‘So tell me, what is the biggest surprise about your job to those that don’t work in the field’, is the question I always ask when stumped for a good question at a dinner party, whenever there is painful lull. I like the question because it comes across as geniune, and because nearly everyone has to cock their head for a second and really think about it, not something that happens often when making small talk.

But I also like the question because once you get close enough to any particular subject, you begin to see it in ways that others don’t, those with only a passing interest or a layman’s understanding.

If you were to ask me that same question, I’d have to answer this way: Everyone thinks that it’s about the recipe here in Italy, when the true is that it almost never is.

Take boiled chicory, for example. It’s easily the most consumed dish in the history of Puglia, yet it’s not really a recipe. It is, in fact, at the heart of the problem that I have when writing recipes to be given to departing students. I feel silly even writing it down, so simple it is to conceive.

Forage or buy some good wild chicory, the kind that you could mistake for dandilions.

Trim away the red and white tips. Wash them really, really, really well. Wash them again. And once more with feeling. Each time they will give up a little more of their soil.

Boil them in salted water until tender, roughly 10 minutes if you picked them today. 15 if you picked them yesterday. Turn off the water at the proper time and just let them cool.

Lift out with tongs, notice all the soil that continues to dislodge into the bottom of the pot.

Toss with your best quality olive oil and serve at room temperature, or reheat in the oil.

It is, in fact, Puglia on a plate. The inherent bitterness. The satisfying earthiness. The green-green flavours. The healthiness of the Mediterranean diet, the silkiness of good extra virgin. They are excellent, and they satisfy completely, filling your mouth with a rich earthy earnestness. Yet however good they are, on the printed page, as a recipe, all of this really underwhelms.

Those that have been following our little cooking school in Lecce, likely know that I’ve been working on a cookbook for a few years now, and these sorts of recipes are at the heart of the book, a recipe book, but only so much that these words on this computer screen are really a recipe.

Follow along the next few months as I publish outtakes of the book, right here. Chime in. Sound off. Let me know what you think. Consider yourself a recipe tester. Send in pictures.  We’ve always been inclusive as a school and so it seems natural to us that our cookbook would continue that spirit.

And for heaven’s sake, come to Puglia this year. We’ll put a big pot of greens on for you. We’ll hand over the big ol’ stirrin’ spoon.

Our 2012 calendar

No related posts.

‘E mo’ si balla belle mie‘, I say to the last three remaining bottles of tomato sauce in the back recesses of the storage shelves, ‘It’s time to dance, my beauties’.  I crack the seal on one of them and the castle kitchen fills with the tangy, saline blood-smell of tomatoes. But not just ‘tomatoes’, particular ones, distinct ones, ones that pull my mind back through the months of the calendar, past holidays and long weekends, on past the soggy-soiled spring and then on into the frigid and  runny-nosed winter, rewinding through last autumn and back into the precise moment of the summer when we canned them, the backward passage of time as jarring as the warbling sound of rewinding a phonograph.

I guess you could call it ‘culinary anthropomorphism’, this strange desire to see our canning projects as the preparation of readied playmates, old friends that stand guard over us throughout the year until called into action, storing the precise moments of a distinct day in a particular season, the same way that wound grandfather clocks store up the multiple twists of long-forgotten wrists.

That we make our tomato sauce for the year actually on our school’s birthday only adds to it, making the making of the sauce more the sober reflection of the passsage of yet another year, more vivid to me than my own birthday, or any New Year’s Eve, regardless of how truffle-studded.

We schedule it for the middle of our birthday week each year. And even though the technique is simply, the process itself couldn’t be more profound.

Here in the south most of us ‘water bottles’ for the tomato sauce, with many of the bottles going back farther than anyone can remember. Only the caps are new each year. Some of the families with whom I’ve made ‘la salsa’ never bother to remove the labels, which instantly dates many of their bottles into the late 50′s or early 60′s, when for the first time supermarkets first arrived in Italy. That these bottles still receive an annual round as salsa containers points to the thrifty nature of the post war generation, suggestion that ‘recycling’ is only new as a buzzword.

