Piano, Piano, Pieno: Authentic Food from a Tuscan Farm

John Abbott is a professor of history at Laurentian University’s Algoma University College. He is the co-author of The Border at Sault Ste Marie and The History of Fort St. Joseph.

The volume under review is not for the occasional cook looking for a
spectacular dish to grace the weekend table. Rather it is intended for
those who appreciate a holistic understanding of the dynamics that knit
food into a complex set of relationships defining a regional culture.

This sense of gratification derives in part from the book’s
autobiographical nature. Susan McKenna Grant, a native of Ontario,
sought and ultimately found in northern Italy and a Tuscan hill farm the
set of cultural and environmental circumstances that brought challenge,
purpose, and harmony into her life. She draws ingredients for her
domestic and tourist establishment from 165 acres of her farm, La
Petraia. Deeply influenced by the slow food movement and the wish to
restrict consumption as much as possible to the seasonal bounty of her
own property and region, she affords readers valuable insights into the
attitudes and techniques required to extract maximum flavour and
nutrition from courtyard creatures such as rabbits, roosters, and
clapped-out laying hens, and the wild boars that consume the mast in her
woods and sometimes the crops of her fields. The arts of braising and
fricassee figure prominently in a chapter titled “I Secondi.”

The volume is imaginatively and usefully organized, with chapters
arranged to replicate the order of dishes in a formal Italian meal. Of
special interest is “Some Special Italian Breads and Their Stories,”
a section in which artisanal techniques, learned from a few dedicated
home and independent commercial bakers and tested in the author’s own
kitchen, promise to restore integrity and flavour to the staff of life.
Il Pane is followed by Antipasti, I Primi (soups, polenta, gnocchi,
pasta, and grain-based first courses), I Secondi (meat, fish, poultry,
game), Piatti Unici (one-dish meals), Contorni e Intermezzi, (vegetable
sides and salads), I Dolci (sweets), and La Dispensa (preserving).

Piano, Piano, Pieno will delight all those who enjoy the combination of
a good story, deep and dedicated research, and a treasury of recipes
informed by a well-defined point of view, all expressed in a lucid prose
style.