Three Weeks in Torino

I was lucky to find this apartment in the center of Torino through couchsurfing. This is the view from the little balcony. Right across the street below is Porta Nuova train station. It wasn't too loud and it gave a nice open view.
Getting to live here was sort of an under the table deal, which I am getting accustomed to in Italy. A girl named Vanessa wasn't really supposed to be subletting it to me, but she had somewhere else to live for the month... It was perfect for everyone.
There were a few students in the building who were fun and welcoming. A friend from the apartment, Fabio, invited me to a lunch with his parents one Sunday




This was my first "real" Italian meal according to Fabio, it was real because it was made by Fabio's mom. All the flavors were familiar, but what surprised me was that a meal-sized portion of pasta was the first course. All the meals I've eaten with families so far have had a course that you are supposed to finish before moving on.

Fabio's dad, Italo, grew all the vegetables in that meal too, which wasn't much of a big deal for them, he grows enough tomatoes and potatoes to last most of the year. When I was there they had just canned all the tomato sauce.
After a lengthy and relaxed recovery from such a feast we went to Italo's garden. I was pretty pleased with my fortune, to already be visiting your normal everyday family garden after just a week or so! Italo's father had bought this piece of land that runs right up to the edge of the train tracks, surprisingly close actually, I'd never seen a fence so close to the tracks in USA. Now the original piece of land is divided up amongst Italo's siblings who all have their gardens there.
Both of Fabio's parents have worked for Fiat since way back when their parents came to Turin to work for Fiat, now Fabio is on more of a academic track and also isn't inclined to garden. I don't know if there is a relationship between those two things. Someone in his cohort of cousins had to step down from the garden or that piece of ground will become a buch of little slivers to small to work with.
The tracks are JUST behind that big wall, the bamboo growing there is for trellises, This is after the harvest, so it's all weeds here, in the greenhouse to the right there was lettuce and chiles and celleriac.
111: I'm pretty sure these are concord grapes, but they are called Fragolino because they taste like strawberries: Fragole
124 & 144: There was this giant fish market, easily the coolest things there were the live eels and the giant clam shells (they were dead already, and probalby more than 200 years old when they died). That's Julietta, she's a foreign students of industrial engineering from Argentina. She was cool and showed me some neat spots, it was good to have a friend who was also discovering Torino.
156: My first day, the first day, of Salone del Gusto was a feast for the senses as well as a feast of samples. Mostly meat and cheese was represented, but the variety was mind bending. It began to dawn on me that I don't know much about meat, raw cured meats and raw cheese is pretty rare in american diets, and let me tell you that that's really too bad.
165: After I tasted new thing after new thing and met some brewers who I will probably visit in Friuli pretty soon I went to this tasting of a 16 year old cheese, you can see the fanfare that welcomed the innards of this crystalized fossil of a cheese. I couldn't help laughing while I joined the crowd of oooh-ing camera holders. I could say more about this cheese... but I was listening to the Italian that the guy was speaking rather than the live english translation. I can report that he turned the cheese over every single day for the first two years of its life and then scaled back to only once every two or three days, without fail, for the other fourteen years. Over that time it lost 60% of its original weight!
I got to thinking nerdy thoughts. This might be the longest "fixed" carbon I've ever consumed, that is, sixteen years ago mountain herbs fixed carbon turning CO2 into sugars etc, then those same molecules traveled via cow milk through time and space without being decomposed and used for respiration (some was of course, by friendly molds and bacteria). The only older carbon I've eaten might be the various food-grade petroleum products, outstripping the cheese's 16 by a whopping 250 million years.
183-5: Not food, but this cigar roller and her spread was the best tobbacco commercial I've ever reverently born witness to...
183: Later, that same day contitions seemed perfect for grappa and cigars. I met this wine importer from New Jersey and the slow food rep from Philadelphia, who was just out of college. We smoked and drank in the most civilized fashion I've ever experienced. I imagined big red leather winged armchairs and rich mahoghany as we talked about things that pair well with cigars and grappa: hunting, guns, the wine business, and american history. there aren't many topics less interesting to me than those, but It was perfect fare for a cigar that burned for no less than an hour. Incedentally I got sick the next day.
I stuck it out for the rest of the salone, three days and it was worth it. The weekend was a madhouse, shoulder to shoulder crowds and the knowlegeble vendors were reduced to sample-giving machines. Still, I met some good people who invited me to see their digs: several olive oil producers, A Polish mead producer and a guy who grows his own barley to make his own beer in Ireland, a shepherd who invited me to walk the transhumance in May, the slow food rep for Kenya was super friendly and welcomed me to come down where I could hang out with the people who make Nzoia River reed salt or Pokot ash yogurt, but I later learned it's on the travel warning list so I can't. A cheese maker in Germany has two interns from Japan now, and I am welcome to visit for a little while too. Looking back and looking at all the cards I have, I feel like I did the salone justice. But while it was going on I just wanted to press pause and gather myself, not only dazzled hypnotized by the parade of samples but also more and more fatigued by a throat cold I felt like the event was slipping by.

