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Janneke Vreugdenhil 10 Dicembre 2008
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Janneke Vreugdenhil, 10 Dicembre 2008, Janneke Vreugdenhil - Netherlands
Janneke Vreugdenhil is a freelance publicist specialized in food and wine. She writes a daily column + weblog in nrc.next, a newspaper that aims and reaches a young though serious public. She has a weekly column in NRC Handelsblad, a renowned newspaper to which she also contributes background articles on food and wine. Furthermore Janneke has her own cookery-show ( http://nrc.tv) in which she shows her public to prepare simple but fresh and original dishes. She works as a restaurant critic and has until now contributed to a wide range of different magazines such as Elsevier, En France, Bouillon, Delicious, Elle and La Cucina Italiana. She published five books, of which the latest was nominated ‘best cookbook of 2008’. Janneke visits Italy on a regular basis and writes about Italian gastronomy in its widest sense. Read more about Janneke Vreugdenhil on www.etenenzo@xs4all.nl
Janneke Vreugdenhil: Prosciutto
“What’s the most special thing you’ve tasted today?”, I asked my friend Fabio Cappellano, while we were desperately trying to find our hotel in Alba. It was five o’clock at night, the Albarese don’t do streetlights and we only had enough fuel for fifteen kilometers, at most.
We had been walking around the Salone del Gusto from noon till ten o’clock. Afterwards, we had joined friends of friends of friends at their table in the hills around Turin to eat an authentic Piemontese bagna cauda. We had talked for hours about everything we had seen, smelled, tasted and heard. But what had been the most special thing?
When we finally drove up the hotel parking lot at sunrise, Fabio knew. “The prosciutto from Mirto.” Mirto is a Sicilian hamlet in the Nebrodi mountains, not very far from Mount Etna. And in that smallest of villages butcher Sebastiano Agostino prepares a raw ham that can compete with the most famous hams in the world.
These hams come from a breed of black pigs, il suino nero di Nebrodi. The pigs are said to have the favourable kind of cholesterol in their body fat. Because this ancient breed is threatened with extinction, a Slow Food Presidium has been founded in order to try and stimulate farmers to breed them again.
The Nebrodi pig is fairly small, and so are Sebastiano’s hams. He lets them mature by dry-curing them for two years and he uses very little salt. That’s how they get their deep, sweet flavour and tender structure. These hams have but one disadvantage: Sebastiano Agostini only produces 800 of them each year.
“What if a big importer walks by and discovers this ham,” I asked Fabio while we were licking every last bit of deliciousness from our fingers, “will Sebastiano start making 8,000 hams a year, or 80,000?” “No way,” Fabio said, being an insider to the Sicilian way of thinking, “he will still only make 800 of them, he’ll just charge three times as much.”
Any way, there isn’t much chance that you’ll be tasting that extraordinary Nebrodi ham any time soon. But there is a consolation. At the same Salone del Gusto I met Nicola Levoni, who is also an artisanal ham producer, only much bigger.
Levoni is a family business from Castellucchio in Northern Italy, that produces artisanal meat products since 1911. They do everything themselves, from the breeding of the pigs to the way the sausages, bacon and hams are displayed in shops. That is the only way for the company to be able to guarantee the highest quality, Nicola told me. And I have to say, that quality is outstanding. Levoni also uses as little salt as possible for their raw ham, which gives it a very delicate taste.
Levoni exports to all parts of the world; their meat products are said to be very popular in Asia. The widest range of Levoni products is found at the Chateaubriand butchery in Heemstede. I’d say: go and taste that.
Janneke Vreugdenhil
Freelance foodwriter
www.etenenzo.nl
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