Best stinco in Umbria.
The wildboar hunting season has ended, so time for the annual final wildboar hunters dinner. The hunters’ cabin is in an old bongo type building and can only be reached by driving quite some distance over an unaspahalted bendy road. The welcome was warm as ever. Funny thing about these wildboar hunters’ dinners is that there is no wild animal served, but they keep promising us they will cook wild boar.
This time we had a fantastic lentil soup with some nice sausage in it, followed by wonderful stinco di maiale, roasted pig-shank. The stinco had been cooked in a beer bath in a wood fired oven, never had it this good! I sometimes am amazed at how skilled the italians are at producing good quality food in enormous quantities. Friday there were 40 mouths to feed which means 40 shanks of about 1 kg each.
The cabin is being heated by a fireplace which does its best but in the end fails to heat the space, so after dinner some tables were moved out and everyone gathered around the fire to play some ‘morra’ with gusto. Lots of noise and energy. However, the more empty the grappa bottle, the less energetic and fast the game was played. I’ll explain in another blog how the game works.
At around 23.00 everyone agreed it was time for a speech, something they came to regret. It turned out that the financial crisis had not passed the squadra and within minutes it was chaos. Luckily no hunter has brought a gun.
The two main troublemakers were restrained and we received some sheepish smiles and we received some heartfelt excuses. Very cordial people the hunters are. We had a great evening and were invited for the communal last supper which will be for around 300 people, yes 300 it says. We were once again assured wildboar will be served …
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