Erbaluce, Your New Date-Night Spot

Just as a little correction to the above posting: Piemontese CITY cuisine has a lot of butter and cream in it, but city cuisine is a very different animal from the cuisine of the country side, and, I don't think, it is very indicative of how the people of a region really eat. My family is from Salogni, a very small dairy town in the commune of Fabbrica Curone in Alessandria. We rarely used butter...+READ

Just as a little correction to the above posting: Piemontese CITY cuisine has a lot of butter and cream in it, but city cuisine is a very different animal from the cuisine of the country side, and, I don't think, it is very indicative of how the people of a region really eat. My family is from Salogni, a very small dairy town in the commune of Fabbrica Curone in Alessandria. We rarely used butter (and never used cream) in our dishes there. Butter and cream were to commodities my family sold to make a living. We had milk from the cows we milked downstairs in the morning, simmered with cocoa and sugar. We DID use a lot of parmigiano in everything, particularly minestrone- which we ate everyday. The majority of the food we ate was very fresh vegetables, greens, and roasted meats (mostly chicken, veal, or rabbit) with some oil and herbs. Fresh fruit and small amounts of cheese were for dessert.
There is no butter in my family recipe for risotto (finely chopped chicken livers and parmigiano reggiano give the rice some richness and flavor,) and, of course, no Piemontese would EVER put cream into risotto.
I only spent my summers over there, so I can't say that they didn't load the winter dishes up with butter, but I think it was highly unlikely. Butter was treated like gold in the village, but, like gold bars, it was seen as an alien substance that was for rich foreign (read as city) people to buy, and not something locally enjoyed.
Here in the States, my family used only olive oil, and a tiny amount of butter for certain dishes (like bagna cauda,) but rarely. Everything on our table was about our own garden grown vegetables, fresh herbs, fish straight from the docks, lemons or wine vinegar, and the best olive oil we could find.
Many of the staple Piemontese classics involve no butter or cream: Buii' (bollito misto) has a myriad of accompanying sauces, none of which have butter or cream in them. Picaja', the traditional rolled, stuffed veal breast has none as well. Polenta is usually made with just water (or chicken broth) and parmiggiano, and no butter. The list goes on.
Although the rich cooking of cities like Torino, and Bologna to the South East, or Milano to the North East of Piemonte may be rich in butter, it is not so in the countryside, and most of those cities have left the butter out of their cuisine, in favor of olive oil, for decades now.
Just like it would be misleading to say that classic French cuisine is loaded with butter (Escoffier called for much less of it than most people think, and, in fact warned against using too much which would mask and inhibit the flavors of the ingredients,) it is misleading to say that Piemontese cuisine is heavily influenced by butter and cream cookery.-COLLAPSE

By Salognese on January 8, 2010 09:57 PM