Where it all started : LASSÚ GLI ULTIMI
Before we get started proper with building the archive, perhaps an explanation of the name of the project will go some way to give context to its purpose.
Let’s go!
Being half Italian, as a lad I spent lots of time in the mountains of a forgotten pre-alpine town in Italy called Biella. This was my mother’s home and thinking back on it now, I remember that as long as I had a piece of bread, a hunk of cheese, a salame and a knife, I was able to have small adventures out on the mountainside for days on end. I had an old shepherd’s lunch basket that hung flat against my side, round and flat, the diameter of a football, with half of the top made from a solid block of wood- this was the flap you would open to access the inside, leaving it down to act as a small chopping board for your lunch.
I never questioned the moulds that covered these hyper-local foods, the fact I had no fridge, nor did I think twice to drink the water that came from natural springs. It was mountain life. My mum told me how she still remembered getting a bowl of “schiuma” as a girl, where if you were lucky enough to catch outdoor milking, all flowers and skirts, the herders would spray warm milk from the udder into a wooden bowl from a long distance, making it all froth so you could eat the sweet delight with a spoon.
Following my years of adult research into traditional food production methods, I returned to these mountain memories with the penny-dropping realisation that is behind absolutely everything I do- it’s the informed understanding that those foods were made from the animals that grazed beautiful and wild alpine pasture, and for as long as I was out there with the herders eating like they did, the primo sale and macagn’ cheeses, the cured bull loin and salame, I too was becoming the mountain through its eating. It felt right. There is no stronger connection to land than this, and it is what makes me question everything that we eat.
As an adult in London, I honed my understanding of natural milk processing as a cheesemonger and affineur of the more traditional cheeses from France and Switzerland, beneath the train arches of Bermondsey.
When I grew familiar with the cheeses I was working with and tending to, I found myself being drawn to the lives of the makers themselves, wanting to know how those foods had come to pass. What part of place they represented in their delicious, physical form. What they were producing was was pure connection to their landscape that they transformed into food with very old methods. The ability to understand nature and seasonal cycles, to take advantage of the wild gluts and harvest, so that you could more readily survive the harshness of winter in remote places far from villages and towns. Resourceful problem solving, using wind, salt and acidity to give perishable food an indefinite shelf-life, with methods that involve no chemicals, no gas, no electricity, no plastic, no haccp, no suing, all to sustain life in the remote parts. It was beautifully honest and unsullied by modern food production requirements, and the key to the disconnect I strive to heal between how food was once made and how we consume it in our current broken system, because we can no longer see the wood from the trees and are at risk of forgetting.
We all respond so well to the things that we discover are made outside of these watchful eyes, to the things we are sold under the counter in markets.
I began staying with these inspiring people, heading deeper into the mountains and hidden places, to document their unique methods of production for some of the rarest cheeses and learn from their inspirational ability to survive in their given geographical context. It was no longer just about cheese, but rather how to keep meat from turning, the special breads that were blackened on the outside to keep moulds away for longer life, burning cotton wool in glass jars to create natural vacuums, broth where water is flavoured with inedible cheese rinds. Last scraps of cheese mixed with grappa in a clay pot over the hearth over multiple years, the contents of which is served on dry bread and will blow your face clean off, but you can still eat it, to waste nothing.
What I really took from it all was the astonishing depth this way of life still holds, and the importance of keeping this established knowledge from fading away by maintaining its generational passing.
Learning of one such gap that presented itself in Ireland, I left London to see what I could do to help support the last smoker of exclusively wild Salmon in Ireland when I found that her daughter had left the business.
Terrified at the prospect of 40 years coastal fish preservation hanging in the balance, this became a four year project to turn Woodcock Smokery of Sally Ferns-Barnes into a learning centre, to keep alive the tradition by celebrating the fish, the Blackwater fishers, the smoking technique and the ethics behind actual artisanal production.
This new access to authentic coastal, artisanal methods has been wonderful to observe, as everyone is now able to learn directly from an expert of their craft, honouring the artisan not only as a producer, but also teacher. Finally! These are the people from which we should be learning.
Although hard to find, I observed that the more fringe the communities in which artisans operate, from alpine mountainsides to the fishing villages of the Atlantic, the more reliant on these traditional techniques they still remain. I wanted to tell their stories to bring this knowledge to the fore, witnessing this added value when you are able to explain the true provenance of food, as it established an invaluable connection. Growing within myself were the skills with which we work the food of our given landscape, using everything, wasting nothing. Observing the seasons. Being in harmony with nature, doing so just by virtue of being and without today’s projected hyperbolic romance.
I absorbed this information to take with me and pass on, through speaking, workshops and tastings, as well as helping new food producers harness old methods which I adore doing. Re-connection to long-established ways of staying alive that are reliant on the natural world, is healing indeed. This is why I have been working towards sharing the most powerful experiences I have had in this regard. Like cheesemaking bound with the alpine pastoral tradition of transhumance in the Biellese mountains (the first guided trip we ran back in May), or smoking wild Atlantic salmon on the coast of the wild Atlantic in West Cork. They shake up your soul and when we do these things, we remember.
A couple of years into my research, I came across a book. Made in 1972, a photographer from my mother’s hometown of Biella named Gianfranco Bini had gone into those pastures I knew as a child and was now revisiting, to document the fading traditions of the mountain. And within, beautiful images of herdsmen and women, butter and cheese-makers, clog carvers, charcutiers, and no sight nor sign of a single piece of plastic, hairnet, blue glove or chemical. He had foreseen the beautiful mountain ways he had grown up with becoming obsolete, threatened by the advent of fast food and mass production, and just like myself, sought to preserve them somehow to inspire others with the vitally important ways of living established way up there, in a world that only the stones know.
The book was titled Lassù gli Ultimi or, for you and I, Up There The Last.
By starting this substack, I am able to keep an ongoing record of these important recipes to help safeguard them and keep them all in one place.
Paid subscribers are what help me travel further into the mountains and islands for ongoing research. Paid subscribers will have full access to the archive including recipe method and photography.
Please consider becoming a paid subscriber, it really helps!
Photography by Max Jones and Heather Birnie
Very excited to see what else you share going forward!
Not yet! It is on my list though, thanks for the kind words!