Wild Boar Piedmontese Dinner

Returned from our truffle-seeking travels in the Piedmont, Tom and I wanted to recapture the gorgeous flavors of that region’s food in a dinner party. Last week I wrote about the pasta dish we created for it with the black truffles we’d brought home. Three of the other courses of that meal – aperitivo, secondo, and dolce – were as authentic as I could make them.

Aperitivo

In this country we think of an aperitif as something to drink. In Torino we learned that they use the same word to designate also the nibbles that cafes and wine bars give you when you order a glass of wine. Here’s the elegant little plate Tom and I received along with our glasses of Dolcetto at Baratti e Milano, a classic belle époque café:

Wasn’t that lovely? Also delicious: We were enchanted. This is not the kind of food I’ve ever tried to make, but for the dinner party I gave it my best shot. I made up a batch of pâte brisée (Simca’s recipe; a rich version with egg), shaped and baked it in 40 tiny barquette molds, and prepared 5 kinds of toppings, one each for the 8 diners:

• Asparagus with lemon mayonnaise
• Spinach blended with ricotta
• Spicy sun-dried tomato puree
• Sausage rounds with mustard and cornichons
• Shrimp with curry mayonnaise

Here they are on the living room table, along with the magnum of Billecart-Salmon rosé generously brought by Frank, one of our guests.

Not as exquisite as the professional batch, but not bad for a first try – and evidently tasty: They disappeared in no time at all.

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Secondo

After the aperitivi, we moved to the dining room and had a small antipasto (roasted prosciutto-wrapped fennel spears, which I’ve written about before); the truffle pasta for a primo; and then, per secondo, braised wild boar.

I took a classic Piemontese recipe from a classic Italian cookbook, Ada Boni’s 1200-page Il Talismano della Felicità. The boar shoulder came from D’Artagnan. Tom cut it up and I marinated it for two days in red wine, onion, carrot, celery, parsley, bay leaf, sage, and marjoram. I braised it in the strained marinade, more wine, and some tomato paste. It took three hours to tenderize, but then it was meltingly delicious, though the sauce needed a little correction to reduce its acidity. With it I served duchesse potatoes and butter-braised Savoy cabbage.

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Dolce

Panna cotta was originally a Piedmontese specialty, but now it’s all-Italian. It’s a great dessert for an elaborate dinner because it’s extremely good, extremely easy to make, and what work there is can be done a day or two in advance.

I used a recipe from a long-ago issue of Gourmet magazine, clipped out and preserved in my recipe binder. You just bring heavy cream, half and half, and sugar to a boil; stir in vanilla and dissolved gelatin; pour it into ramekins, and chill them well. At serving time, I unmolded them onto plates and drizzled them with strawberry sauce. Alongside I served brutti ma buoni, Piedmontese hazelnut meringue cookies brought back from our trip.

Another charming thing about this dessert is that it’s so light and lively on the tongue, it makes you feel refreshed, even after all the previous rich food you’ve had. Of course, that’s an illusion. But in a dinner like this, calories can’t count! And in any event, grappa helps burn off some of them: Beloved husband believes that grappa provides negative calories.

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Here’s the full menu I printed up for the occasion: