Fae e Fogghie (dialect) Fave e Foglie (Italian)
Dried fava bean pure with vegetables.
Anyone that reads this as a dogmatic shopping list has failed to grasp both the spirit and expansive-nature of this dish. Only two things are really pivotal, the dried fava beans, and a lot of different vegetables, cooked in a bunch of different ways, all of them simple. This isn’t the place to sneak in a little pancetta or goat cheese. Keep it simple and make the dish sing through variety and interplay, rather than complex cookery. Rare for an Italian dish, this is a one-course meal. It also happens to be perfect for the evening after your next trip to a farmer’s market.
Dried fava beans (perhaps 100 grams per person, but the paste reheats well and can be used a zillion different ways)
Vegetables.
Soak the fava beans in cold water over night. Change out the water a few times and rinse the beans, careful to check them over for small stones or other foreign objects. Morning of, boil the favas in plenty of salted water until soft. This could be from 2 to 6 hours, depending the age of the beans. Best do it long in advance rather than keeping your guests waiting for undercooked beans. When soft, drain and refridgerate until ready.
Put a pot of water on to boil (good advice no matter what, as no matter what you cook you’ll probably need some boiling water at some point).
Size up your vegetables. If you have some onions, slice them and boil them until soft in simple vinegar until soft and sweet. If you have some potatoes, boil them in highly-salted water and allow to cool. If you have some bitter greens, boil them in salted water until tender. Saute some green beans if available. Toast some bread under the broiler. Saute some zucchini.
All of this is easier than it sounds. All of us know that zucchini is better grilled or sautéed, as opposed to boiled. Potatoes tend to be better boiled than grilled. Chicory needs lots of water to remove some of its bitterness. Fennel tastes best raw. And on and on. As a vegetable becomes ready, pull from the pot or pan, plate and add a dash of salt and oil. Place on table. When you have 5, 6, 8 or even 12 different vegetables, add a lot of good quality oil to the fava beans hit them with a stick blender until smooth and hummus -like. Taste. Should be rich and salty. When all your vegetables are on the table, reheat the fava been pure and place on table in a nice bowl or pot.
Each diner begins by spooning himself a large dollop of fava bean pure, then surrounding it with vegetables from the array. Mix things together. Taste them apart. Notice the raw alongside the boiled the vinegary next to the oily.
Drink a young red, something simple and perhaps unoaked. We drink a simple farmer’s wine, fermented in concrete. To learn more about the wines of the Salento, visit www.awaitingtable.com.
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.
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