First you wash the tomatoes. This year we used San Marzano tomatoes rather than the local choice of the fiaschietto, a little pointed version that gives a tangier sauce. Most years, I do separate batches of both.

You cut or crush the tomatoes so that they cook from within, releasing their juices as the come to the boil. Still though, every year at least one tomato makes it into the cauldron without being cut: it blows up into an angry puff ball, threatening to burst, literally at the boiling point.

Without even a discussion, brigades begin to form, a washing station, a cutting station, with turns at the ‘oar’ passed around to avoid sore shoulder blades.

Here Giulio takes his turn, the wooden spoon requiring enough torque to produce hot spots on the palm and sides of your index fingers. (Yes, his name is really ‘Giorgio’ but so many kept getting his name wrong that ‘Giulio’ just eventually stuck).

The ingredients are straight forward as well. Onions, bay leaves, salt and tomatoes, then a basil leaf for the bottle. In the late summer sun, the colours tend to burn into your brain, a red redder than really red.

Here Fiona from South Africa works the cutting station, if only to be nearer the wine, she says.

Once into the cauldrons, you boil the tomatoes for one hour, which reduces their juices, concentrates their flavours but also sterilises them, so that nothing can grow once they go into the bottle. Shorten this step and you’ll never wonder again what a Jackson Pollack affresco would have looked like. Once fermentation happens, the bottles begin to explode, shooting glass shards and putrid sauce across the room. Do it wrong once and you’ll never do it wrong again.

At the boiling point, you run the pulp through a food mill that removes the skins and seeds, leaving behind pure tomato sauce, certainly much thinner than what is for sale outside of Italy. ‘At the boiling point’ is the important phrase too, as each splatter causes death threats and giggles. It’s my favourite part I think. If only for the really good blasphemy and swearing involving garden tools and pneumatic jacks.

You use a beer capper. Which takes more pressure than you’d think.

As the bottles slowly start to gather, the sense of ‘salsa‘ becomes ‘la salsa del anno‘, or the yearly sauce. A sense of ‘us’ starts to take place too though, that ‘I’ did this or that part of the process but ‘we’ did this together. It is perhaps this loss of the sense of community that bothers me most about the changes in Southern Italian food ways. Sure, in my opinion, it’s still the best food in the world. It’s healthy, it’s vibrant and crafty and brilliant, in how women in the past figured out over time as a group how to create so much from so very, very little.

It’s making la salsa is also a dying practice, something that makes the domestic newspapers. ‘A man on a mission, Silvestori keeps traditions alive by stoking local interest with his students’ hands’ read our last write up.

And this is what our school does best, keeping Southern Italian traditions alive through your interest in them. Yes, it’s a lot of fun making the salsa. Yes, our class unites over it and postcards years later still mention the dirty finger nails, or how we left tomato seeds at the bottom of the baron’s pool when as a class we skinny dipped in the dark that night. That’s the role of a cooking school, of a culinary holiday. And we do do that, really well I think. But I’m talking about something deeper than that.

You as a traveller have a choice. You can choose to believe that all the world’s cultures are made of titanium and will be around forever for your enjoyment, that the act of seeing that culture is passive and incidental.  Or you can share my view, that travellers today are participants in the things that they come to see. That there is interaction, participation. And perhaps more importantly, that travellers must play a part in perserving the things they deemed worthy of a visit.

There won’t be horns tooted when the last group of people gather in Southern Italy to make the yearly tomato sauce, signaling the end of an era here. It won’t make the evening news. No one will write a book about it. There won’t be an app. for that.

About the only thing that I can say for sure about it is, it won’t happen while I’m still alive. Not while I still have my green bottles.

Our school is the mirror back to the local community. And slowly, things begin to change. Families read the newspaper and see our students and remember the green bottles down in their cellar. School kids ask their parents why they no longer make it, and the parents ask themselves the same quetion. College graduates suddedly think it’s hip again. And on.

