Starter

An ancient practice to conserve some windfall of fish or vegetables is to fry them in good olive oil and tuck them under coverlets of bread crumbs into a vinegary bath. The addition of saffron is a fillip only half a century old, when the golden pistils began to be prized beyond their value as a pharmaceutical (page 58). A dish made traditionally also in Puglia, I think the Abruzzesi hands fashion the most luscious versions. Zucchini or eggplant may be treated in the same way as the fish.

Insalata di Pesce Dove il Mare Non C’è (A Salad of Fish in a Place where there is no Sea). Though the Teramani, in truth, live not so far from the sea, their cuisine is one of the interior, of the highlands, with sea fish playing an insignificant part. And so when we were served this divine little salad in a backstreet osteria in Teramo, it proved a light, breezy surprise for an early spring lunch. When we asked the old chef why he had made such an unexpected dish, he answered that sometimes, even in a place where there is no sea, one can have a desire to eat some good, bracing, and briny-tasting fish.

Another dish often prepared for the panarda (page 50), the sausages are rubbed with olio santo, wrapped in Savoy cabbage leaves, and grilled over wood. Because lamb fat can give up an aggressive, even disagreeable, flavor, overpowering the savor of the lamb itself, pork fat is recommended to keep the sausages full of juices and to support their intricate spicing.

II Gran Sasso is the highest peak of the Apennines, surging up from the sea, a beast longer than twenty miles, a great-winged harpy, petrified, iced in flight and leaving only a slender shelf of coastal plain in its wake. And hitched halfway up its magnificence sits the medieval fastness of Santo Stefano di Sessanio. One meets few of its two hundred folk on a Wednesday evening’s sunset walk through its catacombs and labyrinths, peering into the unbarred doors of abandoned houses that spirit up invention and half-light musings. Inside the bar—there is always a bar—a Medici crest embellishing its door, the briscola squad is hard at play. Curious at what could bring us forty-five hundred feet up into the January cold that afternoon, we told them we were looking for lentils. Sometimes I can still hear their laughing. But they found us some lentils, the last of that year’s harvest, they told us, and they convinced us to stay the evening, the night, in a little locanda, an inn, closed for the season but of which one of them was the owner. Of course we stayed and of course we cooked and ate the beautiful black lentils that looked so like a great bowlful of glossy jet beads and of course we drank beautiful wine. And afterward we slept close by the fire. Though it is hardly traditional to adorn this humble soup with cream, when our host offered it with the willowy dollops melting into its warmth, it tasted like a dish as old as the mountains’ secrets. And I would never again eat it any other way. The ennobling of the soup with saffron is common in many dishes of the region but only for these last half a hundred years. Fields of crocus have flourished, though, for centuries in the peculiar micro-climate of the high plains of Navelli and Civitaretenga, since a curious village monk, when sojourning in Spain, folded a fistful of their dried seeds in his handkerchief and tucked them in a prayer book. The monk sowed the seeds first in the monastery gardens, and when the flowers bloomed and he harvested their pistils according to the rites he learned in Spain, he and his brothers planted whole fields of the sweet flowers, desiring to use the saffron as a pharmaceutical and as a colorant for ceremonial vestments. Still, the old monk’s is the only saffron cultivated in Italy.

The raffinatezza—refinement—of the food of Teramo is legendary. And the Teramani propose that it was, indeed, among them that crepes—called crespelle or scrippelle in dialect—were first fashioned. It was much later, they say, that their delicate, eggy secrets traveled to France via the gastronomic exchange during the epoch of the Bourbons. Often one finds the scrippelle plumped with a stuffing of mushrooms or a truffled paste of some sort, then gratinéed. Sometimes, they are composed into a timballo—a lovely molded cake, its layers spread with savory filling. Though they are luscious and a genuine part of the culinary heritage of the region, these fall too far, for me, from the ingenuousness of la cucina Abruzzese. The following, though, is a version of scrippelle that is more homespun, the one we eat always at a lovely Teramana osteria called Sotto le Stelle, Under the Stars. Our ritual is this. At about eight o’clock, we stop by at the Bar Centrale (the place most intelligently furnished with the splendid labels and vintages of Italian and French wines in all of Italy south of Rome, all of it accomplished with Abruzzese grace and humility by a man called Marcello Perpentuini). There we chat with Marcello and take an aperitivo. A bit before nine, Marcello telephones Antonio, the restaurant’s owner, orders a bottle of wine for us and tells him we’re on our way. We walk the few blocks through the quiet streets of Teramo to the little restaurant. Our wine has been opened, some lush plate of local salame and fresh, sweet pecorino laid on our table with warm breads, and, perhaps best of all, someone back in the kitchen is making our scrippelle.

