Vegetable

It is fitting that on a most divine jot of the Tyrrhenian coast, on a promontory between the limpid gulfs of Sant’ Eufemia and Goia Tauro, there would glint the small, golden precinct of Tropea. Fitting, too, that there in its rich, black fields would be raised up Italy’s sweetest onions, and that they be long and oval like great lavender pearls. One peels them and sets to, with knife and fork, a dish of sea salt, a pepper grinder, and a tiny jug of beautiful oil, a perfect lunch with bread and wine. Too, we saw the folk of Tropea simply fold back their papery skins and eat them raw, out of hand, layer by layer, like a magical violet fruit. Sometimes, one finds them all softened, smoothed into a delectable potion made of garlic and bay leaves and white wine. Evident in its resemblances to French cousins, the soup of Tropea, though, is a minestra strepitosa—a magnificent soup—say the Calabrian cooks, belittling the goodness of the French soup. Here follows a version that softens the garlic, caramelizing it into sweetness with the slow cooking of the onions, before the illumination of the soup with red wine and grappa and the finishing of it with pecorino and a heavy dusting of fresh pepper.

A medieval fastness above the Mar Tirreno, Guardia Piemontese is a thirteenth-century village raised up by a band of French-descended, Waldensian heretics in flight from papal justice. Pursued into the pathlessness of Calabria, they resisted the Church’s soldiers then and again and again. Two hundred years had passed when, flush with the dramas of the inquisizione, Pius V dispatched a brigade up into their serene agrarian midst, calling for, in the names of Christ and the Holy Ghost, their massacre. Those few who escaped the flailing of the Church’s swords stayed. And those who were born of them stay, still, speaking a Provencale dialect and celebrating the traditions of French country life, gentling their patch of the earth as though time was a stranger. Too, they are true to their own and simple gastronomic heritage, having obliged no transfusion of the coarser Calabrian kitchen. Here follows a thick mountain soup, so like a Béarnais garbure (a thick cabbage soup from Béarn) even to the blessing of its last smudges with red wine as the French are wont to do à la faire chabrot—pouring a few drops of red wine into the last spoonful of soup, stirring it up and getting every last drop as both a blessing to the cook and a thank-you to God.

During the sovereignty of Byzantium over southern Italy in the tenth century, it was in the workshops of Catanzaro that the silks that emblazoned the courts of Costantinopoli were loomed and crafted and tinged. Thus it was that from these handiworks, humble Catanzaro, its cheek brushing close upon the Ionian, lived its few lustrous moments after the glory days of Magna Graecia. But save the lacy Oriental architecture raised up by the Byzantines, nothing of the comforts of that epoch endured. And so Catanzaro, as did all of Calabria, pressed on in the severest of lives. And when, late in the 1700s, an earthquake felled the city, its fierceness left but dust. Reborn then, Catanzaro is now all of eighteenth-century alleyways, the parishes of the people insinuating upon the palaces of the nobles, the whole formed of a crooked, good-natured charm. And everywhere—round each curve and set into the arms of every angle wait the beloved putiche—the taverns—of the workingmen. Small, dark-wooded dens are they, wrapped in sharp, grapy vapors breathed up from the fat, brown barrels of gaglioppo (a local red wine) over these past hundreds of years. Traditionally le putiche were the dispensaries of only three balms—honest red wine, compassion, and a hellaciously spiced mash made from the viscera of pork, veal, lamb, or goat, sometimes from baccalà, the flesh braised in tomatoes and wine with peperoncini then cradled in a leaf of soft, flat, chewy bread, folded and devoured out of hand. And these morzeddu—dialectically, morsels—made the breakfast, the later morning’s merendina—snack—a consolingly juicy partner throughout the day and evening with stout doses of purply wine. Sadly, there seems of late a flurry of gentrification among the putiche, the work of those who would sophisticate them into whitewashed osterie with wine lists and menus translated into English and German. The cooks, too occupied with carpaccio and tiramisù, no longer make morzeddu. Even the compassion has perished. Enough of the old and crusty taverns endure, though, their comforts unfaded, at least for a bit longer. Here follows a version of morzeddu made with lamb—its shoulder rather than its spleen or its lungs—and a fine terra-cotta pot of the mash and a basket of warm breads are the rustic stuff with which to open an outdoor feast while some other meat or fish might be roasting on the fire.

A humble prescript that flaunts the goodness of summer tomatoes, that asks their roasting over wood, concentrating, ennobling their sweet juices. Propped, then, on crusty seats of bread with a gloss of good green oil and the grace of basil and mint, they soothe hungers for purity.

Horace, born Quinto Flacco of freed Roman slaves in the sleepy village of Venosa in the north of Basilicata, was educated in Rome and Athens in philosophy and literature and trained as a soldier. It was his poverty, though, that piqued him to write verse. A satirist, a classicist, a romantic, Horace was also a dyspeptic. He sought cures from alchemists and magicians. He journeyed to Chiusi (an Etruscan town in Umbria, fifteen kilometers from our home) to sit his ailing bones in icy, sulfurous baths. But it was this soup of dried peas and leeks, a food of his childhood, to which he paid homage in his works as his only cure. The folk of Venosa present, having little else to claim, make the soup in every osteria and taverna, each cook armed with at least one trucco—trick—that makes his soup the one and only true one. Here follows mine, its only trucco its artlessness.

