‘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

Next time you hear one of his solos, sit and really listen. I mean really listen.

I’m not the first to say this, but the solos of Louis Armstrong are famously appreciated for being reduced to their absolute essence. There is no flab, nothing that can be trimmed away without leaving a gaping wound.  His solos are gorgeously spartan, pristine and so sure-footed that generations later, no one has done it better.

I can’t think of another field that hasn’t seen improvements in the last 60 years. Can you?

Spaghetti with clams is like that.

Wait.

Give me a second.

I’ll explain.

The older I get and the more my life becomes more and more immersed in food and wine, the more I appreciate that good food can be about the cook-and often is- but great food is always just about the food.

Take spaghetti and clams. The ingredients are fixed. Live clams. Pasta. Salt for the water. Chilli. Garlic. Olive oil. A little white wine. And parsley.

Not only are there not other ingredients, but even these are fairly minimal.

Bring a pot of water to the boil

Salt the water until it’s as salty as sea water. (That’s not water vapor under the falling spaghetti, but falling spaghetti). Add the pasta to the water and stir.

Chop a good handful of parsley.

Add chopped garlic and just a touch of olive oil to a very hot pan. How hot?

The pan should be hot enough that it catches fire for a second when you add the ingredients. You want the first clam and the last one to open with the shortest amount of time between the two. Douse with a little white wine- for acid to balance the fat of the oil, for a liquid to dilute the salt of clam juice- and to create steam.

As the sauce is light and sparingly applied, the pasta tends get cold quickly. Heat the serving bowl by filling it with your discarded pasta water.

When the clams are open, toss with the just barely drained pasta. Pour in a good hearty glug of raw oil (you added just a touch in the beginning so you can taste the raw oil, which is better in flavour and much better for your health). The remaining drops of water will form an emulsion with the oil, anointing the pasta but not drowning it. If it doesn’t occur to you to mouth the word ‘ethereal’ while eating the dish, you’ve been heavy-handed somewhere along the way.

Pour a high acid white (my robotic choice is always a crisp Verdicchio di Matelica but more for personal history: any dry white will do). Don’t add anything else.

I originally had two sentences about why cheese would be wrong here but I cut them. In the end, if you don’t already know why, I certainly can’t help you.

The more I mature as a cook, the more I stay my hand when it comes to adding more ingredients. The more time I spend in the market finding the best ingredients available, the more I leave them alone in the kitchen.

So the next time you hear his lovely voice building towards a solo, the pocks and scratches, the fever pitch and catcalls of the boys in the rhythm section, the brass keeping time in hard-soled shoes on wooden risers, lean in and really listen.

Listen for the notes that he didn’t play, the virtuoso runs that he didn’t take.

You can’t perfect perfection. The great ones have already beat us to it, both with Louis, and the generations and generations of loving grandmothers that have given us all that we have today.

Related posts:

1. Ciceri e Tria: Southern Italian Soul Food.
2. le orecchiette salentine: little ear-shaped pasta, salento-style
3. la capunata (detto ‘la cialda pugliese): a barley-bread based salad

(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

This is one of those dishes, so emblematic of a place that it’s impossible to think about one without the other. Yes, le orecchiette are eaten all over southern, continental Italy, as indigenous, it’s just that here in Puglia, it’s not just another pasta shape.

It’s the region on a plate.

Well, it’s a micro-regionalism on a plate, actually, to the point that you could be drugged, blindfolded and helicopter-dropped  onto any dinner table anywhere in Puglia, and based on the size and colour of le orecchiette, instantly recognise your actual city, right down to the postal code. (If you do decide to try this trick at home, outdoor dinning occasions are preferred).

Here in the Salento, the southern part of la Puglia (click here for a map) le orecchiette become larger and browner the further south you go. They’re rustic, wholesome and the addition of barley flour makes them much better for you than refined, white flours. Of course, no one here eats them because they’re good for us. We eat them because they’re just plain good.

Great in fact.

They’re also the hardest pasta shape in all of Italy to make, in my opinion. No shape is harder. As a teacher, I push them back later into the week, introducing the easier shapes first. This cuts down on the frustration that usually accompanies learning how to make le orecchiette, nearly always dictating a rich, Rococo-like stream of blasphemy, free-styling profanity featuring donkeys and broomsticks, followed by the tearing of one’s own hair and garments.

And some simply never get it, even after all that.

