The sense of outrage created by the eating of adorably cute donkeys in Soncino was naturally carried over to our next outing: horse meat in Milan. Italians eat just about everything that moves. Italians are reknowned all over the world as avid hunters - they love to shoot birds, wild hogs, deer. You name it, and you will meet Italians blasting away at it. That's because they have
shot everything that could ever move in Italy and eaten it. Entire species of birds and rodents native to Italy have seen extinction come in the form of careful broiling, lovingly sauced with just a hint of sage and maybe some wild mushrooms... and then...
POOF! Extinct. Gone from the face of the earth except for an aroma that lingering in the kitchen.
The next thing you know, you are down to eating the domesticated animals, a a step down, I know, but you gotta do what you gotta do. You eat donkeys. You eat horses. You look up from your plate of My Pretty Pony and suddenly realize that these creatures are damn tasty meat.
And then you
go looking for more. As we did at the Taverna Moriggi in the old financial district of Milan. The Moriggi is one of the oldest eating establishments in Milan... located near a bunch of Roman ruins dating from the fourth century days when nobody really knew
who the hell ran the Roman empire anymore. Was it Ogoric the Blind? Or Astroboye the Unitdy? Nobody remembers. Things got awfully confusing between the second and sixth centuries.
Though the early Anno Domini centuries, the Western Roman empire had a few bad times -
don't we all? - and, reasonably, spent those centuries holed up in Milan, far from the malarial swamps and Berber pirate raids of Rome. There was an invasion of Huns, similar to our trip but lacking the cheap air fares we got on Whizz Air, there were invasive waves of Vandals and Ostrogoths and Avars and Gauls. And the
Taverna Moriggi stands as a testament to those days, situated on one of the oldest buildings in the downtown area.
The Moriggi is one of the last honest, cheap old style Milanese lunch joints still functioning in the downtown. With a typical sense of Milanese style, it has the air of someplace unchanged since the early 19th century.
Where the Barbarians once brought Rome to its knees, today yuppies from Milan's finace district attempt to to the same. And after a hard morning of squandering wealth, you need to eat. The fashionistas are all crowding the downtown eateries, so the
yuppiosi find there way to via Moriggi 8 for lunch.
The last time Igor took us here the place was packed and we couldn't get atble. We were luckier this time. Igor went for the classic Milanese veal cutlet. This is essentiually a Wiener Schnitzel, except that the Viennese were probably still ripping live squirrels apart with their teeth when the
Milanesi learned how to bread veal and fry it. In Hungary, as well as a lot of places in Europe, a "Milanese cutlet" means a breaded meat-wad served next to some spaghetti. In Milan it is served with potatoes. And you can't find a
coteletta milanese more perfect than at the Moriggi.
I had built up a decent appetite walking around the city for hours on end filling up on the beauty that is Milan. Lots of people -
just about everyone, actually - take exception to my love of Milan. It's kind of ugly, big, and busy, but that is how I like my cities. So I walk around until my feet are about to fall off and then I look for lunch. In such cases, offer me pasta in a saffron cream sauce with bits of
speck bacon, and
I am yours, baby...
My brother -
the one who likes "forts and stuff" - is a chef in California who is very well known for his hand at Northern Italian cooking. And I like to eat what he cooks, but until Ron gets his lardo-butt on a plane and comes over to taste Northen Italian cooking in its home territory -
and I do not mean Sonoma County - he is simply fooling his durned unkosher self. You want to taste Italian home flavor?
Only in Italy. This is the face of a Jew eating bacon in saffron cream sauce. I'm going to hell. But at what cost?
Damn... is there a branch of Moriggi's in Hell?
Now we get to the... meat of the matter! Horse meat! Not just any cut of nag, but
brescaola di My Pretty Pony.
Here we have
brescaola - air cured dried horse meat. Now, a lot of folks have a problem with eating horse, consigning it to the kind of foods that one eats during, say, the siege of Paris in 1871, just prior to starting on the
terrines of Zoo animals. I however, have no such qulams. Italians understand the ten-year-old kid's approach to good cold cuts. Why just offer a couple of slices? If
it is so good, why not cover the plate with a whole lot of it and fill yourself for lunch? Which is what we got at Taverna Moriggi. A frigging horse feast.
