Lunch in Venice — A Single Carrot

It is the middle of April and I am sat in an osteria in the northern Cannaregio district of Venice. Away from the cruise ships and the crowds, here it is possible to get a small glimpse of what life might be like for well healed locals. It is a Sunday afternoon, and unlike England, where the weekly family meal is taking place at home, Venetians are out for lunch.

Across the city, restaurants just like the one I am sitting in are serving their customers variations on the same local menu. It is possible to have fancy, deconstructed dishes in top tier ristorante, refined yet simple versions in mid ranking osteria, and basic fare, often served family style from set menus in the trattoria. Whilst prices vary, there is little concern for class or rank at these establishments. All that matters is that the food is an authentic expression of local cuisine, and in many cases, this means simple is better.

In Venice, the unofficial set menu consists of bacala mantecato, soaked salt cod, whipped with olive oil and garlic, bigoli in salsa, thick spaghetti served with an emulsion made from caramelised onions, anchovies, olive oil and pasta water and fritto misto di pesce, a selection of that day’s bounty from the lagoon deep fried in light crisp batter. Few of these dishes require more than a handful of ingredients. The quality of the meal lies as much in the chef’s skill at sourcing them as anything else.

On this particular day, my girlfriend and I have chosen well, and after a busy morning of churches and galleries, I am starting to slip into a state of postprandial contentment, providing little resistance, happy to sit in silence and spectate the scene around me.

Our table is on the water’s edge, looking across the Misericordia canal, which provides a steady flow of water traffic. Venetians going about their daily business, making deliveries in simple motorboats, interspersed with sun burnt tourists, reclining at the back of gondolas clutching their cameras. We are separated from the restaurant building by a strip of pavement where stylish locals and visitors from all over the world meander past in groups, parading their shopping bags and enjoying gelato.

The restaurant staff are starting to spill out onto the canal, blinking in the sunlight after a busy lunchtime shift. The proprietor, who has been having a glass of wine with the table next to us, seeing that the last covers have gone out goes into the restaurant and emerges a few moments later with a platter stacked high with tiny, deep-fried crabs.

First, he takes them over to the table he has been courting to roars of gratitude. Once they have had their turn, as the only other table left seated at 3pm, he brings them over and offers one to my girlfriend and then me, explaining that they are moeche, a seasonal delicacy, before taking the rest of the plate over to his eagerly waiting staff, where they quickly disappear amid a wave of ebullient sound.

Moeche, I later discover, are only available for a few days in the spring and the early autumn when the lagoon crabs shed their baby shells and start to grow new, hard adult ones. This process takes only a few hours as the shells start to harden as soon as they come into contact with the sea water. When exactly it happens is hard to predict and requires the knowledge and skills of the moecanti, expert fisherman whose lives are so connected to the patterns of the lagoon that they know which crabs are going to moult and when. They have been harvested by Venetians for over 300 years and fetch high prices in restaurants and the nearby Rialto fish market. There is said to be a buzz of anticipation around the market in the days leading up to their arrival.

So important are these crabs to Venice that they have even become a part of its art history, arguably the city’s most famous export. The Venetian Lion, or Lion of St Mark, has been a symbol of the city since the 11th century representing the power of the city state and its command over the seas. The winged beast is depicted in two ways. Most famously, like the one that adorns the plinth in St Mark’s square, it is seen resting on water with one foot on Mark’s gospel. It can also be seen, only in the City of Venice, with its wings facing forward, wrapped around its head in a shape reminiscent of a crab’s claw. When depicted in this way in Venetian sculpture and paintings, the Lion is known as being in moeleca.

This being Italy, an ingredient such as this requires a light, but deft touch in the kitchen. The crabs are drowned whilst still alive in beaten eggs before being lightly coated in flour and deep fried in hot oil. They should be eaten whole, in your fingers whilst still warm with a squeeze of lemon and a glass of Prosecco, or a local dry white wine such as Soave.

We are drinking an inexpensive bottle of skin contact wine called “Sassaia” made from Garganega grapes – the same as those used in Soave – by local wine maker, Angiolino Maule. Much like Soave, it has a bright citrus flavour awash with saline mineral tang, attributed to the local volcanic soils. However, this unfiltered wine, fermented using natural yeasts and made without the addition of nitrates has more persistence and a touch of wildness to it.

I inspect the cooked crab, holding it by its body, which is about the size of a Chinese dumpling. The batter is thin enough to be able to see its beady black eyes poking through and the orange pink hue of the forming shell beneath it. Its little matchstick legs and claws are spread out as if it were frozen in mid-flight, shuttling along the sandy seabed.

I bite into the body which gives which way easily releasing its oily insides. The spindly extremities provide a little more crunch which evens out texture. The taste is intense, salty and slightly briny - immediately reminiscent of the shallow lagoon in front of us that shimmers with the multicoloured discharge from passing vaporetto. The citrus notes in the Garganega work in tandem with a squeeze of fresh lemon juice to cut through the oiliness, cleansing the pallet, whilst the long, mineral finish of the wine carries through supporting the sapid, estuary flavour of the crustacean. The combination is as close to gastronomic nirvana as anything I can recall.

