Italian

It was not often,that one was plump enough in the purse to buy a kilo or so of meat from the butcher, carry it home, and cook it up into some luscious, soulful dish. When fortune placed in one’s purse a few centesimi more than were necessary for subsistence, one sought out the carnacottaro (an itinerant seller of cooked meat).

It seems unclear why a dish characteristic of Napoli should be called after a Ligurian port. Some say it’s because a Genovese sailor cooked it for some locals and the goodness of it was hailed throughout the hungry city. Others will tell you that Genovese is nothing more than a torturing of Ginevrina—of Geneva—hence giving a Swiss chef, one from the tribe of the Bourbons’ monzù, no doubt, credit for the sauce (page 84). The truth of its origins, adrift forever, holds less fascination, I think, than the patently simple recipe and the lovely, lush sort of texture the meat takes on from its long, slow dance in the pot.

Beautiful breakfast biscuits with hot anisette-sparkled milk, caffè, or cioccolata calda.

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.

...in the style of Nereto. An old Longobard town in the north of Abruzzo’s province of Teramo, Nereto grows walnuts and breeds turkeys. And when the turkeys grow fat on the walnuts, their just-dressed flesh, roasted with aromatics, indeed tastes of the sweet, smoky nuts. A classic dish for Christmas there, I fix it for our Tuscan version of Thanksgiving. And because our local turkeys, as is likely the case with yours, do not feed on walnuts, I gift the bird with a luscious paste of them smoothed under the skin of its breast. I like the Neretese-inspired turkey infinitely better than the more famous tacchino alla Canzanese, turkey in the manner of Canzano, which typically asks that the bird be relieved of his bones and poached with a calf’s foot and knuckle, then cooled and presented in its jellied broth.

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.

La Coscia della Sposa (The Bride’s Thigh). Once upon a time, the panarda was a rustic sort of feast hosted by a farmer for his neighbors and friends, for his tribe. A feast whose substance was bread and lard—pane e lardo—the words meshed, dialectically, as panarda. Lard was a precious comestible, a potent winter fuel that could keep a body whole up there in the mountains. Thus, if a family had a pig to slaughter, it was a family blessed. And if this family was wont to share its sainted beast, even if only the herb-scented renderings of his fat spread on a trencher of honest bread, it was a festival cheered. Time and greater plenty swelled the proportions of the panarda, it growing into a flushed reveling, a Pantagruelian episode staged by one who desired to give thanks for some plague disarmed, some spiritual wound soothed. The panarda became a gastronomic pageant, a devout rite of Christendom quickened with mystical invocations—a duality, then and now, with which the Abruzzesi are at their ease. A wake, a wedding, a generous harvest, an homage—all these became motives to unfurl the festival, to illuminate, throughout its thirty courses, the inextinguishable Abruzzese ebullience. So fraught is the feast with the host’s honor and the honor of his forebears that guests at his panarda must take to heart the intricacies of the culture into which they have entered. He who does not is imperiled. Stories are recounted of one or another unwitting stranger, who, by the twenty-fifth or twenty-eighth plate, begged his leave from the table. It was then that the barrels of primitive muskets were leaned against the temple of the blunderer, these inspiring, pell-mell, the rediscovery of his appetite. Still, today, when one sits at a panarda table, one is bound to partake of any and all that is set before him. To this, I make personal testimony. Our induction into the rites of the panarda was at a country wedding near the city of L’Aquila, its thirty-two courses presented to nearly two hundred celebrants. Here follow the two dishes I loved best, the first for its straightforward symbolism and display of the ticklish Abruzzese humor, the second for its pure, seminal goodness.

The Abruzzesi have long feasted on wild rabbit and hare. The formula for their preparation traditionally employed some version of al coccio—the braising of the rabbit in a terra-cotta pot. They might first brown it in olive oil with garlic, then cook it quietly with rosemary in white wine, perhaps enriching the dish with a dose of tomato conserve and finishing it with a handful of stoned olives. The peasants typically cooked rabbit in this mode, as it was a carne secca—a dry flesh— and hence deemed inappropriate for roasting. But in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the brigade of serfs who cooked in the castles and villas of the nobility in the province of Pescara soon learned from their masters that all it took was a blanket of some sort—a quilt of buttery crust, a rasher or two of fat prosciutto or pancetta, even a few leaves of cabbage would do—to keep the scant juices of the little beast from becoming vapors in the heat of a wood oven.