To sum it up, Salone del Gusto was freakin' awesome. It will blow your mind.
WELL, SO IT'S OVER... READY TO RULE THIS Fing COUNTRY? (no)
To tell the full idea of the whole story so far, not just the fun bits, here I have to say that the week after Salone del Gusto I just wanted to curl up and eat soup in my apartment. So I did. I wasn't proud of it though, I felt like I was wasting time and falling short of expectations, I was homesick and antisocial and the free trials that came with this mini-laptop I have were expiring. I couldn't even write anything worth sharing, very much in a rut. It was a bad week, but as the date approached for me to travel to the mountains and join Massimo I felt better and then ready. I saw it as the real beginning to my project and I rose out of that funk to have a farewell feast with my friends from the apartment on Via Nizza and trot off to somewhere new.
WAAAAAHHHHHH
*Travel Travel Train Train*
WEEEEEEHEEEEEEE
Yep, I told everyone to wait for me, that I'd be back in a bit after I packed my things. I again felt like I was leaving one of my special homes in the world. I stoically cinched down the straps on my sleeping bag's compression pack and nestled it amongst the heterochromatin of my material capital.
I surveyed the barren landscape. It was just as I found it... Orange walls. Stupid cheap ass dual hot plate, the stunted excuse for a piece of furniture it rested upon. I silently spent five, maybe ten minutes searching the very few nooks/crannies and mostly zoned out. Then, snapping out of some kind of reverie I can not describe yet, I looked at my bags, the pink and the green. They plumply lounged upon one another as if to sagely offer; "hey bro, no need to look at us to see yourself, but... this moment feels good from our vantage point ;) "
I walked down the marble stairs that smell fainly of dog piss for what would be the second to last time. Everyone was chillin in the common unit, different languages blurred, leaving just the faces that spoke them in my memory. Smiling remarks as we raised our 3oz while plasic solo cups. My smouldering dismay was fanned familiarly by the morbid consistency between thumb and middle finger, the trashcan filled with good old petroleum. Everyone chin-chined, Prost, Saluted and generally L'chaimed. It was just a normal night for them, except maybe the French couple couchsurfing with Marco. I was tired and the night was very young. Vanessa snagged a pause in conversation "eh, Darleeng. Reely, please remember us, you know to always have a home, ehh, because we are here in Torino... OK??"
What more can I say? Franchesca and Fabio looked at my eyes in the middle of thier conversation "Siiiihh--Torni, torni, si voi. Va bene, eh" It was a nice goodbye and I didn't think about it one bit on the train the next day.