There is a simple sort of glory about handmade scamorza (a semifresh cow’s milk cheese very much like mozzarella) charred over a wood fire, all plumped, swollen, its skin blistered black and gold and barely able to contain its little paunch of seething cream. Anointed with olio santo and taken with oven-toasted bread, it can make for a fine little supper, a sublime one, even, if the cheese is genuine.

The transumanza is all but a faded pastoral ritual in the Abruzzo. Once three million sheep and lambs were guided each year from summer mountain pastures to the winter lowlands and back again, but now—with the flocks reduced to several hundreds of thousands—they are transported in huge, canvas-roofed vans. And thus the pastoral life is in suspension, lulled into a smaller, less dramatic sort of existence that permits the shepherd to stay fixed, to have some dwelling or other as a home. Before, he lived with only the sky as refuge. His nobilities and his indignities, his dreaming and sleeping and, often, his dying, were fulfilled in the open air. But to hear stories from old men who, as boys, were raised to be shepherds, whose youth, nomadic and primitive, was spent in the waning epoch of the transumanza, one thinks it might hardly have been a life of desperation. Its very solitude was often its gift, say the old men. In his aloneness, the shepherd honed a curiously grand capacity to listen and discern. He became a piper of sorts, free to move about from village to village, and thus to transport to the hungry ears of each place his accumulation of stories. He was a folkloric hero, an exotic who lived by the graces. The old men smile deep in their eyes when they speak of they who live and die hanging tight to the fancy that security is palpable as a jewel. And, so, having heard the dusty memoirs and the swollen legends recounted by the old shepherd romancers, of the austere dishes they recall being cooked out in the open over their fires or under the shelter of some ruin, we wondered if someone, somewhere, might be cooking them still. Having just billeted ourselves at a modest hotel, La Bilancia, in the environs of Loreto Aprutino, spurred by the repute of its kitchen and cellars, we approached our host. Sergio is a gallant man with a burly sort of gentility. He said how strange it was that the circle had closed so quickly, that in his own lifetime, foods representing poverty had come to be of historical, gastronomic, interest to a stranger. We followed him into the kitchens, the parish of his wife, Antonietta. It was she—one who had every comestible at her disposal, kitchens with the square footage of a small village, four chefs at work under her soft-spoken guidance—who offered to cook the old dishes. They were, after all, her childhood food, the consoling plates of her grandmothers. She explained that the Abruzzesi, even when their means invite them to eat more extravagantly, still cook the old dishes at home. “They still comfort,” she said. “They are cherished, they are our nostalgia.” Too, she mused, this was not so true in some other regions where the foods a people ate when they were poor were fast set aside in better times. And so, because her clients partake of these dishes at home, it is other foods they long for when they sit in her dining room. Hence, it was a somewhat singular occasion for Antonietta to prepare the old foods. She set to making her lists, dispatching us on a mission to the nearby town of Penne to find a certain flour, a certain dried bean. Antonietta cooked two of her own preferred dishes from the traditions of the transumanza, from la cucina povera. And that evening, the immense room filled with guests vanquishing great hefts of roast lamb and fricasseed veal and saddle of hare and generous plates of maccheroni alla chitarra with a sauce of wild boar. She sat with us, her impeccable white cook’s bonnet always in place, eating the simple food with an unembarrassed appetite. We, too, loved the dishes, as much for their own goodness as for the images they lit. The rough pasta dough is made from three flours and hand-rolled. Cut into rustic strings, this is not the ethereal pasta of the refined cucina whose destiny it is to linger about with shavings of white truffle or the belly of some poached lobster. It is the coarse stuff that is homey sop fo...

