we've encountered so far has accepted our U.S. vaccination cards, because we haven't yet gotten our booster shots into the Italian system.) 

Our friend Franca is vaccinated but refuses to get a booster, for reasons I'm not clear on, and I haven't seen her yet so we haven't had a chance to discuss it. Without the booster she can't go into the coffee bars where we usually meet. And after a couple of warm days it's gotten too chilly to meet out of doors, since she's also been suffering from an on-again, off-again fever. Her doctor says it isn't COVID and she's been testing negative. The green-pass rules are scheduled to lighten up at the beginning of May, but I have to say I'm more than a little nervous about getting together with her. 

COVID hospitalizations are still down and the pandemic no longer seems to be top of mind. The mayor's Facebook page instead has a lot of entries about bandages and other aid that the town is sending to Ukraine. 

The war and the energy politics around it are causing some serious disruption. Pam says several local industries have cut back or temporarily closed because energy prices have gotten so high. Gas, always expensive here, is now even more so, despite cuts in gas taxes to lower prices.. Italians have been told to turn off their heat to help conserve fuel, even though so far this has been a rather chilly spring. I don't know if it's because of the war or COVID or other factors, but there are more empty storefronts now, and our usually bustling street seems a little less busy.  

Until a few days ago this was a fancy women's lingerie store.

 Overall, though, things seem much the same. Latteria 55 downstairs still has lots of customers for their hams and Parmesan, the clothing stores put up glamorous new window displays every few days, and the bars have plenty of people drinking coffee in the morning and bright orange Aperol spritzes later in the day. The town recently washed and disinfected parts of the centro storico, the historic center, which is our part of town, so everything looks bright and shiny. And it's spring, when even gray days feel like progress toward better times.  

This is the town's Parco delle Rimembranze, Memorial Park, with its rather Stalinist monument to those who died in the two world wars. (The motto on the pedestal reads, in translation, "We are dead only to those without faith," a sentiment that to me seems both delusional and offensive.) It's a reminder of how huge the cost of war was for Europe in the last century, and how dangerous the current situation is. Yet though there seems little reason for optimism, the new leaves and the budding flowers inspire a flicker of hope nonetheless.