A public showcase where to display a private passion for elegant food, something between innovation and inspiration, tradition and what is inside the fridge. Sharing is the only mean through which solitude, insane competition and egoism may be tamed.
Hogmanay is an
odd cheerful word and so its pronunciation, Hug-mê-nay.
Except for the Scots and some enclaves in North America, this term might sound
obscure. And it may appear exotic both to the English neighbours and to the
linguists, since the origin of the word is still widely debated. I choose it
for a reason. Hogmanay includes several inner sub-traditions, among which that
of exchanging gifts, an idea I fancied since I heard of it: if you wish to
learn more, have a look at
I have to divide gifts in two stems: the private gifts and the public ones. This year I was particularly lucky. It is difficult to receive only things you like, with no exception, and I tried to reciprocate this overflow of kindness with the same spirit! Here, I would like only to witness the experience of the public ones.
Salvator Dali, Sacrament of the Last Supper: incredibly visionary
Last supper, Byzantine Museum, San Giorgio, Venice: a byzantine view
What my friends
and I actually did was simple: each of us had to buy a present, maximum price allowed
5€. In the end, the idea of gifts is that of giving, right? Subsequently, each
anonymous gift was marked with a number and put into a straw basket. Then
numbers were distributed to guests. Far from being a gourmet basket gift, it
was, nonetheless, reach of delightful ideas. And it was truly mirroring the
people who made the presents, since honey soaps and candles were there too,
cohabiting along with origami, chocolate computers and chocolate candies from
Butlers. None of these gifts appeared on Ebay the following days: what a
success! At midnight, we prompted the gift distribution and it was a positive
moment: excitement was fused with expectations and casually everyone received
something matching her/his own taste:
Three weeks
passed already by since my Hogmanay! Three hectic weeks of crossed tasks,
filled of bureaucratic deadlines, study organization, gatherings (few yet
positive) and frantic scheduling for the close future. This is frankly insane:
aren’t we supposed to hibernate during winter? Someone may easily contest me saying this, since what I am describing is the adult life effect. Fair
enough. Yet my perception of these three weeks is sincerely different and
deeply nostalgic. Hogmanay for me is just there, round the corner of Time, so the
logs creeping their whispers in the fire, so the laughter is still echoing, so
the food is steaming and songs and jokes reverberate, as a bee trapped into an
empty box:
Hogmanay this
very year has been intense and new. We were many people, nested in an Apennine
hut on the hills surrounding Bologna, yet already on the hill-slop pointing to
Florence. The house belonged to a different epoch and mentality. It grew up in
height like a tree, and chambers and rooms where on the sides of the main hall
way as branches. Since different families use to dwell during summer time
there, every corner of the house display a unique personality. And again since
these people, connected by various links to the same family tree, infuse new
lymph to the mansion only in summer, people are able to feel a sense of
desertion and neglect:
Donald Duck family tree
Lady Oscar's eyes: nothing can be so blue!
The stars, since
woods and nothingness surrounded us,
were as blue as the eyes in Japanese cartoons. The chill was pretty biting and the
contrast between the fireplace area and the rest of the house procured a
significant temperature leap. Paradoxically, even if we ate consistently - and
even if the food was really the double in relationship to what we needed - at
the same time, it was interesting the way, my friends and I, coordinated the
evening. The majority of us agreed it would have been better to cook all
together. Then someone suggested we shouldn’t spoil all our energies cooking
and we opted to prepare something there and bring some courses from home. The
result was we had to cook there even if we had already a great deal of food
brought from home.
The rolled out dough cut in rhombus
Crescentine
(those that rise) were the Queen of the party. They are made out from a pizza
dough, they have to rise, then you can roll it out in pieces with the rolling
pin, create several rhombus and fry them in lard (old greasy unfashionable way)
or sunflower oil (modern lighter crispier way). As soon as they inflate, you
can take them out with a skimmer and serve them with salami (mortadella,
salame, coppa), ham (cooked or crudo), stracchino (a creamy cheese) or
squaquerone (an creamier cheese), antipasti, and – why not – spreadable
chocolate! How morally corrupt we are!
