2023 Author: Cody Thornton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-06-06 02:02
"Ah, what a beautiful cafe". Fabrizio De Andrè also says so. Drank hot and solitary as the breakfast of "hard and pure" or used as a plunger from the stomach after meals luculliano and not, the coffee it seems to form, with the Italians, an indestructible and essential combination.
But is it really so?
If we go beyond the myth, we see that in reality the rankings for coffee consumption in Italy are not exactly record-breaking.
In Europe alone, depending on the years taken into consideration, we sail from sixth to tenth place on average for per capita consumption, preceded by countries such as Norway, Finland and Denmark, their true serial consumers of coffee.
So how can we explain this disconnect between the perception that we Italians have of the cup of coffee, at home or at the bar, as a national drink, and the dissonant, cold objective data?
The explanation is simple. In Italy, coffee, although much loved, is relegated to the two main functions mentioned above, namely of Breakfast or of at the end of the meal.
It is difficult to find a real "coffee ritual", as is the case with the most refined tea, which is sipped and tasted with respect and a pinch of awe.
We entrust him with often marginal roles, as a follower and not as a protagonist, making him slide inexorably from a kind of comfort and refreshment to the most sinister function of simple charge to face a day of work or to digest the (once) abundant Italian meals.
In other European countries this is not the case at all and coffee is tasted on many other occasions, and often considered as a drink to accompany meals, like wine or beer as well as tea, as happens in many Asian countries.
That will be why Davide Scabin during the cycle of events Atelier Espresso tried to overturn the Italian tradition of coffee and included in the tasting menus of Combal. Zero, his restaurant near Turin, the pairing coffee-dishes ”, That is, combining different types of coffee with each type of dish proposed.
A way to clear coffee as a complement to classic meals and unhook it from the stereotype of Italian breakfast.
But that's not all: the eclectic chef has also revolutionized the sequence of the Italian meal, which includes light appetizers at the beginning in a progressive crescendo of taste - and relative heaviness - with the first and second courses.
In his "up and down" menu, in fact, ours begins with well-structured appetizers and then decreases in intensity with the first and second courses, thus satisfying our gastric juices which, Scabin continues, only at the beginning of lunch, and not at the end, they are ready to welcome any kind of thing we throw into the stomach.
And in fact, his menu opens immediately with a nice “miller-style pigeon with green snails and Chinese cabbage”. Just to be clear.
All, of course, combined with the beloved taste of coffee.
Some combinations of dishes and coffee designed by Davide Scabin:
Mugnaia pigeon with green snails and Chinese cabbage paired with an almost cold Indian Grand Cru (Indrya).
Pea cream, cardoncelli mushrooms and suckling pig served with a warm spaghetti, both paired with an aromatic Colombian Grand Cru called Rosabaya.
Marinated snapper with smoked trout and mustard salad paired with an Ethiopian Grand Cru (Buukela).
Cleaning dessert (Cold fusion) accompanied by a decaffeinated. This last coffee served hot: even by playing with the temperatures you can indulge our decreasing desire for food, Scabin specifies.