Bollito blowout

While we enjoyed a string of great restaurant meals the visit from our daughter and her little dog-centric entourage, the one treat we were unable to provide for them was a bollito misto, a classic preparation of all kinds of meats boiled up together. This is not a dish you make for just two or three people, since its whole point is a gut-stretching abundance of various kinds of flesh. Presumably that's why it's a popular restaurant offering for Sunday lunch, when families here like to recreate the huge family meals of their grandparents' era by going out to dine en masse. Unfortunately for us, the first Sunday we were here was Easter, and therefore any place that did a good bollito misto had been booked solid for ages. 

The kids were back for a few days this past weekend, and this time, too, Sunday fell on a holiday. In Italy May 1 is the Festa del Lavoro, or Labor Day, a national event and therefore also a day when everyone wants to go out to eat. (Italians have a lot of public holidays, bless them.) 

But we were spared having to scramble for a restaurant reservation by Pam, who invited the four of us to her place for a home-cooked bollito lunch. She wouldn't let us bring much beyond a few vegetable sides. "The big job you'll have will be eating all this stuff," she told me. "I'm counting on you." Luckily we proved fully up to the task.

After some appetite-stimulating prosecco, Pam presented us with bowls of creamy risotto made with the broth from the bollito and porcini mushrooms. Then came the main event: a platter of beef, beef tongue, beef ribs, and a local pork specialty called Cappello del Prete, or Priest's Hat (or just prete, priest, for short), with a second platter of chicken. Alongside were traditional accompaniments--red and green vegetable salsas, pickled onions, and frutta di mostarda, candied fruit seasoned with hot mustard oil--plus a horseradish salsa that Danny made (so that we'd have a green, white, and red array of salsas in honor of the holiday) and asparagus and a giardiniera-like cauliflower-and-romaesco salad prepared by our daughter's talented compagno. 

Camera shy: the platter of chicken

As always, Pam's cooking proved to be stellar. The various meats were tender and flavorful and nicely complemented by the salsas, while the vegetable dishes allowed us to feel that we were eating a somewhat balanced meal.

First helping (I hadn't gotten to the chicken yet).

What a gorgeous plateful of food. And it tasted even better than it looked. (The thing at 12 o'clock is not an egg yolk but a whole candied-and-mostardo'd apricot.) After all, these traditional dishes became traditional because they are so damn good. 

Pam observed that a bollito, like most of restaurant secondi, is a simple preparation that's actually better when cooked at home. Great handmade pasta requires a lot of experience, and most of the best pasta we've had has been at old-fashioned eateries where Nonna, or someone who has learned at her elbow, is rolling and shaping the dough. So pasta is worth going out for, since there are still quite a few restaurants that do pasta much better than even Pam can hope to. But the nonnas don't seem to have passed along as much wisdom when it comes to secondi, which are often pretty lackluster. Maybe they're too tired after churning out hundreds of tortelli for the first course. 

A word about the prete, which I'd never tasted before. It's the skin of a pig's ankle, stuffed with salted shredded muscle fibers and cold cured, then boiled for several hours before serving. It looks like something you'd find in the hideout of a serial killer, but it's very tasty--sort of like corned beef, but pork--and according to some is an essential flavor element of a bollito. 

A prete in the raw.

Its name comes from the fact that its triangular shape vaguely resembles the hats that once distinguished Catholic clergy, presumably something along the lines of the topper worn by 17th-century cardinal and nepotism beneficiary Francesco Barberini. 

Maybe picturing such worthies with a gross-looking meat parcel on their heads gave the peasantry of old a subversive thrill. Not that most Italian peasants back in the day had many opportunities to eat prete, or meat of any kind, since the church and nobility gobbled up most of the pig and of everything else.

We felt rather like those swinish patricians by the time we'd worked our way through most of the meats and quite a bit of the chicken. A shot of espresso girded us for the finale, a prune crostata.  

How could anyone resist, no matter how full they were?

Northern Italy's desserts are, like its secondi, usually not all that exciting. The British and the French both make more delicious sweets, and to my mind there's nothing better than an American layer cake. But this crostata, a classic of Emiliana cuisine, is among the best dolce that Italy has to offer, straightforward yet complex in flavor. Moreover it too is not hard to make, as long as you can get your hands on a jar of the local, almost black prune jam for the filling. The jam is plenty sweet but also quite tart, and Pam's version of the crust, which included a little buckwheat flour, is a subtle but excellent change rung on the traditional recipe. Despite having, it seemed, no more room in my gullet, I easily consumed a big helping of crostata and picked at the crumbs.

After almost four hours at the table, we waddled home full not only of food but of gratitude for our friends, our family, and our Italian life. And that evening, I had a little more crostata for my supper.