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October 1, 2020 In Best Of, Roam By Nancy

Cheese made in heaven

Since I had such a memorable adventure on the Chamonix side of Mont Blanc I felt it was only fair to give the Italian side a chance so on the return trip to Italy we stopped in Courmayeur for the night. We had work to do. Largely involving cheese.

Before this trip I’d asked Edward Behr for advice about food in the Val D’Aosta. (Edward edits and publishes The Art of Eating, which is one of my favorite publications on food and wine.) One of his recommendations was that we track down a Fontina maker in the mountains. Challenge accepted.

To do so we needed to add on an additional night in Courmayeur — not a hardship as we’d landed in a nurturing, cozy, and rustic place, Maison la Saxe. The six-bedroom inn was in a rustic farmhouse from the 1700s, one of many houses in a tightly packed cluster literally in the shadow of Mont Blanc. When I say tightly packed I mean the tiny lanes between the houses are about an arm’s width across. I asked the owner, Raphael, a guy in this thirties who was born in Courmayeur, had lived all over the world, and then returned to the village to restore and run the inn, and he said they were built tightly together not for defense but warmth. It’s the kind of place where my stone shower had a window thoughtfully installed with a view of Mont Blanc.

Maison de Saxe Courmayeur

I enlisted the aid of Raphael for our Fontina search. He called a Fontina maker who invited us up the following morning. Up is a description I chose carefully. It took us 40 minutes to go just a couple of kilometers above the town of Aosta on one of the curviest roads I have ever driven. Pretty soon we were at eye level with the highest peaks and surrounded by green meadows. It was the closest to heaven I will probably every get.

Raphael had given us coordinates of where to park which was an unmarked grassy area at the top of the road. We then had to actually find the cows and cheese-makers. We asked at a tiny restaurant and were pointed to a hiking trail leading ten minutes straight up through the pastures to a small barn, the summer home of Azienda Agricola Quendoz.

The cheese maker took us into a small room with a huge copper cauldron to show us how it’s done. The cheese maker was originally from Morocco and had come to this spot, fallen in love with it, and moved here to take care of the cows and make cheese, more than a decade before. I can see the appeal of this life.

Fontina cheese copper cauldron

True Fontina comes only from here. To be recognized as “Fontina” (which has DOP — protected designation of origin — status from the EU) the milk has to come from red-pied Valdostana cows who graze only on these mountain grasses. They are milked twice a day and the cheese is made twice a day as each batch has to be from a single milking. The milk is heated in large copper cauldrons, enzymes and rennet are added to produce curds, the cheese is separated and drained, and pressed into a wheel-shaped molds. It’s brined in salt for two months and then set aside to age for three more months, frequently turned and salted. We tried the just ready Fontina along with a much more aged version and they were complex and interesting, not at all like the boring cheeses marketed as Fontina from other countries. This was nutty and buttery and wonderful.

Then on the way back down we got to meet some of the girls.

I wanted to write this article this not because I thought you needed to become Fontina aware, but more because I wanted to share this place of beauty and peace and a glimpse into a different way of life.

Trip notes:

If you are ever in Aosta but don’t have time to make it up the hill Raphael also pointed us to a small cheese shop downtown with a surprisingly large selection and a big cheese cellar in their basement (photo below) called Erbavoglio Antica Latteria. They put together a delicious tasting for us and looks like I can also order from them. I see more Fontina in my future.

Ed Behr also recommended Salumeria Bertolin in Arnad, just as you enter Valle d’Aosta. I stopped on my way to France and loved it. A wide variety of mountain salumi and delicious tasting board. I was fascinated by one that looked like a salumi but was made from beets. When life gives you beets…

picture of boy holding an umbrella watching the Scampanata in Anghiari Italy

May 1, 2020 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

Intrigue, humiliation, and cake batter

I am feeling wistful that today would have started the month of the Scampanata, which happens every five years, and only in Anghiari. It is one of my favorite things about our village. In 1621 it was described as an ancient village tradition and was only postponed during two World Wars. And now.

Please do me the honor of reading the description below and watching the video and let us all pause for a moment and appreciate the things that make us human and connect us and that we do for the sheer joy of it. The things that we will need to rebuild and reinvent. The things I miss the most. (Article below originally posted in 2019).

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I want to jump through the screen, grab you, and say “You will watch this. Now.” Then direct you by holding your shoulder, with no refusals allowed, to the best screen in your environment, and I’d click here. Cause this story and video are my favorites yet.

