Bagna Cauda with Market Vegetables

Start with the anchovies. Not the cheap ones packed in vegetable oil that taste of tin and regret, but the salt-packed fillets you rinse and separate yourself, the ones that smell like clean ocean and dissolve into warm butter like they were always meant to be there. This is bagna cauda: the warm bath.

In Piedmont, this dish belongs to the harvest season, when farmers would gather after bringing in the cardoons and dip the raw stalks into a communal pot kept warm over coals. The vegetables have changed with the seasons and the century, but the ritual remains. You gather. You dip. You talk. The sauce stays warm.

The technique could not be simpler. Melt garlic in butter and oil until it surrenders completely, then dissolve anchovies into the fat until everything becomes one silky, golden, intensely savory sauce. Your job is to find beautiful vegetables and get out of the way.

Every meal is a meaningful choice. The carrots with their tops still attached, the radishes that were in the ground this morning, the fennel from the farmer who grows only three things but grows them well. These choices shape the dish far more than any technique ever could.