The Italian Alps | Beyond fondue

Like France and Switzerland, the Italian Alps have their cheese specialties, including fonduta. But mountain cuisine is far from being limited to dairy products. Chef Marc-Olivier Frappier loves Italy and the Alps. He introduces us to other dishes perfect for après-ski.

Marc-Olivier Frappier, chef of the Mon Lapin restaurant, has an “Italian family”, whom he returns to see every year. Gigi and Diletta welcomed him into their home in Romagna while the young budding chef was participating in the AFS Interculture Canada program (high school exchange). During the holidays, they made the five-hour drive that separated them from the mountains.

“The first time we went to the Alps, it was on the Austrian side and it was exactly as I had imagined. We went into a small inn to ask for directions and there was a band in Lederhosen [culotte courte traditionnelle]. Everyone was drinking beer from big beer glasses. They were the first Austrians I saw in my life and I fell right on the cliché! »

During this trip, the teenager was very surprised to see what we ate in these remote corners, at an altitude of 2500 meters. There were spätzle (free-form pasta), knodels (bread or potato balls often stuffed with meat), speck, radicchio, etc.

Later, when he was the boss of the kitchens at Joe Beef and Vin Papillon, the man we call “Marco” met Myrta. She delivered vegetables from Ferme des Quatre-Temps to restaurants in Montreal. A friendship developed between the young chef and the market gardener who, we would quickly learn, is the daughter of the very famous Italian winemaker Elisabetta Foradori. We also recommend the wines of this house located at the foot of the Dolomites to accompany your Alpine cuisine.

Since returning to her native Trentino to create her own high-altitude gardens among the vines, Myrta has brought back with her everything she had learned in the vegetable gardens of Hemmingford. In 2018, Marc-Olivier and his future wife Vanya Filipovic, sommelier and co-owner of Mon Lapin, visited the Foradori.

“It was during the holiday season. It hadn’t snowed in two years in the area, but it started snowing when we were driving there. There was real euphoria when we arrived, Vanya recalls. Elisabetta lives in a real mountain house on a cliff, much higher than the vineyard. »

This is where Marc-Olivier discovered Trentino strangolapreti, spinach dumplings made from bread.

Since then, he has often served “strangle-priests” at the restaurant, which the team prepares with winter spinach from Quatre-Temps.

“We made them in all kinds of ways, in a truly traditional or more left-field way. But the base of bread and spinach remains the same. »

Apres-ski cuisine

Although it is as seasonal as ours, with a wide variety of fruits and vegetables in summer, Alpine cuisine is often synonymous with winter on this side of the Atlantic and will never be out of place again. than at the chalet, after skiing.

Alpine culinary cultures are much older than ours, but in certain corners of Quebec, the climate is similar and what grows there – or does not grow there! – Also. We therefore benefit from taking inspiration from it.

On February 25 and 26, Mon Rabbit welcomes Lyon chef Marie-Victorine Manoa as part of Montréal en Lumière. “When she asked me what local ingredients she could cook with, I told her, a bit jokingly though, to imagine she was in Chamonix! », says Marc-Olivier.

System D

Even more than other traditional cuisines, that of the Alps is a cuisine of great resourcefulness. This is sometimes still the case today, when deliveries can be delayed by several days by a storm.

“Alpine cuisine is an example of guts and ingenuity in the context of life in a very remote region. When cooking in the mountains, you will have little access to fresh fruits and vegetables in the winter, and you may have to make provisions last for a week between deliveries, while running an inn that feeds from 50 to 250 skiers and other customers per day. Alpine culture is a culture of survival, autonomy and independence,” writes (in English) Meredith Erickson, in her superb book Alpine Cooking. This follows The art of living according to Joe Beef; Joe Beef: Surviving the Apocalypse ; And Friuli Food and Wine: Frasca Cooking from Northern Italy’s Mountains, Vineyards, and Seaside (untranslated), among other books.

Alpine cuisine ignores political boundaries. France, Switzerland, Italy, Austria and Germany (to a lesser extent) merge at the summits. Also we find pasta stuffed with potatoes and beetroot, sprinkled with poppy seeds in the Dolomites, a Relais & Châteaux establishment called Bellevue in Cogne (Aosta Valley), goulash in the mountain restaurant Sofie Hütte, in Seceda, and a hotel called Fichtenhof in Maranza/Meransen, South Tyrol, Italy.

This winter, during the holiday holidays, Marc-Olivier and Vanya went skiing and eating in the Aosta Valley, “a 45-minute drive after the Mont-Blanc tunnel”, more precisely in Breuil-Cervinia.

When it comes to polenta, there is actually one that is currently on the restaurant’s menu. Taragna is made from a mixture of corn and buckwheat. It can be eaten alone, with green vegetables sautéed on top, as an accompaniment to meat, etc.

“I was inspired by looking at the bread at the Automne bakery,” says the chef. So he asked the baker Julien Roy if he could grind his polenta in his workshop on rue Bélanger, with local organic corn.

The chef agreed to share his recipe with us; take advantage of the last months of winter to test different ratios of corn/buckwheat in your polenta. As for the strangolapreti, those from My Rabbit are a little complicated to make, but you can find some simpler recipes on the internet. The book Alpine Cooking, including the French translation, Gourmet trip to the Alps, was published in 2022 by Éditions Glénat, will satisfy all your other desires for mountain cuisine.

Visit the My Rabbit website

In a previous version of this text it was written that the book Alpine Cooking had not yet been translated into French, which was inaccurate.

Polenta taragna

This polenta can be served as a main course, with a bitter lettuce salad as an accompaniment. You can also garnish it with sautéed green vegetables (think rapini and broccolini, for example) or with grilled or even braised meat. It is a particularly versatile specialty.

Preparation: 45 minutes
Yield: 4 to 6 servings

Ingredients

• 150 g organic corn polenta
• 100 g stone-ground buckwheat flour
• 250 ml of milk
• 500 ml of water
• 100 g Louis d’Or cheese in cubes
• 50g butter
• Salt to taste

Preparation

• 1. In a large saucepan, bring water and milk to a boil.
• 2. Pour in the polenta and buckwheat flour, stirring constantly with a whisk.
• 3. Once the polenta has thickened, continue cooking for around thirty minutes, stirring occasionally using a wooden spoon.
• 4. Remove from the heat, add the cheese and butter and adjust the seasoning.
• 5. Serve hot with a little browned butter to finish.

Alpine agreements

To pair with your garnished polenta, fonduta or strangolapreti, among others, the wines from the Foradori estate, in Trentino, are an excellent option. In white, the SAQ holds vintages of manzoni bianco and nosiola grape varieties. In red, it is the king teroldego, a grape variety to which Elisabetta Foradori (re)gave its letters of nobility when she took over the family estate at the age of 20, upon the death of her father, in the mid-1980s.

“Mountain wines come from regions which, for a long time, were extremely poor, difficult to access, with thankless manual labor on slopes that cannot be mechanized,” explains Vanya Filipovic, co-owner of Mon Lapin. The preservation of indigenous grape varieties therefore happened naturally thanks to the geographical isolation of the Alpine arc.

“Altitude brings completely different energies to the plant, as well as to humans,” continues the emeritus sommelier. Lower temperatures slow down ripening, for unique balances between sugar and acidity. Today, winegrowers are seeking altitude as a natural way to combat the challenges of climate change. »

Find Foradori wines