The recipe, like nearly all the pasta shapes of the Salento, starts with 60 or 70% hard durum wheat flour, with the remaining coming from that of barley, or ‘orzo‘ in Italian (unrelated to the pasta shape of the same name).

Mix the two together, make a ‘well’, a ‘fountain’, a ‘volcano’ or an ‘atoll’, then slowly add water. Make it a little wet and add more flour, as opposed to making it too dry and trying to add water (which only makes it slimy, as if it were slip clay).

Once amalgamated, begin to knead. Roll that out into a long snake and cut them into 7 gram pieces. Now the tricky part begins.

Begin to smear the piece into the board, so that it begins to roll and stretch (if it does actually smear into the board, add more flour).

EVERYONE does this slightly differently, so it’s best to keep trying to find a way that works for you. Apply the rich, Rococco-stream of blasphemy before continuing. Break something valuable belonging to someone else. Discuss the litany of those whose parents never actually wedded. Then move on.

You’ll eventually end up with something that is called a cavatello, or the shape of a cowrie shell. You’ve down the hard part. Throttle back the donkey and broom stick references. Apologise to loved ones and concerned neighbors.

Invert them over a finger tip or thumb until they have a high, nice arch. They should be light for their size. Thick orecchiette taste like raw dumplings, rather than pasta. Don’t fuss with the ones that are ugly. Keep moving forward.

Depends on how you eat, whether in Italian style, or in the New World style (those that see meals as having ‘main courses’, as opposed to equally important stages), probably 15-20 a piece will be a portion.

Boil them until soft. (Hour-old orecchiette, rendered light by practiced fingers, need only 2 or 3 minutes. 8 hours old needs closer to 8 or 9 minutes. The clunkier they are, obviously, the more time they need underwater).

Dress them simply. You want to taste the pasta, the wheat, the barley. In summer, we often dress them with a little, just-heated- through tomato, rughetta (‘rocket’ or ‘arugula’) and a fresh local cheese called cacioricotta. Drizzle a little, good olive oil, such as an ogliarola (the best olive oil in the world, in my opinion) and you have the justifiably, world-famous dish.

You can eat le orecchiette just about anywhere in the world. Have them here though, even just once, and you’ll see what I mean. If there is a better example of a culinary GPS, I don’t know it.

If you want to get to know the Salento, reach for a fork.

Related posts:

1. La Passata Del Mezzogiorno (Tomato Sauce, Salento-Style)
2. le pignate: earthenware pots, salento-style
3. Ciceri e Tria: Southern Italian Soul Food.

I’m going to get hate mail on this one. Drive bys with rotten fruit. Perhaps Molotov’s through my front windows. If I had children, larger kids would pull their braids and push them down into the gravel. Folks would kick my puppy, if I had one. Cartoonists and late night television hosts are going to use me as the butt of their jokes. My friends’ wives will stop accepting my handmade pastries, their top lips peeling off their teeth in barely-hidden disgust.  Local officials are going to ‘register’ me. Nope, this one is going to get messy.

But I’m going to post this anyway, no matter the mob that forms at my front door, their soily pitchforks shaken in rage.  Here is my recipe for Taieddhra, a dish so entrenched in the cooking of the Salento, that folks not only disagree on how you make it, we can’t even decide what to call it.

With tiella, taieddha, tajeddrha- whatever spelling you choose- you only really talk about ‘tendency’. Some folks half an hour north of here call it ‘riso, patate e cozze’, one of those dishes, like, say, aioli or vincotto, where the name of the dish also happens to be the recipe, in this case, ‘rice, potatoes and mussels’.  And like so much of the culture of the South of Italy, the rice is thought to be a souvenir from the Spanish domination:It would take you an entire day in a car at top speed just to find the nearest rice grower. (Italy is the only place that I know where, historically, the poor ate wheat and the rich ate rice, as the rest of the world usually worked the other way around).

There ARE a few fixed tendencies though. Most folks feel an almost fetishistic link to a particular cooking vessel for the dish, which used to be earthenware (and indeed, most women over 60 still prefer terracotta). It’s not that much of stretch if you think about it, as like ‘cassaroule’, the name of the vessel dictates the name of the dish itself. And in fact, the origin of the word is likely to be Castilian or Catalan, the diphthong then double ‘l’, seemingly related to that of ‘paella’.

