How to make Coppia Ferrarese ("coupled" bread from Ferrara)

First, you roll each side into small cornetti (croissants)

Then you couple two together, and presto! Then you bake them, and they become deliciously crunchy on the outside and still soft and fluffy on the inside.

All of Rome in a Day (And a Half)

Rome was yet another whirlwind tour, a two day long trek around the city, but I feel as if we saw just about everything there was to see: we saw St. Peter’s and the Vatican museums, the Sistine Chapel, the Pantheon, the Colosseum and Roman forum, the Trevi Fountain, and the Ossuary of the Capuchin Monks. St. Peter’s was surprisingly easy to get in to, despite the mile-long line and estimated 3-hour wait we encountered when we first arrived. We decided to come back later, in hopes the line would shorten a bit in the evening- in the meantime we walked a loop from the castle, to the Pantheon, the Trevi fountain, and back to the Vatican museum, where the line had already dissipated (presumably to go to dinner). After following a never-ending maze of gallery upon gallery of religious and renaissance art, we finally came to the grand finale- the Sistine Chapel. Perhaps I was inundated by Renaissance art at that point, or perhaps it just took too long to get there, but I was not left in awe or at a loss for words by Michelangelo’s ceiling. It was beautiful, yes, and the colors were incredibly vibrant, probably kept that way with meticulous restorations and climate control, but it simply wasn’t more amazing than many other painted cathedral ceilings I’ve seen- perhaps less so, even, as the scale was much larger than most, and so it took fewer winged angels and muscular partially-robed people to fill the vast space. Overall, as one of my teachers would say, the Time was not equal to the Awesome. (This equation, which transcends both grammatical and mathematical logic, is usually applied to long-winded jokes with poor punchlines.) After standing in awe of the fact that this was the Sistine Chapel, we moved on, only to find that the way out was the same long, winding way we took in. This time we made no attempt to meander or enjoy the museum like good art connoisseurs, but made directly for the exit. Once we had made it back out of the museum, we found our way around to St. Peter’s, and got in with only a five minute wait in line and a quick metal detector/x-ray check of ourselves and our belongings- When I gave the guard my pocketknife, I was chided half-jokingly, half-mockingly for having such a dangerous weapon, and the knife was wrapped in a plastic bag and stowed for me to pick up on the way out. St. Peter’s was most impressive of all the cathedrals I’ve seen, but only in sheer size and richness: the pomp and decoration of the church itself seemed less tasteful and thought-out than many others I had been to.

Our last day in Rome, we rode the metro out to it’s furthest stop, then walked along roads for perhaps a mile or more, simply to see and walk on another particular road: Via Appia, or the Appian Way. This road leads from Rome to Brindisi, a town in the south-east of Italy near Otranto, and is one of the oldest roads still in existence (and use) today. It was built in 312 BC, as a supply route to Rome, mainly for military advantage but also for general accessibility of Rome to the world’s riches and imports. Now, the Rome-end of it is simply a well used suburban road, paved with square-cut black stones and several layers of worn blacktop. As it heads out of the city, it is flanked by a park, a small church, a restaurant, and a few brown signs for historical sights further down the road. Nothing unusual, nothing actually saying “here lies the very beginning of the oldest road in the world”. It doesn’t seem to get any recognition whatsoever. I was disappointed. It’s still just a road, I told myself, used for smooth and easy transport of goods and people: it has been a wholly pragmatic object for over 2,300 years, so why change it now? Besides, this stretch of the road isn’t even original, but has obviously been paved over time and time again.

…Still, it somehow felt special to walk down it.

