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Piedmontese Cuisine

Local specialities

One of the benefits of frequent travel is the ability to sample local specialities. When I recall my grandparents’ first visit to the Franco-era Spain of the 1960s few details of that distant and developing country stick in my memory beyond the story of Grandma filling her suitcase with loaves of sliced white bread, a crate of eggs and a bottle of HP sauce; such was the trepidation that their generation possessed for foreign food. Naturally the eggs got smashed en route and the whole lot emerged as a giant soggy omelette when the suitcase arrived at Alicante.

Happily, attitudes have moved on. Cuisine is culture and one of my principal recommendations when asking owners to improve the adverts for their properties on holidaylettings.co.uk is the inclusion of lots of information about food and drink. Although most foreign foods are now available through retail at home, nothing quite beats the thrill of a dish in its place of origin. Phlegmatic Britons have long sought the best curry house or place for a fry-up in their destination resort but that has all changed with a new awareness of food.

Destination and food rarely combine so perfectly as in Piedmont, the area of Northern Italy renowned for fine food and wine and in particular the elusive truffle.

Piedmont isn’t your average Italian region. Lying in the lee of the Alps this kingdom had long been the driver of Italian unification, but paradoxically, its main cultural influences came from its neighbour, France. French has been an official language here for centuries and fashions and furnishings were closely modelled on the French style. This influence also extended to food. Piedmont’s grand capital Turin is now a busy, workaday shadow of the elegant French-speaking city it once was and the small towns that dot its rolling landscape are unremarkable. However, the real hidden strengths of this region are its food and wine. Of particular fascination is the humble truffle (tuber magnatum pico), which develops in seclusion across the deciduous forests that cover this enormous area, between the Alps and the Ligurian coast.

With the migration of so many Italian chefs to the Renaissance Court of France, many of their traditions and ingredients went with them and France developed a mania for the humble tuber from which it never recovered. Even wars and revolutions could not break the French people’s decadent addiction to the fragrant fungus, which continues unabated to this day.

Every autumn the town of Alba draws in huge crowds of food fans who come to marvel at this oddity. Despite being known as ‘white truffle’ the tuber is often a dirty tan colour and grows to an unregulated shape and size dependent upon the roots of the tree it makes its home. Truffles like to draw sustenance from larger deciduous trees like oaks but they don’t appear above the surface; the only sign of their presence is the distinctive metallic odour that would normally be sought with truffling pigs in France but more commonly in Italy specially trained dogs are used.

The truffle cannot be cultivated and has to be hunted. This takes on a serious aspect when we consider the politics involved. With restaurants and chefs bidding for entire truffles the price per kilo sometimes approaches that of gold. And, around the fringes of the festival, sinister men in army greens, gaiters and flat caps, with rifle cases over one shoulder, eye each other up suspiciously. These are the truffle hunters and their clothes are not just for theatrical effect. Truffle hunting has led to many instances of rivalry spilling over into violence, with jealous hunters leaving poison for rivals’ talented dogs and the occasional spat of gunfire leading to injury or even death, with the flimsy excuse that the victim was mistaken for a Boar. Woodlands are jealously guarded; if a secret crop’s location becomes common knowledge it will be lost, as the truffles may not regenerate there for decades, if at all. This is a business of secrets, defended by deadly force.

At Alba’s annual Sagra del Tartufo the delicate aroma of truffle is obscured by the overwhelming smell of roasting pork, which permeates the evening air. Boar have become a thorny problem due to global warming as they breed more often, cause more car accidents and destroy more allotments. Across the forests and farmlands of Piedmont they are hunted for their meat with population control only a secondary consideration. The cured sausage that results is a highly sought after delicacy, tied up throughout the winter to mature. Combined with the robust reds that the area produces – Barbaresco, Treiso, Neive, Barolo – the area can lay claim to some of the richest and most robust cuisine in Italy. The excellent wineries around Alba produce some world-class reds and whites but their circulation is quite limited on the international market; gems such as Dolcetto come out of the region but you would be hard pressed to find them on the supermarket shelf at home. All local grape varieties benefit from low levels of tannins and a ferrous, limestone-rich soil.

The town of Alba is also home to a much-maligned but eternally popular form of confectionary whose 1980s heyday coincided with a memorable TV advertising campaign, featuring a gathering of dignitaries with big hair and shoulder pads, expressing gratitude to the ambassador for spoiling them. The same factory produces a chocolate and almond based paste of similar renown. However, the factory is obsessive about maintaining the secrets of its production process and does not allow visitors. This is entirely in keeping with the Slow Food mentality that was born in these hills; keeping globalisation at bay and encouraging local traditions of food production, the movement has become a force to be reckoned with over the past 20 years. Although it has not halted the march of junk food into Italy, it has had notable successes as a pressure lobby, including refusal to grant franchise licenses to certain international chains and forcing one of the same chain’s restaurants in Rome to remove all exterior signs advertising its presence (as this was felt to be detrimental to the dignity of the area).

Restaurants send representatives to Piedmont to secure supplies of the elusive white truffle; other varieties are available including the tawny Tuscan truffle (Tuber Borchii), which is not as aromatic and fails to command such a high price. China, with industrious vigour, has thrown its hat into the ring with the distribution of a small black truffle which is not given any particular attention. Despite these challenges, Piedmont holds all of the trump cards. With a current wholesale price of €10,200/Kg the region is blessed with a speciality that will never depreciate in value, either among those who seek it or those who consume it. It is entirely in keeping with a tradition that, despite the unrelenting industrialisation of Northern Italy and the convenience of modern shopping methods, it continues to appeal to connoisseurs of real food and drink who refuse to compromise.

Nick Clarke

Nick leads one of the renewals teams at Holiday Lettings. He is also an experienced tour guide working with US school groups in Europe during his spare time. His daily duties involve helping holiday home owners let their properties more effectively and his only source of discomfort is having to chat with owners in glamorous locations while watching the pouring rain outside.

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