Agnello Piccino, Piccino, Picciò (Delicate, more Delicate, The most Delicate Lamb of all). Just outside the village of Campo di Giove—Field of Jove—southeast of Sulmona, there lives and works a butcher who is also a chef of sorts, roasting and braising, as he does, some of his wares in a great, old stone bread oven that sits behind his pristinely stuccoed shop. His clients come sometimes to buy their lunch or their supper still warm and fragrant, readied for the table. Though it was achingly cold on that February morning when first we came upon the butcher at work in his outdoor kitchen, we joined the long, decorously kept line that wound its way from his ovens down the country road. We offered our good-days to the mostly women in whose midst we now stood, women typically Abruzzese, with serene, high-boned faces. They carried their pots and casseroles in sacks or against a hip and, when they felt our interest, they talked to us a bit about the dishes for which the old butcher was celebrated. Mutton braised overnight with tomatoes and onions and red wine; pork braised with bay leaf and garlic and peperoncino in Trebbiano d’Abruzzo; tripe and pancetta with tomatoes and yet more peperoncino; kid roasted with centerbe (an artisanly distilled liqueur made with mountain herbs). Long and reverent was their litany, but when one of them spoke of his agnello da latte—of suckling lamb that he braised only with butter in a sealed copper pot—there came a swift agreement that it was his piatto prelibato—his dish of greatest refinement and delicacy. As the gods would have it that day, the butcher had not prepared agnello da latte but intinglio di agnello allo zafferano (page 47), which, when it came our turn, he packaged for us in a little plastic tub and on which we later lunched in the car with the motor running. It was luscious. We returned in the afternoon, forsaking the day’s program, to beg its formula and to know when the mythical angello da latte might be forthcoming. Il macellaio, the butcher, shook his head on both counts. The suckling lamb in the sealed casserole he prepared only when he found lambs of just the right plumpness and age whose mothers fed only on certain grasses. He turned to the next question. “Una ricetta è una questione di cuore, signora mia; è molto personale,” he said. “A recipe is a thing of the heart, my lady; it is most personal.” I simply looked at him, neither beseechingly nor with delusion, and proceeded to tell him how I thought it had been accomplished. I spoke for a long time, I suppose, he never interrupting even as clients accumulated around his cold white cases. I sealed my discourse by asking why he’d used imported saffron rather than the milder one harvested locally up near Navelli. By now, he was laughing, mostly at my accent, I thought, which is distinctly Northern and often unpleasant to southern ears. At a point much later, after we knew each other longer, he confessed it was only my determinazione—determination—that had made him laugh. The butcher, at least with words, never told me if my understanding of his beautiful lamb stew was correct, but each time I make the dish, I know that the pungent, melting result is a fine tribute to him. And so, when Campo di Giove sits even remotely on our route, we visit, happy to see our friend and hoping to find agnello da latte. We are always a day too late, a week too early. Someday our timing will be divine. Curiously enough, though, the butcher, without my asking for it, one day told me its formula.

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.

Perhaps until the beginning of this century, there came always, in the severe mountains of the Abruzzo, a haunting desperation with the first days of May. Bankrupt of the thin stores conserved to abide the incompassionate winter—their handkerchief-sized patches of earth sown a few weeks before—the contadini (farmers) waited then for the land to give up its first nourishment. Often it came too late and many died. And even as time brought more mercy, these terrible days were remembered, the pain of them soothed by a simple ritual. The story says that on the first of May, sette fanciulle virtuose—seven young virgins— went from house to house in a village in the Marsica, the area that suffered most in the past, and begged whatever handful of the winter food that might remain in the larders. And, then, in the town’s square over a great fire in a cauldron, the fanciulle prepared a beautiful pottage to share with all the villagers, to bring them together, to warm them, to keep them safe. The potion was known as la virtù—the virtue. The soup is still made, ritualistically, faithfully, each first of May in many parts of the Abruzzo—most especially in the environs of Teramo, as well as in the Marsica—now more extravagantly, brightening the humble dried beans with spring’s new harvests. Employing even a handful or so of all the ingredients results in a great potful of the soup, assigning it thus as a festival dish. On some sweet day in May, invite twenty-nine or so good people and make the soup for them. The tail of a pig and one of his ears, though they are traditional to the soup, seem optional to me.

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...

