Truffle Season or Not, Piedmont’s Country-Style Cooks Are Nonpareil

Piedmont (from pie di monte or foot of the mountains) is a wine region in northwest Italy best known for its Barbaresco and Barolo wines, and for the glorious white truffle found in the Langhe and Monterrato hills.

In truffle season (roughly October to January), aficionados from Milan, Turin, Switzerland and Germany swoop down on the medieval hill towns and country restaurants to feast on truffles and game and fabulous old vintages. Every restaurant is fully booked; getting even a simple room takes planning.

What some people forget, since so many are so focused on the heady scent of truffles, is that this region boasts wonderful country cooking all year. And for my money, the cooking of spring or summer and early fall is far more interesting. The pressure is off; this is the quiet season, and cooks can concentrate on really cooking.

At Ristorante Cacciatori in Cartosio, a hamlet outside Aqui Terme, Maria Milano faces her daughter-in-law Carla across a battered cutting board. The curved blade of the mezzaluna (a crescent knife/cutter with two handles) rocks across the board, sending up a fragrance of rosemary and sage.

First thing each morning, Milano lights the wood-fired oven that sits beside the sturdy gas stove. Light streams in the windows, and two cats watch her every move from outside. Her chickpea soup made with pork rind and bones goes on a back burner.

She concentrates on the doughs and stuffings, while Carla prepares the meat dishes and vegetables. Son, Giancarlo, rolls out the pasta on a smooth pine board.

As it gets closer to lunchtime, guests begin to arrive, and poke their heads in the kitchen to see what’s on for today--to admire hefty porcini mushrooms, the pheasant a hunter has dropped by, or the startling gold of polenta poured onto a wooden board.

Giancarlo Milano has no use for show. He believes in the honest and true cooking of this region.

“If we make polenta, it should be made the way it really was,” Milano said. “Why should we serve it on a golden plate and try to elevate this already sublime and earthy dish?”

Served with pollo alla cacciatori (hunter’s style chicken), the dish has a remarkable depth of flavor. It’s the farmhouse chicken. It’s the mushrooms that come from the wooded hillsides nearby. It’s the polenta, stirred with a wooden stick for a full hour. And it’s the experienced hand of the cook.

“My mother has her own natural measure after all these years,” Milano said.

The kitchen turns out deceptively simple dishes, perfectly executed.

To start, there’s focaccia (a rather flat bread, brushed with garlic butter and sprinkled with herbs), cooked in a heavy iron skillet, slender stuffed zucchini or deep-fried ravioli filled with spinach and ricotta.

Giancarlo then will always inquire what you might feel like eating next.

A raw porcini salad? Transparent slices of exquisitely flavored veal carpaccio with a drizzle of Ligurian olive oil? If it’s mushroom season, he might offer a few of the rare ovoli mushrooms cooked with potatoes in the oven. Or a plate of tagliolini , a type of pasta heaped with porcini . He never insists.

If you’d like to eat light, Giancarlo might suggest a boned rabbit rolled with herbs and served sliced in its juices, pan-roasted chicken or a small portion of fritto misto, one of the classics of Piedmontese cuisine.

It’s a mixed fry of tiny veal cutlets, brain, marrow, sweet semolina balls, artichokes, sage leaves, apple slices and more. For dessert, try creme caramel cooked in the wood-fired oven or zabaglione made with a fragrant moscato d’Asti (a sweet wine) and served in a cup and saucer.

Prices for Piedmontese wines from Angelo Gaja, Bruno Giacosa, Aldo Conterno, Ceretto, and Scarpa and Vietti are very low, based on what the Milanos paid when the wines were first released.

Another favorite with local winemakers is La Contea in Neive d’Alba, a diminutive medieval hill town next to Barbaresco’s famous vineyards. The setting is a 17th-Century palazzo on a tiny piazza just below the church, which once belonged to the counts of Neive.

On winter mornings, the restaurant is filled with the heady scent of truffles as truffle hunters gather in front of the marble fireplace, and townspeople troop in for an espresso at the bar.

With soft candlelight reflected on frescoed ceilings and faded gilt wallpaper, the aristocratic rooms are a romantic setting for Claudia Verro’s regional cooking.

In summer, the tall windows are flung open on the cherry tree outside, old-fashioned roses fill the vases, and Verro concentrates on lighter, summer cooking.

One of Italy’s top chefs, she enjoys researching old recipes and has written a seasonal cookbook. Her kitchen garden provides her with masses of fresh herbs and organically grown vegetables.

