It used to be that when students booked, I’d ask them what they expected to find with regards to the food of the Salento. The initial answers back were always vague but every once in a while someone would put the foreign take on Italian food into a cozy sound bite: Cream in the north, tomato in the South.

‘Don’t you guys eat a lot of vegetables don’t there’, would be a common refrain.  ‘Lots of tomato, right’? would be another. And while these answers are not wrong per se, they certainly don’t seem to grasp the flavours of the South, the saltiness, the sour, the bitterness, the hearty immediacy, the walk-in-the-front-door or it all, the stiff kicks in the taste-buds that so much Southern food seems to be about.

Take lampascioni. They are flower bulbs boiled in vinegar and water and then put up under olive oil. And not a week goes by at our little cooking school where, somewhere between the first and 5th forkful that you won’t see the facial expression that seems to say, Oh so this is what the south is about!

Lampascioni are hyacinth bulbs, the same ones your aunt has growing out front of the house. The wild version here are harvested by digging down a hands’ lengths into the winter soil and then digging up the little bulb intact, which like all plants, tends to make its home by really digging in. While I used to harvest them, I confess that at the school, we fly through them so fast that gathering is no longer practical. I buy mine from a local greengrocer, cases at a time.

The recipe couldn’t be easier. You wash them well, trim them down until you have what appears to be a peeled onion. And like onions, this takes some time. Best have some good music. A bottle of wine. A new girlfriend.

Today we’re listening to a call in quiz show which I just love. They play songs from 30 and 40 years ago and women all over Italy call in to tell the announcer where they were in their lives when the songs were new. A crinkly voice from Sardegna. A child-like voice from Roma. A heavy smoker from Pavia. We peel and we peel and we peel.

‘I have a hotspot from the knife’, says Elisa as we peel. Over the radio a woman from Bari gives an open invitation to a singer I never heard of before. ‘I don’t care if you’re old now too’, she says. ‘Just come and visit me’. The announcer is taken back by the honesty of the invitation. He’s lost for words. In my mind’s eye I see a overly-made up 60-year old woman with a poster of a teenage boy up on the wall, his forehead red and fuschia from the years of passing kisses.

Elisa is a physician, 28 and from Lecce, but she’s never prepared hyacinth bulbs before. ‘They are slimier than I would have imagined’, she says. ‘Yes, that’s why you soak them in cool water’, I say. ‘And to remove the proper amount of bitterness’.

Once completely peeled you soak them in water for a day or two, changing it a few times. Then you boil them in half vinegar and half water, which cooks them, but also kills off any botulism spores.

Then you place them in jars and cover them with extra vergine and let them mellow for at least a few months. The flavour is oniony, but with a hearty kick of bitterness and a little floral perfume. If you place them under really good olive oil too, then the flavours are even more complex. I keep a jar in the refrigerator at all times, a greedy spoon ready for barefoot midnight visits.

Come February we’ll pull down jars and begin to taste the first lampascioni of the year. We’ll make up some fresh bread and eat them as a kind of earthy and gutsy pickle, mopping the juices and oil that pool around them.

Today we made 65 jars of the bulbs. I’ll pull down and open each for visiting students, all year long, pristine souvenirs from todays’s perfect afternoon.

 To learn more about our food programme.

To learn more about our wine programme

To see the calendar for both

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‘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

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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’.

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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

Like so much food preparation here in Southern Italy, this is a technique more than a recipe, a way of thinking about ingredients more than it is about a way of cooking, per se. Depending on how you see the world (and what part of it you see), this could be one of the easiest recipes on this site, or one of the hardest. What’s the variable?

Your ability to source really fresh fish.

And as an oily fish, fresh sardines are so perishable that I’d argue, if you don’t like these, you’ve likely never had them fresh enough.

Start at Step 2, and ask your fishmonger to remove the heads and spines of three or four fresh sardines per person you intend to serve. (Step 1 is to find a fishmonger that you trust, who not only has very fresh fish but will take the time to lovingly clean any fish that you buy from him.  More than watch repair. More than a good place to rent entertainment near your home, this is a quality of life issue. Pay attention to it.

It pays.

In Lecce, I have Mimmino, who treats the fish he sells me as if he were going to eat it himself. (He also cleans sardines 4 or 5 times faster than I can (we’ve timed it), and if were to have been in his shop today with me, I assure you that his hands would have been just as blurry in person).

If you don’t have a trusted fish monger, find out and begin to use him or her. The culinary arts are no different than other arts: if no one supports them, they dry up and the next thing you know your fish is coming shrink wrapped in plastic trays, with a ‘sell by’ date stamped on it by someone else on the other side of the world.

The preparation itself couldn’t be easier. You use an acid to denature the proteins. Or, put another way, you dump an acid on them. I make my own white wine vinegar, which I believe is much stronger than commerical vinegars that are usually diluted down to 5 or 6 percent. But lemon juice works just as well. Or whatever citrus fruit you happen to have laying about. When in doubt, go classic. Your friends will think you know something.

Once the sardines turn from red to white, they’re ready. Drain and rinse and give them a dash of high quality extra virgin oil (I use pure Cellina di Nardò, a very fresh, local oil that doesn’t overpower), some parsley and mint (this last herb is far from a classic but it always garners compliments. In the Salento, you find fresh mint in many dishes, most of them savoury).

Wine suggestions? No, there aren’t any. The acidic nature of the vinegar or lemon juice will sizzle your palate to the point that no wine will really be able to triumph in complimenting it.

Water.

Or maybe beer. Or just give up on the idea of a perfect match and enjoy these little babies how grandmother intended them to be: tiny little succulent morsels that speak soberly of the big blue sea.

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