TRENTINO: FIRST, LEMME TELL YOU ABOUT THIS PARTY

Remember how I was saying that it's common to have a first course at meals? Well I recently had the most outrageous first course yet. On Thursday Massimo had a bunch of friends over who had helped him roast an entire cow (500 people ate it at a big party in June) the first course was: fresh raw beef cut into tiny cubes with olive oil, cured beef sliced thin, and smoked salmon on toast and also Speck, ground into Pate' on toast. It was all pretty excellent. Next came a roast with polenta and mushrooms, the gravy was ourageously rich and tasty. This is a family that knows how to do meat.
Massimo's great grandfather started the business and his son plans to keep it going. Not only that, the guy I sat next to, Angelo, makes his own wine every year. He brought two reds that I'd never heard of before: Groppello and Teroldego (Italy has the widest variety of wine grapes of anywhere). First we drank Gropello. Evidently this is a hard wine to pull off because it tends to be sour. I tasted a little bit of sour and took everyone's word that it was a pretty good gropello having nothing to compare it to. (Also I'm wine illiterate, well, we should say that I'm a lover of all wine, I've loved wine made of Welches white grape juice concentrate and Fleichman's yeast--then regretted it the next day).
The Teroldego was darker and I liked it more, it had narrow legs and left a magenta hue in the empty glass which Angelo was pretty proud of. It's hard to find a black enough grape to do that. (take a Moran moment to note that I like the second cup of wine more than the first more than 70% of the time, also that roughly 30% of statistics are garbled by mt memory I wish could comment more expertly on these wines, but I just don't have the schooling. [NOTE, proofreading this, I should add that I had a Teroldego at the bar (connected to the biulding that I live in incedentally) It was a whole different animal from Angelo's. This other one was just like any other red wine that Genevieve might help pick out based on the label art]

[THIS PARTY, PART II] VOI CAFFE'? UNA GRAPPA?

Next Angelo busted out his Grappa. It's illegal to make grappa at home in Italy just like in the states, but I get the sense that Angelo has plenty of company in the illicit production of excellent spirits.
Grappa is like Tequilla in that it has a tremendous range between really bad and really good. Vodka is on the other end of that spectrum: As far as I'm concerned vodka is just vodka, if it is kind of gross, you can put it through a brita filter a few times and it becomes really easy to drink. Try it. But Grappa... Angelo's Grappa was definitely good, like really good.
What you do is this: Get all the grapes and smash them up. Let'em sit somewhere for a while. Siphon off the liquid into a barrel or what-have-you, this is wine, but you should wait a while before you drink it (even though its drunkness-bestowing are mostly as they will be once it's seasoned (aged), the residual sugars and that shit that settles out over time makes the wine "Molto Bruto" (very ugly)... Bella/Bruta--opposites.. Also, Angelo says that the moon has a lot to do with the fermentation and also the settling-out and seasoning of wine. Says it's common knowledge.
So now you have you're wine resting off somewhere, and also a buch of wine-soaked grapeskins. Just throw that slop into the still, do a primary distilation and keep all the distilation, heads tails and if you have to run and errand and you get a ton of water too, meh, I don't think it matters as long as you don't let it burn. Then you have all this grapeskin free liquid, pretty rich in alcohol. Put that back in the boiling end of the still along with maybe some moscato wine or any other strongly flavored aromatizing entity if you wish. Now, the art: carefully collect small batches of the first stuff to come out and save them, a bunch of varyingly toxic and tantalizing molecules start to march out in order of vapor pressure, or some such chemistry term. Then comes our friend, ethanol, then some mostly harmless but varyingly awful tasting 'tails' (Booty grappa, anyone?)
You need a very finely tuned piece of equipment for this process. It is called a nose. For example, I've got quite a snout, but it would be irresponsible to trust my nose at his point in my life for such a delicate task.


Well. Seems like that brings us to the present moment doesn't it??
Right now I'm in a village called Coredo at the top of the north side of the Val di Non in Trentino Italy. I've been doing apprentice stuff around this butcher/salami maker's workshop/storefront. Nobody speaks english so I'm learning Italian really fast, which has gone from difficult and isolating to exciting and fun in the past few days. I'm on the other side of my first bout of **oh shit what I am I supposed to do!--I can't just mosy around this foriegn country where nobody speaks my language and ask 'hey, mind if I follow you around and and watch you make food for a few weeks??' ** phase and now I feel really good again.

I'm past half-way through a three week stay in the labyrinthine 4 story complex that houses the business and most of Massimo's family. This little apartment on the top floor is my domain for now. At present I'm sitting in my little kitchen with its east-facing window. I just saw a flatbed pickup roll downhill on the street below loaded with about 15 or 20 5-gallon stainless milk canisters and then a few minutes later saw it roll off back up the road, unloaded. This little apartment that's mine is usually vacant they told me, also indicated by the abandoned stationary bike from the '80s, the dormant behemoth dehumidifier, and various ice chests sitting in the atrium.