McToast

After we bid a sleepy goodbye to the rest of our college group at 3a.m., as they piled onto a bus to the airport from Parma, Kayla and I began the next stage of our adventures abroad: venturing out on our own. We would stick together until Rome, where Kayla would meet up with her mom, and I would meet up with my friend Kennan, and then we would part ways. Instead of going directly to Rome, however, we decided to make a stop in Milan: we planned to take a train from Parma to Milan, spend the day and a night there, then fly to Rome on a cheap local flight. Giacomo arranged a taxi for us to the Parma train station, as his parting gift, so we didn’t have to drag all our luggage from hotel to bus to terminal to station on our own (we still had quite the time with the stairs at the train station though). We arrived in Milan around 10a.m, but did not anticipate the walk to our hostel from the station- Google maps told us optimistically that it would only take 25 minutes to walk, but it did not add our 120lb of baggage into the equation. Roughly an hour later, we finally dropped our bags off at our hostel and ventured out into the city once again. Our first stop was much-needed food, and I’m somewhat ashamed to say we went to McDonald’s. However, Italian McDonalds have one redeeming feature on their menu: McToast. This euro-menu item is simply a grilled ham and Swiss sandwich, but in Italy even McDonald’s ham is fairly good quality, and the McToast is comfortingly like something I would make for myself at home. And so Kayla and I set out to see the sights of Milan, scarves wrapped tightly around our necks and warm McToasts in our hands. From there, we walked everywhere. We saw all the usual things every Italian city has to offer (castle, gigantic cathedrals, open city piazzas), but also stumbled upon two exhibitions of Da Vinci’s sketches. We originally sought out The Last Supper, which is tucked away in a small but highly ornate church in the middle of a residential area of the city, but found that tickets were sold out for the rest of the day (15-minute slots must be reserved ahead of time, and only 15 people are allowed in every 15 minutes). Around the back of the little church, however, was another chapel which held (for 6 euro entrance fee) a random assortment of Da Vinci’s original sketches, carefully pressed between glass, in climate-controlled glass cases. Kayla and I wandered from sketch to sketch, at first in awe of the mere fact that we were looking at originals, then amused by the spontaneity within the sketches. Here is a precisely drawn automatic crossbow that can shoot eight arrows at a time, and can be reloaded faster than any other weapon of the time- but what’s this? It looks as if Leonardo has doodled a person swimming around in the upper left-hand corner, with some sort of snorkel device. And here is a to-scale catapult, capable of flinging flaming balls of rock and exploding debris at the enemy- just, er, pay no attention to that horse frolicking in a pasture off to the side. Either the great Renaissance Man reused his sketch paper, or his mind often wandered away from his commissioned projects. I prefer to believe the latter.

As we left the little chapel full of sketches, the ticket lady pointed out that our ticket would also get us into another art museum near by, where there was another exhibit of Da Vinci sketches, as well as many other collections of Renaissance art. Even though it was beginning to get dark and we felt like we’d walked almost every street in the entire city, we decided to go check it out. The little museum had quite an impressive collection, including a signature Da Vinci painting, but the high point of our visit there was the library: the dim, cool room was three stories tall and lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves, every one full of books, and most locked behind glass. It was the classic ancient library, rolling ladder and balconies and marble busts of famous bearded men and all, and to add the finishing touch, the center of the room held the second collection of Da Vinci sketches. I wanted badly to take photos of the room itself, but the museum’s proctors were stern and forbidding, and the “no photos” sign was blatantly apparent on the door (even if it was in Italian).

After the museum, we decided to call it a night, heading straight back to our hostel except for a brief stop at a grocery store for dinner- yesterday’s bakery rolls, some fresh mozzarella, pesto, and a tomato for each of us. We had a picnic of sorts in bed, then set our alarms for 4a.m. (for our flight at 7) and went to sleep.

