|
Bread for a day, wine for a year.
This ancient proverb marvellously encapsulates the cuisine of Sienese Chianti. Produce, seasons and territory, reflecting an economy that was once based on sharecropping and on sending products, ingredients and recipes to the town.
Wine was brought by the Etruscans. Chianti was and remains synonymous with Italian wine. Over and above being drunk, it is used extensively in local cookery.
Chianti bread is baked in a wood-fired oven. It lasts all week: you start with the bread knife and it’s as good on the last day as on the first. Any leftovers become, depending on the season, panzanella, ribollita, pappa col pomodoro, and occasionally also that mixture with poppies which once calmed any epileptics in the family. Toasted it is the basic element of fettuntaor with (black) cabbage on slices. For this you need olive oil, the precious liquid gold which was another gift from the Etruscans and whose flavour underlies all Chianti cookery. When necessary it was used as drastic medication or as the basic ingredient in love potions.
Cheese is marzolino and pecorino which was largely the fruit of trade during the twice-yearly pasture changing when flocks passed through Chianti.
Chianti also had its “poor man’s spicery”: garlic and onion, sage and bay leaf, pepolino (thyme) and rosemary, radicchio and bitter herbs, basil thyme and salvestrella, juniper berries and acacia flowers. The meat is among the world’s best: beef and veal, pork, cinti senesi and wild boar, free range chickens, guinea fowl and pheasant, duck and mallard, rabbit and hare, pigeon and wood-pigeon. And lamb at Easter
.The desserts taste of corn, of fresh eggs, of honey and jams: tarts, pine-seed cakes and sponges, both plain and filled.
Take care with Chianti raisin wine, which is neither sweet nor dry: it’s raisin wine. If you’re lucky enough to find any, don’t go dipping biscuits in it. That would be a sin, and not just a venial one.