Many local food scholars tend to see the rice as the swing element, the one ingredient that makes the dish Spanish in origin, where as its absence tends to site the inventors of the dish as Arabs, Persians or even Turks, the last group who invaded the Salento just as Columbus did his thing, switching the European emphasis from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic.

The method for construction couldn’t be easier. Peel some potatoes and cut them into thin rounds. Thinly slice some courgettes or zucchini or whatever you want to call them. Steam open some mussels and discard the half of the shell that doesn’t contain the meat. Grate some aged, smoked sheep’s milk cheese. Break out the breadcrumbs. Start with potatoes, then breadcrumbs, cheese, a layer of mussels, courgettes and on, finishing with a nice bit of potato on top.

Here at the school, I’ve met all kinds of folks from all walks of life, from all over the world but I’ve never met anyone that doesn’t cite crunchy, oven-roasted potatoes as among the best foods on earth. I tend to steam open my mussels with a cup of white wine, just to get things started and stop them from exploding. I let that liquid ‘decant’, the sand and detritus falling to the bottom. That’s the liquid I use, pouring it over the dish before putting on the lid and jump starting the dish over an aggressive flame.After a good five or ten minutes, move the dish to a hot oven, and let it go for 40 minutes or so, checking it to see if the potatoes are soft to the touch. Once they are, remove the lid and brown the potatoes, turning on your broiler or grill, if you have one. Brown the potatoes slightly more than you’d think. Go for crunchy.

There is only one little problem with this recipe though….

Well, it’s sort of big, little problem, as problems go. No one here I know would agree on… ANY of this.

It MUST have rice, it can NEVER have rice. Some add tomatoes. Some augment the smoked sheep’s milk cheese with other aged cheeses, such as Rodez or even Parmiggiano Reggiano. Some cover it to bake, others swear that it should never be.

Some women I know open the raw mussels by hand, insisting that the mussels shouldn’t cook twice. I’ve seen the dish reinvented so that it contains almost none of the ingredients that I see as pivotal, the name of the dish, some how, remaining the same.  I’ve served my version to friends that subtly suggested that I switch fields, perhaps, until I finally find something that I’m good at.

But I’ve also served mine out in the countryside to a grandmother who cried as she ate it, her arthritic fingers moving the fork to her quivering lips. ‘I eat this dish all the time, but I haven’t really tasted it in 40 years’, she said, her dialect as thick as winter soup. I’ve served it old men who saw my version as unremarkable and nothing special, which is the highest prize you could ever hope for, their wives’ versions a mirror of my own.

I’ll open the door when my angry neighbors and local foodwriters come for me, inviting them all in and around my table. I’ll take their jabs at my cooking. I’ll accept that my version isn’t the real one, that their mothers make it better. I’ll insist that they are right. We’ll open some wine.

As for me and my version, I have my own convictions: I tend to trust the sober, antique tongue of that signora. For the first few moments, it was only her eyes that were welling as she ate.

No related posts.

Ciceri e tria is really a cold weather dish but we serve it all year long, dropping the portions to thimble-sized portions as the sun starts to become a larger presence. This is one of those flip-flopped dishes, what used to be the cooking of the poorer but is now mostly made by the rich: Only the truly wealthy have the free time on hand to make something from scratch when cheaper versions are available for sale.

Please don’t eat this with any wine aside from a negroamaro. And no cheese. This is a human-ingenuity at its best, how mothers solved nearly empty larders over time, deliciously. Dishes that remember those sober moments are what true cuisine is about.

Chick peas, dried
Carrots, onions and celery
Barley flour
Hard durum wheat flour
Salt
Chilli peppers
Parsley, diced
oil

Soak the chick peas overnight. Change the water. Rinse. Add the vegetables, and salt and simmer until tender, from 2 to 10 hours, depending on the date of harvest (you won’t like know that, so plan to cook ahead a few hours). Meanwhile, make the pasta, by adding roughly 30% barley flour to the 70% hard durum wheat flour and water until you reach pasta consistency. Roll out into thin ribbons, several times thicker than egg pasta allows. Think bandage shapes, like 3 inch snips of parppadelle. Or Narrow little sticks of gum. Dry a few hours.

Take a third of the pasta and fry in small batches, in extra virgin olive oil. Regulate water and bring the chick peas to a boil again and add the raw pasta. Cook until tender, around 3 minutes. Decide whether or not to fish out the vegetables from the broth. Add fried pasta, the diced parsley and a good glug of raw oil. Serve in bowls. Supply helmets if making this for your Salentine friends: Once they start to swoon, things get out of hand fast.

