Cascina del Cornale and Slow Food
A month before our wedding, a friend of ours pointed us to an article in Gourmet. It featured a small co-operative, Cascina del Cornale, which supports small, artisanal farmers. They have a market and a restaurant which spotlights those producers: everything they sell, and probably just about everything they use in the restaurant, can be traced to one of these artisans. The reason she had pointed it out is that it is right on the main road connecting Asti and Alba in the Piemonte. Exactly where we were honeymooning.
Melissa and I showed up at the end of lunch hour, fully expecting to not be able to eat there (why we got there late is a long story; don't assume that the Cascina del Cornale is actually in the only Cornale on the Michelin map). But they seated us anyway. Magazine in hand, we showed it to the woman doing the seating. After all, she was the woman featured in the picture.
She is also the driving force behind the Cascina. Elena Rivera was dismayed to see a number of small producers going out of business, driven out by larger, blander competitors. So she came up with the idea of banding together to manage risk. A decade later, the mark of the Cascina is a respected indicator of quality in the Piemonte region.
The best place to buy these special products is at the Cascina's market. A small room is reserved for fruits and vegetables, and features the stories of the producers who grew this food and what makes this particular fruit or vegetable interesting. The signs are all in Italian, but Simona, one of the main people in the co-op, was happy to translate as she showed us around. The other, larger, room is where you can buy cheese and meats, olive oils, honey, wine, and a myriad of other products made by the people in the co-op. We walked away with some olive oil, Carnoroli rice (said to be superior to Arborio for risotto), and some samples of ice cream.
But if you don't feel like cooking, you can also find these products at the restaurant on the same lot. We ate there twice, and had a good meal each time. The food is served "family-style" even for two people. The wine list is modest at two pages (this is modest in the Piemonte), but we enjoyed both wines we had there. The staff is welcoming and kind, and you can't help but feel like part of the family when you eat there, even if like us you speak no Italian.
When savvy food lovers in the U.S. think of artisanal producers in the Piemonte, they can't help but think of Slow Food, the international organization which supports such producers and is headquartered just down the road from the Cascina in Bra. But Cascina del Cornale is not associated with Slow Food. We quickly learned that Slow Food in Italy has a different profile than it does here in the U.S. Ms. Rivera and her fellow co-op members distrust the fact that Slow Food takes money from corporations and the government. Where do the membership fees go, they want to know? They were very curious about our experiences with Slow Food here in the U.S. They wanted to know what kinds of things we did, and seemed interested about the different experiences. It was interesting to hear alternate perspectives on the movement.
In many ways, Slow Food puts forth a dream which Cascina del Cornale lives every day: a world in which artisanal producers have a market in which to sell their unique products, a way to sustain a traditional practice or a heritage vegetable. But Cascina del Cornale has out Slow Fooded Slow Food itself. We couldn't help but compare Cascina del Cornale's restaurant with the osteria Boccondivino, the restaurant where Slow Food started and which is now run by the organization. At both places, the food was good, but at Boccondivino, there were a couple of items that were called out as special ingredients. At Cascina del Cornale, one section of the menu was devoted entirely to the producers who prepared the ingredients. The charcutier (for lack of the Italian) was mentioned, as were the cheese producers, and vegetable growers. It was what Slow Food strives for, a world where consumers know how the food got to their table. But it has taken someone else to achieve it.
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