It’s our first night in Bellagio, Italy. We’re sitting at a table in a little beehive of a restaurant. Neatly-dressed servers are moving swiftly around us in every direction. A bottle of wine sits on the table with bread, oil and balsamic, a bottle of water, and a big plate of assorted cured meats to keep it company. I’m so happy right now.
As noted last time, ordering in restaurants in Italy can be a little daunting. But that’s behind us now, so we can just relax and enjoy. The smells wafting around us are amazing. Talk about aroma therapy – they should charge extra for the aroma therapy treatment we’re getting in here!
Il Menu
A menu board full of good things hangs on the wall. “Pasta Fresca” is always good to see. Riso , Zuppa del Giorno, Verdure. With a little imagination, you can figure out most of the menu even if you don’t speak Italian. Not all of the dishes are obvious, though. “Manzo” is “beef.” I wonder where the word, “manzo,” comes from? (Or the word, “beef,” for that matter).
The special of the day is written on a small chalkboard. For a set price you can start with “antipasto di salumi.” Then, for the first course, (the “primo”), fettucine alla bolognese. The main course, (or “secondo”), is the “stew of the day, served with polenta.” Let’s see… salumi, fettucine bolognese, stufito with polenta? I know what I’m having.
Salumi
My delicate and demure Better Half opted for lighter fare. She ordered “Pollo alla Cacciatore.” She knows she’ll get plenty of bites from me. Plus, we’re going to share the salumi. No one will leave hungry, that’s for sure.
The first time I saw the word, “salumi,” I thought it was a typo. Back home, we have salami and other cured meats, but no one calls them “salumi.”
“Salumi” means “cured meats” in italian. And we’re in the land of cured meats now. Curing meat is an art form here. There are lots of different kinds… prosciutto, capicola, pancetta, sopressata, bresaola, and of course, salame. (“Salami” is the plural of “salame”).
But what about baloney? I was practically raised on baloney. Baloney is cooked, not cured, so it doesn’t make the Salumi List. To make baloney, take some pork and pork fat, grind it up, stuff it into a tube, then cook it. Now you’ve got baloney. But not salumi.
There’s no “cooking” involved in curing meat. All they do is to get a piece of meat – usually a leg. Probably from some animal that doesn’t run very fast. They use a lot of pig legs, but if you ask me, pigs run pretty fast, so maybe “doesn’t run fast” is a bad assumption. On the other hand, I’ve never seen a cheetah leg hanging up to cure, so maybe there’s something to it. But I digress…
When you have the meat, rub salt all over it and hang it up to dry. In this neck of the woods, they might hang it up for months. Salt draws water out of the meat. Since there’s no moisture inside, the little things that make meat spoil can’t grow. It just dries out while the flavors get concentrated. When you’re done curing, get a sharp knife and start slicing. Now you have salumi.
Ora di Mangiare! (Time to Eat!)
Our antipasto di salumi showed up in no time. It was a dinner-sized plate loaded with different kinds of cured meats. We didn’t know exactly what kinds of salumi we were eating, but we liked all of it.
We munched and sipped, and when we were finished, the next courses showed up – fettucine alla bolognese and pollo cacciatore. Everything was molto delizioso.
Even though we’d been munching on goodies here and at the wine bar across the street, our dinners disappeared pretty quickly. I think that maybe, when we come to Italy, our stomachs know somehow and expand in anticipation.
I had one more course coming. The “stufito del giorno,” (stew of the day) turned out to be like pot roast with vegetables, along with a slab of polenta. The polenta had been cooked, then baked on a big, flat tray, and sliced into slabs like the one on my plate. They topped it off with a drizzle of gravy from the stufito. Mmmm.
Polenta, to people in this part of Italy, is like what fish is to Eskimos. Sure, there’s plenty of pasta to go around, but in Northern Italy, polenta is on almost every menu. That’s fine with me, because I like it a lot.
Up until the 16th century, they used buckwheat or faro to make polenta. But in the 16th century, someone brought corn, (or maize), back with them from North America. Everyone said, “Hey – il mais è molto buono!” Now Northern Italy is corn country.
We were way too stuffed to think about dessert. We paid the bill, said “ciao” to the staff, and went for a short after-dinner walk. Then we hit the sack, because we were WIPED OUT.
To be continued…
