- Commercial bees infecting wild ones.
- Ag graduates put to work in Punjab.
- Humanure. You heard me.
- Agricultural rehabilitation in Darfur.
- “Increasing farm yield should not just be aimed to reduce the local dependency on imported food items as much as it should be tied in to the tourism industry.”
- “One day he said he wanted to have a vinegar festival.”
- Edible landscaping.
- Peach mojito. Yummie.
Nibbles: Funding, Grains, Wildflowers, AVRDC, Cloning, Salinity, Education, Sheep dogs, Swans, Writing, Fisheries, Big ag
- Silver lining: IRRI funding up 20% so far this year.
- Foodie discovers diversity: Amaranth, Himalayan Red Rice, Teff, Farro, Triticale, Sorghum … How have I never tried any of these?
- Texans save wildflower seeds.
- “We are not trying to use vegetables as a substitute for food, but rather as an addition to the food basket, to help farmers become better nourished and grow out of poverty.”
- Jurassic Park video.
- Olive varieties differ in response to irrigation with saline water.
- BBC’s One Planet podcast on urban agriculture in Kampala.
- St Kitts kids learn about sweet potato diversity. From the Taiwanese.
- Even in the struggle between shepherd and wolf the issue is uncertain.
- Agricultural biodiversity rituals corner: swan upping. Ah, swan terrine.
- A roundup of Britain’s nature writers. A sort of nature writer upping, I guess.
- Remember that catfish post a couple days back? This completes the trifecta.
- “…the crop from ground, washed, packed and stacked in supermarket-ready trays in just six minutes.”
La Zucca
That early stirring of globalization that was the Columbian Exchange changed Italian food and cooking forever. That’s well known. What would pizza be like without pomodori and peperoncini, after all? There’s also polenta — and pasta e fagioli. And no doubt also traditional potato-based dishes, though I can’t think of one just now. But the third member of the Mesoamerican Trinity is often forgotten when the usual suspects of the exchange are trotted out, as I’ve just done.
Which is a pity, because the pumpkin features in some pretty nice dishes. ((Ok, I cheated a bit. The Mesoamerican trinity is maize, beans and squash, rather than pumpkin, but you know what I mean.)) So it was nice to see it celebrated last week in Tolentino. We found this sculpture in the piazza which houses the regular fruit and veg market.
On the wall is the text of an ode to the vegetable (or fruit, but I’m not going there) by the local poet Giovanni Sebastiani (1874-1959). You can read “La Zucca” here. But don’t ask me to translate. The local Marche dialect is all but impenetrable to me.
Nibbles: Coffee, EU, Homegardens, Cooking, Pollination, Agricultural origins
- “How did the scientists at the National Zoo get involved in the coffee business?“
- Water! The EU Agriculture Commissioner has a blog. Who knew?
- Refugees in Jamaica “eat what they grow.” Thanks, Mary.
- Culinary conservatism. Next up: culinary neo-conservatism. Saints preserve us.
- Texas wild rice bad at sex.
- The hydrological roots of agriculture in Yemen.
Vino cotto
We’d seen the signs a couple of time on the road from Macerata. Vino cotto. Easy enough to translate, but what the heck is it? Cooked wine: gotta be more to it than that, surely.
A bit, but not that much, as it turns out. I found out by accident. We locked ourselves out of the house, I had to get to Colmurano to locate the spare key, our own car keys were in the house, of course, but a friendly neighbourhood farmer gave me a lift — and we got talking. Here he is, and no, that’s not what he drove me into town with.
All the local farmers make vino cotto, but the best stuff comes from Loro Piceno, apparently. You heat the must in a large copper pot, down to half the volume. Then you store it in oak casks. For years, occasionally topping up the water. We tried a bit when we got back from getting the spare keys. My friend found some stuff in his garage that he thought was about forty years old. Or maybe fifty, he wasn’t sure. It was sweet but not too sweet, thick but not too thick, with a kind of burnt, caramelized, vaguely nutmeggy feeling to it. Hard to take in quantity on a hot summer day, but perfect for a cold winter night, I’m sure.
Wikipedia has some information on vino cotto, but the Italian version is much better than the English. And you can see the whole process on Casey Cole’s blog on low-carbon living in the Marche. ((Incidentally, the province of Macerata has a really nice idea: gastronomically themed itineraries.))
Over his vino cotto, and then also his red wine, of which I ended up taking home a gallon, the farmer told me about what it’s like to till the land in the Marche. This is what the landscape looks like: that’s his alfalfa field in the foreground, and his farmhouse on the left. What you can’t see is his wheat, ready to harvest, and his sunflowers. ((I wonder if it features in Iain Gately’s new book, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol.))
It’s a hard life. He can’t really make ends meet. The fodder (straw and alfalfa hay) gets trucked up north as nobody has any cattle around there now. A few sheep, maybe, that’s all. The local cheese is a nice pecorino, but the women don’t make it anymore. Kids aren’t interested in life on the land, just motorinos and smack. They used to have 24 people working on the farm, now it’s just him and his brother, two retirees. Skyrocketing agricultural prices? News to them. But at least they have their vino cotto.