So buy a kitchen scale already. Or pull it out and use it. No scam against cooks has been as wide-spread as the need for measuring cups. And weight is much more accurate. These are great little cookies or biscuits. They could not be easier to make, but they also keep remarkably well in a hermetic jar. Originally baked only for lent, as the name, quaresima, ‘lent’ in Italian, suggests, you can now find these all year long. And try that favourite cantucci practice too, dipping these little dream boats in some sweet liquor.
250 grams of cake flour
200 grams of sugar
300 grams of shelled but not peeled almonds
4 eggs
25 grams, ground cinnamon
Some liqueur, such as Frangelico. Or Strega
Dash of salt.
Olive oil
Mix all the ingredients together in a big bowl, by hand or with mixer. Mix well. Oil a very shallow, wide oven pan and pour the mixture in. Place in hot oven (200 c or 350 F) and bake until a cake-like surface begins to take shape, or around 15 or 20 minutes. Grab your favourite fork and slip some Nirvana into the stereo, turn it up and just really go crazy with the fork, tearing up the cake into as many pieces as possible. Scramble the pieces, breaking it as much as possible. Place back into oven and bake until tooth-crack stage. Pull and cool. Sweet dipping wine and Nirvana optional when serving.
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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