Simple Cooking

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.

If I were given the task of choosing one bread from all the bakers of Italy, one that I could eat everyday and forever, it would be the golden-fleshed bread of Altamura, its thick skin, parched, crackled, its form a fat, crisped heart, cleaved nearly in two.

Once Kallipolis—“beautiful city” in Greek—Gallipoli is a tumult of white-chalked abodes heaped up under a feverish sun. A fishing village three thousand years ago and now—after its episodes with pirates and slavish dominions, its risings and its fallings—it is a fishing village still. Affixed to the newer town by a bridge, its oldest quarter is a quaint islet in the Ionian. And it was there that we first saw Rosaria. It was in the pescheria (fish market). It was the late-afternoon market where the day’s second catch—and what might have remained from the morning, at a smaller price—was offered. Admiring her confidence, her stroll over the slippery, sea-washed stones of the market floor, inspecting the gleanings—silently, unerringly, one thought—and transacting prices with the fishmongers only with her eyes. When she was convinced by something, she pulled coins and bills from a small pouch hung around her like a necklace, then positioned the parcels in a basket she carried atop her head, leaving her small, elegant hands free to repose on her hips, to move in agreement or discord or exclamation. We dared to ask her the names of the more exotic offerings and, so encouraged by her gently spoken responses, we opened discourse on the celebrated fish soup of Gallipoli. Through her laugh, she told us that the allure of the soup seemed perplexing to her. It was, after all, a potful of humble fish. Nearly everyone cooked it, in one form or another, every day. “We cook what the sea gives up to us. It’s our garden,” she said. She told us she had cooked the soup for as long as she could remember, and that the perfumes of it being cooked by her mother and grandmother were older yet in her sensual memory. She volunteered news of her evening’s program and said we might join her if we wished. She was to prepare a supper for three old friends, widows all, and molto simpatiche—most pleasant. She said we might meet her at 7:45 in front of Sant’ Agata. Timid, pleased, we sealed our agreement. By then, the weak February sun was readying itself to slide into the sea, rosying the clouds in its path, bedazzling them in washes of gold. We watched her climb the curling road farther up into the old town until her narrow, top-lofty form melted into sweet lilac dusk. We looked at the last of the sunset from the terrace of a little bar, adding jackets and sweaters and scarves against the winds, sipping at red wine, imagining what would be our evening with her. We found her in front of the cathedral and, following her the few meters to her door, were welcomed into her apartment in whose parlor we sat whilst she collected, arranged the soup’s elements. Only then did she invite us into the kitchen. First, though, the ceremony of gli aperitivi—cold, pink wine poured into small, rounded crystal cups. Then was Rosaria ready to dance. She set about by whacking the filleted fish—sea bass and red hogfish—into great chunks; she warmed oil in an old coccio, adding garlic, onion, and crushed salt anchovies. In the scented oil, she deftly browned the fish—removing it to await the second act—adding fat prawns, heads removed, tails intact, and rolled them about, flourishing her wooden spatula with a sort of spare drama and sending forth great sea-scented mists. She made the sauce by adding peeled, seeded, chopped tomatoes and white wine. After ten minutes or so, she reunited fish to sauce, rubbing peperoncini—I saw three for certain, but there might have been four— between her fingers into the pot and leaving the soup to gently simmer while she fried trenchers of rough bread in sizzling oil. I flashed a moment upon the contortions I’d suffered to build a bouillabaisse, one whose directions filled more pages than a play by Pirandello. I thought, too, to the flushed, moist faces of cooks—spent, brokenwinded&mdash...

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.

We had been in Puglia and its environs nearly a month. Sapped from our journeys, our palates debauched into slumber from the opiate of too many chile peppers, our wits palled from nightly Circean cups, we needed redemption from the table. We asked each other what would soothe. Surely we needed to stop driving. Fernando wanted pastina in brodo—tiny pasta cooked in broth. I wanted a small custard pie, warm, soft. I wanted bread and butter. We both wanted to be in a place with not one more three-thousand-year-old olive tree. We wanted sympathy more than we wanted supper. And there we were, lost in Otranto. When finally we asked the same giornalaio, newspaper seller, for directions to our intended destination of Melpignano for the third time and got the third different answer, we thought it a good thing to surrender our search for the unnamed, unsigned place there that had been pressed upon us by our friends in Lecce and simply brake at the next and nearest little place with even the thinnest promise about it. Finding it, we tumbled out of the car, shuffled up the drive and asked if there might be a room for us. The cheery little man took our things, showed us up the stairs, started up the heater for the bathwater and began the reverent story of his wife’s genius in the kitchen. I saw Fernando’s face fading a bit toward citrine. Swooning, I tried so to smile at the even cheerier little man through my narrowing vision. He began his pastoral roundelay with her pigeons braised in red wine and juniper, on to her lamb roasted with potatoes and wild mushrooms, before coming to the rhapsody of her way with goats’ hearts poached in white wine and lemon. Fernando was nearly able to deflect him with an inquiry about the era of his handsome stone house before he began the lip-smacking tale of the pigs’ livers roasted on branches of bay. We closed the door. We took a bath. As we were dressing, the cheery little man knocked gently. They were waiting for us—he, his wife the cook, his son the university student, his brother the hunter, his friend the winemaker. They’d thought, since there were no other guests, we might dine together, make a real celebration of the evening. They had laid a beautiful fire and lit candles upon a narrow, wooden, unclothed table set for seven. They were so sweet, so excited by our presence, for their own clever spontaneity, for the prospect of a long winter’s evening to be passed at table. Fernando rallied and began nibbling at a creamy heft of new pecorino sitting on a crisp white cloth next to our aperitivi. I followed the lady into her kitchen, unraveling our adventures in a nervous sort of monologue. Rather than sympathy, she offered her envy. “Beati voi, tutti questi giorni in giro, sempre a ristoranti.” “Blessed are you, all these days running about, always in restaurants.” I thought to be more direct. “You know,” I said, averting my eyes from the legs of lamb she was basting, “what I would like most this evening is to eat something simple and comforting. I feel like a tired child.” She looked at me for the first time, really looked at me, heard me. She wrapped her great, fleshy arms about me, crushing me to her moist, rosemary-perfumed bosom. She had understood. She marched me back to the table with instructions to sit quietly, sipping at the winemaker’s best red and to wait. After a half an hour’s sashaying to and from the kitchen with the first of the feast’s plates, the lady, her broad olive cheeks blushing up to the corners of her dark eyes, carried in a small, white porcelain bowl with its own cover and set it down before me. I lifted the lid, unloosing the scents of cinnamon and butter and perhaps of chocolate, which curled up through a tangle of pale yellow noodles swathed in a curiously dark sort of sauce. “Ecco la pasta in nero,” she exclaimed. “There it is, pasta in b...

