The Man Who Ate Everything (31 page)

Choucroute garnie a I’Alsacienne
is so demanding under the best of circumstances that, after two meticulously authentic meals, I lowered my sights a few millimeters and limited myself to meats that can be collected in New York City after no more than two or three hours of shopping. I sometimes splurge by dressing up the choucroute with a roast pheasant or duck legs, grilled quail or confit of goose—all possibilities in Alsace—and enjoy substituting spaetzle or sliced, fried potato dumplings for boiled potatoes.

There is nothing remarkable about the recipe that follows. It is, I think, simply delicious in an everyday, authentic Alsatian sort of way.

Choucroute Garnie a I’Alsacienne

At least 3 hours before the feast, melt a
scant
1
/2 cup of duck or goose fat
in a heavy 9- to 12-quart flameproof casserole or stockpot, add 5
cups of very finely sliced yellow onions,
and cook, stirring, for 10 to 15 minutes until the onions are limp and translucent but not browned. Meanwhile, put 5
pounds of drained fresh young sauerkraut
in a large strainer, pour
2 quarts of cold water
over it, press firmly to expel the water, and leave to drain again. On a 6-inch square of cheesecloth that has been rinsed in warm water, place 25
black peppercorns, 1
^:
/2
teaspoons of coriander seeds, 5 cloves, and 15 juniper berries;
gather up the corners and tie with kitchen
twine. Then make a bundle of
6 branches of parsley, 4 branches of fresh thyme,
and 2
bay leaves;
wrap the
leaf of a leek
or a strip of parchment paper around the middle of the bundle and tie tightly with twine.

When the onions are ready, stir in
1 1/2
cups of dry Alsatian wine
(Riesling or Sylvaner), 2
cups of homemade chicken broth,
and 2
cups of cold water.
Add a well-rinsed
1 1/2
-pound slab of unsmoked, dry-salted, or brine-cured bacon
from which you have removed the rind, and which you have cut crosswise into two equal pieces; a 1
1/2
-pound slab of smoked bacon,
also divided crosswise; 2
dry-salted or brine-cured pig’s knuckles or shanks,
rinsed well;
1 pound of smoked pork butt
from which you have removed the netting, if any; the spice bag, the herb bundle, and
3 carrots,
scraped and washed. Sprinkle 1/4
cup of finely minced garlic
and 2
teaspoons of coarse sea salt
over all, and lay on the sauerkraut, fluffing it with your fingers.

Add enough
cold water
to bring the liquid to an inch below the top of the sauerkraut. Cover and, over medium heat, bring to a boil. Immediately reduce the heat and continue cooking at a strong simmer for
1
1/4
hours, stirring every 20 minutes. The sauerkraut should still be crisp. Remove from the heat and let cool for anywhere between 30 minutes and 1
1/2
hours. Then begin the final preparation, which requires 45 minutes of frantic yet ultimately satisfying work.

Peel
4 medium potatoes,
cut them in half, and cook in 1 cup of the sauerkraut liquid until tender.

Preheat your broiler. Place 4 quarts of water over high heat; when it comes to a boil, it will be used to cook the sausages. Meanwhile, with long tongs, remove everything but the sauerkraut and its liquid from the casserole: Place the two pieces of smoked bacon on a
plate. Place the salted bacon, the smoked pork butt, and the pig’s knuckles in a large baking dish, moisten with sauerkraut liquid, cover with a wet kitchen towel, and keep them warm in an oven or toaster oven set to low, or over a pot of barely simmering water. Moisten the kitchen towel again from time to time. Discard the carrots, the spice bag, and the herb bundle. Put the sauerkraut casserole over medium heat, stir well, and simmer, uncovered.

When the sausage water has come to a boil, drop in 4
white veal sausages
(weisswurst or bockwurst) and
4 smoked country sausages
(bauernwurst), and reduce to a simmer. After 5 minutes, remove the white sausages to a skillet greased with
1 tablespoon of goose or duck fat.
After another 5 minutes, add 4
Strasbourg sausages
(knackwurst) to the water, remove immediately from the heat, cover, and leave for 15 minutes. Brown the white sausages over medium heat.

