Upon exit from the shop and checking the receipt, R and i commented that
the bill, after all, was less than what we expected, given the
amount and quality of the purchases.
"Over here, it's well-spent!" whispered a girl with Indian or Pakistani
features just moments before, with the knowing tone of one who probably
La Casera cheese shelf
is a regular customer of
La Casera herself. She was responding to my witty jest that emphasized
worry for an expensive bill, humor that i thought appropriate to the friendly climate of the shop.
Besides cheese and cured meats, the shop also has a little section
for salt. While Eros, the storekeeper, passionately described to us the experience of
tasting salt from various origins, i was thinking to the contradiction between
the criteria of ecologic shopping and the purchase of a can of salt coming from
Himalaya, rather than South Africa. But, come on! When will it ever
happen again to be able to compare salt from Ibiza with the Hawaiian one?
And so we added those two containers to our shopping bag.
I am quite ignorant in this matter. Up until now, to me salt was
just salt. NaCl. It's not that sodium chloride could ever have different
organoleptic peculiarities if it comes from South American mines instead
of Sicilian saltworks. Eros told me that the differences in taste are not given
by the chemical substance itself, but by its impurities that every kind of salt has.
Could be...
Anyway i was already fully satisfied by the more interesting subject of
cheese.
"Taste this last, please" goes Eros, handing me a teaspoon with some fresh goat cheese.
Delicious! so much that i asked him to add some of it to the basket. In the mean time
R was involved by a woman (Eros' mother?) in buying an exquisite slice of Matera bread,
displayed on a counter at the end of the shop.
Fortunately these last two purchases were made at the end, after a list of items that were already carefully prepared before, selecting from the products listed
on La Casera's website. It's really difficult, in fact, to choose real-time among hundreds
of available cheeses (mainly from Piedmont, but also from other Italian regions, and some
foreign ones).
Cheese!
The fresh goat cheese, together with a slice of pecorino siciliano ai
pistacchi di Bronte (a token gift for the large purchase) were the worthy completion
of our shopping list that included three cow milk cheeses (Toma del Maccagn, Raschera semistagionata,
Tella Alto Adige), one sheep (Canestrato di Castel del Monte) and one goat (Ubriaco al Traminer).
Any choice we inquired about was followed by a qualified comment from Eros.
As a choice criterium we took into account the difficulty of being able to find those cheeses
(a more famous pecorino di Pienza, for example, is easy to find also in the regular shopping centers).
"You're in the right place" answered Eros, amused, showing up from the back-shop when,
to break the ice, right in front of the display shelves, i said "Goodmorning, by chance do you have
cheese over here?"
A moment before, in front of the shop window, i dwelt upon the thought of the many surprising
forms developed in the centuries of the need to preserve the milk nutritive properties.
Indeed we were really in the right place.
In the picture of the cheese plate, starting from the yellow one on the top, clockwise:
Bagoss (cow milk, Lombardy), Ubriaco al Traminer (goat,
Veneto), Canestrato di Castel del Monte - presidio SlowFood (sheep, Abruzzo),
Pecorino siciliano DOP ai pistacchi di Bronte (sheep, Sicily), Toma del Maccagn - presidio
SlowFood (cow, Piedmont), goat fresh cheese (Piedmont), Graukase
(cow, Alto Adige), Vezzena - presidio SlowFood (cow, Trentino), Raschera
semistagionata DOP (cow, Piedmont). In the center, Tella Alto Adige (cow).
Bagoss was bought in a grocery shop, Graukase and Vezzena at
the Christmas markets in Merano (Trentino Alto Adige),
the others are all from Eros' shop.
La Casera
Piazza Ranzoni, 19
28921 Verbania Intra
http://www.formaggidieros.it
