We conserve Buckwheat
Buckwheat has accounted an important source of livelihood for nearly five centuries for mountain peoples from Alps. Nowadays this grand product has been rediscovered and re-employed for realising rural and tasty recipes. Buckwheat has a high nutritional value, even if is particularly well-known for the astonishingly pleasant taste it gives every single recipe, just as Cradel Shortbread.
Since year 1000 we are Occitan (and on the job we speak in dialect: several of us speak Piedmontese and somebody speaks Occitan)
Once, in comparision with nutrition in the city, occitan cooking was considered frugal: we're talking about "malnutrì diet" ("malnutrì" means undernourished in Piedmontese dialect), whose nutrition consisted mostly on tightening one's belts.
It was about a life-support cooking linked to seasonal products in this area, based on rye bread, potatoes, chestnut, polenta, milk, eggs, cheese and wild grasses. Nowadays, these same food concepts are considered bases of a healthy nutrition.
Saluzzo and its Marquisate, by way of Boccaccio and our Griselda
Fruit-growing is the boutonniere of local production. Fruit basket is full of peaches, apricots, plums (“ramassin” in Piedmontese dialect), apples, pears and kiwis. Agricultural products are the main characters of “women market” (“el mercà d’le fômne” in Piedmontese dialect) anchored in centuries since the time of Marquisate.
These grand local products got a place of honour in our recipes: you can find them in the filling of Bugie or as garnish of Tarts and Crumble Tarts.
To the present day
More recent traditions are source of inspiration for realizing rural and healthy recipes. Our territory is full of contamination; thanks to its vantage point has been way station of several peoples. Each of them gave us a part of their cooking talents. We can’t forget that thanks to anchovy’s traders we got the recipe biscôit, and we were inspired by it for our Rural Rusks.
Monviso from the hills of Verzuolo (CN), Italy
A glimpse of the landscape taken from the hills of Verzuolo: in the background the Monviso - King of Stone - from which the river Po is born.