La Terra Fortunata: The Splendid Food and Wine of Friuli Venezia-Giulia, Italy's Great Undiscoveredregion

A Fortunate Crossroads

Fred Plotkin made Italy his own in his authoritative Italy for the Gourmet Traveler (1996), a guide to restaurants, food shops, hotels, and the inner life of dozens of cities. Since then he's decided to share his own Italy – first in Recipes From Paradise (1997), a kind of love letter to Liguria, the region on the Italian Riviera where he has lived and written in a seaside apartment made fragrant by the gently pungent small-leaf basil that makes the world's best-known pesto, and now in La Terra Fortunata, a portrait of a very different sort of region.

Like Liguria, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, which is in the northeast corner of Italy bordering Austria and Slovenia, was formed by poverty and hard work. In both regions women not only tended the fires while their husbands were gone for months at a time – at sea or working in remote countries to bring back money for the family – but also chopped the wood for the fires and planted the fields and tended the animals for the food they cooked. This tough reality is at odds with the gorgeous and clement Mediterranean seaside of Liguria, but more in keeping with Carnia, a rugged area of Friuli-Venezia Guilia in the foothills of the Alps.

Plotkin may have lost his heart to Liguria, but his soul resonates with Friuli-Venezia Giulia, and he has written a book that is a model for all writing on Italy. Few regions have been as burdened with the explosions of history as Friuli-Venezia Giulia, which is "fortunate" for the resourcefulness of its extremely hardworking, extremely warm people and also buffeted by the fortunes of its location at the crossroads of western and eastern Europe.

Rome placed great importance on this region, and only when the Roman stronghold of Aquileia, in the lower reaches of Friuli Venezia-Giulia, was sacked as the empire fell did Rome lose its dominance. Aquileians fled to a few unpromising islands to the south, and the city they hastily founded became Venice. Nowadays any tourists who find their way to Friuli-Venezia Giulia have usually traveled two hours north from Venice. The Austro-Hungarian empire had its only port in Trieste, the cosmopolitan city that bested Venice in commercial importance. Hemingway and Joyce lived and wrote in Trieste, which Plotkin says was long the New York of Italy, and a hundred years ago its literary cafés were the intellectual crucibles of Europe. Many of the most protracted battles of World War I were fought in Friuli-Venezia Giulia. Just twenty-five years ago much of Friuli was gravely damaged by earthquakes. Forced cosmopolitanism and a long history of poverty have produced one of the worthiest and most complex cuisines in Italy, and the cool, hilly land produces some of the world's great white wines – the country's most renowned – and many superb red ones, too.

I treasure Plotkin as a peerless friend as well as colleague, and am enormously gratified to report that the people, food, and wine of Friuli-Venezia Giulia have inspired him to write better than he ever has – with an easy command of a wealth of information that he lays out with his customary directness. His introductory guide to the way Italy eats (information you are to "toss away" when it comes time to learn how Friuli-Venezia Giulia eats) could preface many a cookbook on Italian food. Anyone can learn much from his guide to buying and storing and opening and serving wine, and the notes at the end on several dozen wineries are a model of informed and opinionated concision.

The number and variety of recipes are immensely generous and thorough, like the people of the region. Here is homemade liptauer, ricotta enlivened with paprika, mustard, capers, parsley, and scallions; fresh figs and the sweet prosciutto of San Daniele, the only rival in silken softness to the famous Parma prosciutto and many would say its superior; and a pillow of pumpkin gnocchi with poppy-seed sauce. It was hard to choose just a few dishes to exemplify such a diverse cuisine. Here are three that feature signal flavors. Penne with ricotta and cinnamon could hardly be simpler – the sauce for the penne pasta is just the other two ingredients plus an optional sprinkling of sugar. Rich, yes, as are many of the other recipes, which surprisingly often have butter and cream – this very northern region is well above the theoretical olive-oil line, after all. Polenta with ginger is one of the few combinations that Plotkin himself created – and it proved to be so convincing that several natives who were his dinner guests thought they remembered it as a traditional dish. Richly flavored white fish such as monkfish, grouper, halibut, cod, or Chilean sea bass sauteed with garlic, white wine vinegar, and a startling amount of black pepper is the ultimately well-balanced creation of Livio Felluga, one of the grand old men of winemaking in the region and the patriarch of a marvelously warm and hospitable family. (Terre Alte, from Livio Felluga, is a blend of white grapes that goes with almost anything, and Plotkin calls Sossň one of the world's only Merlots that could be called great.)

Even if you're not a cook, even if you'll never go to Friuli-Venezia Giulia, it's worth buying this book just to read "Meeting Giulia Cimenti," about a legendary eighty-year-old cook in the mountains of Carnia who had eluded the author during most of his nine years of research. The meal he finally had when she was in the kitchen ("In my notepad, with heavy underlining, is a word I seldom use: Fabulous") and his encounter with her afterward crystallized his admiration for and even awe of Friulians. This is a woman so eager and able to learn and prepare the next dish that near the close of a long, dignified conversation she lets Plotkin know that it's time for her go back to the kitchen. "Work is good for you," she tells him. "We should tell men that." Everyone can learn a good deal from the people and food and wine of this star-crossed region.

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