The smiles are certainly visible in this picture.  And you can almost smell the sweat, hear the bassy bubbling of the cauldrons, the laughter of a red wine-soaked banter.

Here I present you our birthday class of 2011 and the 340 litres of salsa that we made together as a school. It will be the sauce that dresses the pasta that you will make if you visit us before next September. In front of this group of Italian culinary patrons are the bottles that will survive the windy winter, on into next spring and up until the return of the ripening tomatoes, the pretty green bottles, my faithful companions through the upcoming year.

Here is me with my new toy, a remote control for my camera: it allows me to take pictures while I teach and oversee the students and staff.

If you’d like to learn more about learning to protect and nurture the foods that you love here in Italy, consider attending a course at my two culinary schools or our new wine programme.  There is a lot more to food here in Italy than just learning how to use a knife.

Our 2012 calendar.

My wine site.

My food site.

My school’s site.

Reviews on Trip Advisor.

Related posts:

1. La Passata Del Mezzogiorno (Tomato Sauce, Salento-Style)

Try it sometime. Next time folks ask what you do for a living, tell them that you run a cooking school in Italy. They’ll be instantly at ease and more than pleasantly surprised, eager to talk about recipes, their favourite restaurants and wines that they’ve had recently. Complete strangers will open up, the conversation as easy to maintain as a forest fire. 

That is, until 5 or 6 questions into it when they’ll inevitably ask what you eat when you’re absolutely alone and can have anything you want, a meal just for you: Here is where it gets tricky.

I lie.

I always say that I make a lot of towering soufflès. Or some fussy little crepes. Or that I whipped up a 4-tier wedding cake, just to keep up my chops. If you say anything banal you’ll disappoint them, every time. The truth is that most folks in the food industry really love simple food, leave us alone and we’ll eat things that don’t fit into the mental image you have of us.

Take la capunata, for example. It couldn’t be simpler. It also just so happens to be the thing I eat more than anything else, all summer long. And I’m not alone here.

Start with some menoceddhe, a strange local fruit that is half way between a watermelon and a cucumber. Outside of the Salento, you could swap cucumbers for them and no one will sound the bell. 

Just like no one here in the Salento would use bread for this dish.

Here, we use la frisa.

It would be impossible to overestimate the role of la frisa (most often called, la friseddha) in the food of the Salento. It’s been the most consumed ingredient here for the last thousand years. Folks load up their suitcases with them when visiting transplanted relatives. University students live on them. Your grandmother here probably has some hidden under her bed.

Desalinate some capers in some water.

If you’re wondering about the name, the dish shares linguistical roots with other words you already know, such as the Arab-leaning Sicilian dish called ‘la caponata‘, and the English word, ‘capacity’, meaning, something stored in a vase or jar.

Soak le friseddhe in some water for a few minutes. In a pinch  you can use sea water, which was how it was often done historically. And still often is (as you don’t need silverware, friseddhe are widely consumed at the beach). If you use water from the Mediterranean, hold back on the salt at the end. (The Med has always been a really salty sea as the evaporation rate is faster than fresh water can enter, or even that which flows into the basin, ‘fresh’ salt water entering the Strait of Gibraltar).

Remove le friseddhe after a few minutes and let them stabilise on a plate.

Slice a little red onion as thin as you can. Soak them in water if raw they’re a bit strong.

Slice some fresh basil into little a sort of lazy chiffonade. Even here in the southern part of Puglia, our basil season is only 4 months long. I trim back mine each year mid-season and tend to give away something approaching 15 kilos, the profumed bundles causing heads to turn and giddy mouths to gush. 

Assemble all the ingredients and douse liberally with the best extra virgin you have, as long as it’s southern, such one based on the olives ogliarola or even coratina. You need a bitter oil to balance out the flavours. Add salt if using fresh water.

Shoo away the unnamed cat that lives in the school’s garden if need be.

If you really want to do it up, a glass of cold rosato would be perfect. And you certainly don’t need any bread.