But I am sitting on a Tuscan terrace overlooking a valley filled with rolled hay and sunflowers eating cacio and pepe made by actual Romans so I can’t. Instead I will use my words, as I always used to tell the kids.

I am going to tell you about this event that embodies what I love about Italy—it’s highly-local, quirky, and resonate with deep human fears and joys. Every five years, in the village of Anghiari, an ancient rite unfolds, but with up-to-the-minute alliances, tricks, and grudges. It’s the Scampanta. The centuries-old society that ensures that the Anghiarese do not oversleep. (The verb scampare means to be a near thing, a close call.)

The rules are simple. You volunteer to join the Society of the Scampanata and show up in the piazza three times a week, in the month of May, by the time the bells strike 6 in the morning. And you sign in. That’s it. Sounds so simple. And harmless. The complication is that if you oversleep a fate worse than what you can imagine awaits—and we’ve all had pretty horrible dreams about the repercussions of sleeping through the alarm.

Trouble is, it may not just be up to you and your alarm. In a small community tiny slights can build momentum and every five years is about the right pressure-release timer to get back at that person who always parks in your spot, or hasn’t mowed the meadow as promised. And as you need to be born in Anghiari, or a resident for at least ten years, to participate the social connections are deep and complex.

If you are late to check in you turn yourself over to the Society for your fate. If you live out of town there are people who will drive to your house to fetch you—sometimes with a police escort. Some days during the month everybody is there on time and you can feel the sense of disappointment in the assembled crowd.

You really need to see the video to see what fate awaits those who oversleep or are somehow prevented from arriving in time. Some unfortunates have woken up to find their front door bricked shut during the night. Others have had their cars lifted onto blocks in the wee hours and all four tires removed. Still others have been convinced by friends to go with them to play a trick on someone far from town and had the tables turned—finding themselves fooled into getting out of the car and then stranded in the woods.

It must have been really hard to make sure you woke up on time in the days before alarm clocks. There’s a history of Anghiari that was written in 1621 that refers to the Scampanata as an ancient event at the time. Not hard to imagine that its roots run deep into Spring rituals around the need to plant and till the land.

And it is unique. No other place on Earth has the Scampanata.

Next time you want to hit the snooze button just remember the lyrics of the Scampanata song:

“Scampanata, scampanata
in Spring you return to our halls
to visit the lazy who stay in bed
to break their sleep and their balls”

April 27, 2019 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

The world of Italian brotherhoods

The Misericordia procession on the night of Good Friday is mysterious and evocative, and to an American sensibility, alarming. A procession of hooded and robed figures carrying crosses and a symbolic coffin, lit by torchlight, followed by hundreds of villagers is a glimpse into another world. It is one of those moments when I need to put my cultural instincts on hold to understand what is really going on in my little corner of Italy. I was watching the procession when one of the figures, unrecognizable in his hood, paused to say hello and I recognized the voice of a friend. I called him later to invite him to meet for coffee so that I could learn more.

The robed members of the procession were members of the Misericordia, an ancient cofraternity, or brotherhood, present in nearly every town in Italy. Today, the Misericordia provides ambulances and emergency staff, volunteers to drive the elderly to doctors appointments and physical therapy, and during Donella’s year in middle school it was the Misericordia who drove a fellow student, who was quadriplegic, to and from school every day in a special van. But I was unclear on how this civic function related to the procession.

The idea of laymen banding together in such brotherhoods is a very ancient tradition, first happening in Constantinople and Alexandria. The first one in Europe popped up in Paris in 1208. Cofraternities arose during the middle ages when these groups of “brother citizens” filled gaps that existed because there was no functioning government, only a feudal system caught between the power of rich landlords and the church. Somehow people needed to get buried, especially during times of plague, the sick needed to be tended, orphans and illegitimate children needed care (and dowries!), and prisoners needed a companion to take them to execution. Another friend (who is not a member) mentioned that these brotherhoods often aided members in deeper business and social ties with bits of friendly information and advantages, in addition to fulfilling one’s duties as a “good Christian”.

Although there were a range of these organizations, the main one that exists in modern times is the Misericordia. Our village organization dates from 1348, the year the plague hit. (Once was not enough in 25 years as the plague also returned in 1363 and 1374.) The group had a few struggles in the 1700s when the Grand Duke Leopold thought these brotherhoods had too much power and disbanded them, but they returned as nothing nearly as effective replaced them.

