Erica De Mane

The maid who became a saint in Pasolini’s Teorema.

Tomorrow is All Saints’ Day, or Ognissanti, as it’s called in Italy. It honors all the holy departed (it first took off around the time the church came to have more saints than there were days in the year to assign to them). It’s an important holiday in Italy, but it never has outshined the even older one a day before, now known as All Saints’ or All Hallows’ Eve, but with pagan origins from before the Christian era. It’s a good holiday—primarily, for me, because it serves to celebrate the fall harvest, and does so with food and wine.

Many years ago my husband and I were in Assisi on November 1. We wandered into one of those strange cave restaurants, the religious-themed tourist traps that Assisi specializes in. The place was damp but had a big wood-burning fire. Everyone was eating roasted chestnuts, a longtime symbol of the fall harvest, and drinking young red wine. The wine, called Novello, is Italy’s answer to France’s Beaujolais Noveau. The pairing, we found out, was an Ognissanti custom. The warmth from the fire, the ritualistic peeling of the chestnuts, their smoke tinged, sweet starchy insides mingling in our mouths with the sharp wine was overwhelming. My husband actually started to weep with joy.

You may not have a dark cave in which to enjoy that culinary experience, but it’s well worth trying anywhere you are.

To prepare the chestnuts all you need to do is: Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Make a little cross on the flat side of each chestnut with a sharp knife. Lay them out on a large sheet pan, and roast them until they smell fragrant and the skin at the cross mark has started to pop out a bit, about 30 minutes. Pour them  into large basket, and cover them with a towel to keep them warm. Peel them while they’re still warm. Their insides should be soft and almost creamy. They get harder to peel as they cool, but that shouldn’t be a problem, since they’re so addictive you’ll want to eat them one after another.

As far as wine goes, I don’t often find Novello here (the Italians don’t have the marketing down the way the French do), and when I do, it’s often acidic and even a little sickening. I’d rather get a good bottle of Dolcetto from Piemonte, which is light and fruity and tastes more like the wine I drank in Assisi (at least according to my recollection). I recently sampled an excellent Dolcetto Langhe made by Eraldo Viberti. If you can get a bottle of that you’ll be in saints’ heaven (is there any other one?).