Related posts:

1. le orecchiette salentine: little ear-shaped pasta, salento-style
2. granita di caffè: espresso-flavoured italian ice
3. gli spaghetti alle vongole: spaghetti and clams

I’m told that I have something of an obsessive personality, although I really prefer the adjective, ‘enthusiastic’.

Take summer dishes: This year I’m only really eating three dishes, and all three of them nearly everyday. The only one that is not part of my normal summer repertoire is this new, lightened form of apricot gelato that I recently came up with based on not wanting to keep 10 egg yolks around all the time.

And, to be honest, the fear of a yellowing heart just out in front of such a round-numbered birthday.

If a death battalion of black-slippered ninjas were to attack my place at 4 am, there is a good chance they’d find me barefoot and maybe even naked, eating ice cream straight from the ice cream maker, the fridge door propped open for no other reason other that it feels good. I even keep the gelato paddle right next to it in the freezer. It’s not pretty to watch, I’m sure, but that might explain why it happens so late at night.

There are only two fixed rules when making gelato. 1) Everything will need to be colder than you think: Freeze everything: your machine for at least 24 hours; your firming receptacle; your serving bowls, even the spoons. The only real problem you’ll likely ever have with a frozen desert is just that, that it wasn’t frozen enough. Should that happen, keep it to yourself and just call it something else. Even mistakes are great, just not ‘gelato’. When mistakes do happen, regroup and re-examine the rule in making gelato: make sure everything is colder than you think necessary.

Also, the same science behind enamelware’s strength in holding out to heat is also true for its ability to hold onto cold. French enamelware makes great chilling vessels. Providing, of course, you followed the first rule in making gelato.

And, 2) sweetness is harder for our tongues to pick up when things are chilled. Gelato is not the place to skimp on sweetness.

The marmalade might stand out as a cheater’s step but it’s not, not really. Both the flavour and texture of your gelato (due to the pectin) will be improved significantly. Most of the really intensely-flavoured gelati in Italy have shenanigans going on in them (powders, potions and packages), somewhere along the way during their production. If your own homemade ice cream has ever underwhelmed you, that’s why.

Il Procedimento.

A kilo of ripe apricots. 200 grams of sugar. 200 grams of apricot marmalade. 1/3 litre fresh cream. 1/3 litre fresh milk. Pince of salt.

Wash the fruit well, cut up into tiny dice, the smaller, the more intense the flavour. Or toss into food processor, minus stems and stones (No real need to remove the skins, as you’ll see below).

Place fruit in the bottom of large saucier and toss with the sugar, leave for half an hour to macerate. Add the rest of the ingredients (the apricot marmalade, a pinch of salt, the milk and cream).

Bring to a boil and turn off the flame. When cool, pass through a sieve. Move to chilled refrigerator receptacle. Chill 4 hours or more. Run through machine for half an hour or until it stops on its own. Move to frozen receptacle and allow to firm for two hours. Serve in chilled serving bowls.

If you’re feeling like a fancy-pants, you can also roast some apricots until they become concentrated and sticky and chill those too. A little drizzled vincotto is also excellent.

But try out this recipe and shoot me an email with the results. I bet you like it. I bet you eat it often. I bet it’s the thing you’ll be eating when your eyes begin to dart about the ceiling at the slightest thump in the night, awaiting the soft-footed ninjas, your lips glossy with sweety-creamy- goodness.

Related posts:

1. granita di caffè: espresso-flavoured italian ice

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 ……’

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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)

Come autumn time here in the Salento, a number of fruits and vegetables start to turn up in the markets, just like old cherished friends that have moved away but then came back again.

Faces light up. There is lots of smiling, happy greetings.

‘We’ll have to have you around for dinner, now that you’re back and all’, folks seem to say, loading up their shopping baskets.

I planned to make la cotognata the first day I saw them at Pina’s little shop, the fruit in the cases still dusted with the faintest of fuzz, not unlike peaches.

Pina beamed like an 8-year old as we talked about the fruit and the famous preserve made from them, her enthusiasm completely contagious.

Such a sweetheart, Pina is.

You may never really know what your boss thinks of you, or even your spouse for that matter, but with your greengrocery in Italy, it couldn’t be more obvious.