My friend from the procession, who is a member, said that he is the third generation of his family to belong and that supporting the group is an important tradition, especially as membership has declined by about 50% over the last forty or so years. The Misericordia is deeply rooted in the Church, but not run by the Church, and it was impossible for my friend to weigh whether belonging had a more religious or secular/service meaning. “As with much in Italy, it is largely the same.” People in the village are expected to support the group by contributing what they can in time, money, or both. Some of the staff is highly trained and receive salaries to work full-time as EMTs, but there are many ways to be involved, such as volunteering to drive those who can’t to appointments.

I was describing the difference between calling “911” in America, where an ambulance appears that you will have to pay for, staffed by people you’ve never met, with our experience once in calling “118” here where five paramedics appeared with an ambulance which took us to the hospital, all free of charge, and my friend was surprised. I said that we have no equivalent (or tradition) of the Misericordia because we don’t have the same sense that seems to pervade the Italian village that we all need to take care of each other. He looked puzzled as he tried to imagine this lack of ties to the people who live around you.

April 13, 2019 In Best Of, Chow, Live, Recipes By Nancy

How I know it’s spring in Tuscany

One of the things I love most about creating Itch is that I’m constantly reminded to keep attentive to what unfolds around me every day. I had so much fun thinking about spring for this post, and the little things that make me know that it has arrived.

1. Fava Beans

In the spring fava beans are suddenly everywhere, but show up in two completely different ways. First there are the fave that you eat. Italians often serve them in a very different way than I’d had in America. I was used to the beans being shelled, the small inner beans removed, and then blanched to make it easier to remove the skin around the inner, bright green bean, which was the only part served. (One memorable exception to this was many years ago in San Francisco’s Mission District at Delfina when they served fried baby fava beans which were eaten whole, outer pod and all. They were delicious.)

Here, even at very nice restaurants, when you order fave you often get a plate of raw, whole beans, along with some thin slices of pecorino cheese, salt, and some olive oil. You then remove the inner pods yourself and eat them raw, along with the skin coating them, accompanied by some oil and cheese. We still aren’t totally convinced that this is as good as just the innermost pod cooked in some delicious way, but this kind of dish makes everything dependent on the essentials: the fave must be very, very fresh and the quality of the oil and cheese is critical.

My sister turned me on to a recipe that involves throwing whole, really fresh fava beans in a plastic bag along with some olive oil, sea salt, red pepper, and garlic, tossing together to coat, and then roasting the beans over a fire until cooked and tender and a bit charred in places. You can eat these whole and we have served them several times as an aperitivo, along with a prosecco.

But fave in markets and restaurants aren’t that unusual in many places around the world. The second way fave are a harbinger of spring is that they are used as a cover crop to restore nitrogen to the fields where tobacco was planted late last summer. All those glorious little beans are plowed under just when they get really promising, unharvested.

2. The Lamborghini come out

If we were to do an MRI of our brain activity with the verbal prompt “Lamborghini” I think our brains would light up in very different ways. The image I conjure up is one of a tractor. After WWII Ferruccio Lamborghini started a company to make tractors out of reconfigured military equipment. He also made heating and cooling equipment and between his businesses became wildly successful. So successful that he started to collect luxury cars, including a Ferrari, which was a constant nightmare to maintain. He decided to start his own car brand in 1963.

Today, in the valley, having a Lamborghini tractor is definitely the cool kid choice and at this time of year the tractors, Lamborghini or otherwise, hit the fields and make them incredibly well-groomed. Soil is also prepped in long, rectangular patches for personal vegetable gardens, called orto, often in the front yard of a house.

3. The dandelions face their natural predator, the horse

We cheated and put a horse cookie in the middle of the dandelions to make sure that Salome would cooperate for the shot, but she ended up ignoring the cookie to concentrate on her favorite thing, fresh dandelion greens.

4. The world turns blue and green

5. Poppies

6. One of my favorite restaurants opens again after a long winter.

Laura and Marco open Il Travato in Monterchi sometime around Easter. I just saw Laura near the piazza and she said that Pasquetta is THE DAY! (Pasquetta is literally “Little Easter”—the relaxed family day after Easter usually marked by a picnic.)

Laura taught us how to make her best-in-Tuscany spaghetti aglio olio e peperoncino, which we often make at home.

