Fresh tomato sauce
Divorce yourself from the fact that you’ll eat this most of the year, or even a big part of it. There are really just two forms of tomato sauce: the barely cooked using fresh tomatoes at their peak (a related fact) and that using cooking, peeled tomatoes, whether you were the one that jarred them or not. This here is the first one. If you only have access to hothouse tomatoes, or tomatoes that are out of season, this sauce will be so wimpy as to be pathetic and not worth your time. What’s known inside of Italy but apparently not outside, is that the fresh sauce is not better than the cooked one, just different.
Ripe tomatoes
Salt
Olive oil
Chilli
Rocket (arugula)
Cut the tomatoes into postage stamp size pieces and just heat through in the olive oil. Add a pinch of chilli, again for balance as opposed to full-on heat. Salt as you remove from the heat. Start to finish should be 90 seconds or so. Toss in the rocket if using, so that it just wilts in the heat of the pan. Toss with pasta and bring together with a cup or two of the pasta water until emulsified.
Wine:
You can go with either. A red would play to the almost-blood like qualities of the salty tomato, but a high-acid would clean the palate between bites, making each mouthful seem that much fresher.
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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