The Man Who Ate Everything by Jeffrey Steingarten

Author:Jeffrey Steingarten
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Non-fiction, Travel, Humour, Writing
ISBN: 9780307797827
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 1997-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

November 1989

Hail Cesare!

I returned home from a week in Cesare’s kitchen in Albaretto della Torre, population sixty, with an indomitable urge to cook. I began by heaping two pounds of flour and polenta on my wooden table, molded a deep crater in the center, broke twenty egg yolks into it, and began stirring the eggs with a fork.

Every day all over Italy countless cooks do precisely this when they make pasta, except that using only egg yolks is something I had learned from one of Cesare’s neighbors and except that I ran into a problem. As I began to incorporate flour from the crater’s inner wall, a wavelet of egg splashed over the top, causing serious erosion, and when I nimbly scooped up a handful of flour from the stable side of the mound and used it to stanch the flow, the crater collapsed. A torrent of egg yolks, now thick with flour and cornmeal, surged across the table, carried off a pile of chopped garlic and, like molten lava rolling over a Hawaiian housing development, leaving death and destruction in its wake, headed toward my handwritten notes. As I snatched away the notebook, the flood plunged on, lifting two rosemary branches as though they were matchsticks and cascading over the edge of the table and into an open silverware drawer.

Cesare never warned me about making pasta near an open drawer. He did suggest that I would do better with an electric mixer to form the dough, kneading it afterward by hand. My wife contended, among other things, that if I had washed the silverware immediately, it would not have taken on the feel of industrial-grade sandpaper. I replied that if laundry science had been my goal, I would not have traveled thousands of miles to a remote hilltop in Piemonte.

“Food eaten in anger turns to poison in the stomach,” I reminded my wife when dinner was ready, quoting a timeless Sufi saying. But the danger was past, for when the tastes of the Langhe were spread before her, she grew docile as a lamb and congenial as a kid turning slowly over an acacia fire.

Cesare is chef and owner of a restaurant called Dei Cacciatori (the Hunters’ Place) or Da Cesare (Cesare’s Place) or sometimes both. Albaretto is a half-hour drive south of the ancient city of Alba in the part of Piemonte (“Piedmont” in English) called the Langhe, and to these eyes it is the most magical hill country in all of Italy. In the autumn, when the grapes and hazelnuts have been gathered, when truffles ripen under the hillsides and wild mushrooms grow up between willow and oak, the Langhe becomes an epicurean madhouse. Germans, Swiss, and Italians flock there for tartufi bianchi d’Alba, the intense white truffles of Alba; for Barolo and Barbaresco, the noblest red wines of Italy; and for the finest veal, game, berries, porcini, hazelnuts, and chestnuts you can eat. Alba is only a two-hour drive from Milan, one hour from Turin, or a half day north from Nice.

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