This is a substantial soup classically made from fresh fava beans and a dried sort of bean/pea hybrid called la cicerchia, whose taste and texture are very like that of the fava when it is dried. This version, asking only for the dried favas since la cicerchia is not readily found in America, yields a rich, smoky flavor that is wonderful against the comfort of the warm crunch of the bread.

Should there be, one day in your life, both a handful of still-warm-from-the-tree ripe figs and the juice-dripping flesh of a melon, go quickly to find leaves of mint, some good green olive oil, and the juice of a lemon to make this little salad. Use only flawless components and arrange them for someone wonderful with whom to rhapsodize over it. You might, then, need heady, appropriate conversation. You could choose to speak of Platina—one Bartolomeo Sacchi—the Vatican librarian and author, in 1475, of Platine de Honestate Voluptate. The work’s argument concerns the history of Roman cuisine and was the first officially published cookbook since those written during the Republic. Or you might want to chatter a bit about Cantalupo in Sabina—the Singing Wolf of the Sabines—once a papal garden property outside the Roman walls where a strain of tiny, orange-fleshed melons were cultivated, they, no doubt, being the precursors to those we call cantaloupe. Perhaps you might choose not to speak at all, thus distracting nothing from the sweet little figs.

From the somber mountain village of Amatrice in the Abruzzo—one of the areas from which have emigrated, to other regions of Italy and throughout the world, many cooks and chefs—was born the famous pasta all’ Amatriciana, prepared faithfully by the pilgrim cooks wherever they go. One evening in Rome, an Abruzzese cook asked if he might offer a different pasta to us, the one most nostalgic for him. What he presented was, indeed, pasta all’ Amatriciana, simply made without tomatoes. In dialect, its name contracts into gricia.

These are Rome’s other artichokes. Softened rather than crisped in their oil bath, they are of an extravagant goodness.

Not so many springtimes ago, I knew it was a Roman birthday for which I yearned, convinced that the salve of the place would soften the edges of a long sadness. Arriving crumpled and unslept on that morning, I slid my two dusty bags under the purple flounce of the bed in my genteelly shabby room at the Adriano and bolted off to the Campo de’ Fiori. I needed lilacs. I explained to the flower merchant in the market my desire to bring più allegria—more cheerfulness—to my little hotel room, that I was preparing for a sort of birthday party. He amplified the girth of the sweet-smelling sheaves I’d chosen and dispatched his helper to carry the towering bouquets through the twisting streets back to the Adriano. His field of vision completely contained inside thickets of blossoms, the porter left me to play front guard, to scream commands and admonitions back at him, staging a droll farce that could happen only in Rome. Safe inside the hotel with the lilacs, I purloined a large metal wastebasket from the reception hall, tied up its middle in a length of green silk, and installed the great, weeping blooms at the foot of my bed. I raced back to the market to fill two baskets with tiny, blushed velvet peaches still on their branches and hung them from wall sconces and draped them over mirrors and bedposts and on the roof of the dour, mustard-colored armoire. I collected breads from the forno (bakery) in Via della Scrofa, not so much to eat but for the comfort of their forms and their scents. I unwrapped the Georgian candlesticks I always carry with me from their cradle in my old taffeta skirt, threw open the shutters to beams of a rosy moon, and the birthday room was ready. I’d collected a beautiful supper at Volpetti: a brace of quail, each reposing on a cushion of roasted bread—depository for their rosemary juices—olives crushed into a paste with capers and Cognac, a stew of baby artichokes, new peas, and fava beans scented with wild mint and called, mysteriously, la vignarola—the winemaker’s wife—and a small, white, quivering cylinder of sweet robiola (fresh handmade cow’s milk cheese). I laid the feast on the dressing table, serving myself only bits of it at first. But little explosions of goodness insinuated themselves, and the quiet supper urged me into the goodness of the moment. Hungers found, strategies resewn. Happy birthday. During the time I lived at the Adriano, I went each morning to the market in Campo de’ Fiori, stopping to chat with my flower man, he introducing me to the lady with the slenderest, most delicate asparagus, which I devoured raw, like some earth-scented bonbon, and the one with the baby blood-red strawberries collected in the forests of Lake Nemi up in the Alban Hills. A ration of these beauties I vanquished each afternoon between sips of icy Frascati from my changing caffè posts along the campo. With those weeks as initiation, I might have stayed the rest of my life in the lap of that neighborhood, that village within Rome so contained and complete unto itself, and surely would never have known a single lonely day. More than she is a city, Rome is a string of small provinces, fastened one to the other by old fates.

