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

Il Coniglio del Salento (The Great Salentine Rabbit).


The Great Salentine Rabbit.

If your rabbit tends toward dryness, consider brining it, that is, soaking it in salted water to retain moisture. As little 20 minutes under salt water can achieve miracles. This is a master recipe, what used to be called a fricase in English. Once you grasp the browning, then slow simmering you can really run with this one. A careful cook will notice that the short list of ingredients means that each must be at its best.

One rabbit, broken down into 8, 10 or 12 pieces, depending on the nationality of your butcher, discarding head and probably too, internal organs.
Olives (We crack ours with a heavy water glass, to remove the stone)
Thyme
Olive oil
White wine

In a heavy-bottom pot big enough to hold all the pieces, radically brown the rabbit in a little high quality olive oil, careful not to over-crowd the pan. Browning demands high heat, no lid or crowding the pan, all the things that promote condensation on the bottom, which is actually boiling. Go for black. Or even dark brown. Once all the pieces are radically browned, add the entire rabbit back to the pan, deglaze with white wine and add half the thyme and all the olives. Cover and move to the smallest burner you have. Simmer gently until done. This will likely be about half an hour, but it depends on the age and bred of rabbit. Toss with a good glug of raw oil and the remaining thyme and serve it forth.

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