Academia Barilla

The Academia Barilla, where we had 4 days of classes, is like the expensive vacation resort for culinary students and chefs. In this dreamland, this sparkling building of wonders, there is everything you always wanted in a kitchen and a learning environment. The kitchens are huge and immaculate, the tools you need always present themselves at hand, and dirty dishes magically disappear behind your back. All the ingredients are laid out before you, fresh and highest quality, any tedious steps like measuring and weighing already done. You simply come in and cook, cook for hours, never running out of clean spoons or pans, no matter how many you dirty. When you finish your culinary creations, you turn around to find one of the back counters is now a fully set dinner table, with bottles of cold water at every place. You sit down and enjoy what you’ve cooked, then whenever you like, you can leave- no clean up is required of you.
Exuberant descriptions aside, the Academia Barilla is an incredible facility, and was well used by us for the four days we were there. Our first day we were escorted on a tour through the labs, the main lecture/demonstration hall, and the tasting room- a room full of enclosed personal cubicles, designed specifically for tasting without outside stimuli interfering, each equipped with a comfortable chair, water fountain, and even special lighting (colored lights that offset whatever food is being tasted, to insure color is not effecting your perception). After a brief lecture in the lecture hall about what Academia Barilla is all about, we were lead downstairs for a little free time to explore the culinary library: over 100,000 cookbooks, thousands and thousands of menus, and some of the oldest and rarest culinary writing. I spent our spare half-hour slowly flipping through one of the many binders of old menus, menus from the 18th and 19th centuries, from Italy, France, England, even a few here and there from the U.S. There were menus from everyday family restaurants (plates of pasta for 0.30 lyra), menus from weddings and religious ceremonies, a menu for a duke’s luncheon, gold-edged and rolled up in an elaborate scroll case. I was surprised at how much of the menus I could understand, especially the ones in French, and at how simply they were written- many looked just like what you would read off an Italian-American family restaurant menu today.

Too quickly, it was time to leave the library and begin classes: our first day was themed around olive oil, and started with an olive oil tasting. Our teacher took us through the entire process of making olive oil, pointing out the countless things that could affect the flavor. Then we began tasting, a tablespoon or so of seven different oils from different regions. We smelled them, swished them around, studied the color and the clarity, then sipped a tiny bit and coated our mouths with it, pulling air through it up into our noses so that every tiny aroma and flavor could be noted. After discussing (rather ridiculously) what aromas we detected, from rotten leaves to pineapple juice to chocolate, we attempted to decode what it all meant. Green tints suggest there is more chlorophyll in the oil, and also more vitamins and minerals- however, thatmake it taste any better. If the oil is foggy, it probably hasn’t been purified or fully filtered, in which case it has more nutrients as well. If there are tannic notes, perhaps the olives were not sorted carefully enough, and there were stems or leaves in the pressing, or maybe they were treated too roughly, and the pits were damaged. Warm fruity flavors indicate a warm fall, with enough rain for plump olives. More acidity means a colder fall, perhaps drier as well, giving the trees less of a chance to store extra sugars and nutrients. What does it mean when you smell pineapple and chocolate in an oil? Well, no one could explain that one….
After our tasting, we proceeded to the lab for four hours of cooking with olive oils: we made a couple salads as starters, infused oil with pepperocini (hot peppers) for sauces, made a pasta with an olive oil base, and a roast rubbed in olive oil and herbs. All of them were delicious, and although we only made tasting plates of each, we all agreed that dinner at the hotel after class seemed unneeded.

Our second day was pasta. Just pasta, nothing but pasta. But what pasta we made: egg pasta for drying, fresh potato and spinach gnocchi, and a multitude of colored pastas. Squid ink pasta, tomato pasta, chocolate pasta, saffron pasta, more spinach pasta, all kneaded into balls of smooth playdough-esque colors. Then we were allowed to play with them, rolling out striped tagliatelle, black and orange farfalle, and crazy autumn-camouflage raviolis. Black-and-brown spaghetti with tomato sauce on top is in no way appetizing to look at, but we made and ate it eagerly nonetheless, attracted by the sheer novelty of it. The pasta day ended somewhat early, and we were allowed a little more sweet time in the library before heading back to the hotel for dinner.