Delighted with the discovery, we spent the next two days requesting moeche with a knowing wink at every lunch and dinner, whilst slowly unpicking the story behind them. They were often not on the menu but were produced at request, usually with a sting on the end of the bill. But that did not deter. It was as if we had been let in on a secret.

The more I read and thought about it, the more significant that first mouthful felt. We had unwittingly been presented with food that was completely unique to that specific place and moment in time. To add to it all, the wine pairing had been so harmonious that I was sure that it couldn’t not be by some sort of design.

Whilst other tourists were undoubtably having similar experiences across the city, for a moment, it felt like we were more than just spectators but a living, breathing part of the Venetian landscape.

Was that deep-fried crab and sip of white wine, on that day and in the spot, precisely the right bite in the right place at the right time? And did this celestial coincidence provide a recipe for a type of sensory experience that could not be surpassed? One that connected us in the most literal sense to the cultural and physical properties of a place in the present moment.

I hated the term but nonetheless considered myself a “foodie”, although what that really meant was that I was an average cook and amateur restaurant snob. Living in central London I ate out regularly, often in great restaurants. At that time, London afforded the opportunity to eat some of the best Indian, Italian, Vietnamese and Peruvian-Japanese fusion food the world can offer, all within a 40min tube ride. I knew it was the best because the chefs had Michelin stars and charged exorbitant prices.

Having visited a couple of wine cellars on holiday in Burgundy, I was familiar with the concept of terroir. The idea that there are human and physical attributes within certain villages, or appellation and even specific plots of land within those that give wine unique characteristics had certainly helped me to navigate a wine list. It also seemed plausible on a geological level that there were soil compositions and aspects in some areas that were hard to replicate and affected the way that grapes ripened. As a benchmark for quality however, it had always felt rather nebulous and the idea of human influence and “local knowledge” playing a role seemed completely redundant in the era of global free movement.

Authenticity in food was something I looked for and appreciated only when travelling. I had never taken time to consider why the local beer you enjoyed on holiday never tasted quite the same when ordered in a pub back home or why, despite bringing countless reblochon cheeses back in my suitcase from French skiing holidays, my home cooked tartelette only ever tasted like old socks, whist those in an alpine chalet the previous week had been joyous, life affirming experiences.

Would those crabs have tasted the same without the faint drone of river boats and the whiff of diesel, or like most of the soft-shelled crabs I had experienced in London’s many, mediocre “pan-Asian” restaurants would it just have tasted like generic, vaguely crablike, batter? If I had picked up the same bottle of wine in my local wine shop would it have conjured the exciting, primaveral emotions that it did on that April afternoon or would I have dismissed it as another, rather too funky “natural” wine, aimed at the burgeoning hipster market?

The enjoyment of both was inextricably interwoven with time and place. What’s more, they tasted the way they did because of the physical and human attributes of the place in which they were produced. Whilst the seasons were clearly integral to the availability of the moeche, the typical spring weather also played a decisive role in the taste experience, just as a heavy downpour of snow might enhance the enjoyment of rich, melted alpine cheese.

I started to think of other examples that fitted the bill but soon realised that our appreciation of any food and drink is always in some way linked to the context in which it is consumed. What made the addendum to that lunch so special was that the wine and moeche were directly born out of the context, rather that built to fit around it. Food and drink could tell a story of place, and a moment in time, in just in the same way a painting, sculpture or building could.

Whilst perhaps not particularly ground-breaking, this idea felt worth pursuing further, if only, I thought, to provide a road map to more indulgent, epicurean experiences. However, in moments of more serious reflection, I also felt that it could have significance at a deeper level, as a way of understanding people, places and our relationship to the natural environment.

Back in London and stat at my desk in a glass office building off Blackfriars Road, I couldn’t stop noticing the homogeneity of life around me. Everything about my daily routine, from the “California style” lunchtime burrito to exercising on machines in a subterranean sweat box, felt contrived and devoid of meaning. All of it was designed to be able to be picked up and served in just the same way to anyone, anywhere at any time.

I had been taken to that spot, off the usual tourist route in Venice, by Osteria Italia, a restaurant guide, published in Italian by the NGO Slow Food. This, I had been told by a friend with Italian routes, was a food lover’s trusted companion when travelling in Italy. After using it on a few trips, I had been impressed with the places it had taken me – always away from the main strip, unassuming on the outside and in, but serving up food that had a genuine, trustworthy feeling to it.

During quiet afternoons in the office, I started to research the publishers a little further. Founded by a group of left-wing, Italian activists as a protest against a branch of MacDonald’s opening at the foot of the Spanish steps in Rome, which they saw as an assault on Italy’s food culture, Slow Food has grown into a global movement to promote good, clean and fair practice in the food industry. The Venetian moeche I realised, was the antithesis and perhaps also the antidote to the MacDonald’s hamburger and maybe everything else that felt bland and soulless around me. Was there a richer life experience waiting to be had if I could just unpick the formula behind that combination of deep fried decapod and cloudy, artisan wine?

In a roundabout way this conviction, coupled with misguided love, a touch of recklessness and frustration at a life that felt like it was being half lived, set in motion a chain of events that six months later led to me quitting my job and moving with my girlfriend to Italy, having enrolled in a Master’s degree at the University of Gastronomic Sciences. Set up by Carlo Petrini, the founding father of Slow Food, I felt that this was as good a place as any to start to search for answers.