Lucca IV: Fighting faintness

By my calculations, there were 2.7 minutes during my first day in Lucca, Italy, when I wasn’t eating or drinking. My hosts ensured such deprivation would end there by dispatching an English-speaking local to take me on a tour that afternoon of the city’s food shops and cafes. Our objective was to sample some of the delectables that are unique to the area. In true Italian style, we ended up trying most of them, though I drew the line at a local blood-and-pig’s-head sausage (at least until the next day). The experience underscored a brother’s contention that Italians could coax a delicacy out of virtually anything that walks, sprouts, flies or swims.

My guide-cum-enabler started me off slowly, suggesting we merely peer through a bakery’s window at a local specialty called torta di verdura. It looks like a green pie, and usually hits the dinner tables on religious holidays, the guide explained. I was about to suggest we give it a try when she described the ingredients: Swiss chard, maybe a little cheese, usually a few other vegetables baked into it to form a strongly flavored savory dish. There was a long pause. “It’s an acquired taste,” she remarked.

The other cake for which Lucca is known, she continued, is the buccellata, which at times looked like a giant bagel, at other times like a giant bagel whose sides are squeezed together to form a long double-tube loaf.

In what would become the pattern for our tour of gluttony, my guide suggested we give buccellata a try, and shot into a food shop. I started getting my Euros together while she chatted up the store keeper, pointing to me every four or five seconds. After awhile the proprietor brought me a dish with two slices of what looked like raisin bread, along with a tiny cup of pinkish liquid. I went to drink the liquid, but everyone in the place moved to stop me. “You dunk it,” the guide whispered. As soon as I lowered the bread into the wine—vin santo, literally holy wine—the whole place seemed to breath a sigh of relief. I realized why when I tasted the wine-soaked bread. The bread itself was mildly honeyed. But the wine could’ve sweetened a wedding cake. Downing it in a gulp might’ve put me into a sugar shock. Besides, the guide explained, vin santo typically costs five times as much as regular wines, and wasn’t to be gulped.

Not that I would have learned any prices from our tour. When I went to pay the proprietors, the guide invariably stopped me. It seems that ignorance of buccalleta or other local specialties is not to be tolerated in Lucca. And clearly I was more ignorant than most. Though we visited easily a half-dozen emporiums, each readily offered up free samples to a stranger they’d never see again. As far as I could tell, the motivation was pride. Which was why I soon found myself trying a rival establishment’s buccalleta. “It’s the best,” the proprietor confided in English. I skipped any vin santo there, still a little buzzed from the earlier sample.

But that was nothing compared with the near paralysis that set in when the guide took me to one of the city’s oldest and most famous cafes, Di Simo, which has been in business at least since 1846. The proprietor insisted we try one of the traditional local alcoholic drinks, a digestif called biadina. It’s traditionally served with several pine nuts, and local lore notes that it actually restores you twice—once with the liquid, a second time when you eat the pine nuts on the bottom of the glass. “Restores” is a carefully selected euphemism; “kicks your ass” might be a more apt descriptor. “It’s 40 percent alcohol,” the guide explained with a smile—after I’d downed a good lot of it.

We staggered out to take in some of the historical sights of the town. But a food option was never more than a few waddles away. My guide showed me several bakeries that stack trays of focaccia in front of open front-of-the-store windows so locals can grab a slice as they dash to work. But that’s as close as Lucca traditionalists come to fast food.

By the time our tour took us to one of the city’s many meat shops, further consumption would have been humanly impossible. So we merely looked at specialties like biraldo, a sausage that’s made by boiling a blood-and-scrap pork sausage for about six hours, if I understood the shopkeeper's account.

We also forewent a taste of lardo colonnata, or lard cured in a marble box. The process gives the lard a special taste, my guide explained. Locals slice the lard thin, put it atop a slice of bread, and toast the whole thing so that the lard starts to melt.

After showing restraint in the meat shops, we ended our tour at a gelateria. I was too stuffed even to taste anything, but my guide provided explicit directions as to how to get there from my hotel the next day. Which I, of course, did.

But that day of eating our way through Lucca had to end. It was almost time to get ready for dinner.

Lucca III: Food trends & traditions

Hearing the local purveyors tout their wares, you’d think the food trends of Lucca, Italy, were the same currents shaping menus back in the United States. The salespeople—nearly always the farmers or artisans who produced the materials—talked up the organic, healthful and gluten-free items that originated from their fields. Throw in the boasts about everything being locally sourced, processed by hand, and produced according to ancient family recipes, and you could’ve been at a food show in New York or San Francisco. Until you got to the farro beer, the chestnut liqueur, or the savory-sounding jams.

Lucca, a part of Tuscany, may be little-known in the U.S., but it’s renowned throughout Europe for its extra virgin olive oil, boutique wineries, and farro, the grain known in English-speaking countries as spelt. Locals also wax rhapsodically about the widespread local use of chestnuts, either by milling them into flour for cakes, breads or pastas, or as a flavoring.

Those items continue to be the bedrock of the local food culture. But a younger generation of producers and consumers are nudging the heritage-revering area to at least look at other ways of using traditional ingredients.

