Pollo alla Brutta Cafona
Think beyond breasts. And really consider brining the bird (place chicken in enough water to cover and add 20 grams of salt, please in refrigerator for at least 4 hours. Few kitchen steps are as rewarding as brining). Remove. Pat dry. You’re ready.
Assorted chicken or rabbit pieces.
Tomato paste
Chilli flakes
Fennel seeds
White wine
Fresh herbs, finely diced.
Parsley, treated the same way.
Salt packed cappers
An organic orange or lemon
Olives, large and green is ideal but any will work, as long as you are the one that pits them.
Olive oil
Heat your heaviest enamel Dutch oven for a good 5 minutes, add a glug of oil and then loosely cover the bottom with the biggest chicken parts. Jerk pot as not to stick, but then don’t touch for at least another five minutes. If you find yourself moving the chicken around, you’re doing it wrong. Go to your inner sanctuary and become one with the chicken. If, after 5 minutes, you turn a piece and it looks black and burnt, you’re ready to flip. Repeat, and remove. You’re looking for some real colour here, so don’t rush it. And you’re only browning, not cooking all the way through. Remove browned pieces and start again until all your chicken is browned. Watch the pot. If the oil is smoking it’s breaking down, turn down the heat. If it’s not popping, turn up the heat. Be careful. There will be spattering.
Defat the pan.
Add the chicken back, add all the other ingredients minus the fruit and herbs. Cover and gentle simmer, for at least half an hour. The brining will keep the chicken juicy. If you use salt packed cappers, then avoid adding further salt. If this is a dinner party, simmer chicken for half an hour, then remove from heat and chill. Reheat all the way through, place on large platter and cover with herbs and fruit peel. Wonder why you used to prefer the breasts.
Wine:
A zippy young red would perfect with this dish, such as a fresh primitivo.
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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