It's a cozy affair; just the little atrium, one bed, one bath, and one kitchen with one Six range gas/electric convection oven/broiler and all the nice cookware one might need including an array of perfectly sharp knives. Yes, somehow after a yearsworth of dreaming and planning and hoping I have landed in the realness. This is a family that knows about food.
COWS TO BEEF
Well, wasn't really bargaining for it, but I got a heaping helping of realness on monday. Turns out that Massimo's joint is a slaughterhouse. That's pretty sensible isn't it? I mean, there's tons of farmers around here who very much understand that the couple of cows that mow thier unused (that is, un-appled) pastures for them are made of meat of a high quality, meat they'd like to eat. It's very very rare to find a slaughterhouse/butcher storefront in the USA. I've seen one though, in Arkansas. The demand is growing now though because of the desire to eat one of the cows you own, but also know what its last moments, or in the case of our great nation, days or weeks of crowded soy and corn based existence (shoutout to all the cow-owners out there).
Massimo killed four cows, three veals that he bought from two different people, and one old cow that he did as a job for its owner. He was really tired as the final cutting and hoisting was finaly at hand. So that meant he let me take a whak at some of the heavy lifting.
I know it's not my place to do any of the skilled slicing, if they took the time to teach me they's get behind and besides it's really skilled work that takes a long time to get the hang of. The only two people who cut meat are Massimo and Michele. Michele's been doing it for ten years and of course Massimo was bound to be a butcher from birth. His brother is a butcher too, the generational business started about a hundred years ago when the demand for one started to mount in this neck of the valley. Before that, slaughter and dressing meat was mostly task for whoever had the animal and whoever was willing to help.
Massimo was thinking "Ques'animal e' troppo veccio per mangiare, Ostia! Gli ossi sono troppo bruti per tagliare, dificile' la vita del macellaio." He certainly wasn't thinking, "damn! I just killed, gutted and chopped three cows in half lengthwise," I sure was though when he handed me the long handled bone cleaver and sat panting against the railing of the hydraulic lift platform. "Voi provare" yeah, I did for sure want to try. But shit, This beast was mooing an hour and a half before! And I had just spent twenty minutes with a hose on full blast hydrating its steaming aromatic stomach contents enough to flow down the floor drain! (OK, don't freak out, but the heaping bulk of humid grassy bits... actually started to smell really good, not at all like cow poop or barnyard days... more like vigorous beer fermentation with some kind of extraterrestrial hop meets freshly mowed wildflower field) Gross!! Nope.

