Podcasts

Getting to know the cinta senese on its home turf The rebirth of a Renaissance pig

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In the town hall of Siena is a series of glorious frescoes that depict The Allegory of Good and Bad Government. In one of them is a pig, long snouted and thin legged, black with a white band around its back and down its front legs, being quietly chivied along by a swineherd. It is absolutely recognisable as a cinta senese, a Belted Sienese pig, today one the most favoured heritage breeds in Italy. But it wasn’t always so. Numbers dropped precipitously in the 1950s and 1960s, to the point that the herd studbook, recording the ancestry of all the animals, was abandoned. And then began the renaissance.

One place that contributed to the revival of the cinta senese is Spannocchia, a large and ancient estate not far from Siena. I was lucky enough to visit earlier this summer, to see the pigs first hand and to learn about them from Sara Silvestri.

Perhaps the biggest surprise, to me, was that not all cinta senese are blessed with the white belt that is deemed a characteristic of the breed. Some have white spots or stripes but not the full band, and some don’t seem to have any white at all. This could be flaky genetics – odd for a breed with a supposedly ancient lineage – or it could be the result of marauding male cinghiale, which are a problem in Spannocchia and elsewhere. Right now, all these visually defective animals (and most of the perfect specimens too) end up on a plate. I wonder how long before every piglet born is properly belted.

Notes

  1. La Tenuta di Spannocchia has a couple of websites, one mostly for the Foundation that’s behind the place (alas, mostly broken) and one that’s more commercial, which is where you’ll be sent actually to book a stay, should you wish.
  2. Be careful searching Wikipedia for information on the pigs. There’s a bit in English and much more in Italian, if you can find the correct page.
  3. Photograph by Lucy Clink.

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Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 057

  0

10 July 2017

It’s all a bit tangential this week, as I recover from declaring internet bankruptcy on my return from holiday. Is there something you spotted during June that deserves a wider audience? Send it to me. In the meantime:

  1. Don’t contribute to the fatberg menace. I swear, when I first heard about fatbergs, a million years ago from Derek Cooper, there was a company in England that rendered the things down, cleaned them up, and sold the results back to restaurants. That’s sustainability, right?
  2. Soap and water obviously isn’t a solution to the fatberg menace. The good news, buried in a very long article, is that a quick wash with cool water is adequate for almost all food safety needs.
  3. How to write about food that isn’t part of your own culture; several people of colour tell me.
  4. Is a well-done steak part of my culture? No, but it is for 11.7% of the customers of one US chain. I’ll say no more.
  5. My cultured compadre Luigi reports on a strange people who treat melons as veggies.
  6. More cucurbits. Bee Wilson asks: Why don’t we complain about cucumbers? And if you want to complain that the article is behind a paywall, complain to Bee (and to me). And Bee, take a look at this, if you’re interested.
  7. Finally, and this really isn’t tangential so much as completely unrelated, one of my favourite writers talks over a few drams of one of my favourite tipples.
Podcasts

A brief survey of the food of Corfu Sofrito is not what you think it is

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 20:53 — 17.0MB)

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The island of Corfu was part of the Venetian republic for hundreds of years. So when I went there on holiday I expected to see some Italian influences, and there were plenty; Venetian lions, eroded by time; elegant buildings; Italian restaurants everywhere; and dishes with Italian-sounding names, like sofrito and pastitsada. Also, a curiously neon version of limoncello, made in this case from kumquats rather than lemons. I was fortunate to have an introduction to Cali Doxiadis, an expert cook who has made her home on Corfu, and over an excellent lunch on her terrace I plied her with questions.

Cali wasn’t too keen on kumquat liqueur or its history. You’ll find all sorts of tangled accounts of how kumquats got to Corfu. Many of them mention Sidney Merlin, a Greek-born British marksman and amateur botanist, and most of the stories say he introduced kumquats to the family’s estate in northern Corfu in 1860, which would have been quite a feat as Merlin would have been only four years old. One even gives the date of introduction as 1846, ten years before Merlin’s birth, which was actually the year that plant hunter Robert Fortune brought them from China to Europe. As best as I can tell, Merlin’s kumquat’s arrived in 1924, a few years after he had successfully introduced Washington navel oranges. Wikipedia tells me that “to this day,” the Washington navel “is known in Greece as ‘Merlin’,” a fact I did not know at the time and so could not confirm with Cali or anyone else. Who knows, maybe it was introduced twice, once by Merlin and once, much earlier, by an unknown British colonial officer.

Notes

  1. Huge thanks to Aglaia Kremezi for intrdoucing me to Cali Doxiadis and of course to Cali for her hospitality and patience.
  2. The old town of Corfu really is a delight, and a World Heritage Site to boot.
  3. Pastissada de caval can still be found in the Veneto. And here’s a once-over-lightly guide to Corfiote foods.
  4. I snatched a bit of music from John Skolarikis.
  5. Banner photo by Lucy Clink. Those two little blobs are me and Cali talking. Cover photo borrowed from Mavromatis, purveyors of kumquat products.

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Extra Matter

Eat This Newsletter 056

  0

29 May 2017

  1. Wendell Berry takes the coastal elites to task, with style and grace.
  2. I like what the American Anthropological Association had to say on the matter: “Maybe the colonial narrative is as guilty of reductionism as the nostalgia narrative – but at least it moves the conversation away from a weakness of rural character to the demonstrable effects of economic policies and practices.”
  3. Then there’s the whole question of who is actually doing the work in agriculture. Longreads has an extract from a new book that gives a voice to migrant workers in California.
  4. From Berkeley, mind, a little bit of history on innovations in food processing. “Today, there are more than 400 types of mixed salads.” And that was just the start of it.
  5. Do people perceive those bagged salads as “healthy”? Probably not, according to one graphic Marion Nestle lifted from the 12th annual Food and Health Survey produced by the International Food Information Council. She also reminds us that the IFIC is “industry-funded” and that “the data come from an online survey taking 22 minutes to complete”.
  6. A Feast for the Eyes is celebrated in The British Journal of Photography. You may never look at food photographs in the same way again. Well, you probably will, but you may also think a bit more about them.

Let me take a brief moment here to moan again about how hard it is to find interesting food news that originates outside the USA. Help me out, if you can.