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

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.

...in the Manner of Saint Mary of the Bath.

Made from handmade whole wheat or egg pasta cut into wide ribbons—half of which are sautéed until golden in garlic and chile-scented oil then, along with the poached pasta, tossed with roasted almonds and chickpeas softened in a rosemary, garlic, and bay-scented bath. It is a beauty, the crisp, garlic-scented pasta against the soft, delicate ribbons of it with the mealy, nutty little chickpeas and the bitter almonds stitching them together into a plateful of fantasy conjured from homey stuffs.

Orecchiette—little ears—are a pasta made from grano duro, or semolina, and served often with a rough sauce of cima di rape, the bitter leaves of a variety of Italian turnip not always available in America. Do not mistake them for young broccoli, as some do. Should the real thing not be at hand, it is a better business to substitute dandelion or beet or turnip greens or red chard or even to make the sauce only with cauliflower, especially the grassy-green, purply-edged Roman variety.

Six hundred years before Christ, the Greeks raised up a grand colony on the verges of the Mar Tirreno, dedicating it to Poseidon. Now known as Paestum, the whole cadence of life, as it was then and there, sits in high relief, a phenomenal diorama, traceable, floating, gleaming. The great temples, barely wounded and without a haunting, invite one inside to stay among the rests of old dreams, to race among the open pathways between them. A cordial parish, a fair Camelot, it seems, while one sits awhile on the thick tufts of grass inside the Temple of Neptune, having slipped under the easy gate to watch the sunrise, to collect armfuls of the tall, thin spears of asparagus that grow wild, treasures to take back to Alfonso to cook for lunch. He, having spent the morning gathering clams, combined the collected booty with fusilli di Felitto—beautiful pasta, hand-rolled then wound, one string at a time, around the traditional, corkscrew-shaped wires, used and prized like jewels, by the women of the nearby village of Felitto. Dishes that marry wild vegetables with sea or shellfish are typical of the Cilentini, they thinking it a thing natural to prepare their suppers with stuffs foraged from woods that fall down to the sea.

Alfonso cooks a dish much like this one, invented epochs ago by the Cilentini during the vendemmia—the harvest of the wine grapes. He tells the story of the fishermen who were also winemakers, who, after depositing the daily winemaking debris into the sea, set out their shore lines, much as they did every other evening. Serendipitously, they lured an abundance of fat, pewtery sea bass—branzino—the fish bewitched by the fermenting perfumes of the grape skins and seeds. The Cilentini then roasted the fish who’d fed on the grape must over cuttings from the vines. The flesh of the fish was scented, through and through, with essences of grape. Legend has it that the dish made voluptuaries of all who ate it. Stuffing the fish with cooked grapes likely gives it an even more luxurious savor than that taken on by his must-eating ancestors.

Prepare it with only mussels, with only clams, with various types of clams, make it for two of you or for all of you. Carry a great, steamy pot of it outdoors to a table set with candles and backlit by the moon on a cool, almost cold evening, everyone nuzzled in sweaters but still in shorts and sandals, hungry, tired, perhaps, happy. Serve it then, just the way it is offered in the tiny taverns and six-table houses that look to the sea between Amalfi and Positano.

Perhaps the essence of Campania is this, of the countryside, of the pastoral innocence of the good, pure foods one eats there. Search, beg, grow, procure these few ingredients, first eating them with your eyes, dashing all record of plastic mozzarella and dusty-fleshed fruit masquerading as a tomato. This is not a recipe as much as it is quiet illustration of one fine way to eat in Italian.

This illuminates the pervasive Napoletano mastery over vegetables, the charred, sweet flesh of the peppers invigorated by the brine of the capers and olives, excited by the potency of the garlic and the pecorino, all of it hushed, then, by the raisins and the bread.

An island off Napoli’s great bay is Ischia. Wild rabbits thrived there once and some still do for a while, before the clever Ischitani sack them, whipping them into old terra-cotta pots, flattering their dry, scant flesh into rosemaried silk.

This was and is still the dish every Napoletano wishes to come home to for Sunday lunch. There have been sonnets written to its lush sauce, to the perfumes of it curling down to the alleyways below, signaling that, at least for a day, all would be well for that family. The tomato, after its long, slow courting with the red wine, takes on a sort of rusted ebony tint, a beautiful rich color the Napoletani, with their keenness for flourish, are wont to call “black.”