Introduction
If you lean in and really listen to the Baron, you’d swear he was getting drunk. I’ve seen the transformation before, when textbook Italian starts to ebb into marble-mouthed dialect, the linguistic synapse of a storyteller traveling back in time. First it was only a word of dialect here and there as we discussed the dishes of his childhood, but the last hour has had me squinting and hanging onto his every word, the way you might really grip the steering wheel while driving through a really thick fog.
‘Before there was so little, so very, very little’, he says, he eyes beginning to tear. ‘We always had just enough but those in the community struggled in ways that I think would be difficult to really imagine today. Unless you know real hunger, I mean real, real hunger- and for years at time- I don’t think the food down here is readily obvious. At least not from outside looking in anyway.’
I pour myself some more wine and disagree with him, at least in theory. I run a cooking school here in the Salento and those that come love the food of the region, for its pure flavours, never needing any of the back story to access the dishes on their own merit. The Baron falls silent for a moment and cocks his head to the side and eats a forkful of his Cecamariti, the way you might half-heartedly attempt to study a picture of your own mother, trying to forget who she is.
‘It’s good’, he says. ‘But I don’t think I can really taste it without also tasting the doorway back.’ He smacks his lips and takes another bite, holding his head low, as if he were in church.
I’ve decided to start my blog about the food of the Salento with the Baron because I believe that you, the reader, believe that the traditional food of the South of Italy is still being made by the poor, the uneducated, the rural and those that many of us would be tempted to call ‘peasants’. ‘Every morning in Italy, all the little old ladies wake up and begin to make everything fresh from scratch’.
The opposite is more often the truth.
Traditional food in Italy is the process of flip-flopping, where the real luxury today is finding the time to make things from scratch for those you love. Traditional food is being kept alive by those that know enough to love it, that understand that there is always something more to any dish, beyond a list of its ingredients. And that was what was really happening inside the Baron's mouth as he chewed.
lunedì 28 aprile 2008
Ciceri e Tria (Kick-Ass Bean and Pasta Stew)
Although far less famous abroad than le orecchiette, this is actually the most beloved dish of the Salento. It’s a brothy, rib-sticker of dish, more like a hearty stew than your average pasta soup. You’d never put cheese on this. Nor would you want to add any meat whatsoever, the fried pasta was originally meant to mimic the texture of meat, back when there was so little of it going around in our neck of the woods.
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 the Salentini start to swoon.
Wine:
Nothing says ‘lovin’’ like negroamaro with this recipe.
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