With all the simple ingredients, the bitter extra virgin, the fresh herb, the sun-drenched tomato, the earthy, hearty appeal of the barley, you have the golden summer there in your bowl, a stunner of a season riding your overloaded fork to your happy mouth.

So, when they ask, let’s be certain to get our story straight. I’ll say ‘fussy little crepes’ if you’re going to go with ’4-tiered wedding cake’. It helps to huff a lot, as if you had work really hard for it.

We wouldn’t want to disappoint.

Silvestro Silvestori

Lecce, Italia

www.awaitingtable.com

Related posts:

1. le sarde marinate: marinated fresh sardines

Just outside the castle walls- but still inside the epicentre of the city- you’ll find a bread baker named Piero, a soft spoken man who just adores the local bread. While he makes several kinds, all in the Salento style, his ‘pucce’ are famous enough for folks to come from other towns just to buy them. Which is odd, I think, as Piero himself didn’t grow up eating them.

Piero is from Palermo but moved to the Salento when he started dating the woman that would become his wife, Francesca, a sunny and giggly woman who you’ll often find working the cash register.

‘The bread of the southern Salento is darker, richer, much more substantial’, he says. ‘I absolutely love it and it’s what I have for breakfast every morning’.

‘If you don’t bake bread everyday’, he says, ‘ I don’t think it’s obvious how much it changes from day to day. It’s never exactly the same’.  It’s late afternoon and I poke my camera into his spent oven, which never cools down completely.

‘It’s thick, thick stone’, he says, slapping it to impress how massive the oven is, not something you turn on and off with a switch.

As a much younger man, I baked bread for a living, for well over a year. It was always something I wanted to do for a while, and so I did. Nowadays, every time I enter a bakery the memories come flooding back, of early, early mornings, of getting used to seeing the city streets always empty except for the street sweepers, of the smells of wood smoke, yeast, flour and how, each time, the giddy alchemy that is bread.

I was enchanted at the giant ovens as they worked, the constant sense of pregnancy.

And aside from a few exchanges with Marino the street sweeper, how all of this would happen without mumbling a single word, eight or ten hours at a time.

At the castle, I now teach bread baking using the baron’s wood-fired oven, but it took me a long time to relearn the habits. Put bread directly on the oven floor and it bakes fastest from the bottom up, because of the contact with the radiant stone. But bake something in a tray or pan – rabbits, potatoes, chickens, carrots or even whole pigs- and heat comes mostly from above, a strange set of affairs in the world of cooking.

Piero and most bread bakers in southern Italy bake directly on the floor of the oven, which means that they build a fire, then remove it. Then they use wet palm frowns soaked in water tied to the end of a stick to wipe away the wood ash before baking. It’s renewable, free and after a few thousand years, well, it seems to be working.

And that might be what I love most about talking with bakers. And the baking of bread it and of itself, that there is nothing new about it. Yes, some new mixers can help you skip a step. Automobiles can enlarge your customer base. But, beyond that- the exceptions mainly being birth, love, death and all the taxation that happens in between- it’s one of the few things unchanged as long as we’ve been people.

There has been a lot of talk lately here in Europe about the end of bread and that the predicted progression of food is towards the molecular and that bread is oddly absent from that.  On the few occasions that I’ve eaten such food, I tend to marvel at its sense of creativity, of its ambition. As a food person, I find it dazzling. But on the way home after such a meal, I think of Piero and his bread, and realise that my eyes may wander at a fresh young thing ever now and then , but I’m still very much in love.

And in those few early mornings when I’ve worked with Piero, as we pull the steaming and yeasty pucce from the oven, I can’t help but say the same sentence each time under my breath. ‘Ahhh, ecco gioia mia’.

‘Here you are, my love’.

If you enjoy this, please share it with others using the social media tabs

below.

To my school.

To my wine site.

To my calendar.