Meanwhile slice both the smoked bacon and the salted bacon crosswise into half-inch-thick strips and grill them under the broiler until crisp and deeply colored but still moist within.

Drain the sauerkraut and heap it up on a very large, warmed platter. Slice the smoked pork butt into eighths. Remove the sausages from the water and cut them and the browned white sausages in half crosswise. Arrange the sausages, sliced meats, and potatoes around the sauerkraut and set a knuckle at its crest. Serves 8.

November 1989

I returned home from a week in Cesare’s kitchen in Albaretto della Torre, population sixty, with an indomitable urge to cook. I began by heaping two pounds of flour and polenta on my wooden table, molded a deep crater in the center, broke twenty egg yolks into it, and began stirring the eggs with a fork.

Every day all over Italy countless cooks do precisely this when they make pasta, except that using only egg yolks is something I had learned from one of Cesare’s neighbors and except that I ran into a problem. As I began to incorporate flour from the crater’s inner wall, a wavelet of egg splashed over the top, causing serious erosion, and when I nimbly scooped up a handful of flour from the stable side of the mound and used it to stanch the flow, the crater collapsed. A torrent of egg yolks, now thick with flour and cornmeal, surged across the table, carried off a pile of chopped garlic and, like molten lava rolling over a Hawaiian housing development, leaving death and destruction in its wake, headed toward my handwritten notes. As I snatched away the notebook, the flood plunged on, lifting two rosemary branches as though they were matchsticks and cascading over the edge of the table and into an open silverware drawer.

Cesare never warned me about making pasta near an open drawer. He did suggest that I would do better with an electric mixer to form the dough, kneading it afterward by hand. My wife
contended, among other things, that if I had washed the silverware immediately, it would not have taken on the feel of industrial-grade sandpaper. I replied that if laundry science had been my goal, I would not have traveled thousands of miles to a remote hilltop in Piemonte.

“Food eaten in anger turns to poison in the stomach,” I reminded my wife when dinner was ready, quoting a timeless Sufi saying. But the danger was past, for when the tastes of the Langhe were spread before her, she grew docile as a lamb and congenial as a kid turning slowly over an acacia fire.

Cesare is chef and owner of a restaurant called Dei Cacciatori (the Hunters’ Place) or Da Cesare (Cesare’s Place) or sometimes both. Albaretto is a half-hour drive south of the ancient city of Alba in the part of Piemonte (“Piedmont” in English) called the Langhe, and to these eyes it is the most magical hill country in all of Italy. In the autumn, when the grapes and hazelnuts have been gathered, when truffles ripen under the hillsides and wild mushrooms grow up between willow and oak, the Langhe becomes an epicurean madhouse. Germans, Swiss, and Italians flock there for
tartufi bianchi d’Alba,
the intense white truffles of Alba; for Barolo and Barbaresco, the noblest red wines of Italy; and for the finest veal, game, berries, porcini, hazelnuts, and chestnuts you can eat. Alba is only a two-hour drive from Milan, one hour from Turin, or a half day north from Nice. Spending a few fall days around Alba makes for one of the greatest gastronomic vacations you can take anywhere in the world. Yet travelers from the United States are rare, perhaps because Alba is not on the way to anywhere else.

It was a rainy November evening when I had my first meal at Cesare’s. The dining room was rough and warm, dark wood against stucco walls and tall shelves of wine bottles begging to be opened. In the stone fireplace at one end of the room, a sizzling joint of meat turned slowly over a wood fire. The frenzy of the white truffle season was upon us, and the room was packed beyond its usual capacity of twenty-five guests.

