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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
November 7, 2004
Paparot
Today I should like to shift the subject slightly from American politics to Italian food. More precisely to what they eat in Trieste and the Carso and in Friuli-Venezia Giulia -- that region "between Venice and Vienna" that is too often overlooked because it is small and because it is a kind of frontier. But what a frontier! For it is the place where Europe's Latin Germanic and Slavic cultural traditions meet and meld. The country of Slovenia is next door; and Istria the natural hinterland of Trieste though now separated from it by a national border is more Croatian than Italian. Trieste was once the free port and only port of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (did I forget the Hungarian heritage?) which made it a very cosmopolitan place. It was founded as Tergeste by the Romans at the Adriatic head of their province of Illyria (see Shakespeare's Twelfth Night). A multiculture built on Roman foundations; and only part of Italy again since 1954. Trieste city of Italo Svevo whose novel The Confessions of Zeno is among the world's great comic masterpieces -- indeed THE masterpiece of the psychology of self-deprecation. Also city of James Joyce of Rilke D' Annunzio Pasolini (who was a greater and more interesting poet than filmmaker I do solemnly believe). Ernest Hemingway too spent a lot of time in Trieste: the most celebrated bore in literary history. What makes the cookery of Trieste's region so splendid as Fred Plotkin explained in his gorgeous and definitive book La Terra Fortunata (2001) is the variety of its harvest and the combination with wine. Friuli-Venezia Giulia has everything from the fishing paradise of its Adriatic lagoons and marshes to the corn-bearing Kansas-like plain of the Bassa Friulana to the prosciutto-ventilating foothills of San Danielle to the intense vineyard patchworks of Collio and Gorizia to the pine-clad Alpine heights of Carnia and mountain valleys of the Val Canale. Everything grows there within a small space (less than 100 kilometres across) and since ancient times the region has been a crossroads of the spice trade gathering the products into its cuisine. It is admitted to be among the top culinary regions of Italy by the real gourmands (up there with Liguria Emilia-Romagna Sicily) but also among the top wine regions (with Piedmont and Tuscany). And it has in its small area perhaps the greatest variety of grape types in the continent of Europe. In a word it has everything including the charm of exoticism for it is hardly well-known. As I learned from Mr. Plotkin the good wise Friulian folk have an approach to the table that is as uncommon as it should be universal. They lead with their noses; they smell before they taste. The barbarians who inhabit most of the rest of this planet just gobble and gulp all tongue and no nostrils. And the Friulians understand -- unlike the communists at Ontario's Liquor Control Board who reduce wine from a joy to a source of government revenue -- that wine is not only a drink but among the essential flavourings in cooking from day to day. I am quickly running out of space my reader will need a recipe. I think the thing today is to make a soup. Trieste and its region is replete with soups and this one of spinach and cornmeal called a "Paparot" is my favourite item from Mr. Plotkin's wonderful inventory. Moreover I think it might serve as an introduction to the region's culinary mind: Take a kilo of washed baby spinach removing only tough stems and cook them until tender covered in only the moisture still clinging to the leaves. Squeeze out and reserve the liquid; then mince the spinach. Put a peeled clove of garlic in a casserole at low heat gently melting several gnarls of sweet butter to flavour it. Remove the garlic as it begins to colour then add and saut? the spinach ever so gently. Now while this is cooking cut a couple of inches of polenta into a bowl mixing a small fist of unbleached flour adding a ladle of your best chicken broth and stirring till lumpless. Put a full pint of your broth into the spinach together with the liquid you earlier squeezed then add the flour mixture little by little stirring thoroughly over medium-low heat for half an hour. Then let it stand for an hour lightly salted and peppered. Then heat it back up and serve (about six) with a bottle or two of fragrant cool (but not refrigerated!) Pinot Bianco. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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