A Travel Ritual

And a three-ingredient dinner salad you can make in any hotel room

Greetings everyone! I’m still in Parma, and in fact just returned from a Vin Santo tasting in the hills north of the city followed by lunch featuring pisarei e fasò. It’s a local specialty made with teeny tiny tender gnocchi and sweet-tomatoey stewed borlotti beans — think the world’s best pasta e fagioli — and holy moly I wish I could tell you that the recipe is at the bottom of this newsletter, but alas, the 85-year-old family-run restaurant that prepared the dish for the dozen Via Rosa travelers I’m here with refuses to tell anyone exactly how it’s made. “A little butter, a little pork fat, a little this, a little that,” is all they’ll say when you ask. Yes, there are a hundred thousand recipes for pisarei e fasò online, but somehow I know it won’t taste the same. Replicating that dish at home would be like trying to capture a vast landscape on my iPhone. I have lived long enough to know that my attempt will always fall short.

I can’t believe I just spent that many words talking about my lunch, especially since this newsletter isn’t even your official download on Parma. (That one will drop for paying subscribers next week and, like the Puglia and Sicily writeups, will go deeper on our day-to-day itineraries.) Today I mostly want to talk about a little travel ritual I have that helps orient me to the food and culture of a new city. It’s something I’ve been doing for so long I didn’t even realize it was interesting or helpful until I mentioned it to a few people who started doing it themselves.