7. Bees

March 23, 2019 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

Finding inner peace at the ATM

My Apple watch frequently reminds me to take a minute and breathe, as did my Calm app on my phone, until it caused me too much stress and I had to delete it.

My recent trip to the Bay Area, complete with super-efficient ATMs, put my usual experience of getting cash in the village square in a new perspective. Just trying to get euros in Italy is a big, brash reminder that there is nothing to do in life but slow down, breathe, and look at the view. A friend once told me that when she gets cash from this ATM she knows she has actually arrived in Italy. And if you don’t get the message at the ATM you certainly will in line at the butcher, getting a coffee, or a ordering slice of pizza. Con calma above all. In these places we are among friends and equals and wouldn’t want them to rush or stress over the size of the line. Anything else would be rude and foolish at once.

I thought you might want to see the slowest ATM in the world in action.

March 9, 2019 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

Carnevale, village style

Maybe other celebrations of carnevale are more famous—Venice, New Orleans, London, Rio—but I’d argue all night that none of them have the pure joy, community, and heart that carnevale has in a small Italian village.

Carnevale is a tradition that started in Venice a thousand years ago. It’s the last great hurrah before the beginning of Lent, with its tradition of penitence. Carnevale evolved from ancient pagan Spring traditions of fertility and rebirth that were repurposed into the Christian calendar by the ever-pragmatic Catholic church.

In the village of Anghiari carnevale is one of the biggest events of the year. Tractors, which pull the floats, are washed and polished. Traffic is diverted from the main street. Containers of silly string and bags of confetti are everywhere. Nearly the whole village turns out, most everyone in costume, especially the kids. A lawn mower-sized tractor pulls a train of carts around the piazza for the smallest children. Floats often make political and social statements and can be surprisingly elaborate, but my favorite is often from the hamlet of Motina, which has about 100 inhabitants. One year the whole hamlet dressed up as the 101 Dalmatians.

But what gets me is the sweetness, spirit, and warmth of the thing. I can’t watch this parade, which circles the town multiple times, without getting tears in my eyes. It’s the way people honor and care for each other. It’s the old guy who wanders around the village every day, seemingly lost, always dressed by his family in a vest of safety orange, who was asked to lead the parade. The two buff 20-something male heartthrobs who never miss this opportunity to cross-dress, much to the delight of the crowd. The band, which is never quite in tune, but always enthusiastic. The Italian love of spectacle and show, manifested by the littlest kids dancing completely to their own rhythm on stage, cheered by the crowd. It’s that there are ways for everyone, from the youngest to the oldest, to be celebrated, to be seen, to have fun.

More scenes from carnevale, in case you haven’t seen this video before.

January 27, 2019 In Best Of, Chow, Live By Nancy

Spezzatura di maiale: nose to tail in action

After living in Tuscany for six years we were lucky enough to be invited to one of the most storied family events in Italy—the spezzatura di maiale—or the dividing of the pig. This tradition of using all parts of the pig has inspired chefs from Fergus Henderson of St. John in London—whose restaurants and cookbooks have popularized the idea of “nose to tail”—to Samin Nosrat, who filmed a pig being butchered in Italy for her cooking series “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.” An invitation to spezzatura di maiale offered the chance to go deeper than the popular coverage to see what this tradition is like in a family setting, as it has been done for generations.

For the majority of people in Italy, for hundreds of years, raising a pig was everything. I’ve learned that the ideas we have about the bounty of the Italian countryside are largely a modern construct. For most of history everyone but the aristocracy was barely getting by. Many of the oldest generation still living were raised in conditions of near-starvation because of Mussolini’s agricultural policies—for many years in the 1900s even plain pasta was a luxury. It was difficult to raise a pig to maturity because it required enough excess food to feed it. If at all possible, people raised two, one for their own use and one for the doctor. A kind of early medical insurance.

The pig is slaughtered in the winter because it is colder—the whole world becomes a refrigerator. A day or so after the pig is killed the spezzatura happens, which is a full day of work for four men (this seems to be an almost exclusively male task). Since the middle ages there have been butchers, called norcini, who traveled from town to town during the winter to do the spezzatura. Their skill with knives also made them the default surgeons and dentists.

After the intricate and precise work of cutting up the pig and making sausage, pancetta, salumi, prosciutto, and other things pork, there is a feast shared with friends and neighbors. When other families kill their pig it is their turn to host the festa. According to the family we joined this tradition has been largely unchanged during their lives, and it provides an opportunity to have some favorite foods, which are only available on this day.

