Rhapsody in Food

I wrote the following a couple of evenings ago.

I had high expectations of the food in Padova.  But as it turns that out my expectations were far too modest.  The food is not good, it is marvelous.  Even – or rather I should say especially – the most simple things.  A “tramezzini” <trahmettzini> looks like a little Wonderbread sandwich, but stuffed with porchetta (roasted pork) and grilled melanzane (eggplant) it is a sublime culinary indulgence that fills me with guilty pleasure as I wolf it down alongside a birra ala spina (light local or German beer on tap).   There is variability around the mean, but oftentimes the juice from the market oranges makes you want to sing in the morning and drink more than your share.  The fresh spinach, loaded with dirt, stands crisply firm as the grocer grabs it out in huge fistfuls and stuffs it into a plastic bag, and it stays bright green and hugely flavourful when steamed. A nub of butter, a sprinkle of salt, and wow.

But if that is too hard then for a pittance you can buy a softball-sized orb of perfectly cooked and seasoned spinach that has been squeezed to the perfect state of not-quite dryness.  Then in another shop you buy tiny raviolini stuffed with funghi and parma cotto, elsewhere some flat-shaped onions and hard fresh garlic.  An iceburg of parmigiano reggiano; they don’t slice it but rather splinter it off in chunks the size of a collie’s head and wrap it in paper.  Fresh porcini mushrooms.  Plump bowls of pesto Genovese in one shop, perfect gnocchi in another.  Figs of several varieties, lushly ripe.  Young walnuts, like hardening rubber; the vegetable man showed us how to open them and how to peel off the dark skin from the more planar surfaces of the nut, thereby making them all the sweeter. Sauted in butter (such butter!) the fresh walnuts made a fine dressing to ridiculously juvenile beans that squealed demurely when we chomped into them.

T’other day  I cooked chicken breasts in the simplest way – really, all I did was walk that delicate line between under and over – and it was, well, modesty comes in so I’ll just say “Gosh I enjoyed it.”  For less than 6 euros on another occasion we got a lovely plump yellow chicken that, roasted, did us a fine courtly dinner and several lunches and then a simple pasta sauce with the last sumptuous bits.

 

 

I haven’t had much in the way of great wine here, but have slurped an embarrassing richness of good wine for as little as 4 Euros a bottle. (I’ve not yet steeled myself to try the really low-priced stuff, but there are lots of bottles under 3 Euros.) 

 

Completely unrelated, but no, not at all unrelated, the church bells.  It is quarter to nine, so of course one church starts its two or three bells, then another adds its singleton, and a third comes in with an offset pair, and they are all willy-nilly synchopated to drive a drummer to distraction and delight. Now they are all going (and surely beyond hearing are other bells shivering the air in a supportive way).  Then the first trio drops out but the others (it must be a full minute now) keep going.  Oh, there, another has dropped out, there are just two sets of two or three, and now just one pair that somehow seems very slow and far-off with two voices, a ding and a dong alternating, strengthening, then fading into obscurity, washed over by the passing tram and the motorcycles deep and shrill and now just a single bell, dang, dang, dang, dang, gentling into silence. Five minutes pass and another single bell, evidently assigned to ring the five to nine, takes its turn for a two-minute run of 4/4 time, no messing around.

OK, back to food, for a few additional highlights.

In our first week here in Padova one night we had the tiniest, tenderest lamb choplets ever – pan fried in butter and then lightly sauced with sauted garlic, white wine, rosemary.  We felt quite predatory eating them. 

Jujube, here called giuggiola, about the size of large grapes but a little more tapered and with flesh like crab apple in texture and somewhat apple-like in taste, with a single oblong seed.

{Now a bell starts signalling nine o’clock.  Just one bell, donged nine times.  I guess the others are the art bells.}

Sea bream, here called abramide.  Shiny, glossy, plump, bright-eyed, whole and fresh on the ice.  The fishmonger gutted and filleted them, zip zip zip.  Tossed in flour and pan fried in butter, squirt of lemon (I don’t have to tell you that each lemon is heavy loaded).

One of our best dinners:  A porchetta omelet alongside Moira’s brilliant green bean and potato salad.

Another fine one:  Moira’s chopped chicken liver pasta sauce on fresh fettuccini.

At Ai Porteghi restaurant, attended by waiter Ricardo.  A salad of snowy white, thin, crisp slices of super-fresh porcini with shavings of parm, a few drops of olive oil, and a crunch of salt.  A dish featuring dried shredded horse meat.  Terrific white fish perfectly cooked.

A nice grilled squid and shrimp salad from a stand in the Piazza del Frutti.  Watched them cut up some variety of purplish octopus for other customers.

Today and yesterday at lunch I walked a block from my office and had a huge white porcelain bowl of insalata mista.  Yesterday with tuna fish, today with shrimp and small fresh balls of buffalo milk mozzarella. 

We’ve been here well over a month and I’d say the single best thing we’ve had was the fresh warm tomatoes shown in an earlier blog.  Cut up and sprinkled with salt and pepper.  That was on the Ligurian coast – I have never had tomatoes anywhere near as good as those were.  They were grown on the property on which we were staying.  Of course, it’s not all that easy -- down in town there in Monterosso we went to a restaurant called Ciak that specializes in local seafood and had a seafood risotto that was so good that I feel a bit emotional just remembering it, and I’m sure lots of time and skill went into every component of that dish.

Kitchen of Ciak restaurant in Monterosso, with swordfish.

Kitchen of il Ciliegio (the cherry tree) restaurant near Monterosso.

 

Back to sound.  This is a student town.  Founded in 1222, the University of Padova currently has approximately 65,000 students.  The university is scattered all over town.  We have the great good fortune to have an apartment right smack in the middle of the centro, the heart of old Padova.  Reportedly there have been well-developed settlements here since something between 1100 and 1200 BC (before Christmas).  But over the last millennium it has become more and more student-dominated (the whole city has, according to Wikipedia, a population of 214,000, so whether that includes all, none, or [most likely] some of the students, they make up a sizable proportion of the populace).  My office in the psychology building is a brisk half-hour away, but there are plenty of university buildings cheek by jowl with us, and every night the students are out and about living it up like it was the last Friday of the semester.  And they very often sing, in groups large or small but in a decidedly skilled, almost choral way.  A hoot.

After students complete their degrees, they make a public presentation of a jokey and risque autiobigraphical poster and their friends ridicule and tease them and often pelt them with eggs, tomatoes, etc.  Here one recent celebrant abuses another. 

 

Ooh, I was just seized with longing for a coffee.  Much too late for that, but it will be a long, long time before I get over the joys of Italian espresso and am once again satisfied with the Canadian version.