EATING CAT, RABBIT, HORSE AND ILLEGAL BUTTER // In Defence Of The Mountain - PART ONE
A three-part reflection on the discovery of taboo traditions that are steeped in the complex and harmonious routines of pre-alpine survival culture.
There are a few recipes that sort of sit below my reality radar. They are the ones that get me most excited, that I come across through old books or told stories and though the chance of them still being put to practice in their authentic context is highly unlikely, it is the goal of this project to make sure of it. (Speaking of radars, I have been off it recently, putting together this large piece which will come out in a flurry over the next three weeks to make up for a largely iphone-dry January.)
As you will see, I am getting a little closer. Whilst researching this piece, I had to reckon with the real-time fading of food heritage by the physical perishing of memory. And yet, I was also granted a glimpse into a culture that still keeps such secrets, hidden in the mountains, living out defiantly above the modern world, but thwarted by it too. The difficulty is trying to find the communities and then once found, to gain the trust of these people who propagate traditional methods that I seek out in a real context, as they still depend on them to live. I saw amongst the communities that continue to practice true cucina povera, their ways are coloured by an element of insecurity and shame that has grown over the past century in contrast to modern life. The idea that wild food prepared without fridges or chemicals developed into stigma through what it represents- poverty over progress.
This is why they are still so secret and why they need investigating, as they offer tried and tested, genuinely sustainable approaches to living. I feel nothing but the fiercest pride for the artisans who practice them.
The names in this piece are not their real ones, out of respect for the alpigiani.
Paid subscribers get my additional photos from the field, the subjects of which are DEFINITELY NOT the alpigiani I recently spent time with for this three-part piece. ;)
IN DEFENCE OF THE MOUNTAIN
Part One
Max Jones
At the very end of last year I thought about how slicing into a fragrant trotter on new year’s eve, glistening with sticky fat and collagen, stuffed with shreds of a pig’s head and skin, fermented and served with lentils and fruit that has been preserved in mustard essence bought from a chemist, feels as normal to me as fish and chips. Zampone and Lenticchie is a traditional recipe that I grew up with.
I embrace this point in the year that I cherish and I recognise the meal as something profoundly familiar that connects me to my family in Biella, a small city in the prealps of Piedmont. It leads me to think how these rituals and ingredients stem from the common sense and ingenuity of thousands of people through hundreds of generations in this place, who figured out how to survive in their given geographical context.
I wonder about why my interest is so keen, how sharing my findings with delight and fascination makes me realise the extent to which we are disconnected from a way of living that is linked to the passing of seasons.
I remember how once I gave out pieces of wild Atlantic salmon I had smoked in Ireland at a tasting, and two people cried when they ate it. It wasn’t only for its remarkable flavour. It was that I was able to explain in great detail for an hour exactly where, who and how it had been caught, filleted and smoked. The richness of life and the lives behind each process and the extraordinary lifecycle of the actual fish itself, up until it had been outwitted by traditional river fishermen to feed their communities the same way for twenty-five thousand years. And not forgetting that the point of it all is that through its eating, we can live. The deeper I delve, the more I discover things that might help us going forward, and it is my job to present the whole picture.
Munching into the sticky zampone and thinking how the lentils represent good fortune for the year ahead, I decided it was high time to action a project I had been mulling over throughout 2023. The idea that people are everything and that knowledge of life in a specific place is particular and precious made me think that historically, most communities would look to their elders for wisdom and remembering, and I wanted to see what they could teach me too.
On new year’s day I called the retirement home of my old aunt Nini to see if I could go in one afternoon and give a talk about my research in traditional foodways. I was hoping to animate the space a little to help my aunt make friends, and was excited at the prospect of speaking with these grandparents who might remember what their grandparents cooked for them for lunch as children, hoping to listen with respect and humility to hyper-local stories of food with a direct generational connection to recipes from as far back as the late 1800’s, by my count. The ways of transforming their landscape into food, safely locked away in their personal experience and memory. A greater treasure to me there cannot be.
