Cooking with Cesare Pavese

Characters in Pavese’s work follow the unchanging traditions of the countryside, including eating much polenta, easily made from medium-grind cornmeal, like this.
"Film buffs will know the Italian modernist writer Cesare Pavese (1908–50) because his novel Among Women (Tra donne sole) was the source for Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Le Amiche. But I came across his work in the unlikely location of a cookbook, English food writer Diana Henry’s How to Eat a Peach. Pavese, Henry writes in a chapter entitled, 'The Moon and the Bonfires (and the Hazelnuts),' was born in Piedmont in Northern Italy, and his native landscape was 'almost a character' in his work. She quotes him as saying that, if you live there, you 'have the place in your bones like the wine and polenta.' How to Eat a Peach is formatted as menus drawn from Henry’s travels and interests, and her Pavese-Piedmont menu, inspired by the 1949 novel The Moon and the Bonfires, offers an ox cheek stew, white truffle pasta, and a hazelnut-strewn chocolate cake. She suggests an accompaniment of the local Barolo or Dolcetto wine. ..."
The Paris Review

The wines of Piedmont are elegant and challenging, like the work of Cesare Pavese.

2015 August: Cesare Pavese, 2017 March: NYRB: The Moon and the Bonfires, The Selected Works of Cesare Pavese