We had no idea what to expect, and being a morally conflicted meat eater, I braced myself to be unnerved. But there was something about the atmosphere—the complete focus and attention of the men, the immaculate room, and the use of nearly every last part of the pig—that left me with feeling more of deep respect for the animal than anything else. This is an event that is not taken lightly. Very little of the meat is consumed fresh. The majority is preserved for use throughout the coming year. At the end of the day there were a couple of bones left, and that was it. Organs, skin, fat, cartilage … everything else was carefully used.

A bonus is that a breed of pig that was endangered, the Tuscan cinta senese, is now safely off the endangered list and thriving, because so many small farms, including this family, are raising them.

January 2, 2019 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

Lepers, donkeys, and baby Jesus

Around Christmas every year a surprising transformation takes place in the small hamlet of Le Ville. A cluster of nondescript, fairly modern houses, and the adjacent garden plots and fields, turn into ancient Jerusalem.

Our local Jerusalem is inhabited by Romans, slaves, shepherds, spice grinders, metal workers, basket makers, rug merchants, a colony of lepers, and more, along with cattle, goats, sheep, and donkeys. At the center is always a couple, accompanied by a newborn, a bull, a donkey and a couple of angels. It is the living nativity of Le Ville, or “presepe vivente.”

I grew up in a culture where Christmas is all about the tree. In Italy, the most important symbol is the nativity scene. They are more common than Christmas trees—there’s one in every church, most homes, and some businesses. I even spotted one in the deli case of the cafe at the train station.

A few towns have decided to take it further and create living nativities. In 2005, some people from the hamlet of Le Ville went to a living nativity over the border in Umbria and decided that they would create their own. They started work in July of that year, and according to the organizers, “worked incessantly, every afternoon, late into the night” to make the Christmas deadline. It was small but a success and has grown every year. This year around 10,000 people will come.

It’s the thing I look forward to the most over the holidays. There are over 200 volunteer participants in 50 scenes, lit by over 1,500 candles and numerous open fires, with music from Ben Hur playing over speakers. The path through it is a kilometer long. There’s a cantina halfway through serving olive-oil soaked bread toasted over an open fire, and pottery mugs of hot spiced wine. The sheer pageant of it sweeps me along—Italians have a special gift for spectacle—it is not surprise that opera was created here.

It also has a nice Tuscan practicality. It happens for five nights between December 26th and January 6th—it can’t start earlier because there wouldn’t be a baby Jesus. The three wise men don’t show up until the last event, on Epiphany or Twelfth Night (when they originally appeared). They enter with great fanfare and head to the manger.

The competition to be the sacred family is carefully managed by the organizers so as to not hurt any feelings. Couples who have recently given birth take turns, and Le Ville leads the way in gender equality with three of the five babies this year being girls. Also, parents are parents—you don’t need to be married to be Mary and Joseph.

December 26, 2018 In Best Of, Chow, Recipes By Nancy

How Santina makes agnolotti

Our reason for wanting to talk with grandmothers about cooking is to delve into a slice of Italian life: the role that nonne play in the family, traditions that are almost lost, and what all that means today, in modern Italy.

When we interviewed Santina about making agnolotti, a traditional Italian filled pasta, our goal was to capture more than just how to make it. Which we did. But those elements did complicate the edit. We decided to create an addendum to yesterday’s video, showing more practically how to actually make this wonderful dish, for those who want to roll up their sleeves.

So, here it is.

December 25, 2018 In Best Of, Chow, Recipes By Nancy

Making pasta with a grandmother

We are starting to develop our series on grandmothers cooking. Curious about what special things grandmothers make for the holidays, we were led to Santina, a pasta-making phenomenon. She always has fresh pasta she has made on hand to give to her family, including grandchildren, and great nieces and nephews. They frequently drop by for meals and keep her informed on the latest news in their lives.

We thought we’d be focusing on how Santina makes a filled pasta, agnolotti, but as is often the case here the people turn out to be more interesting than just what they do. Santina has inspired us to do two videos. This video gives you a sense of her special spirit, the role that a nonna often plays in Italian families, and what Christmas feasts are like in this small village. We wondered if there is a secret that Italian grandmothers have to keep their families legendarily close. We were surprised (and delighted by) the unexpected direction the answer to this question took, because of her wit.

Tomorrow we will share Santina, Part II, with some coaching and hints you need to make agnolotti, or any other fresh pasta, at home.