“Antica e desueta [archaic and forgotten] is a beguiling introduction to a recipe,” I said to my friend, the cook and writer Stefano Arturi, when we talked on the phone the other week. He laughed, noting that those words in relation to recipes made him both curious and, because of their foggy closeness to mythologising, suspicious.
It was his recipe for hazelnut ragu that started it all, sending us down more or less the same paths in books and online, where we met more of the same thing: fabulously contradictory stories in which ragu made from hazelnuts was an ancient Piedmontese dish of great beauty born out of economy and hardship, and also “forgotten”, which justifies the lack of any evidence as to where it actually came from. Yet also, a breezy, contemporary dish that, like so many modern dishes, was scorned by those faithful to more traditional (ancient, authentic) versions. There were other claims, too, such as “This is the authentic recipe” and “This is an improvisational dish: do as you wish”. In short, a big tangle, which makes for entertaining reading. Although maybe not for those of the opinion that recipe writers should stop the self-indulgent introductions and get straight to the recipe – which is what we did.
