Parma for Great Art, Opera, History…and Food

By Shirley Fong-Torres

Contact Shirley at: wokwiz@aol.com

(The Piazza Duomo in Parma, Italy, above)

I could have hung out in "Bologna the Fat" my entire stay in Italy, but my bi-polar bear Wroburlto had his own agenda.

We said arrivederci to the wonderful staff at Star Hotel Excelsior and crossed the street to board a Milano train for Modena and Parma.

Wro loves trains, but his main reason for wanting to move down the Emilian Way was soccer. While the glamour teams in Milan and Rome and Turin get most of the attention, games in Modena and Parma are more accessible and every bit as intense.

A Battle Between Modena and Reggio

A battle for 16th place between Modena and Reggio brought the sold-out stadium to its feet in anguished protest every time the referee's decisions went badly for the home side.

An elderly gentleman sitting next to us taught Wro how to insult a referee's family honor in Italian. I try so hard to raise a proper cub, but what's a mother to do?

Watching games on the International Channel back home, Wro had fallen completely in love with "The Two Adrian's," stars of the Parma team: Adriano, from Brazil, and Adrian Mutu, from Romania.

Parma is famous for developing players, and the Adrians are two of the best young players in the world. "Cute too," Wro points out. (Adrian Mutu was recently sold by Parma to London team Chelsea for some $25 million, setting off riots amongst Parma fans. Wro says he is going to London, too).

Wro had his soccer boys, but I was here for the food. Modena is a great culinary town, where many people still make balsamic vinegar in their cellars and age it for decades.

Sealing the Town's Reputation for Eating

The town's reputation for eating was sealed when the composer Rossini lived in Paris and longed famously for the sausages for which Modena is famous and the rest of the world envious - zampone and cotechino.

Zampone is made by selecting the choicest parts of a pig's shoulder, neck, ears, throat and shank, making sure it balances fat to lean, seasoning it with cinnamon, cloves, salt, pepper and nutmeg, adding some pig skin that has been cut on a garlic-rubber board.

This all goes into a mortar and is then stuffed into the pig's feet, which have been boned, cleaned and steamed. That is then cooked under such rigorous controls that only a special pan called a zamponiera will do.

Cotechino is made of the same ingredients, but is stuffed in ordinary casing. In one shop, someone offered Wro some 80-year-old balsamic vinegar, but Mommy explained it cost as much as three nights' dining out.

Parma, the name of both the town and the former duchy that included it, is off the tourist map, despite having everything tourists usually want: great art, opera, history, and food.

They have been salting the legs of pigs and hanging them to dry in the crisp Apennine hills south of the town for thousands of years. The greatness of Parma ham (prosciutto di Parma), and so many other Italian foods, is in the fine details.

It's not unusual here to see halogen lights spotting the food. That's what's important in Emilia-Romagna. You never see a single Italian reading while dining here either -- that would detract from the food, from the fine details of dining.

In Parma, Wro and I learned that flavor is in those details. In the first century B.C., Varro wrote about the pig breeding of the Gallic tribes in this part of Italy and praised the preserved meats.

In Langhirano, the village where most all Parma ham is cured with sea breezes over the Apennines at exactly 900 meters above sea level, the air makes the unique curing methods possible.

Prosciutto di Parma Lightly Salted

Prosciutto di Parma is salted lightly -- and only on the rind and the uncovered area of muscle. This gives a sweetness that other hams lack. It also requires patience. Parma hams must come from pigs that are at least 140 kilos and at least 10 months old.

The light salting method must be repeated, with at least six days between treatments. This allows gradual absorption. During the drying process, the hams must be hung in rooms with large windows on opposite walls, to allow the unique air to circulate during the day.

They must be beaten with wooden mallets and uncovered areas of muscle must be covered with "sugna" (minced pork lard with salt and pepper), before they take an aroma test, administered by a special bone needle.

The most Parmigiano detail of all is the slicing. A couple of years ago, the slicing of Parma ham became a matter of international law, when Parmigiano producers objected to British knife wielders.

The way the ham is sliced is crucial, and it's never so good as when it is freshly sliced. 'Berkel's' blue enamel slicers, made by a Dutch company, are out of production, but cherished in Parma and worth around $10,000. A trattoria that has one shows it off.

Prosciutto di Parma must be sliced with a vertical blade, which prevents meat from clinging to the blade, thus avoiding heat that would volatilize the flavor unfavorably. As with the whole process, slower is always better.

Trying Dishes with the Best Prosciutto

At Ristorante La Greppia (Via Garibaldi 39) our marvelous waiter ordered for us, making sure we tried dishes with the best prosciutto, as well as the best Parmigiano- Reggiano cheeses.

These cheeses have been made here for 2,000 years, and again, the flavor is in the details. Cows must eat a clover-and-grass diet to produce milk thick enough to separate naturally.

Parmesan cheese can only made between April 15 and November 15, when the clover produces the best milk. Wheels of curd are aged in cool cellars, inside coatings of wine or grape seed oil, then moved to warmer storage rooms for a year or more.

Three years later, the cheese earn stravecchio status. Four years garners the title stravecchione. Some restaurants hold cheeses that are 20 years old and more.

Parma cooking is much like Bolognese, so at La Greppia, we tried our favorite tortelli again, along with an exquisite salt cod in red ragu with potatoes and an osso buco with risotto.

Finally we ended as the pigs that made our prosciutto ended their meals, with some of sliced Parmiagianno-Regianno cheese.

That is the final secret of the prosciutto di Parma: the pigs are fed the whey from the former duchy's famous cheese. Wro said Italians should feed their cubs as well as their pigs.

Then he insisted that we rent a car and head for the Po River Valley, in order to enjoy the area's famous "culatello," which is like prosciutto, only made from shoulders instead of legs.

Fortunately, the concierge at our gracious Hotel PalaceMaria Luigia was able to point us toward a chauffeur service, since I am famous even amongst my Chinese friends for getting lost while driving in my own hometown.

To Wro's great delight, our driver's name was Adrian, just like the two soccer players for whom he had developed crushes. Adrian drove us around the great sausage making towns of the Po Valley: Busseto, Zibello, Roccabianco, San Secondo, Soragna, and Fidenza.

Sampling the Culatello

We sampled culatello in most of these places, while learning that the area also made wonderful, if less famous, coppa, from the head, and lonza, from the rind, and cotechino and pancetta from the bellies.

After taking tea back in our charming old hotel, we walked about Parma, a town that is trying hard to get itself on the tourist map.

Major art exhibitions, a serious new cooking academy and an advertising campaign are all in place to lure visitors to the ancient charms and flavors of Italy's best known culinary town.

They are even taking legal measures to protect their name from being misused by inferior food products calling themselves Parmesan, without abiding the tough criteria that they impose on their own cheese and meat industries.

Parma is magically easy to walk about. We visited the famous opera house, walked the ancient streets, and heard 15th-century music in a cathedral that was older than the music.

We also bought tickets to the sold-out soccer match vs. Lazio of Rome. Adriano scored the game-winning goal in the last minute, after a brilliant run by the other Adrian. Wro said that days and nights don't get much better than that.

Travel Tips

~Heavily subsidized by the government, trains are the best travel bargains in Italy. It cost us less to ride trains all the way from Bologna to Parma, after stopping in Modena, than it cost to take a shuttle bus from the Bologna airport to our hotel.

~Business and convention center Bologna is busy week days, but hotel bargains can be found on weekends. Parma is the opposite, a popular weekend town with some low rates possible during the middle of the week.

Hotel Palace Maria Luigia
Viale Mentana 140 Parma 43100 Italy