The reality was that we sat in a circle, around twenty-five of us, most of whom struggled to hear and many who genuinely couldn’t remember what they had for lunch that day. I was humbled by this painful paradox- that the knowledge I value most augments with age by real connection to the past, but is increasingly compromised with the passage of time, which is what makes it valuable in the first place. It is the crest of a wave, a swell of lived knowledge rising to a peak that comes tumbling down with physical and mental decay.
Initially it was difficult to stir these memories by asking them directly, I guess the idea of listing normal meals from one’s lifetime seemed too abstract. I changed my approach to be more story-led, hoping some of my own experiences would fan the embers of the sleeping crowd. I spoke about food and Ireland and fish and when I swam with wild salmon in the pool of an old forest, and this story-telling seemed to stir something. An elegant woman in her nineties with clear eyes spoke in a loop about her butcher husband’s skill to kill when most families kept a pig for meat-
“…no-one heard his pigs ever cry out, people would ask for him for miles around. He was so good. You should never hear a pig cry out. People would ask for him for miles around. He was so good. They asked for him from Vercelli to Ivrea. He was so good. You should never hear a pig…”
This rippled through the room as others chimed in with pig related stories which led to family dishes and we uncovered a few classics I knew well like panada bread soup, mountain trout in carpione (a kind of alpine souse), vitello tonnato, buseca, descriptions of real butter that you can’t find anymore, fresh schiuma from herders (a sweet froth formed by squirting milk into a wooden bowl straight from the cow), and other staples of the region I had already come across with no-one really able to recall how they were made, just confirming vaguely that they had indeed eaten them.
Amongst these precise and vague recollections, everyone agreed that food back then was different and better, prima del supermercato. It was easier to recall things they felt emotional about that connected them the people behind them, before the supermarkets.
I had no luck in securing some of the big recipes I am still chasing, like snake broth risotto or frogs cooked in raw milk and cream, but I intend to find them for this archive soon.
I was fascinated to hear the traditions of eating horse. This was another food that linked everyone there, who explained to me how the meat was beaten flat with mallet, covered in slices of ham and wild herbs, rolled up and roasted. How when you would ever feel sick or anaemic you would be given a horse steak or horse tartare, bought from the Macelleria Equina (horse butcher) and taken almost medicinally for its low-fat and high iron content but more importantly, the mighty strength of the animal itself you would take on through its eating- a sentiment that has carried through right up until today, with at least two horse butcher’s in Biella that are still growing strong.
After an hour or so we drew to a close with most of those present beginning to nod off. As the assistants wheeled the oldest among them back to their rooms, a man to my left who had been silent the whole afternoon reached out and tugged gently at my elbow. A handsome and classic looking gent in his eighties with dark skin and a sharp, silver haircut, he had sat in silence the whole time.
“Oi you” he shouted in piedmontese dialect, looking at me straight with wide eyes-
“Cats”
I had heard about this tradition of eating cats in the pre-alpine and mountain communities some time ago, but put it down to legend or a little joke told to startle kids. I had heard something about leaving them to age beneath the snow for a week, but this was when I was younger and didn’t have the knowledge with which I approach things now. It sounded absurd and whenever I brought it up I was always told by my elders that “yeah sure thing we ate cats” with a wink and a grin. I put it down to war-time desperation food, a one-off tale grown into legend.
The few that remained in our circle had a mixed reaction to the old gent, with some rolling their eyes in disdain and some affirming that yes indeed, “si mangiavano I gatti”. Difficult to translate, it’s something like “cats would have been eaten”, or “one would have eaten cats” or “yes they ate cats”. It is an indirect statement that is ambiguous by design and the difficulty was trying to find out just who exactly “they” were.
Not knowing it at the time, I had experienced something crucial to my research- I had been looking for recipes in a sort of horizontally radial sense, not considering elevation. When I got home I looked at a map and saw that the retirement home was as close to the centre of Biella as the higher mountain communities of the Elvo, except there are almost one thousand metres difference in altitude.
Perhaps “they” were up there.
CONTINUED IN PART TWO
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