Cow archaeologist. This is how he defined himself, in a curious interview with La Stampa, Stefano Piccardo, 40 years old, Genoese by origin and Piedmontese by adoption. Precisely in the Tortona area, in the province of Alessandria, Piccardo has become the embodiment of "happy degrowth": with a past as an advertiser, art director and director in the "Milano da bere" (where he also worked as a musician), he reinvented himself as a breeder of endangered cows, a sort of countryside archaeologist: “I have restored a foodstuff”, he says in the La Castagnola estate, from the 1600s, saved from time and potential speculators, in the Cassano Spinola countryside. “It had belonged to my grandparents, but it was destined to be sold”.
With his return to the estate – 40 hectares of meadows, a 2-square-metre farmhouse with 70th-century furniture and annexed ghosts – a journey back in time also began for him: “I wanted to know what they ate there, in those hills , in the past, how my grandparents' grandparents cured and prepared the meat”. This is how he interviewed the elders of the village and ended up in the thirties when cattle were reared only for subsistence: "Before the Second World War there was no meat industry, and there were different species of cows: then there were XNUMX years of genetic selection". That Stefano tried to undo, recovering the cows abandoned by the industry. He says that today they would no longer have a market, that large-scale retailers would not be interested. But to him yes. There are two autochthonous breeds: "The Tortonese, which is very wild, difficult, small, looks like a fawn, and then the Pezzata Rossa d'Oropa: there are very few of them and they are very small".
He took 26, he always tells La Stampa: "And in three years they became 60", thanks to natural reproduction (the only bull takes care of it). And with them, the staff has also grown: "Papà Betto, Perez, Cocca, the Martinezes, the Nanès, chef Ivan, the Simos and mum Cia". Together, the turning point: Stefano understood the value of that recovery and has decided to brand its exclusive. “Thus the Carne 1874 brand was born, more than a century old. You can only eat it here – stuffed agnolotti, stew, boiled meat, ribs, fillet, carpaccio, tongue – at Castagnola, which over the years has become an agricultural society and B&B. Desire to find it on the shelves of the market? Not even a bit. It's a different size. Large numbers are of no interest: that brand – «carne 1874» – is a kind of work of art”.