Related posts:

1. who you’ll meet at the castle:giuseppe the caretaker
2. who you’ll meet at the castle: il barone
3. who you’ll meet at the castle: salvatore il barista

(This is the first part in a series of posts dedicated to fish and fish cookery, and especially how it’s done here in the Salento, the thin slice of gorgeous land dangling out into the middle of the seas that make up the Mediterranean. Like you, I had always tended to fall back on a handful of recipes, virtually neglecting the rest of the monger’s case. This summer, all of that is going to change. I’ll be posting a lot, so feel free to read it if you like but if your summer is going well, this info will still be on the site come autumn: just ignore it until you have more time. Have a great summer!)

‘There is no such thing as Italian food’, the saying goes. And it’s true.  In a nation remarkably free of truly national traits and standards, you’d be hard-pressed to make any single blanket statement about the food and wine up and down the peninsula.

Well, except maybe for this: If there is anything that seems to guide the hand of every great cook here, it would be A) Find good ingredients. B) Don’t screw them up.

A simple tomato salad. A simmered haunch of beef. A grilled trout. A summer soup. A pasta sauce based on leaves and nuts. Espresso over ice with almond milk. Most dishes here are walk-through-the-front-door simple and rarely involve anything that you’d be tempted to call ‘technique’.

….Just like la pepata di cozze. It takes only a few minutes to cook, costs very little and from technique point of view, you could teach a monkey to make it. (the excuse I always give whenever local friends ask me how just one cook could make so much of a mess in a kitchen on my days off, only that I usually say ‘team of monkeys’, which is, sadly, more plausible).

First, find some good mussels. Here in Puglia, I can say without a hint of arrogance, that we have the best mussels in all of Italy, which might be the same thing as saying, ‘in all the world’. And while Northern France’s cider-based mussel dishes are excellent, and those with coconut milk and red curries of Thailand never fail to transport the tongue half away around the world, it’s the actual animal itself that is remarkably good here. Sometimes you have to wonder how come the meat inside didn’t manage to actually pop the shell. Plus, the sweetness, bordering on that of lobster.

Like lobsters, eels, crabs, clams and crayfish, mussels are nearly always killed by the cook. If this upsets you as a cook, you probably shouldn’t be eaten meat in the first place. (About the only culinary conversation that doesn’t interest me is one where the diner insists that someone else kill his dinner, only to judge that person as ‘cruel’ for doing so).

These are my hands, effectively killing a mussel. Once the beard is ripped out, death begins.

While I have no ethical issue with this, I do have culinary ones: Mussels are sold alive for a reason.  Pull this beard an hour before lunch and you’ll have a great lunch. That same raw mussel though, I wouldn’t eat it for dinner.

Once cleaned, take your heaviest pot and put it over a flame for a good ten minutes. If it’s not smoking and nearly glowing, it’s not hot enough, in my opinion. You’re going to need that carry-over temperature once you introduce your liquid, in this case, a dry local white wine called ‘verdeca’ for the same reason that ‘verdicchio’ is called ‘verdicchio’. (young and verde, or green).

Toss in some whole garlic-cloves and some chopped chili (black pepper can be used instead but as historically this was imported from India and out of economic reach of most folks here, I believe that the ‘pepe’ in la ‘pepata‘ refers to red peppers rather than black. A food scholar friend disagrees with me but two others agree: that there should be a little hum of heat is agreed upon by all).

When the pot can’t get any hotter, toss in the mussels. If you’re using mussels from the Mediterranean, you’ll likely need to add more wine than just to taste, or to steam with. You’re actually diluted down the mussels broth, as the sea’s evaporation rate is such that you’ll actually float in the water.

They are going to hiss and spit. Cover, wait a minute or two and begin to fold the mussels in the pot, remembering that those that steaming over a liquid will cook slower than those immersed in one. Fold from top to bottom, as opposed to stirring horizontally.  When the majority of them are open (today it took less than 3 minutes), add a lot of finely-chopped parsley, a glug of raw extra virgin olive oil and serve immediately. You can put a slice of old bread in the bottom of the bowl (the drier the bread, the more its ability to absorb the broth)

Regarding wine, I only ever reach for one and it’s pink and local. If you’re still hung over from all the pink wine you drank when Love Boat was still on the air, try one again. With your more mature taste buds, you might be able to see what all the fuss is about.  Look for a Rosato del Salento. And tell me what you think of it.

