When I die I want to go to a place like this, just become a mist in a garden of roses and moss covered fountains and twinkly lights, people dancing about speaking pretty foreign languages that make the twilight echo and ring like a bell choir.
I took this picture this weekend at Gusti di Frontiera, a food and wine festival in Gorizia. The festival grew substantially this year from the last; the newspaper said only 30% of the booths were repeats from the years before, and that this year 12 countries were represented. Gusti di Frontiera means "Tastes of the Frontier", and the mission statement for the festival claims that, for the weekend at least, Gorizia, and Central Europe, is one giant piazza without borders.
I felt like a mouse in a cheese shop walking about the festival, my mouth watering, each booth we passed eliciting tiny yelps of excitement, growls from my tumbling tummy. I wanted just a nibble of everything: the grilled meats, the pigs being turned on spits, huge rounds of aged farmers cheese, buckets of fresh Gorgonzola, being scooped up like ice cream.
Each country in attendance had it's own area, either a side street, or a piazza, or, in the case of frou-frou-france, a rose garden. I LOVE things like this, being able to get lost in my imagination, walking about dreamily, pulling on FL's hand, saying, "oh, darling, let's go to Austria! Let's go to Switzerland! Catalonia! France! Tuscany!", each transplanted, shrunken country filling me with a different emotion, mood. I feel like my tongue transforms to speak the languages, my eyes change colors to reflect the atmosphere.
In France we ate stewed duck, chilled oysters with lemon, and tiny, thimble-sized bulbs of fresh sheep's milk cheese. At the market, I ran my hand over cashmere scarves, basked in the light of hand-painted paper lanterns and saw my reflection holding woven wicker handbags. I bought a beautiful vial of pink sea salt tossed with rose buds, and some green tea.
In Germany and Austria we ate giant sausages with kraut, and saluted the other festival, the mother of all festivals, currently taking place in Munich, Oktoberfest. Giant mugs of beer were ordered and bashed onto the wooden tables as girls in little milkmaid costumes pranced about in beat to the bad Bruce Springsteen cover band.
Italy had a whole road, the main drag through town, with vendors from Marche, Puglia, Liguria, Sicilia. Barrels of olives, slabs of cured pancetta, fresh baked bread, salt-less from Tuscany and the flat kind from Sardinia. I searched in vain for Calabria: I dream regularly of n'duja, the mouth-numbingly spicy pork fat spread that is made there. The stuff is illegal in the US, and virtually impossible to find outside of Calabria, as it is both something that is made personally and eaten by the family, and because it seems that hot peppers and "the likes of them" are abhorred or feared anywhere North of the Po River. The first time I ever ate some was on the farm in Piemonte; a friend of Mario's had sent him some n'duja in exchange for some cheese. I was pretty much the only person who ate it, slathering it over my bread like jam, sometimes unable to sleep for the thought of it, sneaking into the kitchen at night to give my tongue a kick. Pouting over Calabria's inability to represent at the festival, I was calmed by FL, who remembered that Bonelli, the butcher, is from Calabria, and suggested that I should ask him how to acquire that molten delicacy.
In Catalonia we ate honeyed cookies and listened to a Spaniard sing and strum. In Albania I introduced FL to the miracle that is baklava. One of the larger back piazzas was dedicated entirely to Grado, the fishing village about 45 minutes away, and the place was overflowing with bags of fresh clams, muscles, and something suspiciously similar to crawfish. This is where FL and I gorged ourselves on something raw, in a shell. I cannot for the life of me now remember the name, but they were tiny and orange and so beautiful.
I surprised myself as well: In a festival full of almost anything I could dream of or ask for, I went back to the same booth three times to eat the same thing. And the booth was from Serbia, of all places! I was led there by the smell; it was the smell of heat, my nose stung, and I wanted whatever it was bad enough to push myself to the front of a sweaty, rambunctious, oddly-dressed crowd speaking an intelligible and rough language to find out what in the world the fuss was about. Stuff peppers, grape-leaf-wrapped beef, slabs of some meat that I could not place but desperately, savagely wanted, soft, fluffy flat bread, clotted butter and AJVAR. Jesus God, this ajvar.
My eyes poured tears as I ate it, but it was so fresh, positively intoxicating. At one point on of the whole chili peppers, bright yellow and about the size of a tooth, got wedged in that impossible gap beneath my tongue and the backside of my molars. I could not get it out, not with a fork, my finger, a straw. It was stuck, and I clogged my mouth with bread to try and pacify the heat, the pepper slowly dissolving and causing numbness to my entire mouth. I didn't care. One side of my mouth was for gargling beer, the other was for more ajvar. Sausages, ribs, fresh salsas of tomatoes and onions, I don't know what it was, but this place was bangin'. The line at certain points made the wait almost an hour, but we were not swayed. The atmosphere was fun enough, with beer and traditional Serbian music, though the Serbians were pointedly clan-like, nice enough but not at all mingling the surrounding booths of Albanians and Hungarians. Their booth was packed to the gills with nationalists, the rest of us waiting in the drizzling rain for their sizzling meats.
And as for wine, you ask? Porchis, those infallible love-bugs without whom our lives here in Cormons or beyond would be sad and colorless, had rented themselves their own kiosk. Beer, pork, and, of course, Kandie, Fabbio's wine. When our souls were in need of a geographical reality check, a life-saver so to speak, we returned to the Porchis kiosk, and had a little glass of Sauvignon. Ever jovial, ever generous, Fabbio and Simone were like a beacon of home amongst the confusion of the festival. The opening-day party for Porchis is, incidentally, Thursday! That means that fall is here, and Sauvignon is right around the corner.
Bentley's cake is out of the oven, cooled, and ready to be iced. Doesn't look half bad, but I think I'll make him the giant panino, too, just in case.
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