Shanks slowly braised like these composed a winter Sunday lunch served to us in a linoleum-tiled card room snugged behind a bar on the edges of Potenza. The players were sent off precisely at one so that the cook might lay the oil-clothed tables with yellow linens and set them with blue and white china. The eight or ten tables were all reserved, as they were each Sunday, the only day when the improvised dining room was open. We had heard about the wonderful food and asked the signora if we might wait until the table of one of her fixed clients might become available. “Impossibile.” She laughed. “Questi tavoli non saranno liberi prima di mezzanotte.” “These tables will not be free before midnight.” She explained that after lunch, the pretty linens and china would be washed and tucked away to await next Sunday, leaving the gaming tables free for cardplaying throughout the afternoon and evening. When one booked a table, one booked it for lunch and endless rounds of briscola, the high-stakes action to which even the women were invited on Sundays. A lovely and entrepreneurial program, we thought, but what about our lunch? The sympathetic signora made room for us, tightening up the seating around a table for four, adding two more place settings and chairs. And so we dined with the priest and his mother and a retired fruitseller and his wife, all of whom spoke only in dialect while we bumped along in Italian. The encumbrance of language soon dissolved in the mists of the signora’s beautiful food. Plates of local, dried sausages and farmhouse cheeses, baskets of just-fried, bay-perfumed breads, a soup of bitter greens, great bowls of rough, handmade pasta sauced only with the rich liquors from braised lamb and dusted with pecorino and, finally, the whole, braised shanks of lamb themselves, sending up sublime perfumes of garlic and rosemary. And as sustaining as is the memory of the company and the food on that Sunday in Potenza, it is another scene that plays more sweetly in my mind. A sort of coming-of-age for me—it was there that I learned, fast and well, the secrets of briscola.

A sort of Lucanian stone soup, this is from Basilicata’s long repertoire of dishes built from almost nothing at all. Once the sustenance of shepherds who could concoct the dish with a handful of wild grasses and the simple stores they carried, too, it was often the family supper of the contadini—the farmers—whose ascetic lives asked that each bit of bread nourish them. I offer it here as balm, a pastoral sort of medicine, one of the thousand historical, wizened prescripts known to soothe and sustain.

The jots of coast and whatever sea fish they might offer have little embellished the Lucanian cuisine, yet the fat, brown trout from her rivers and lakes are coveted, stalked. The most characteristic prescription for their cooking is to scent them with the wild herbs one finds near the water, stuff them with a few crushed olives, wrap them in a slice of pancetta, and roast them, on site, over a beech or chestnut wood fire.

Rionero in Vùlture, a tiny village crouched on the hem of a quiet volcano, is where Basilicata’s worthy red wine is born. Ancient gift of the Greeks were the vines called Aglianico, still flourishing, somehow, stitched up nearly three thousand feet onto the shoulders of the long-sleeping Vùlture, their black-skinned fruit nourished by the volcano’s ashes and the nearness of the sun. The yields of the rich fruit of the Aglianico is each year less, not for the nature of things but for the dearth of a new generation of vine workers. Even now, the production is sadly small. Young, the wine is untamed, full of acid and tannin and potential. After five years, an Aglianico can ripen into a wine sitting on the fringes of nobility. After an all-night rain and the next morning’s mushroom hunt in the forests above Rionero in Vùlture, this dish, with a 1992 Aglianico and a half-loaf of coarse, whole wheat bread taken, warm, from the village forno, made our lunch.

Foggia is the city studding the largest wheat fields of Italy’s south—the tavoliere—it being the ancient, present, and endless granary of the peninsula. Too, are potatoes cultivated there, soothing the Pugliese penchant for them in breads, tarts, stews. Our maîtresse d’hôtel in Foggia baked a reprise of this luscious tart evening after evening, sometimes filling it with minced lamb or thin slices of poached sausage or crumbles of smoked ricotta, and presented it barely warm as our first course.

After the fast demise of Sybaris, it was Taranto that grew up, the city most splendid of Magna Graecia. And it was there that oysters were first cultivated, for the coddling, I suppose, of true sybaritic cravings. Taranto was and is quite perfectly situated for the business, sitting, rather like an island, between the mar piccolo—the little sea—a coastal lagoon fed by both fresh and sea water and the mar grande—the big sea—part of the Gulf of Taranto in the Ionian Sea. And it is this very shifting in the salinity of the waters around Taranto that builds up the sweetest, fattest oysters. Nothing better can be done to a fine oyster than to slip it down one’s throat, chasing it with sips of some crisp, icy white wine. But here follows a recipe for barely roasting oysters that, if not ennobling them, at the least takes nothing from their own natural goodness.

Creamy evidence of how savory and seductive can be a naïve little pap made from a handful of dried beans.

...Anchovies, and Black Olives) Brindisi, the ancient Brundisium of the Romans, is a sort of rough, emotionally bankrupt port city. Still, we like to walk and sit, sometimes, on the edges of its rickety old wharfs early of a morning to inhale the bright, briny tableau of the place. And round about eight-thirty—high noon for the fishermen, who rise before the sun—we wait to see the baker’s boy running down the docks, toting a great basket of puddica—traditional Brindisino flatbreads—just born and sending up great hungering perfumes for the fishermen’s lunch. It seemed to us the highest form of ceremony left in the dour old place.

Made with bruscandoli, hop shoots, should their wisp of a season embrace Easter. If not, one searches out the first, slimmest shoots of asparagus.