As you may have heard, I’ve dedicated this summer to learning more about cooking fish, as I said above. But I’ve also thrown myself into learning more about food photography. Rule one in most of the books that make up the stack I bought say, Don’t eat the food you photograph.

I think this is a great rule but as your eye lovingly saunters over this last picture of a big bowl of steaming mussels, guess which one I ate first. It was salty and sweet and intimate.

My finger had barely pushed down the shutter button before my mouth was flooded with all of this, all that is so incredible about the Mediterranean and all that we’re able to coax out of the salty sea.

Related posts:

1. la mia taieddhra: famous dish of mussels, potatoes and courgettes

Ingredients for Stufatu

Does the dish have to have potatoes? Probably. Does it have to have bay leaves? It often does, but thyme and mentuccia and even Penny Royal make appearances from time to time. Must it have bell peppers? Most likely. Aubergines? You bet. Sheep’s milk cheese? Well, that’s when things turn slippery. In short, lu stuffatu is a wine-less ratatouille, a more sprawling version of the Catalan Samfaina or in English, an array of vegetables stewed in their own juice, dusted or not, with some spicy sheep’s milk cheese. It’s also just about one of my favourite dishes ever, perhaps even my ‘one dish for the rest of your life on the desert island’ answer, if you were to ask.

I think the key, like all good food here in Italy, is to let the market guide the ‘recipe’, rather than to think of the dish as having hard and fast rules. You could probably even make a fairly stodgy version of one just by clearing out the drawer in your refrigerator. By ‘stodgy’, I mean that a stuffatu is only as good as its ingredients and I don’t think I’ve ever made one with ingredients older than a few hours back from the market, which is probably why the dish always pops in my mouth. And in my memory, if I happen to go long enough without tearing into one, which thankfully doesn’t happen often.

French enamelware is my preferred vessel, but I have a neighbor that makes hers in the oven, something that strikes me as fundamentally wrong. An old friend of mine used to make hers adding tomato sauce, which turned the dish into a thick version of vegetable soup. She was a nice woman but things were doomed between us, and maybe not just even because of her stuffatu, if memory serves. Restaurants here will occasionally make a finely-diced version, calling it stuffatu, but I don’t think the dish should ever be fussy or look as if the cook was drilled in knife skills by German Stormtroopers.

It’s just not that kind of dish. It’s supposed to taste like ‘home’, another often wily concept.

Here is my ‘recipe’, which if we’ve ever met, you probably already know it isn’t really a recipe, anyway.

Hit your favourite market and grab a couple of anything that looks good: courgettes, aubergenes, waxy potatoes, cherry tomatoes, onions, leeks, carrots, bell peppers. Cut everything into logical pieces, smaller the longer each takes to cook (you do this already anyway, whenever you make soup, whether you realise it or not). Take a heavy,heavy bottomed pot with a tight-fitting lid and get the puppy hot for a few minutes. Coat the bottom with a drizzle of your best olive oil. Toss everything in, minus anything really soft, such as the tomatoes, and keep it moving for a few minutes, browning everything. Salt it, add the tomatoes, cover and simmer until tender. Toss in the bay leaves or thyme, and a good glug of raw oil. Stir. Set the table. Plate nicely and dust it with a good spicy pecorino, or even a well-aged parmiggiano, if you are really in a pinch. I like a high acid red with it, although I’m naturally prone towards Italian wine anyway.

Plated Stufatu

If you were to throw in Jennifer Hudson in something clingy, some monkeys specially trained to use a cork screw (in my mind the monkeys are always dressed like little Bell-Hops), then, yeah, I could be happy just with lu stuffatu for a very, very long time, with or without the dusting of spicy pecorino.