For instance, at a trade show convened for those of us who were visiting from the States, one of the local craftsmen poured samples of his newest beers. One was an extremely light, almost lager-style version made from farro and orzo, also an Italian signature. The other, he said with nearly bursting pride, was made solely with farro, something he’d been told could not be done because of the production inefficiencies.

The 100-percent farro beer, as yet even unnamed, is the same pale yellow as a wheat beer, minus the cloudiness. Indeed, it was crystal-clear, with a head “that could last for two hours,” the brewer explained through an interpreter. I swear I saw a tear forming in his eye.

The brew also has a much lower alcohol content, a mere 4 percent.

The brewer described the beer was an alternative to the darker, slightly heavier brews that Italian elders in the area might’ve sipped when they were youngsters learning the traditions of their elders.

A tour of local food shops and cafes revealed that younger Italians are indeed drinking differently than their parents did. Aperitifs, my tour guide explained, are the current rage among people in their 20s. They’ll head to the same time-steeped cafés where their grandparents might still stop by in the afternoon for a local digestif called biadina, which is served with a few pignoli thrown into the glass. The young adults descend on the places at 7 for aperitifs of one sort or another, often garnishing them with nuts, raisins or other enhancements that are arrayed in glass bowls on the bar. At 9, they head off to dinner, which of course is accompanied by wine.

A liqueur company participating in the Lucca trade show acknowledged that it’s had to make some accommodations to changing drinking habits. The buzz-phrase is “doing it for the market.” The owner cited such concessions as the introduction of a drink that tastes like dark rum, as well as a creamy limoncella and a liqueur, called Halloween, whose flavor was lost to language differences. His product line also includes a chestnut-flavored liqueur.

Several of the trade-show exhibitors featured jams of local produce—such local fruits as raspberries and currents (or what we’d know as blueberries, judging from the labels), to be sure, but also carrots, pumpkins and basil, to name just a few. Samples were given on bread, leading me to say something extremely intelligent about what a strong toast market Lucca must have. I was quickly corrected. In Lucca, one interpreter explained, persons of taste put jams and marmalades on cheese, as an alternative to using honey. Surely I must put honey on my cheese, she suggested. I couldn’t even bring myself to answer. Clearly it was yet another major setback in other cultures’ impression of America.

My shop-tour guide suggested that the jam-on-cheese phenomenon was getting a boost from another recent trend in the local dining scene. A new preoccupation has taken hold of blending salt and sweet items, like desserts flavored with balsamic vinegar, or salts used in baked items.

I could’ve been home, listening to a bunch of foodies discussing what they’ve been witnessing on the local dining scene.

Taking a limoncella for the team

Ah, the things we have to do to make a living. Today, for instance, I’m sitting in Lucca, Italy, getting ready to eat and drink my way through local specialties. I’m on a tour to learn what foods and wines—and let’s not forget cigars and coffee—could be feasible for restaurants back in the States that want to differentiate their menus with authentic regional Italian cuisine. Man, what a grind.

The tour began last night with dinner at one of the city’s most historic restaurants, which is saying a lot. Among Lucca’s distinctions is the retention of a wall that was built around the city for its defense back in the time of the Roman Empire (but updated twice, most recently during the Renaissance). Our guides explained that they wanted to start off our visit with dinner at Buca di Sant’ Antonio because it features the foods they ate at the family table while growing up. These were the dishes made by their grandmothers, who in turn learned them from their grandmothers.

We were steered toward the 226-year-old restaurant’s specialties by the crackerjack staff. Meanwhile, our guides, both from companies that promote Lucca business and tourism, selected local wines. My meal started with sautéed chicken livers served with a specialty bread that had a coarser grain than usual. It had almost a nutty taste, like the nut and whole-grain breads you see in health food stores back in the States. Several of my fellow visitors tried the “pies” that were offered as antipasti—one with leeks and ricotta, the other with asparagus and ricotta. All were terrific.

My second course was a pasta and rabbit dish with a very robust sauce—one of the highlights. Something about it was very familiar, but I couldn’t quite place where I might’ve had it before. Later, one of our hosts noted that the chef of New York’s Beppe restaurant was from Lucca. I realized that’s where I’d enjoyed a similar dish, though I doubt it was made with rabbit.

My meat course consisted of roasted baby goat, with a simple accompaniment of roasted potatoes. It was delicious--juicy, flavorful, yet mild. The meat had a slight but pleasant musty flavor, like amplified dark meat turkey. It was as tender as a braised pork shank, but deeper in taste.

The meal wrapped up with a local specialty: Cookies that are made with olive oil in place of butter, lard or other shortenings. They were a bit heavy, but tasty. And just perfect with the dessert wine that our hosts chose. The wine was made with the local grechetto grape. The vintner later explained that the grapes are dried on mats for two to three months, until they’re largely dehydrated. Then the pulp is pressed, yielding a wine with extraordinary depth. The sweetness was more of a highlight than the sugary backbone of the wine. And as my wine-centric colleagues noted, it had great fruit.

The experience wiped out the surpisec we got when we saw our first restaurant in Lucca--a McDonald's.

Okay, I’d better rest up before I move to the next sampling. I’ve heard that we may actually have to heft more wine glasses this morning.