I don't go to Italy to eat Italian food. I go to enjoy the cuisine of Tuscany, Sicily, Piedmont, Liguria, Sardinia. The country's best food is intensely regional--and in many cases, it's created by women chefs who learned to cook from their mothers and grandmothers.
When I went back this fall, I visited restaurants where I've had meals that are etched into my taste memory. Late October is a perfect time: Summer crowds are long gone, the grape harvest is in and, more important, menus are resplendent with porcini and white truffles, intricate pasta and risotto dishes, feathered game and the other dishes that go so well with the robust red wines of Piedmont and Tuscany. In short, it's heaven.
But those grueling foodie expeditions, two or three weeks of eating every meal at a very serious restaurant, are not for me. When would I wouldn't have time to search out the best porchetta (roasted pig) sandwich in Umbria--so succulent with its crackling skin and stuffing of wild fennel, garlic and black pepper that I had to go back three times in one day? Or to taste Luciano Sandrone's new Dolcetto straight from the cask along with homemade salame and bread baked in the village's communal bread oven? Besides, eight hours a day at a table, with a five-hour drive between lunch and dinner, is not my idea of fun. I know enough to pace myself; I want to be hungry to appreciate the food.
Especially the ones at dal Pescatore and Ristorante Guido, two places no one would ever just stumble across. Even with directions, these restaurants are not easy to find. Over the years, I've reached them via some curious adventures--bouncing down pitch-dark country roads, accosting winemakers on tractors for directions and, once, taking up an old gentlemen's offer to show me the way on his bicicletta . After reacquainting myself with them, I must say that both are even better today than I remember.
Each time I go to dal Pescatore near Canneto sull'Oglio, outside Cremona in northern Italy, I inevitably get lost. In late fall and winter, there's the fog to confuse things, and it's not easy following the obscurely placed signs to localita Runate, population 35. The ivy-covered restaurant stands at the edge of a lonely country road, with the small Oglio River behind. As we drive up, Nadia Santini pedals toward us in her chef's whites, the basket of her bicycle filled with the season's last deep-gold squash blossoms. Out back, her father-in-law, Giovanni, tends the terraced beds of the kitchen garden that slopes down to the river, while in the kitchen, his wife, Bruna, expertly rolls out the pasta for her famous tortelli di zucca, a pasta stuffed with pumpkin. Nadia's husband, Antonio, is inside, checking the wine cellar, a stupendous compendium of great Italian wines.
The restaurant gets its name from Antonio's grandfather, who was a fisherman, or pescatore. An old photo, taken when Antonio was a boy, shows his mother and grandmother cleaning fish outside, in front of fishing nets hung out to dry. Today this small outpost is an elegant two-star restaurant.
Nadia, who looks scarcely out of her teens, has been cooking 22 years. She's an instinctual cook steeped in the traditions of this region near Mantua where the food is still very much based on Renaissance cooking. Her cooking is completely seductive. I want to eat the grilled eel, the horsemeat stew scented with cinnamon, the delicate breaded frogs' legs again and again. This time, we start with a rustic fresh salame and culatello, a superb cured pork loin, sliced so fine that it is almost transparent and dropped like a handkerchief on the plate. Agnoli, meat-stuffed pasta the size of a wedding ring, float in a bowl of rich yellow chicken stock. Just as I lower my spoon to take a first taste, the waiter pours in about a glass of Lambrusco, which has to be the best use anyone has ever found for this lightweight red wine. Nadia serves a spectacular pasta of shaved bottarga , or pressed and dried tuna roe, with pieces of sweet, barely cooked black bass, and after that, a risotto of pearly al dente grains of rice shot through with sauteed porcini, fresh peas and ribbons of zucchini blossom. Only then did she send out what I'd driven all this way for: tortelli di zucca , a supple handmade pasta stuffed with bright orange pumpkin, crushed amaretti and mostarda , candied fruit dosed with sharp mustard essence. It's sweet and hot at the same time, as intricate as a Renaissance tapestry.
