A Short History of Bagna Cauda

More than a dish, Bagna Cauda is a rite. It is synonymous of good company, delicious food, and the season's new wine. A Bagna Cauda meal must be concluded with hot Bollito and stock, said to favour digestion. The origins of this dish are remote: it may be a direct descendant of garum, a sauce that was ubiquitous in ancient Roman cuisine. Garum consisted of the foul-smelling fluid oozing from fish that was flavoured with spices and left to ferment. It must have resembled blachang, widely used in SE Asian cuisine. Bagna Cauda, or rather its main ingredient salted anchovies, reached Piedmont along with salt smuggled from Liguria through the Alps: this traffic originated in the attempts to evade Genoa's monopoly on salt. Smugglers often hid their precious loads under a thick layer of salted anchovies. After Genoa lost her privilege in the early nineteenth century, anchovies gradually became the real object of the no-longer illegal trade, and several former smugglers turned into dealers. Most of them were part-time farmers and peasants who left their fields in September to reach Liguria, maybe Sicily, or even Portugal and Greece. There, they bought their stock from fishermen or wholesalers and took off again for Piedmont's towns, markets, and farms. Bagna Cauda is a simple dish, but with a number of local variations, as each town or village (or, indeed, falimy) claims to own the one and only "original" recipe. Whatever the recipe, the other main ingredient of Bagna Cauda is garlic. It needs no introduction, having been known and used for thousands of years. In ancient Egypt, seven kilos of garlic could buy a young slave, whereas the Greeks and Romans believed it could enhance the strength and aggressiveness of athletes and soldiers. In the Middle Ages and afterwards it was considered a charm against witches and vampires, as well as a potent aphrodisiac. And so on. The other protagonists of Bagna Cauda are the vegetables that are dipped in the piping hot sauce (which is exactly what "Bagna Cauda" means). We have chosen two, that are especially rooted in the Piedmontese tradition. One is Jerusalem artichokes, aka "topinambour". This nutritious tuber was first brought Europe in the sixteenth century. Easy to grow in any climate, it has beautiful yellow flowers, whereas its roots are widely used to produce syrups, spirits, and cosmetics. Its taste is delicate, artichoke-like and is excellent with Bagna Cauda. For culinary purposes, the yellower, smoother roots are to be preferred, discarding the purplish or knottier ones. This tuber can be eaten raw or boiled, mashed or fried, or added to salads. The other protagonist is cardoon. It has an unmistakable bittersweet taste, and is extensively grown in Piedmont, especially in Valle Belbo and around the town of Chieri. In Piedmontese dialect, cardoons are also called "gobbi," meaning "stooped", since they are bent, tied, and kept underground for some time to improve their colour, texture and flavour.