Cesare’s children, Elisa and Filippo, brought us plates of tripe and fresh porcini and a tiny green the size of clover, all hidden under paper-thin slices of white truffle. A wild-duck breast followed, flavored with a sweet sauce of chestnuts and white truffles, and a large onion baked on a bed of salt, scooped out and filled with white truffles, meat broth, pureed onions, and cheese. Each course was Cesare’s variation on a Piedmontese theme, robust and refined at the same time, the fantasy food of a country boy. Cesare (pronounced “CHEH-ZA-ray”) is forty-two, with thinning chestnut hair, an ample nose, a full mustache, and sharp gray eyes. He is the son of a farmer who owned the original Dei Cacciatori down the road from Cesare’s current place—Cesare has turned it into a guest house—and who cut hair as a sideline. “I would simply like to be thought of as a good cook who continued the traditions of his region with his own imagination,” Cesare says. Some consider Cesare the best cook in the Piedmont, one of the best in all of Italy. “Cesare is also a few crazy,” I was told by a great wine maker whose vineyards are nearby and who first introduced me to Dei Cacciatori. “But what can you expect of a genius?”

Cesare’s wife, Silvana, brought us a baked potato drenched in grappa and a cream of hare with white truffles—somewhere between a mousse and a pate—and asked us if we would like to start our meal. We were baffled until etymology came to the rescue: “antipasto” literally means “before the meal” or
“repast”
(not “before the pasta”). Piedmont is famous for its antipasti; one local restaurant brings you a procession of seventeen, each served separately or in little groups, never crammed together on a huge platter.

The repast started with a variety of traditional Piedmontese pastas. Some of us had
tajarin,
an incredible type of tagliatelle or tagliarini noodle typically made with only the deep orange yolks of local eggs. Others chose
agnolotti,
tiny ravioli stuffed with meat and cabbage or spinach (or, as tonight, stuffed with pumpkin) and pinched together by hand. Both were moistened with
sugo
d’arrosto,
a thin sauce of browned butter, sage, and meat broth and both were showered with white truffles.

Next we had to choose between oven-roasted wild boar, a guinea hen baked in clay scooped up from Cesare’s land, or a spit-roasted leg of kid just taken from the fireplace. The kid was the most perfect piece of meat ever to enter my mouth. The outside was dark and crisp and pungent with herbs and smoke from the acacia-wood fire; the inside was sweet and succulent and practically falling apart, something like the best North Carolina pork barbecue. Now I understand why James Beard once wrote that spit-roasting over wood is the ideal way to cook meat. (Cesare, who typically shows contempt for precise measurement in the kitchen, insists that the bed of the fire must be exactly forty centimeters below the spit. He uses acacia wood because he bought a vast amount of it last year when the government put a road through his friend’s property, but says that oak and vine cuttings would be preferable.) I have become obsessed by the concept of spit-roasting, and I am thinking of moving to an apartment where I can set up a motorized spit in a wood-burning fireplace, even if the place lacks windows and running water.

Dessert was a pear poached in Barolo with a sauce of
mirtilli
(whortleberries or tiny blueberries) and a puzzling platter of leafy hazelnut branches. The leaves were pretty enough, though the hour seemed late for a change in the table decoration, and the glossy brown nuts themselves were impenetrable without a nutcracker. At last we discovered that Cesare had replaced one hazel-nut in each cluster with a sweet, golden cookie.

When inspiration deserts him, Cesare simply shuts the restaurant for a while. He does not have much patience with restaurant critics. When the Michelin guide to Italy—not the proudest achievement of that company—awarded him his first star several years ago, Cesare posted a sign on the front door of his restaurant:
if you’re here just because you read my name in michelin or
veronell
i, please do not enter
.
More pragmatic than Cesare, Silvana put her foot down, and the sign disappeared.

But the critics have been kind to Cesare. He was discovered in 1972 by Nino Bergese, the most celebrated Italian chef of this century and cook to King Umberto; Bergese told Luigi Veronelli, author of the standard guide to the restaurants of Italy,
ris
toranti
di Veronelli,
and soon Cesare became widely known. “Personal, inventive, and refined. … A great cook, at once a faithful interpreter of traditional Langhe cuisine and capable of exceptional new dishes” is how I translate Sandro Doglio’s appraisal in his
Mangiare & bere in Piemonte e Valle d’Aosta,
the most comprehensive guide to the restaurants of Piedmont. “Inspired … moody … extravagant … at times bizarre” are the adjectives that Faith Willinger applies to Cesare’s cuisine in her indispensable
Eating in Italy
(Hearst Books, with a much-updated edition expected in early 1998).