Hit your favourite market and grab a couple of anything that looks good: courgettes, aubergenes, waxy potatoes, cherry tomatoes, onions, leeks, carrots, bell peppers. Cut everything into logical pieces, smaller the longer each takes to cook (you do this already anyway, whenever you make soup, whether you realise it or not). Take a heavy,heavy bottomed pot with a tight-fitting lid and get the puppy hot for a few minutes. Coat the bottom with a drizzle of your best olive oil. Toss everything in, minus anything really soft, such as the tomatoes, and keep it moving for a few minutes, browning everything. Salt it, add the tomatoes, cover and simmer until tender. Toss in the bay leaves or thyme, and a good glug of raw oil. Stir. Set the table. Plate nicely and dust it with a good spicy pecorino, or even a well-aged parmiggiano, if you are really in a pinch. I like a high acid red with it, something with lots of mineral flavours to mimic those in the vegetables….although I’m naturally prone towards Southern Italian wine anyway.

No related posts.

Come late summer in these parts, you still see older folks gathering in small groups out in the countryside.

Someone will have an old radio on, set to some station where all the music was recorded back when full, lush symphonies were all the rage.

An old stew pot will be bubbling away on a nearly-forgotten flame. Water for the pasta will be coming to the boil. Someone will be tipping green beans, while someone else will be grating some strong sheep’s milk cheese. Still off school for the summer, young tan kids will be everywhere, chasing lizards or riding old rusty bikes down dusty roads.

It’ll be time to make the annual tomato sauce. I love it so much that I volunteer my services to anyone and everyone that will have me. I could be yours for a plate a pasta, a few sauteed snails and the contents of a reused water bottle of local malvasia.

It’s just that lately among literally hundreds of times of making passata in my life (I’ve made it 18 times, with different families, this summer alone), I’ve had a very uneasy feeling about making tomato sauce. And that uneasiness doesn’t seem to be going to go away today.

We’re just outside of a town called San Vito Dei Normanni, or Saint Vito of the Normans, a name the explains why you’ll see so many blue eyes among the local townspeople.

And even before 10 am, the back of my neck is tan and warm from picking so many tomatoes. At some point Rocco asks me how come I’m still not married. Still looking at the ground, I can hear the same concern in his voice as last year, when he asked me the same question.

‘I know, you’re right’, I say. ‘This year I’m going to make a change though. I’m thinking mail order’.

Half an hour passes in silence, until he says, ‘The Russian ones can be lovely’.

It occurs to me to tell him that I’m only joking, but then it sinks in that he just beat me at my own game.

We cut the tomatoes in half, or at least puncture them to avoid them exploding from the heat of a rabid olive-wood fire. A massive fist of fresh basil goes in the cauldrons, as does a whole box of sea salt.

The smell is the perfect mix of vibrant tomato and campfire, two of my favourite smells in the world.

The sound of the boiling tomatoes is bassy, metallic thuds, like the air bubbles coming up off a submarine.

After the tomatoes have boiled for one hour, only the pulp is lifted away and kept (the leftover water is cooled and then poured over the artichoke plants, which really thrive in salty soil).

The mill is mounted and a sense of giddiness spreads: this is the time when everyone IS going to get burned, although only superficially.

Dispensing with the normal motor on our mill that I tend to use at the school, Carmine uses a massive drill to increase the torque to impressive speeds. Each splatter causes yelps and giggles, the kind you hear when someone is playing with a sharp-toothed puppy.

Tiny but angry red welts raise under each splatter drop, until, eventually, like bee keepers, no one seems to care anymore.

I’ve known Carmine for years, and like every Southern farmer I’ve ever met, he tends to underestimate his own abilities.

He lost his fingertips making his own olive oil. He built his own home. Two of them, actually.

He makes his own wine, cans everything, supplying his children and grandchildren- and now great grandchildren- with the bounty of his garden.

And that is more or less the problem. Not him, he’s great. It’s the dependence on him, without it really ever being appreciated that that is what is actually happening.