The next day was the longest, and began with a cooking lab in the morning. We were cooking with meat, traditional and contemporary Italian recipes: a veal tartar (raw marinated veal) with Parmigiano mousse, lamb lollypops crusted in hazelnuts, a milk-braised pork roast, and osso bucco with saffron risotto. After finishing each dish, we all got to taste it before moving on– veal tartar is not what you think of when you want a snack at 10a.m, but it was undeniably good. In fact, all the dishes were undeniably good, and by the end of lab, we had each eaten more than a meal’s worth. Then lunch was served. After lunch, and another half-hour break spent in the library, we dove into cheese tasting. Eight cheeses later, it was time for another lab, cooking with (guess what?) cheese! We fried Scamorza, we baked Pecorino, we made deep-fried sandwiches of Sierasss and skewers of mozzarella, salads with fresh sheep’s cheese. I think we would’ve all died of a cheese overdose had the Barilla kitchen not produced a large pot of pumpkin soup out of nowhere to accompany the many cheese dishes. Needless to say, dinner was yet again utterly superfluous.

Our final day was the wine tasting. Class started, as always, at 10a.m. Our teacher looks like a teacher, but from the early 90s– he has thick glasses, unkempt hair, and a pale blue sweater with a collared shirt underneath. Appearances are quickly cast aside as he begins to talk, however, and I realize he is one of those people who has done everything, and now teaches only because it’s what he truly enjoys. He was a top manager for Mars (the candy bar, not the planet) in his prime, then moved to Italy and started his own small artisanal foods business, which he sold after eight years, so he could focus on consulting and teaching. He is a wine expert, which he slowly became along the way through his business, and out of personal interest. He gets very excited as he begins to really dive into our lecture on wine, and spurts information like an encyclopedia. We spend from 10a.m. to 1p.m. and from 2p.m. to 5p.m. in class, and we taste 6 wines in all. At one tasting per hour, there is a lot of lecture, but the time seems to fly: there are 400 different varieties of wine grape in Italy, so if you are going to spend an entire day on wines, this is the country to do it in. (to put that in perspective, the U.S. has a mere 35 varieties. France has 50.) The wines we taste are widely varied, starting with two whites, then moving through three reds and ending with a dessert wine (of the Moscato variety). One of the reds really counts as two tastings, because the teacher had accidentally gotten the same wine in two different vintages– a fortuitous mistake, he explains, since now we can do a comparison tasting to see how this wine ages, and what a difference two years in the bottle can make. After a day full of sniffing, swirling, sipping, and swishing, I’m more than ready for dinner, but less than ready to leave the Academia. I sneak in a few more minutes with the library, say goodbye to the staff, and head back to the hotel for the final dinner of our semester abroad.

Who Lives Inside the Wheel?

