The Auction She Could Not Refuse

A love letter to Lombardy, and to Sharon, who let the bidding go just a little too far

By Joseph Harris

Every year, on a weekend in late summer, the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens does

something quietly magical. It opens its gates to local wineries and restaurants, sets tables

among the flowers and the fog, and invites the community to wander, taste, and give

money to the hospital. The event is called Wine Song. It has been going on for thirty years,

maybe more. It is the kind of institution that a small coastal town builds slowly, without

quite meaning to, until one day it is simply part of what makes the place itself.

Kathleen and her sister Sharon were working our table that afternoon, passing bite-sized

pieces of lasagna and eggplant parm to people who had been drinking wine since noon

and were grateful for anything that absorbed it. The samples were generous — this was

not an accident — and the crowd received them with the particular enthusiasm of people

who have just realized they are hungry. It was a good day. The gardens were beautiful, the

fog held off, and a certain amount of wine was consumed in the name of medicine.

At the end of the afternoon, after the tasting was done, there is an auction. A tent, a

microphone, an auctioneer, and a room full of people who are simultaneously generous

and not entirely sober — which is, as it turns out, the ideal condition for fundraising. The

crowd tends toward the comfortable end of the financial spectrum. They give well. The

hospital has benefited from this for decades.

I am not going to tell you what Sharon paid. It went to a good cause — a specific imaging

system the hospital did not have, the kind of equipment that finds things early, when

finding them early still matters. That is where the money went, and that is the right place

for it.

What I will tell you is what Sharon bought: a trip to Lake Como, in Lombardy, for two.

Luxury airfare. A hotel on the lake. The full architecture of a dream that the auction house

had assembled with considerable skill and that Sharon, somewhere around the third

paddle raise, had decided was hers.

Kathleen, who is Sharon's sister and my partner, looked at her with the expression that

sisters reserve for moments when admiration and alarm arrive at exactly the same time.

Sharon did not appear to notice.

What Lombardy Is

If you have not been to Lake Como, I will try to describe it, though it resists description

the way beautiful things usually do. The lake sits in the foothills of the Alps, north of

Milan, carved by glaciers into a shape that looks on a map like an upside-down Y. The

water is deep and cold and a shade of blue that shifts with the light — pewter in the

morning, sapphire by noon, something close to black when the mountains throw their

shadows across it in the evening.

The villages on the shore are vertical — built up the hillsides because there was no room

on the waterfront, which was always taken. Bellagio sits at the junction of the lake's two

southern arms like someone placed it there for compositional reasons. Varenna, on the

eastern shore, has a waterfront promenade so narrow that two people cannot walk it side

by side without one of them ending up in the lake. Menaggio has a ferry dock and a café

and the particular quality of a town that has decided it does not need to try very hard

because the view does all the work.

The villas are famous. Villa del Balbianello with its terraced gardens jutting into the water.

Villa Carlotta with its camellias and its Canova marble. Villa d'Este, which has been a hotel

since 1873 and carries itself accordingly. George Clooney has a house on the lake. This is

mentioned in every article about Como, as though celebrity proximity is itself a form of

endorsement. It is not. The lake was beautiful before Clooney and will be beautiful after,

which is the correct attitude to have about these things.

But the beauty is not the point, or not the whole point. The point is what Lombardy is.

The North That Feeds the South

Lombardy is the wealthiest region in Italy. Milan is its capital, and Milan is not like other

Italian cities — it runs on time, it wears good clothes, it has opinions about efficiency that

the rest of the peninsula finds either admirable or exhausting, depending on where you

are standing. Lombardy produces roughly a fifth of Italy's GDP. It is, in the language of

economics, a net contributor — meaning it sends more to Rome than it receives, a fact

that Lombards will mention to you exactly as often as you are willing to hear it.

They consider themselves northern Europeans who happen to live in Italy. This is not

entirely a compliment to Italy, and they know it. The Lombard identity is built on work,

precision, and a certain reserve that reads as cool to outsiders and as dignity to

themselves. They drink less at lunch than people in the south. They are on time for

meetings. Their pasta is made with butter, not olive oil, because butter is what the alpine

foothills produce, and Lombards cook with what the land gives them rather than what the

travel posters suggest.

Ask a Lombard if he is Italian and he will say yes, of course. Then he will tell you, with

great politeness, that he is Lombard first. This is not separatism. It is something older and

more stubborn than separatism — it is the specific, particular identity of a people who

have been here since before Italy was a country, and who remember it.

The Italians are like this everywhere, is the thing. Every region has this quality — this

proprietary relationship with its own landscape, its own kitchen, its own accent. The

Genoese are Ligurian before they are Italian. The Venetians are Venetian before they are

anything else. The Pugliesi carry the heel of the boot like a passport. The Sicilians — well,

the Sicilians are simply Sicilian, and the conversation about whether that makes them

Italian is one they are happy to have indefinitely.