Pina always selects each piece of fruit for me as carefully as she would a precious stone. She deliberates. She fusses. Her up-clenched hand goes up and down as she figures the relationship between size and weight. ‘This looks like a good one for Silvestruccio’, she’ll say, using the local diminutive for my name.

And you know that your greengrocery really loves you when they trim and cut away any bruised outer leaves before the produce ever even touches the scale, the tell-tale sign of genuine love, of anyone that is, that sells perishable goods, measured by their weight.

My little car’s back shocks squawked at the added weight as I drove home. Seventy-five kilos is a lot of fruit. It’s what I weigh.

One of my best friends came over to help out.

We cut and peeled for hours, the two of us singing along to torch songs from Mina, the Barbara Streisand of Italy.

It wasn’t nearly as girly as it sounds.

I mean, take the synchronized choreography numbers, for example….you could tell our hearts weren’t really in it.

A quince is virtually edible fruit when raw, and just getting a knife to pass through so many of them caused blisters within minutes, then broken blisters, bandages and rubber gloves within the first hour.

The doorbell rang: Sergio my local grocery was on his bicycle, 20 kilos of sugar on the cross bar.

As I figure it, I take it as a great sign of success that I can pick up a phone and have him at my doorstep with minutes with just about anything I need. Forget the eggs for a crostata? Sergio will be ringing the doorbell even before the phone is back in its cradle.
But the thing I like best about Sergio, is that he treats each phone call as though it were an white-knuckled adventure, the feverish collaboration between purveyor and cook.

His old rusty bicycle always comes to a rubber-skided halt in front of my door, a box of course salt under his arm, or a litre of milk stuck up under his coat.

Francesco needed to leave and as promised, I paid him off with massive mortadella sandwiches, something of a ritual of mine whenever I force myself into hard labour.

We took a half an hour lunch break, monitoring the browning of the fruit as it oxidized. As one of region’s best olive oil producers, Francesco had his own harvest beginning this week. He needed to get back to work.

From here on out I’d be alone.

And there were still four hours to go.

As I stirred and stirred, I thought about how I had discussed the recipe with many older local woman over the last few days, ever since spotting the quinces at Pina’s little shop.

I started asking around because of something that had been bouncing around my head a lot lately.

The great American food anthropologist Sidney Minz defines a cuisine as, When the people that cook it consider themselves experts at it.

And there are few foods in the Salento more Salentino than la cotognata.

Of course, as in just about any field, most true experts make horrible teachers: they are too close to their subject, and can’t imagine not knowing what they know. When I tried to pin down the specifics of la cotognata with the scores of ladies I’ve been speaking with lately, most treated my questions as flying pests, things to bat away during an otherwise pleasant conversation.
And like so many things here, there was the inevitable line, when folks under a certain age just returned blank stares when I asked them about the quince paste.

The thing is……

….that age keeps getting younger.

It’s widely reported on, but here in Italy the concept of QB in cookbooks is still very much alive. ‘Quanto basta’, or ‘as much as it takes’ finds its way into nearly every recipe. In English, ‘to taste’ isn’t used with the same fervor, especially regarding key ingredients, such as flour, acids, even leavening agents.

QB though, is not the road map to an unknown land that your average recipe in English means to be. QB can’t teach you,say, that new Afghani recipe, unless… you happen to be Afghani. QB is a baby-step, a memory-jarer for those already very familiar with the dish. As I stirred, I thought about how silly a recipe would be for this sort of food. And that my real question was not that I wanted a recipe, but that I wanted to see how many of the ladies still see themselves experts.

Uncle Sidney’s hammer landed squarely on the nail.

I portioned out la cotognata in batches, quite literally filling every baking tray in the house, 24 total.

I finished at around ten p.m., and just sat over-looking the trays, dazed from fatigue.

I’ve now lived long enough to see patterns in my life. I see ’success’ differently than most people I know, I think. For me, part of that is that I can take the time to prepare my own food, to be an expert at it. And that I can take the time to do that with the people I care about, to feed them, to connect to them through food, the cultural drops of super-glue that bind us together.

And so, come to Lecce early next November and you will find me, stirring a giant cauldron, listening to Mina, some local red in a jelly jar beside the stove. That will be me there before you, dirty, stinky, tired, feeling like the biggest success the world has ever known.

Related posts:

1. La Cotognata (Quince Paste, Salento-Style)
2. La Passata Del Mezzogiorno (Tomato Sauce, Salento-Style)
3. le orecchiette salentine: little ear-shaped pasta, salento-style