Frying the rhombus in abundant sunflower oil, using an aluminum pan.
Then we had a
quiche: I brought back from Scotland a Bleu
d’Auvergne, a French blue cheese, which conveys the taste of the Stilton
and the creaminess of Roquefort. Worth eating. Michelle suggested me to add an
egg to the pastry and the result was unexpected. I reduced the amount of water
needed and the texture of the dough turned out fabulous. 200 gr of white
flower, 100 gr of unsalted butter, 1 egg, 20 ml of ice-cold water (instead of
80 ml), and a pinch of salt. All the rest is appearance: yet the idea of the vegetables disposition derives from the animation movie Ratatuille:
Golden, rich, irresistibly perfumed!
Cutting the quiche into a wheel of taste
This was
followed by a courgette and Shetland potatoes omelette, which should have been
a home-made mayonnaise sauce. Unfortunately Isabel could not achieve her aim,
possibly because of the heat of the room and we turned the attempt into an
omelette (frittata), closer, perhaps, to a Spanish tortilla:
4 egg yolks, 2 spoon of apple vinegar, the juice of 1 lemon and salt and
pepper. We had to incorporate the egg whites since they weren’t needed for the
mayonnaise, but it would have been a great loss and a pity to dismiss them.
Not a bad attempt, Isabel! Your food is cheerful as your character
Then, I regret
to say this, in the morning cotechino
with lentils and antipasto piemontese
and oven baked aubergine parmigiana
and a couple more things that I cannot remember.
Here you can find the antipasto piemontese recipe, unfortunately in Italian only! Piemonte is a wealthy italian region at the borders with France, Turin is its county seat. On the other border there is Lombardy, whose major city is Milan. Above there is the tiny region of Valle d'Aosta with the Mont Blanc and below Liguria, where Genoa lays and where pesto is done!
5th January. Michelle and I went
to see Moonrise kingdom by Wes
Anderson at a cinema house. Beautiful film: lyrical and melancholic, about the power of commitment and love. With Bill Murray, Bruce Willis and Edward Norton in unexpected grotesques roles. Indeed worth seeing.
Their faces speak for themselves, but the film is not just ironic,
there is a red tragedy thread about feelings and human relationships
in nowadays America.
Then we took two flutes of dessertpassito wine in a
delightful tavern called Rovescio (inside out) in via
Pietralata 75, which I will describe soon since it is one of my favorite taverns!
Stylish, rustic at the same time, elegant wines, and an
exceptional chef Raffaele Fierro: http://www.rovescio.it/
6th January: Epiphany in a Joyce’s sense. I cannot describe my emotions about this days, cause I wish to keep them locked inside me, privately in gentle custody so to say, yet I have the chance to offer a short sketch of what happened!
The sense of Epiphany is to find something or someone, partially knowing what
you are going to face, partially abandoning your intelligence to something
irrational as marvel.
Michelle
and I went to Cesenatico, a fair sea-town on the Adriatic sea. We desired to walk along the shore with the low-tide. We came across a
wonderful and luminous nativity scene on the very canal, built up on a project by Leonardo da
Vinci.
The nativity scene took place on the boats! The water reflexion in darkness
was particularly fascinating.
At a local festivity market, I also bought a tunisian tajine (whose virtues I will soon retell!) and finally we had a nutritious snack, based on piadinacrescione or cassone, a
typical local dish, which might remind the attentive eater to an Irish potato bread combined to a
Greek pita (piadina – pizza – pita indeed share the same semantic root).
Sectioned crescione: yummy! Below the recipe, offered by the wise-ful
Giallo Zafferano!