It was nearly eleven on Saturday and Fernando was standing under the open roof in the rain, tender, silvered glissades of it plashing quietly, as it has for two thousand years, onto the black and white marble of the temple floor. He, not minding, stood directly in the puddle, its depths caressing the tops of his shoes, looking up at the sky like a child in wonder, the water settling in fine mists on his cheeks and eyelids. He turned fifty that morning in the Pantheon. His spiritual birthday thus celebrated, he pronounced that his carnal festival was to be solemnized in not less than six of his preferred ostarie/trattorie/ristoranti. Fernando wanted to eat artichokes. More, he wanted an artichoke crawl—a critical journey up and down the vicoli (narrow streets), an earnest search for great, golden-green, crisped Roman roses—as many of them as he might vanquish in a day and its evening in a half dozen genuine houses—we were in search of the one perfect carciofo alla giudia. Ten years ago, I might have propelled him into the arms of the trattoria da Giggetto, when I was still convinced of the authenticity of its cooking. Sidled up as it is to the edge of the Portico d’Ottavia, perhaps it was only the taberna’s majestic old neighbor that wooed me. Fernando had his own ideas. At midday, we made quick aperitivi e antipasti visits to Arancio d’Oro in Via Monte d’Oro and La Campana in Vicolo della Campana, taking only one or two artichokes and a glass of white wine. We would settle in at Agata e Romeo in Via Carlo Alberto for a proper lunch that would start with another of the little beauties. The evening’s gallop would open at Tram Tram in Via dei Reti before a stint at Il Dito e la Luna in Via dei Sabelli, where we would crunch on more fried thistles. Our palates veneered in stainless steel, our bellies convulsing, plumped, we brushed sea salt and crisp freckles from our lips and our chests and stepped at last inside the dimmed sanctum of Piperno in Via Monte dei Cenci. Murmuring something to our waiter about not having much appetite, he assured us that he would carry to us only those plates that could titillate a dead man. He started us with a salad of puntarelle—a thick-bladed wild grass collected in the Alban hills— glossed in sauce of anchovies. Then came the misty comfort of stracciatella, chicken broth scribbled with a paste of egg and pecorino. Expert by now, able to whiff their very presence from twenty meters, we knew then the artichokes were only moments away. He set them down, clucking over their beauty, assuring us their salty vaporousness would coax our hunger. He was right. We continued with la coda alla vaccinara—oxtail stew—abbacchio—roast suckling lamb—a few crumbles of a hard, piquant pecorino pepato—peppered pecorino—a soft brown pear, and sealed it all with a great fluff of roasted chestnut mousse that we ate with small silver spoons.

A patently rustic treatment of the prawns that presses us to a dramatic sort of dance in front of the flame as we toss the fat, handsome things about in the hot oil, their briny perfumes dissolving up in great vapors around our heads. A bottle of fine Cognac perched on the kitchen shelf seems an occurrence as common in Rome as is the one filled with the simple white wine from the hills just outside its gates. Here, the bottle is used to a fine end, scenting the seething, sputtering flesh of the prawns inside their bronzed, vermilion shells.

When I was growing up, my dad and I had an ongoing asparagus arrangement: I would cut off the tips of my asparagus spears and trade them for his ends. While most asparagus eaters like the tender tips best, to this day I still prefer the fibrous-textured stalk and would happily swap tips for ends if anyone offered. In this simple first course, asparagus is grilled, then layered with prosciutto and dressed with mustard cream. I hope it’s delicious enough to disappear before your guests have a chance to debate which end is better.

Morels are to spring what tomatoes are to summer: they epitomize the season. Their spongy texture and funny pine-cone shape give these wild mushrooms unmistakable personality. In order not to mask their delicious earthy flavor, morels are best when prepared simply. In a French kitchen, morels are often cooked with cream. And as with so many traditional pairings, when you taste the combination you understand why it’s a classic. Here the morel ragoût is bound with a little cream, spooned over toasted slices of brioche, and topped with dollops of crème fraîche. The soft herbs are left whole; when you bite into them you get a big burst of flavor.