Nut Free

Whaling and swordfishing have been the tempestuous business of Bagnara for three thousand years. Wedged as the port is twixt great rocks and the Mar Tirreno at the savage hem of the Aspromonte, it forms a fittingly folkloric tableau for the lumbering black ships trudging out for the hunt. A tower, higher than the masts, is the tight, trembly perch from which one man sights the fish. As did the Greeks from whom they are descended, the harpooners tramp out onto walkways hinged a hundred feet out from the ship over the sea, spears at the ready, to wait for the fish. Once the ships are sighted from the lighthouse, the fishermen’s wives gather on the beach with carts and wagons, transport to take the fish to market. Sometimes, fires are laid right there by the water, one fish whacked into trenchers and roasted, a barrel of wine propped against the rocks, the unfolding of an old ceremony. One fishes, one builds a fire, one eats his supper.

Perhaps the most elegant version of Sicilian tuna for us was this one that we ate in the kitchen of a tiny, chalk-white house set in the curve of an alley and whose arch-walled garden looked to the sea. The lady who cooked it for us—the owner of the house—was born there in that most ancient parish of Trapani more than ninety years ago. Warm, insistent winds—the breath of Africa, one thinks—billowed up the old blue curtain that was her back door, bidding in the damp, balmy spice of her wisteria as she sat there, beatific, talking and working. It was as though pressing peppercorns into the flesh of a fish was a most magnificent task.

Deep in the Gothic tangles of the Aspromonte sits the fourteenth-century Santuario della Madonna di Polsi, a refuge culled by an ancient order of cloistered sisters dedicated to the honor of the Madonna, through a life of acetism. Once a year, though, in the early spring, when pilgrims from faraway parishes walk over Monte Montalto to the sanctuary to celebrate the festival of the Madonna, the nuns sacrifice a flock of newborn lambs to the glory of her, braising their flesh in old, shallow coppers and feeding the faithful at long, rough-hewn tables set out on a meadow floor.

Here, the Calabrian fashions a rough paste of flour, sea salt, and water and perhaps an egg and a spoonful of oil, rolling it out thin and cutting it into wide, uneven ribbons, calling it maccarruni i casa—maccheroni made at home. It is married to a well-made sauce flavored with some precious trimmings of pork and left to braise and plump in its liquors. The whole offering, pasta, meat, and sauce, is carried to table and eaten, one hopes, with the lush hunger it deserves. Here one uses a good piece rather than a few trimmings of pork. One might choose an acquisition from a good pasta shop or specialty grocery or make the good maccheroni alla mugnaia (page 37) for this dish.

Zagara—flower, in Greek—is the name farmers call their precious agrumi, they, it seems, likening the sweet, spicy perfumes of their oranges and lemons to the scents of blossoms. Thus, citrus fruits are Calabrian flowers. One farmer dared me to try to cook this luscious dish with bergamot rather than oranges and lemons, assuring me that it was the one and only fruit with which the massaie (housewives) braised pork long-ago. Finding none to beg or buy, I cannot tell you how the dish might have been with the ambered flesh and juices of the mysterious bergamot. One day I will.

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.

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.

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.

From Lecce and its environs, quince paste—a deeply bronzed jelly molded into plump squares and tucked inside wooden fruit boxes—is our favorite Puglian treasure to take back to Tuscany. Here follows a lovely sort of pudding made from quince that, though it offers a less-dense dose of the fruit, yields one with all its beautiful, apple-wine sort of autumn savor.

A perhaps four-thousand-year-old, pre-Mosaic formula, the name of the dish is derived from its cooking vessel, caldaro—cauldron. A characteristic preparation of Gravina in Puglia, this is the ancient dish thought to be denounced in the Old Testament: “Thou shall not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk,” forming the Orthodox Hebrew proscription against dishes that combine meat with milk. This version sautés suckling kid or lamb until golden in fennel, parsley, and garlic-perfumed oil before its milk braising.

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

Mussels unfettered by garlic taste more like their own sweet, turgid selves. On the tiny porch of the seaside bar where we ate this pasta, the cook who was the mussel gatherer who was the bartender who was the pastrymaker added crushed, dried seaweed to the finished dish. He cooked the mussels and the pasta over a fire he’d built of driftwood a few meters from the bar. It was a fairly good-sized blaze, ample enough to heat an old cauldron along with the mussel pot, it bubbling with a potion of wild myrtle berries in which he immersed a great, gray fish net, tinting it, cooking it to a deep, bright blue.

A smoky char permeates the potatoes and the onions and this, fusing with the brininess of the capers and olives and anchovies, gives up luscious flavors.

In the thirteenth century, when the Angevins reanchored their royal seat from Palermo to Napoli, the latter was illuminated, transformed, by the influx of a luxe new citizenry. Royals, nobles, and government bigwigs were followed by a cadre of the epoch’s great artists. Giotto and Petrarch and Boccaccio ensconced themselves in Napoli. And as they are wont to do, the masses, too, followed, hoping to stay warm, a little warmer even, inside the echoes of the city’s great, new noise. And as much as she did flourish then, also did the misery of her increase. In great part, Napoli starved under the reign of the French kings. While obscenely cinematic festivals were being staged inside the lustrous salons, the Napoletani waited outside each evening for the cooks to wallop out over the castle walls to them the viscera of the lords’ sheep and cows and pigs and goats. And from these mean stuffs did the women and men of Napoli invent their suppers. Among the dishes that became tradition during this time was zuppa di soffritto, a high-spiced potion made from the heart, spleen, and lungs of the pig and still prized by the Napoletani. Here follows a version of the good soup that asks for less exotic parts of the pig.