A summer meal here might begin with fresh salmon carpaccio crostini topped with the artichoke hearts, green tomatoes, sweet peppers or eggplant she puts up in olive oil every summer.

There may be slices of peppery homemade salami, hazelnut bread and grissini, the crunchy breadsticks that accompany every meal in Piedmonte.

Thirty egg yolks go into every kilo of flour to make her silken pasta. Among the best pasta dishes: her maltagliate (“badly cut” scraps of pasta dough) with herbs and robiola cheese, and her carbonara monferrato sauced with raw egg, Parmesan and pancetta (Italian bacon), and showered with fresh fava beans, asparagus and zucchini.

Next might come salmon or trout in a gritty hazelnut sauce, tender little lamb chops with thyme or pigeon alla diavola, cooked rare. One very old Piedmontese dish is finanziera, a rich innards stew with cockscombs, an essential ingredient.

Her version transforms it with spring peas, asparagus, fresh fava beans, bits of zucchini and the requisite marrow, and cockscombs (yes, the real thing--crunchy little zigzags) in a sauce with lots of herbs.

Or she might make Tonino Verro’s grandmother’s recipe for braised duck, serving it with a bundle of slender asparagus , tiny pan-roasted potatoes and peas with pancetta on a bed of creamy polenta.

For dessert, there’s lemon or grape sorbetto , moist hazelnut torta with honey, or bonet, a loaf-shaped coffee or chocolate custard, cut in slices.

Tonino Verro is the ebullient host and maitre d’, and he seems to be everywhere at once--on the phone, making appointments for clients and guests to visit winemakers, rushing off to Imperia on the Ligurian coast to pick up a special olive oil, or up the precipitous drive to Castelmagno to buy cheese made in mountain villages there.

He’s also got an excellent, broad-ranging cellar of Piedmontese wines, and a good selection of grappas at the bar.

Lidia Alciati at the more formal Guido, a Michelin two-star restaurant in Costigliole d’Asti, cooks only in the evenings and then only by reservation and never for more than 36 people.

That’s because, unlike a French two-star restaurant, she has no brigade of junior cooks slaving away cutting vegetables, skimming stock and saucing plates.

The middle son , Ugo , now bakes bread and exquisitely light pastries under his mother’s tutelage, but other than that, Alciati is entirely alone in the kitchen and insists on cooking every dish herself. That may be why the food is so consistently good.

Alciati is a traditionalist who’s most at home cooking the classics of Piedmontese cuisine, yet her presentations are austerely elegant: a dome of duck liver mousse is crowned with shaved white truffles, a cold rabbit galantine garnished with strawberry-scented aspic.

But it’s taste that’s most important to her--the rich shock of her wild mushroom soup enriched with egg yolks and Parmesan, or her ethereal handmade agnolotti (a variety of raviolo) with a subtle stuffing of chopped veal and pork roasts, cheese and greens.

She might have venison or succulent capretto (roasted kid) fed on sweet spring grasses, or a stracotto (a veal or beef stew) cooked in the same ’78 Barolo her husband Guido pours to accompany it.

Guido Alciati knows every inch of the Langhe hills, every plot of vines, every cellar. He logs almost 100,000 miles on his car every year in search of the best local ingredients.

He visits the farmer who raises capretto (kid) or baby goat for him, stops by another for the zucchini flowers and fresh herbs. He has special sources for tender robiola di Roccaverrano made from half goat’s milk, half pecora or sheep’s milk.

And his truly extraordinary cellar is filled with thousands of bottles of Barbarescos and Barolos laid down years ago, and served only when he deems them ready to drink. He buys only in the good years and in quantity. Prices for these top wines are still astonishingly low.

Finding the Restaurants

Restaurants: Ristorante Cacciatori, Via Morena 30, Cartosio, Italy. Call (0144) 40123. Closed Thursdays and Feb. 1-20, July 1-15. Near Aqui Terme, about an hour’s drive from Alba. Meal for two: about $60. Ten simple but comfortable rooms, with bath, $30 per night.

La Contea di Neive, Piazza Cocito 8, Neive d’Alba. Call (0173) 67126. By reservation only. Closed Sunday evenings and Mondays. Prices from $60 to $100 for two, plus an extensive a la carte menu.

Guido, Piazza Re Umberto 1, Costigliole d’Asti. Call (0141) 966.012. Dinner only. Closed Sundays. By reservation only. Prix fixe menu at $80 per person. Two Michelin stars.

For more information: Contact the Italian Government Travel Office, 360 Post St., Suite 801, San Francisco 94108, (415) 392-6206.