Cooking the Gifts of Place
In Atlante Gastronomico delle Erbe, Andrea Pieroni writes an ode to the common herbs that can be found in the Piedmont region of Italy, a mountainous region in the northwest of the country that borders France. The Atlante, published in 2022 by Slow Food Editore, is illustrated with fine line botanical drawings in every shade of green. This 256-page hardcover tome includes 158 plants and 60 recipes, and dedicates a full page to each wild herb and details each recipe over several pages. All herbs featured in this work can be found growing in the region’s cities, nearby forests, or on the edge of town.
Part foraging guide—readers are invited to gather the ingredients rather than grow or buy them—part love letter to the Piedmont wilderness, and part cookbook, this is a hyper-local guide, rooted in culture and ancestry. Pieroni offers something different from popular herb books that focus on medicine-making: The recipes have locally abundant Italian herbs at the center, and the vast majority are vegetarian, or easily adapted to be so. While today, popular Italian cooking is not necessarily associated with vegetarianism, Pieroni’s work reminds us once again that traditional folk-cooking is rooted in availability: the herbs were there, free and generous, in a way that meat could not be.
This perspective is an antidote to a hyper-connected world: Pieroni’s work is not directly transposable—in fact, not even necessarily within his own country. However, each herb is presented with a selection of its names: in Latin, Italian (including various Italian dialects), French, and German, as well as its foraging season in the corresponding places. Because of this, new questions emerge: how will the wild asparagus soup (page 33) differ in taste when “sparau” are gathered in Sardinian winter versus the “Wilder Spargel” of a German spring (page 31)?
Pieroni’s work highlights that foraging can connect people horizontally, with the land and with our present community, as well as vertically, to ancestors who also foraged, and to descendants, for whom, ideally, the reader protects and stewards the land so they too may be able to eat freely of their surroundings. Through consuming the plants that emerge season by season, dishes are able to nourish on the physical, emotional, and community level.
Food sovereignty is not something that most Western Europeans typically worry about, though that foraging is a veritable trend might demonstrate that this is changing. Knowing how to forage has been a lifeline for many people in times of crisis, a way to claim some independence from an industrial for-profit food system. A collective movement back to the wild, even in small ways, places us in a long line of resiliency, resistance, and survival. In this, the Atlante Gastronomico offers an invitation and a map to compile a gastronomic herbarium for the land we are currently living with and on, wherever that is.
Originally from France, Anne Jomard moved to Switzerland to pursue her doctorate in biomedical science, focusing on nutrition and health. Since transitioning from the lab bench to the newsroom, Anne reports on the intersection between nutrition, food systems and climate change. She’s passionate about all aspects of food: from growing it in her urban garden and foraging wherever possible, to cooking and discovering new cuisines. On the weekends, you can find her exploring the Zürich food scene, where she’s been living for the past 9 years. Get in touch with Anne by e-mail.
