We want to share with you a very old and traditional course of our region: the “bagna caôda”, or “hot bath/sauce”. You cannot find it outside our area and not everybody likes it. We prepared the “bagna caôda” for our Polish colleague Kalina and her comment was “interesting”, which means for a polite polish that she detested it (too much garlic in it!).
We cook it in autumn and often on the 1st of November, when families celebrate All Saints or all Souls Day, all together around the table. Bagna caôda is a rite. The atmosphere gets very convivial thanks to the typical burners warming on candles and to the muttering of the sauce which keeps on boiling during the whole dinner. In this sauce you can “throw” every kind of seasonal vegetables (of course we refer to the piedmontese autumn), some fresh - like cardoon, fennel, celery, endive - some boiled - like onions, boiled potatoes, cauliflower, cabbages, turnips, beets -.
The sauce is mainly made of garlic and of anchovies. Anchovies? In Torino we don’t have the sea! But in ancient times there was a lively commerce with the coastal villages of Liguria or of France and merchants traded anchovies preserved with salt. So many typical piedmontese dishes are made with anchovies: not really Km 0 but anyway a food considered “poor” and sustainable.
RECIPE BAGNA CAÔDA
Ingredients
1 can salt anchovies, drained
2 plump cloves of garlic, peeled
4 tablespoons butter, softened, or cream
¼ cup extra virgin oil
Place all ingredients in a blender and whirl just until the garlic cloved are finely chopped. Pour the mixture into a saucepan and heat slowly for hours on low heat, until the mixture is bubbly and the anchovies completely dissolved.
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