Our trip to the Parmigiano-Reggiano factory turned into much more of an all-day event than anyone anticipated, but I think it counts as the most interesting day I’ve had in Parma. Our tour of the factory started at 8a.m., because the fresh milk comes in early and must be used immediately with milk from the night before to get the correct mix of good bacteria. Milk from the night before is left in wide vats to separate overnight, then the cream is skimmed off the top before it is mixed with the fresh, whole milk from the morning: this provides the right amount of fat, but also gains all the good bacteria from the fresh milk, without having to skim it off (developed bacteria stay in the cream of the milk, where they can feed on the sugars). Our tour guide (who happens to be the owner), explains it in a much more expressive way, and even employs a couple of our group to help him act out the movements of proteins, fats, and water within the milk. As he says about bacteria, “these three good guy bacterias live in the wheel from the very start- they run around eating, but they never produce gas, so that they don’t make holes in the cheese- but they make it taste delicious!” The rest of our tour is equally interesting, from the room where the cheese is molded and stamped (I now know how to read the markings on a wheel of Parmigiano), to the brining room –“here we give all the wheels a nice salt-water bath for 19 days! It is very good for their skin…”– to the best room of them all: the storage room. We gazed upon over $3 million worth of cheese, stacked in neat rows on shelves that ran the length of the room and went all the way to the ceiling. This was one of two storerooms- the other had all the more expensive, older wheels in it. Most of the wheels we saw were not yet real Parmigiano-Reggiano, because they had not yet been inspected and stamped. After a year of aging, an inspector will come and check every single wheel, carefully hammering on it with a tool similar to a doctor’s reflex hammer, checking for hollow sounds or variations that could mean air bubbles in the cheese, and would keep that wheel from ever getting the official Parmigiano stamp. Any wheels that passed, however, got the official stamp melted into the side of their rind, and would go on to be sold on the market for around $900.
We ended our tour of the factory with a tasting of the 15 month, 24 month, and 36 month old Parm- Each had a distinct flavor and texture, drying and intensifying with every month. The oldest was my favorite, not because of the flavor, but because of the texture, dry and crumbly with tiny pockets of crunchy tyrosine (an amino acid). The flavor is unmistakable as well, of course, but every wheel will end up with different, sometimes unexpected, tastes and aromas mixed in- one 24-month Parmigiano I had definitely tasted like pineapples. Another was more like grass.
Instead of going home after our tour of the factory, the owner brought us down the road a couple kilometers to the farm to meet his dairy cows. This is the beauty of his company, he explains, patting one of the cows on the head: he can control everything. He knows the cows, he knows the milk, he knows the process, he knows everything about the cheese. “This way” he says, placing a hand dramatically over his heart, “I can be sure I am proud of the cheese.” Then he laughs, and says we should come see the baby cow that was just born this morning, and see the new barn that’s being built, and that we should come back that night, because the restaurant that is attached to the factory is also a bar/disco where he will be DJing tonight, and he would love to have so many young people there. He says he will play American music for us, and will go talk Giacomo (our guardian and program director), into keeping the rented bus for the night to bring us. Most of us agree eagerly. …after all, who wouldn’t jump at the chance to say they’d danced the night away at a Parmigiano factory?

Redi (time-warp backwards)

Our last day in Assisi was the longest and fullest of our short two weeks there. The night before we had had our last lab and final dinner, for which we cooked a medieval smorgasbord of roast pork and meat pies, garlic torte, herbed bread, and savory cookies to dip in spiced wine for dessert. After dinner, we went out to a candle-lit courtyard for a performance from the medieval reenactors of Assisi- reenactors who usually performed for saint’s day festivals, Christmas, and Easter within the city. First, there was the “court”, a king and queen (who had lead our fieldtrip the week before) who danced with their courtiers before being seated to watch the flag wavers. The flag wavers were much more skilled than their titles suggest, running and swinging their flags in elaborate patterns, sometimes juggling them to each other, dropping them onto their feet and the flicking them up again in high arches. Two of the flag wavers were small boys, perhaps 10 and 12 years old, but just as skilled and synchronized as the rest of their grown-up team. All of this was accompanied by a drum line pounding out a deep, heart-shaking beat. After the flag wavers, we were lead back inside to sit cross-legged on the floor around the medieval band and choir, who told the roughly-translated stories behind their songs as they sung them: they were a pagan group who sung about love and wine and the seasons, and usually traveled around performing for festivals and wedding parties. Their songs were lively, at times even rowdy, and accompanied by the lute, rebec (something like a small cello), recorders, harp, and a hammered dulcimer. It was beautiful and jubilant music, and we clapped and sung along like small children from our places on the floor. I felt like dancing and singing for hours afterwards, even when we had returned to our hotel- I had to force myself to go to bed much earlier than I wanted to, so I would be able to get up for our field trip to Tuscany in the morning.