Once the pulp has passed through the mill, which removes the skins and seeds, it’s time for bottling. And just like every Southern Italian farmer’s wife I know, Laura wastes nothing, right down to her reused caps. When I ask about their ongoing effectiveness, she waives it away saying, ‘we haven’t lost a single bottle in years’, a statement I can’t make myself.

Today we bottle four hundred bottles, which is on the high side. Everyone speaks proper Italian with me but breaks back into marble-mouth dialect when speaking with each other. Only half an hour away, it’s a dialect so different as to be incomprehensible to anyone from Lecce.

I work in silence, just listening to the foreign tongue, the wind ripping through the fig trees and the electronic pings from the nearby hand-held video games. Several kids have been rapt with them all afternoon.

We finish filling the last of the bottles at around 5 pm. We’ll load them into reused oil drums and cover them with water that has been heated for days in the sun. Old fiscoli- the jute mattes used for pressing olive oil- are used to buffer the layers of bottles. I build a new olive-wood fire under the oil drums.

After the water comes back to the boil for half an hour, the fire is left to burn out.

In two days, when the bottles are cool to the touch, they’ll be unloaded and consumed over the course of the next year. The last three bottles from last year dressed our pasta for lunch today. I’m sure there was some home economics employed to make it stretch just perfectly, a fact revealed in shy smiles.

But what was been my returning thought, all week in fact, is how old I feel making tomato sauce with this family. I’m the youngest person here working and I’m in my late 30’s. After me, everyone is 50 or above. Carmine is in his 80’s.

This is not that ‘kids these days’ rant. It’s the parents that have me concerned (and while I know and love this generous family and have for years, I’ve not shown their faces on purpose. I’ve also changed their names). This is not to shame them (the adults are wonderful people, fiercely proud of their traditions, which is why I’m here to help out as much as I am). I mean to speak of something bigger. Part of the problem is the self-loathing farmer, those who want better for their children. Part of it is the availability of grocery stores and supermarkets, something that didn’t exist here only a generation ago. Part of it is ease. It IS hot. It IS hard work. It IS holiday season, when most young people want to take to the beaches.

And while I fixate on my own backyard– Italy’s ‘Halfday’– it’s a problem that is happening the whole world over, the rapid lose of culture and cuisine, happening right under the noses of those claiming to be the proudest of them.

‘We make our own’, you’ll hear local 30 year olds bragging about the sauce in their cupboards, the reused bottles exactly like the ones we bottled today.

‘But do YOU make it’, you’ll ask, hoping to find someone who still does. ‘Well, me, no… but…. my grandmother….’

And just like it’s not the ‘kids these days’ rant, so too is not the ‘letter writing versus email’, or any of the old dinosaur’s argument made in the face of a changing world. If you could see the look of pride on the faces of those 30-year old’s when holding the jar, who’ll see a real value in their eyes in that homemade sauce. And sadly, you’ll also see the disconnect between that jar, and what the word ‘ours’ really means.

With the drums loaded, I kiss and hug everyone and make arrangements to see them all in a few weeks. Reaching for my car keys, Laura fills my fingertips with bags of fresh figs, artichokes and a little fruit that doesn’t translate into English.

As I pick up speed heading down the open road in my little turquoise FIAT, my skin dry and salty from the day under the sun, I rehearse the same speech as I have on many occasions, each time while driving home from making tomato sauce out in the country side.

In my mind’s eye I look down to see my dark-eyed children, tanned and wild-looking from their time away from school.

I say, ‘Come around my angels, come watch Papà. This is how we cut the tomatoes. You see? This is how we build a fire. This is how much salt to add. One of you go pick some basil from the garden. You see? This is how we jar them. This is very important. All of you look at me. Look at me. You need to learn to do this. This is what WE eat.’

‘This is what WE do, together’.

‘As a family, this is who WE are’.

‘Excellent, my little brown peanut. Now, take the basil that your sister gathered and ……’

Related posts:

1. eating the calendar: our tomato sauce, last year, this year and the next
2. La Cotognata (Quince Paste, Salento-Style)
3. La Cotognata (Quince Paste, Salento-Style)