The Bar at the Taverna Moriggi. A better selection of wines will be hard to find, and knowing that I am not good at walking thousands of urban kilometers in the afternoon after drinking wine, I stuck to mineral water for my meal. But walking creates a thirst, so Igor led us towards a local bar for a coffee. In Italy coffee is... unbelievably fantastic. Is that enough superlative for you? It is true. Order your coffee
lungo, though. An Italian espresso is usually two teaspoons of incredibly strong and delicious super coffee, but still
, it is only two teaspoons. A cafe
lungo means you get a bit more hot water tossed in with your coffee, and it still beats any coffee on the face of the planet.
Anywhere.
Tooling about the neighborhood brought us to the Basilica of Sant'Ambrogio. This is one of the earliest churches in Christian history - it was built by Bishop Ambrose in 379-386, in an area where numerous martyrs of the Roman persecutions had been buried. The first name of the church was in fact
Basilica Martyrum. Then they realized that nobody could possibly ever spell that and went for Sant'Ambrogio. The flat appearance of the hut-like façade is typical of Lombard medieval architecture. Lombards were into huts. Given its age, it was much more impressive to me than the ever-unfinished Duomo downtown.
Oddly, it seems that this plaque, located outside the Basilica, shows annoying exclusivist tendancies. Somehow, it seems people who bake pizzas in summer for a living are not allowed into the church, nor are are people who use cell phones, which eliminates most of the population of Italy.
All in all, a good day in Milan... but even late at night, you gotta get home and nibble on something. Take out! Is that journalist Kate Carlisle in the background? Damn! It is! And...
she's hungry...
Soncino is a beautiful, small medieval walled town on the flat Lombardy plains, near Cremona, right on the border betwen the Duchy of Milan and the Kingdoms of Brescia and Pavia. it wasn't the easiest piece of real estate to maintain in the fifteenth century, and was the scene of several major battles involving knights and pikemen and such, in which Milan came out best, leaving the town to the contending clans of Guelphs and Ghibellinis. These were two clan based political parties as much given to stringing each other up as to stringing up Brescians and Pavians. In times of war the two clans shared the one castle, which is preserved as a museum these days, albeit a victim of the nineteenth century trend of reconstructing old castles in the style of some romantic novel instead of basing it on any historic representation. "Castello di Mickey Mouse!" said our host, Alessandro.
The real reason we were here is the local Trattoria, the Antica Rocca, (Soncino, Via Battisti 1, tel. 0374.85.672) which is rooted in local cuisine styles. And that means donkey meat stew is the house specialty.
While we tried to decide what to eat - it was an easy question of ass or no ass? - we were served a plate of local wild onions ("little lamps") anchovies and dried tomatoes.
Horse meat is quite common in Italy, and donkey meat is also a local specialty, although today most of the donkey meat is imported internally from Sardinia. Located about an hour's drive from Milanb, Soncino attracts a lot of sunday visitors from the big city out to try the local dishes and wines, and of course, donkey meat stew is the main attraction. We started our meal with a selection of proscciuto and salamis.
Next up was a plate of gnocchi served in a sauce of ground duck breast meat with chiodini mushrooms in cream sauce. If you live a very good life on earth and don't harm innocent donkeys during your life, this is what they give you to eat in heaven.
Notice that there isn't a hint of canned tomato sauce to be seen on this table. Everything was home made, and fresh to the season, which is a surprisingly mild winter. The house specialty - donkey stew - appeared next. time for some real ass munching!
For all our horrified expectations, donkey meat turned out to taste like... meat. Nice texture, good red meat. The donkeys are actually imported from Sardinia, so we didn't even have to feel bad about any donkeys seen in the neighborhood. The sauce was the main flavor in the stew - a red wine reduction heavily herbed with juniper, bay leaf, and rosemary. Served up next to a lump of polenta, this made me feel like i could eat a herd of cute, adorable, lovey-dovey baby donkeys.
A cup of good espresso and a glass of sambuca with three coffee beans inside to end the meal. And guess what? At about EU 25 from each of us, this is actually a lot cheaper than any sit down resto meal I can find in Budapest. Excelent value, and the world has to feed one less cute donkey! Soncino is also the location of the first printing press to have published the Hebrew Bible. 
The first of the Jewish Soncino family engaged in printing was Israel Nathan b. Samuel, who set up his Hebrew printing-press in Soncino in 1483, and published his first work, the tractate Berakot, in 1484. Eventually the Soncino family oved their operation to Istanbul, but today the house is a museum of the lithography craft, presided over by a very entertaining old curator.
Navigli used to be the run down area of Milan, crisscrossed by canals that hauled barges of sand into the city for construction. today it is the hip night life district, full of bars, restaurants, and gift shops that serve the after dark crowd. Right by Porta Tichinese station is a market area, and in front is a well known fish market offering freshly fried fish. Igor splurged on some squid, and the two chefs offered their skills as Japanese translators.