Italy is not a country so much as a confederation of deeply held local identities that agreed,

in 1861, to share a flag and a national soccer team. The flag is waved with conviction. The

soccer team is supported with passion. Everything else is negotiated region by region, and

the regions negotiate hard.

This is why the food is so specific. It is not regional variation in the way that American

food varies by region — a little more spice here, a slightly different preparation there. It is

ontological. The food is the identity. Change the pasta shape and you have changed the

argument.

What the Lake Produces

Lombardy's kitchen is not the kitchen of olive groves and sun-hammered stone. It is the

kitchen of Alpine meadows and glacial lakes, of dairy herds and slow rivers and a climate

that rewards patience. The butter is real butter — the kind that comes from cows that eat

actual grass in actual pastures, which is what Alpine dairy has always been.

The pizzoccheri is the dish that explains everything. It is a pasta made from buckwheat —

not wheat, buckwheat, a grain that grows in thin mountain soil where wheat would fail.

The noodles are short and flat and dark and substantial, and they are tossed with potatoes

and Valtellina Casera cheese and savoy cabbage and a quantity of butter that would alarm

a cardiologist and delight a Lombard. It is not a subtle dish. It is a dish that has been

keeping people warm at altitude for centuries, and it tastes like exactly that.

The risotto alla Milanese — saffron rice, bone marrow, Parmigiano — is the city's

contribution, elegant where the pizzoccheri is rustic, but built on the same logic: butter,

patience, and the conviction that adding another ladleful of stock is never wrong. The

bresaola, the air-dried beef from Valtellina, is as northern as food gets — cured in

mountain air, sliced thin, eaten with arugula and lemon and olive oil, which is the one

concession Lombardy makes to the Mediterranean world below.

Fontina is technically a Val d'Aosta cheese, but it lives in the Lombard kitchen the way

certain neighbors live in your house — so permanently and usefully that the distinction

stops mattering. It melts into everything. It is nutty and mild and it does not compete; it

completes. The Pollo alla Valdostana — chicken thighs braised in white wine with fontina

— is an act of pure alpine hospitality: open your door, apply heat, let the cheese do the

rest.

What We Are Cooking

Tuesday night at Cucina Verona we are cooking the northern lakes. The menu begins with

a cream of asparagus soup — velvety, restrained, the color of early spring — alongside a

chilled snap pea salad with mint and pecorino, which is the lake's way of saying that the

cold months are over and the hillsides have remembered their purpose. We are drinking

a Pinot Grigio delle Venezie with this course — bright, clean, with just enough mineral

edge to balance the cream. The Venezie sits at the threshold between Lombardy and the

Veneto, which is appropriate, because thresholds are interesting.

The second course is our version of pizzoccheri — tagliatelle tossed in a butter-sage sauce

with finely diced potatoes. We have taken a liberty with the buckwheat, substituting

tagliatelle because that is what our kitchen does well, but the logic is unchanged: butter,

sage, potato, a pasta substantial enough to hold everything together. We are drinking a

Vermentino di Sardegna with this — an unusual pairing, perhaps, for a northern dish, but

the wine has a herbal quality and a clean finish that finds the sage and stays out of the

butter's way. Sometimes the unexpected pairing is the honest one.

The main course is Pollo alla Valdostana with braised Tuscan kale — chicken thighs slow-

braised in white wine and fontina sauce, the kale simmered in garlic until it has lost all

defensiveness and become simply good. We are pouring a Montepulciano d'Abruzzo with

this — a wine of depth and dark fruit and a certain rustic authority that has no particular

reason to be at a Lombard table and fits perfectly anyway. Italy is full of these happy

contradictions.

An Offer She Could Not Refuse

Sharon is going to Lake Como. The details are being arranged. There will be a flight with

real seats and a hotel that faces the water and mornings with coffee on a terrace while the

Alps decide what color they are going to be today. There will be boats across the lake and

lunches that last longer than lunches have any right to last and evenings when the water

goes dark and the lights come on in Bellagio and the whole scene looks like someone

invented it for the purpose of making people understand what beauty is for.

She will eat pizzoccheri, I hope. Real pizzoccheri, in Valtellina, where the buckwheat pasta

is made by people who learned it from people who learned it from the mountain itself.

She will drink Sforzato, the wine of the Valtellina — Nebbiolo grapes dried on reed mats

until they become something concentrated and serious and entirely unlike anything you

can get here. She will discover that lake trout, pulled that morning and grilled simply over

wood, is an argument against complication.

And she will understand what we are trying to say on Tuesday nights at Cucina Verona —

that every region of Italy is a complete world, entire unto itself, and that the extraordinary

thing about Italy is not that it is one country but that it is twenty countries, each one

convinced, with good reason, that it has the best of everything.

They are all correct. That is the miracle.

Come Tuesday. Twenty-nine dollars. Family style. The way the northern lakes intended.

Reservations: (707) 964-6844 or click here

124 East Laurel Street, Fort Bragg, California