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In the Ristorante Del Cambio in Turin the chandeliers and gilding combine to produce a misty glow. The entrance carpet looks like a Hermes scarf. The staff glide around as if on casters and conversation is carried out at the pitch of an idling and expensive motorcar. They have been serving meals here since 1757. In the lobby there’s an oil painting of Count Cavour – architect of the Risorgimento and a regular – and on the menu, if you’re lucky, is chicken Marengo, the dish invented for the Napoleon after an early triumph over the Austrians in the hills to the north. At Lingotto, once the Fiat factory now a conference and shopping centre, they are gearing up for the biennial Salone del Gusto, an international culinary fair organised by the Slow Food movement which has its headquarters at Bra twenty or so miles outside the city. As its name implies Slow Food is a kind of anti-McDonalds. Started by a Piedmontese food writer Carlo Petrini the organization campaigns for a return to traditional farming and production methods, the use of local ingredients and recipes, the preservation of indigenous varieties of fruit and vegetables and breeds of livestock. Like many campaigning gastronomic movements (CAMRA, for example) Slow Food is at once radical and conservative, forward thinking and backward looking. At Del Cambio the food is not so much slow as timeless. As such it fulfils many of the demands of Petrini and his followers. The menu di tradizione (which will set you back a handsome E66 without drinks) includes tajarin – the local egg rich pasta – with zucchini; veal and wild mushroom stew and a cheeseboard freighted with rare Piedmontese specialities such as the earthy Bettelmatt and Saras del fen, a creamy ricotta that comes ravelled in fine hay. The wine list leans heavily on the meaty reds from the Langhe valley – Barolo (invariably styled “The king of wines and the wine of kings”) and Barbaresco (lighter than Barolo and consequently often described as its “little brother”). The restaurant dubbed the “Old Lady” (a title it shares with the city’s most successful football club Juventus) is not alone in preserving Piedmontese culinary heritage. Even Turin’s more innovative kitchens honour local culinary tradition rather than simply burying it. Beneath the vaulted brick ceiling of Al Goramond amongst the timbales and sturgeon carpaccio you’ll also find a hearty dish of brill in a potato crust and the Piedmontese answer to ravioli, the semi-circular agnolotti, stuffed with goats cheese. At the chicly trendy Vintage 1997 meanwhile, the mosaics of tiny vegetables and fusion flourishes have not elbowed aside veal braised in Barbaresco, or agnolotti (this time filled with roast pumpkin and rosemary) while the ubiquitous Gianduja (a creamy mix of chocolates and toasted hazelnuts that more or less defines the phrase “Oh I really mustn’t have any more, but…”) comes in a mousse with vanilla sauce. The passion for local ingredients is not only to be found at the ritzier end of the ladder. The vast and sprawling market at the Piazza della Repubblica is the sort of place where the must-have accessory is a wheeled, tartan shopping basket (preferably held together with knotted orange twine) and all business is transacted at a volume sufficient to be heard above the yelling of the traders, the rumble of trams and the crazed twittering of caged songbirds. Here old ladies in head-squares weigh pear-shaped aubergines in the palms of their hands, men with the complexions of tree-stumps shovel finger-sized courgettes complete with flowers into brown paper-bags and diminutive nuns stare intently at the dead eyes of fen-bred carp. There are sweet chestnuts from the Valle di Susa, cherries from Pecetto, boxes of blanched cardoons that look like dead Triffids and piles of the sort of knobbly tomatoes that in Britain can generally only be grown by your Uncle Eric. Turin’s central role in the Risorgimento has lead to it being styled “The birthplace of Italy”. The city has also been the natal ward for a good deal of culinary invention. Grissini is the Torinese gift to peckish diners and the parents of hungry toddlers the world over; Nutella comes from here; so too the choc-ice (known as a pinguino you can still eat them at the gelateria that first created them, Pepino, a few doors along from del Cambio). Piazza Castello, full of snogging students, tumbling fountains and beds of acid yellow marguerites, is the birthplace of vermouth, or the commercial variety at least. In 1786, Antonio Benedetto Carpano concocted a mix of dry white wine and aromatic herbs, sweetened with spirit, which he believed would be a more suitable beverage for ladies than the local red wines. Carpano was by all accounts a cultured man with a passion for the poetry of Goethe and reputedly named his new drink after the German word for absinthe “Wermut”. It proved so popular that soon his shop was open 24-hours a day. Ninety years later a customer from the nearby Borsa came up with the drink for which Carpano is now best known when he marched in and, in the argot of the stock market demanded a “Punt e Mes”, a mix of one-and-a-half “points” of dark bitters to the usual bianco vermouth. Bombing in 1943 destroyed Carpano’s original shop, but you can still drink Punt e Mes across Turin. Ordering one during the aperitivo slot (roughly between six and eight in the evening) will give you access to a free finger buffet, one of the best of which is to be found at Café Platti. Platti is housed in a building the colour of glazed pastry. The window is decorated with little silver bowls of crystallized violet and rose petals, apple pies with lattice crust, bottles of Bicerin liquor, chocolate tarts and enough boxes of madeleines to send Marcel Proust back into a previous life. It’s the sort of place where elderly ladies in mink stoles stride through the door and demand a Negroni (a fierce mix of vermouth, campari and gin) and a bowl of water for their Dachshund. Baroque is a style of architecture which anyone who cares about food knows is synonymous with calories. Austria, Belgium, these are not countries that practice calorific minimalism. For the cooks of these countries more is more. Turin is one of Europe’s great Baroque cities and it shares an approach to portion control that anyone who has spent time in Brussels or Vienna will recognize. In Gelateria Fiori the massive ceiling light looks like the sort of thing
Esther Williams might have swum in. The marble counter is the colour of
hokey pokey ice-cream. A few hours later, the Café San Carlo. The service is so efficient you have to have to be on your toes on the staff will order your food for you. After rich cheese risotto (the Po valley is the centre of Italian rice growing) and a plate of cold roast veal with mayonnaise, tuna and capers I feel that if I eat anymore the bomb squad will have to carry out a controlled explosion, but the waiter waves aside my protest. “You can manage something small,” he says, “I’ll bring you something. A little thing”. It proves to be six candied sweet chestnuts and a mound of whipped cream. Afterwards I walk away gingerly feeling that if I hit a bump my suspension will collapse. In the Via Po I come across a small market of local organic producers that has been organised and promoted by the regional council. I buy a big slice of toma de Valchiusella off a man whose faded denim shirt and wild mane of greying hair, and scrubby beard gives him the look of somebody who would turn up on Rock family Trees talking about the time he played rhythm guitar in the Steve Gibbons Band. Made with unpasteurised milk it gives off the sweet, warm odour of cows in hay and has a salty tang that sends your saliva ducts into overdrive. It recalls the assessment of another Piedmontese cheese, toma veja, which it is said has threefold benefits, “It stems your hunger, quenches your thirst and cleans your teeth”. As well as the cheeseman, there are producers selling big jars of chestnut flower honey, fresh salami studded with fennel seeds, peaches in chocolate sauce. There are organic wines too. Nebbiolo, Barbera, Dolcetto and Asti Spumante, a sweet sparkling wine that will suffer forever in Britain by it’s association with 1970s wedding receptions, but which at it’s best is really, well, not as bad as you remember, especially if you are eating a rich desert such as dolce torinese, one of the city’s many delicious variations on the theme of chocolate and nuts. The most sought after of all Piedmont’s raw ingredients are also on display, white truffles. Unearthed by specially trained dogs (there was once a university of sorts for truffle hounds at Roddi) from between the roots oaks, chestnuts, willows, hazels and poplar trees, the truffle is a sensitive beast, particularly when it comes to altitude. It is only to be found between 1,300 and 1,950 feet. The white truffle has been described as “the poetic mystery of the gastronomic world”, but there is really nothing mysterious about it. It is a parasitic fungus that attaches itself to the root system of trees – the arboreal equivalent of athlete’s foot. The truffle is served with veal, chicken and in risotto, but perhaps most typically in fonduta, the Piedmontese version of the Alpine cheese fondue, which is here made using cream and egg yolks rather than the white wine and kirsch they favour across the border in France and Switzerland. The cheese used is fontina, which has been made in the Val D’Aosta since the Middle Ages (the first written reference to it is in Pantaleone da Confienza’s Encyclopaedia of Dairy Products which dates from 1477). Fontina comes in big yellow roundels and gives fonduta it’s delicate, creamy taste. I bought a jar of it from the stall of one of the producers in via Po. At home we ate it with grissini. My eight-year-old daughter pronounced it delicious adding enthusiastically “It’s like a Dairy-Lea Dunker!” Though it may be winning the battle in Turin, the Slow Food movement still has work to do. Addresses: Al Garamond Vintage 1997 Caffe Platti Caffe San Carlo Caffe Fiorio Caffe Pepino
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