Our fieldtrip began at 8AM, with a sleepy two-hour bus ride to Multipulciano, a region just over the boarder of Tuscany. The city of Multipulciano is, like most cities in central Italy, built on the very top of a hill, surrounded by sturdy walls with four or five large gates. Large buses are not allowed within the walls, as they could not fit down many of the streets anyway, so we are dropped off at the bottom of the hill to walk. We walked through the main street of the town, past a hundred little shops selling Tuscan wines and leather shoes, dried pasta and olive oil, until we got to Cantina del Redi. The entrance to the wine cellars looked normal enough, blending in as just another door along the street, but just inside the entrance stairs lead down far below the average townhouse basement. This is one of the oldest established wine cellars in Italy: although the main cellar was built in the 16th century, it is connected to an Etruscan tomb. The cellar has been used continuously since it was built, and has always produced respected wines. We tasted three wines, each accompanied by a tidbit of the regional cuisine: a slice of soft, sweet salame, a piece of sheep’s cheese, or a slice of bread toasted with olive oil. The first wine was a 2008, simple rosso- a cheaper table wine, blended from two different grapes. The second was a 2007, more expensive, Vino Nobile that you could buy now and leave in your cellar for 5 or 10 years, and have something worth five times the €12 you paid for it. The last was a 2005, special reserve, made from Briareo grapes hand-picked at their prime. You could definitely tell the difference in age, mostly by the absence of the tannic bite in the older wine, but also by the caramelly, smooth sweetness of the aftertaste. I wanted to buy the oldest, but the €20 price tag dissuaded me. I convinced myself that just a taste was enough, and that someday I would have a wine cellar, buy young wines cheap and coax them into such a delicious state on my own, then pull them out for special dinner parties. By then, maybe I would even be making my own sheep cheese and salame as well…

Duomo di Parma (an assignment for SOC 399)

The Duomo di Parma is a very old building, its 832 year-old façade a patchwork of replaced stones and mended mortar, its clock tower wrapped in scaffolding for refurbishment. The inside is dark and vast, a huge hall of endless pillars and apses, with a ceiling arching up into shadow. It appears much bigger than it is, because every wall is covered in paintings, opening out into whole other rooms and worlds that don’t exist- when I first walked in the door I turned around to find a completely different entrance depicted behind me, a giant archway flanked by stone lions, with crowds of people waiting on the other side. The trompe l’oeil was spectacular: some pillars and statues seemed to have three dimensions until I was close enough to see the cracks in the paint. I had seen good trompe l’oeil before, but I had never walked through an entire world of it.  The main hall is flanked by apses, and each apse has its own style. Some follow the mural-like frescoes of the main walls, with life-sized crowds gathered around a saint; others have smaller, comic-bookish storyboards of the life of a saint or stories of the Bible, painted in medieval style. One is done in Byzantine portraits surrounded by gold leafing and geometric patterns, another in a clean Victorian style with crown moldings, the next covered in more trompe l’oeil, this time of carved marble cherubs and Corinthian scrolls. One apse has no decoration at all, but has been done over completely in mottled gray plaster: an unadorned crucifix stands at the end, and the room is filled with plain wooden pews. Surrounded by all the extravagant embellishment and trompe l’oeil, the barren focus of this alcove pulls your eye in more than gold leafing and bright colors.
In the main cupola, the dome at the center of the cross-shaped hall, there are people painted all the way around the ceiling, dressed in colorful robes, bare-footed and surrounded by clouds, as if half floating and half climbing towards the top of the dome, which is incased in shadows. I cannot see what is at the top until someone from a tour group pays a Euro to turn on the lighting in the dome- then everything is suddenly and brightly illuminated. At the center is Mary, ascending to heaven, sunbeams bursting around her, groups of angels pointing and gesturing encouragingly. The painting is done so well that I can’t find the corners where the octagon walls meet the circular dome, they are covered so smoothly in clouds or flowing robes. I stare up at it until my neck gets sore, trying to make my eyes focus on the flat, solid walls I know are there, and failing. After 5 or 6 minutes, the lights go off again, and the ascension of Mary, with all her sunbeams, is darkened until someone pays another Euro.