So, It's not like I havn't chopped up dead animals before, but only on special occasions and never one ton ones, right down the middle with a fifteen pound axe. I gave it all I had, got down throught the upper thorasic vertebrae, past the shoulders, and then the curve of the neck started to act like a shock absorber for my hacking. Massimo had caught his breath, so he took up the cleaver and laid a few more chops down before finishing the job with the saw. He told me to push the sides of beef down the rail off to the side of the room. It's just this greasy rod that these flat-faced hooks easily glide across, but not so easily when they have a riddiculous load on them. I think Massimo had a private chuckle while he watched me inexpertly wrestle the former cow around the curve of the rail. I didn't mind, I'm sure it was hillarious to behold.
In short, once the're on the rail, animals are just meat to Massimo. That's on a good day. On a bad day they're just Euros, money that has to be ground, spiced, dried, smoked and aged just so before it can be redeemed for legal tender. I say "once they're on the rail" but maybe even before the're on the rail, I don't really think so, but it was tough to tell. Michele doesn't like to do the deed though, he did the last calf, he was quick and precise with the gun and the chain and the wench, but he told me that "E' bruto fare cosi' i vitelli, non mi piace, ma cosi' e' il lavoro"
Well, that was my cow experience. Maybe you'd like to know just how they meet their end? It's a special pistol. A normal pistol with a bulky looking barrel that has this three inch long (9mm diameter) cylinder that shoots out and then goes back in, it looks like a power drill with no bit in it. You load a blank into this thing and shoot the cow in the head. It falls to the ground as if it were held up by a string and the string just broke with the same crack as the pistol. Then it's hoisted up by a back leg, kind of flailing dangerously with knee-jerk aftershocks of having its brain ended in a flash. Once it's upside down it's important to cut it's throat quickly. It's heart is beating still for a little bit and this helps to get all the blood out, also when both jugular veins are cut it means that what little brain is left is getting no oxygen. Massimo didn't tell me that particular tidbit, but it is the idea behind kosher slaughter. Matt Youngblood put knife to neck for the sake of a party we had at my house one time and the guy at the little goat farm in Austin told me most of what I know about slaughter. It was really helpful to have this understanding before coming here. By the way, try pushing on your own jugular veins and see if the world doesn't immediately start to slip away.
IN CONCLUSION
So yesterday I started to get sick, and strange thing, it really was a huge stroke of luck. It's Saturday, Shabbat, and I really needed this day to gather myself. Not from slaughter five days ago--changing the subject--much more because after having arrived here nearly two weeks ago my head was just spinning from the newness. Each day Massimo thought of something for me to do, not just loading carts of sausages and vacuum sealing, but also tagging along to his other sattelite location in the next valley over, going to the mind-bending apple-sorting and distribution center that sorts and packs world-premier quality apples to UK, Algeria, Russia, and the rest of Europe. (Each apple is photographed sixteen times and then the software guru lady, Eva, applies one of many different computer programs to sort it into one of about 22 grades. The program she chooses depends on the overall quality of the apples of the 300kg load contained in each crate that comes from the independent orchards who belong to the cooperative called Melinda. Ooof I could go on about this apple sorting factory! one super interesting anthropology note: it's only women iwho work in the packing room, recieving computer sorted apples and loading them into various boxes, giving the finest apples a final inspection. I asked Eva why it was only women, 200 people, all women. I mean this is like fertil ground for the type of guy who goes to pilates classes for the chicks! She just laughed and said something like, "yeah, I know! no men want to sort I guess, it's not like they couldn't, we have the same thing on this side of the factory, all the forklift operators are men. except for two women! I don't know why it's like that." Then when I asked Mauro, the distributions office guy that Massimo hooked me up with, he said it was because women have the right eye for sorting pretty fruit. Women do the shopping usually and women are more discerning of what looks nice. I tend to agree, I also know a few men who would be excellent apple sorters!)

Where was I? I really have to be selective about what I write about from these past days or this will go on forever. The point is, my brain's in qiute a state from all the firsts it's been given back to back. It's been wonderful and also exhausting. Just to maintain any knid of inner normalcy is a task when there's not much opportunity to take a respite in the familiar, you know what I mean? I havn't had a conversation, phone, IM or otherwise with another person in my native languge for this whole time in Val di Non. It's called immersion, but I didn't know it was going to feel a bit like drowning! (in a good way) So, I think that's mainly why I got sick. I didn't realize how much mental energy it was taking to do easy day to day type stuff, and my body fell victim to bacteria that decided to GO ROUGE!!

SO today everybody is careful to avoid me and they urge me to eat medicine and soup and chill out by myself. I don't even feel that bad and I'm in a really good mood. All I want to do is write and breathe through my nose and I'm not disappointed to say that writing is coming more easily. I'm feeling that huge sense of gratitude I wrote about in a previous post agian. I mean, this, right now, writing this blog is a requirement for me, one of the very few stipulations I have to worry about. And I've sipped broth, looked out the window, daydreamed, and thoroughly enjoyed this day of writing and stitching together all the scatterd bits of writing I've accumulated since I got to Italy. It's pretty backwards that this was the perfect shabbat, just what I needed, and I've done two weeks worth of work!

Thanks for reading, lots of what I put up here is copied right from letters to friends and family. Somehow writing for "the blog" has a feeling of emptiness about it, I know that a few people read this, but if I don't know about it, I may as well be writing in my journal (a very different writing style that has no business on the internet). SO, Please, please, please, if you have a question or anything--any comment at all, go ahead and comment it. Or email, facebook, couchsurf, snail mail... shout really loud into the jet stream... whatever. Any questions or thoughts that crop up for you might help me take advantage of this opportuniy a little bit better!

Ciao!








PS, listen, internet is in short supply here, I'm keeping my fam awake now!. This is the test of the post. Any numbers refer to pictures. I will refine this post later. think of this as a sneak preview.