For good measure they tossed a couple of special skewers of shrimp and squid in on top of our order...
Wandering a bit farther down the canal, we stopped for some aperitivi. The Milan tradition - dating from as far back as the 1980s - has been to offer a "happy hour" of free food as appetizers with the price of a drink between 6 and 9 pm, the dead hours before any self respecting Milanese goes out to eat at around 10 pm. Aperitivi Milanese has become a kind of secondary meal in itself. We began with the classic Milanese cocktail, the Negroni - gin, campari, and vermouth. 
A drink entitles you to the buffet.. which at the Big Pig Bar was a modest affair, but just right for the job at hand.
Ahh.. Milano... what Big Pigs we are...
The old "Press Building" was torn down last year to make way for the construction of... something. We don't really know yet. Usually this means another glass "office complex" monstrosity with a Burger King on the ground floor. The "Press House" used to house various old commie newspaper offices back in the day.
After 1990 it was handed over to a series of rabidly right-wing and anti-semitic newspapers (Istvan Csurka's "Magyar Forum" among them) as headquarters. These rags went bankrupt and eventually there were no sympathetic post-commie commie governments to keep paying their rent, and so the building went under the block. In any case, I passed their monumental dig today.
Blaha Lujza tér is a sad story of how a vibrant urban center becomes a run-down bus stop with a couple of fast food joints. It is the Retail Location of No Return, an elephant's graveyard for a long string of resturants, the Bermuda triangle for clubs and theaters. Yet, it had a lot of class. At least one ornate front wall is being kept as a reminder of its better days.
Meanwhile, five minutes down the korut is the Big Dig at Rákóczi tér, destined to be a new Metro station for the imagined fourth metro line. Rákóczi tér used to have the reputation of being the streetwalker's district, and while you can still see some rather toothless professionals plying their old trade in the area, for the most part everybody is looking forward to the new metro and the possiblity of developemnt that it should bring. The whole history of the Four Metro is aready a tale of huge cost overruns and money disappearing down into a huge hole, but most Budapest residents still hope that someday they - or their grandchildren - will get to ride on it. Until then... big holes in the ground. 
At least this hole is an intentional, voluntary attempt to rebuild the city. Budapest has been bombed into dust more times than anyone cares to recall, such as during the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, when Rákóczi tér looked like this. We can at least be satisfied that whatever happens, it will be for the better... someday.
Over in Buda, another Big Dig is happening at the corner of the old Skala Metro site in the eleventh district, which is completely hamstringing mass transit and commuters trying to get to anyplace in south Buda... such as the Fono Music house.
It takes about ten minutes to simply walk around this hole to get to various substitute buses going anyplace. Have Moicy! One cool thing about giant holes inthe urban landscape... kids like 'em. Aron sure does....
In any case, we are taking off tommrow for a week in Milan, Italy. I'm not sure when I will be posting, if at all, from Milan, but expect that we will all be enjoying "apertivi Milanese" for five days. Basically, the Milanese have reinvented "happy hour" as a mad buffet where every bar and restaurant offers all you can eat buffets and snacks from 6 pm to 9 pm for the price of a drink. I've done this before. And now I am going to do it again - Fumie found an amazing deal on the web for Whizz Air offering tickets to Milan for Ft 40 each (about US 27 cents) , plus the rather pricier airport taxes. We'll stay at a good friend's , and whatever I didn't eat in New York (i.e., Italian food) I will murder in Milan.
The only other decent táncház happening would have been over at the Fonó Budai Zeneház, on the far side of Buda in the depths of the 11th district. I like the 
Palatka is built around a core of relatives from the Kordoban family of Gypsy musicians, and in their heyday the Hungarian folk revival musicians depended on this band for much of the source material and dance repertoire that made up the tanchaz revival. The 
The original fiddlers, brothers Bela and Marci Kordoban. Bela - who was reknown for his healthy appetite, being able to put away 28 stuffed cabbages in a sitting - passed away in 2002, after a concert in Veszprem.
Marton, who was a good friend of mine and from whom I learned to play in the style of Palatka, died tragically after playing at a folk dance camp in 2005. He fell off a ladder that lead to the musicians' sleeping loft and hit his head.
Marton's son, Florin, stepped in to take the role of lead fiddler, while their brother Lörinc moved up from playing kontra fiddle to become the defacto band leader.