THE BEST FOOD IN THE WORLD

I’m sitting in bed as I type with a mug of lemon tea as I seem to have caught a cold or some sort of bacteria this past week. It’s easy to understand why I have all these germs after spending a full 7 days with my classmates, either on a bus, intimately snuggled in a quasi-2 star hotel, feasting at numerous dinner tables, drinking vino, being out in the cold, taking photographs, butchering pigs, eating different cuts of pigs, cheese, laughing, and more travel. That doesn’t sound that great neither does it begin to describe the whirlwind visit our class made to the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy.

Lunch on day 4: Cured Meats

If I were to use one word to describe the trip it would be, it would be passion. The food producers we met in the course of the week had passion written on their faces and you could see it as they spoke about their jobs, none the less when we tasted the fruit of their labour. No wonder the common statement “This is the best-insert product- in the whole world” was applied to all their products. I don’t blame them, they have reason to be proud of what they do and anyway there is a blury line between fact and opinion when it comes to food products. My personal favourites this week were the Award winning Marcello Lambrusco, which I had at Ristorante Cocchi  in Parma, as well as the home made balsamic infused strawberry jam I had at Agriturismo Bosco del Fracasso.

It was a fascinating trip: learning about of the food we love, their stories and the traditions involved in the production and the consuming, meeting the producers and having a glimpse of their lived experiences. A joy for the anthropologist in me. The only problem was my lack of Italian to express myself. I’m slowly trying to solve that problem. But for now I must rest as I am tired from a week of eating “The best food in the world”. More to follow this week about feasting in Emilia-Romagna. 

Some of the terrain in Emilia-Romagna 

Kuvhima

Kuvhima, if I have spelled that correctly, translates to "hunting" in the Shona language. The assumption is that when you go kuvhima you return with meat of some sort: rabbits, pheasants, game not fungus. Well I’m in the Piedmont region so the idea of returning home with fungus is more than acceptable, if not praised.

Properly dressed in boots of all sorts we went hunting for the sought after fungus that grows in the depth of the earth known as a truffle. Although it felt like a game of nascondino/ verstoppertje-(my attempt to say "hide and seek" in Italian and Dutch)  Tartufo nero  and  Tartufo Bianco di Alba were found. It was a fascinating experience watching our hunting dogs Kira and Zorro sniff their way through the woods as us humans trudged behind them in search of the hidden treasures. Frantic digging of the earth signalled to us that treasure had been found. When successfully retrieved we marvelled at our piece of expensive fungus and the dogs got a tasty treat in return.

The truffle has a certain je ne sais quoi to it. With its rich, and slightly pungent aroma, the truffle is for me an acquired taste. That being said you can do a lot with them. The truffle was guest star in some of these products that we tasted: honey, butter, cheese, salami, preserves, oil to name a few. 

It was a day well spent hunting and tasting expensive fungus. Not your ordinary hunting experience, but one that has a lot of money to it as a single truffle can cost roughly anywhere between €25 to a few thousand Euro.