7th January. Michelle and I had
a tête-à-tête breakfast in a modern
café, called Travel caffé located in via Arcoveggio 74. Having breakfast
with Michelle is like picking up again and again the first apple with no fear
of a divine chastisement. There the bartender, Luigi, a friend, does one of the
best coffees in Bologna. He once was a baker so his croissants as well are
really special. Two days after I ate there again six pizzette…the corresponding amount of calories would have probably killed
a polar bear and took a macchiato.
"One pulls another" (una tira l'altra) says an idiomatic italian expression,
meaning that you cannot restrain from scarfing down them all.
I
favourably remember that day, since Michelle came back for lunch after work and it is a joy when imagination and Reality merge together.
8th January. I had a long and profound conversation with Lord Ricard, blogger of Vox Clamantis in deserto - RQ. Afterwords, Claudette and Fabiao joined me for lunch: two amazing friends brought ashore like bottle messages by a glorious Erasmus in Edinburgh, some years ago. We had a range of antipasti followed by linguine with home
made pesto (which came directly from last summer garden-harvest), then a splendid chicken with vegetables in the Tunisian tajine, and
finally an angel food cake. We were able to survive only because of the
excellent Nero d’Avola from the sun-drenched provinces of Oriental Sicily and a Dolcetto d'Alba from the Langhe Region, in Piemonte, at the borders with sweet France.
This mysterious terracotta object provides a phenomenal alternative to pan-preparation.
During the evening, instead, I attended dinner
again at the Rovescio tavern with
twelve friends (equally distributed between female and male friends) and
luckily enough we were not thirteen. No one actually wishes to be appointed as
the Messiah:
The last supper by Valentin de Boulogne, 1625-1626,
Rome, National Art Gallery (Museo Corsini).
9th January. I had a long phone
conversation with Katie, otherwise called the hummingbird. Michelle came back again for lunch! During the
afternoon, I went out with Christine for a green tea with wild roses at Il
mondo di Eutèpia, a terrible name for a outstanding tea house in via
Testoni 5/d. Eutèpia derives from Eu
+ tòpos (good place), so in itself is a pretty welcoming name, but the oddity
of Ancient Greek makes this threshold a bit awkward to decipher.
The evening
instead was embellished by an experiment: three couples and the Beermisù, a
version of Tiramisù made with beer... We shall come back on this! By now, enjoy my art-attack in tracing a beer mug on the wet cocoa powder:
Beer-me-su!
10th January. I met father
Laurence, a cherished teacher, and now a friend, who educated me to the sense
of humbleness, not through teaching but through concrete example. We went to Matusel
a distinct restaurant in the University area, precisely in via Bertoloni 2.
Michelle joined us and took a vast plate of grilled vegetables.
A welcoming combination between art and food,
wood and soft lights: the staff is very kind and zealous,
vegetarians are never left on their own: http://www.matusel.it/
Then I went
book hunting: despite I would have liked to keep calm and spend nothing, I
ended up with five books. Then I took a tea again at Eutèpia with my best friend Martina and Frederick, the most
knowledgeable man about atomic bombs and China I know. Finally, I went to
Hannah a true friend, who’s always a wonderful conversationalist: despite we
are very different, our dialogues do not suffer of any sort of rigidness, yet
we feel free to express ourselves with dignity and openness.
Last nights are often sad. Personally I
felt miserable. I would have liked to let Time flow slower: hearts need to knit that subtle knot which
makes us lovers, paraphrasing John Donne’s Ecstasy. No net, hook or string could trap my wish and fulfil it:
instead my desire of departure-procrastination fell somewhere in tall grass, forgotten and out of reach: the
following morning came out quickly and the suitcase was still on its way to be
done.
Emigrants bring sorrow and hope in their suitcases,
dandys often travel escorted by manageable palate dreams.
11th January. With Death in my
heart, I had to say goodbye to Michelle, took again two flights and two BA
meals and landed safely in Edinburgh: an Urban Eat wrap with mozzarella and
pesto, and a snack made of sparkling water and crisps or sparkling crisps and salty water? ...to be continued...
