Vittorina Seghesio is eighty-seven and cooks the traditional food of Piedmont side by side with her twenty-five-year-old grandson, Pierpaolo Rinaldi, who has a degree in political science as well as one from the hotel school in Mondovi. The two of them get into some magnificent fights. She prefers to scoop up ingredients in pinches, fistfuls, and bunches and never weighs anything. He fervently believes in scales. “Once upon a time there were no scales,” she says with a sly smile, as if she’d just laid down a couple of aces, trumping his dedication to liters, grams, and weighed ingredients. A high-speed talker and mover, she never tastes anything either. The grandson insists that you have to taste to see if it’s done, if it needs seasoning, if the texture is right. “Nonsense,” she replies briskly. “Touch with your fingers, your hands. You’ll know when it’s right. Just look.”