…in the manner of Ellisabetta. Abruzzesi women seem congenitally beatific. They endure, they temper, they are faithful to their own notion of life and betray none of the gnashing dramatics of those Italian women who seem to burlesque passion, who remain in pain eternal, fanned if only by the postino’s tardiness. The Abruzzesi are intrinsically more dignified than those. As wives and mothers, the Abruzzesi seem more revered than leaned upon. Not the archetypal massaia, farmwife, a woman of the Abruzzo historically worked the fields, made bricks, and piled them up into rude buildings with the same good sentiments with which she told fables to her children and suckled her baby. There are many stories, in fact, of women of the Abruzzo that I might tell you. I could tell you about Francesca Cipriani. Well into her seventies, slender, of fine bearing, her long, silver hair pinned up under a kerchief, she speaks eloquently of what it is to live in an isolated mountain village at the end of this millennium. She knows very well that hers is the last generation with the will to stay there inside the small rhythms of its solitude. She is of the village of Campotosto, long and still famed for its plump, rough-textured sausages. She is one of the last artigiani—artisans—who build, by hand, the mortadelline di Campotosto. We were hard put, though, to talk her into selling a few of them to us. She said that this last batch had not yet had time to age properly and that she simply would not sell them in their unfinished condition. We told her that we had a woodshed much like hers and that we lived, not so high up as she, but nevertheless, in the mountains and that we would promise to hang the little sausages there in our own crisp, cold, oak-scented air. She consented. As we were driving away, she raced after the car, counting on her fingers and calling to us, “Lasciatele appese fino al giorno di Pasqua e a quel punto saranno perfette”—“Leave them to hang until the day of Easter, at which point they will be perfect.” We did exactly as she said, taking Francesca’s mortadelline from the woodshed on Easter morning, slicing them thickly, and eating them with a soft, buttery pecorino bread for our Easter breakfast. And then I could tell you about Elisabetta. We found her in the countryside between Anversa and Cocullo. We saw a sign fixed to a tree, penned in a child’s hand, we thought, that read, LA VERA CUCINA ABRUZZESE. COME ERA UNA VOLTA. THE TRUE COOKING OF ABRUZZO. AS IT ONCE WAS. It was, after all, nearly noon, and the invitation was, indeed, irresistible. We pointed the car, as the sign’s arrow indicated, down the narrow, scraggly lane. We stopped in front of the only house. There was a puppy sitting among the weeds and wildflowers, a starched, white napkin laid before him like a tablecloth and beset with various little dishes. After wishing him a buon appetito, we turned to the door. Another sign, in the same child’s hand, invited us to ring the bell if we were hungry. We rang the bell. And there came Elisabetta. A rosy wool skier’s cap pulled low over her brow, her thin, tiny body swathed in long skirts—one piled over another for warmth—and scuffed black boots composed her costume, all of it ornament to her caffè-latte-colored skin and the great, gray sparklers she had for eyes. Elisabetta, now seventy, began her career as a restaurateur at sixty-one. She was just coming into her stride, she told us. Since we had arrived much too early for lunch, she sat us down in the kitchen in front of an old whisky bottle filled with cerise-colored wine and two tumblers. She puttered about, chopping and stirring and such, talking about her life, her adventures, how, when her then twenty-year-old son was sent to Sicilia for his military service, she went along. Because she feared the boy would miss her too much and because she feared, too, she migh...

Caligola, Caligula—the diminutive in the dialect of the Empire for shoe—was the name given to Caio Cesare, despot of the Empire in A.D. 37. And it was under the murky waters of the small volcanic lake of Nemi, south of Rome, that were excavated, earlier in this century, two of the emperor’s small sailing ships—toy boats, really—from which his madness commanded droll, demonic games played in the shadows of the lake forest, the once-sacred woods of Diana’s mythical hunts. Now the pine and oak forests about the little lake of Nemi seem serene enough, whispering up nothing of the old horrors of the place. There, in May, begin to push up from the velvety black earth the most gorgeous and tiny wild strawberries. We like to go there then, for the festivals that celebrate them, to eat them, cool and fresh from their woodsy patches. And on a Sunday last June, as the season for them was ending, we lunched in the town of Nemi, hoping to find one last dose of the berries for dessert. Sitting out on a shaded terrace that looked to the main square, we watched the promenading of the few citizens not yet seated at table. A little ruckus came up behind us from two boys jousting with silvered plastic swords. One of them was a robust sort of chap, thickset, his patrician black-eyed face in profile to us. His adversary was a waif of a boy, a miniature of the other with the same legacy of splendid form and feature. The small one was losing the battle. I tried not to feel every blow I saw him take, the bigger one thrusting the blunted end of the toy sword into his spare middle over and over again. The little one was crying, then, but hardly in surrender. His pain was evident, his fear, too, I thought, yet he stayed to fight. Then, throwing his weapon to the side, the victor began to use his hands to pummel him. The diners around were unmindful. I begged Fernando to do something, to stop them. He told me sternly with his eyes that we must do nothing. I got up and walked, nonchalantly, over to them. “Buon giorno, ragazzi. Come stiamo? Come vanno le cose?” “Hi, boys. How are you? How are things going?” I asked inanely, as though they had been shooting marbles. Gentlemen to the core, the bigger one said, “Buon giorno, signora. Noi stiamo bene, e lei?” “Good day, my lady. We are well, and you?” “What is your name?” I asked, playing for time so the little one might catch his breath. “Io sono Alessio e lui si chiama Giovannino.” “I am Alessio and he is called Giovannino,” offered the big one. I ventured further. “Alessio, did you know that you were hurting Giovannino, that you were hurting him so terribly?” “Sì, signora. Lo so di avergli fatto un pò male.” “Yes, my lady, I know I hurt him a bit,” he answered willingly. I asked him why he would want to be so violent with his little friend. Alessio looked at me full face: “Signora, siamo romani. Combattere è nel nostro sangue.” “We are Romans, my lady. To fight is in our blood.” Educated by the eight-year-old gladiator, I could only shake his hand, then shake the hand of Giovannino and walk back to our table. Fernando told me quietly that a Roman boy could never be Huckleberry Finn. During the lunch, I noticed that Alessio, now sitting on a bench between two people who were likely his grandparents, kept looking at me, waving once in a while, smiling at me with sympathy for my unworldliness. He strolled by the table a little later and asked if we were going to taste the gelato di fragole. It’s made with basil and pepper and vinegar, he proclaimed, as though that composition might be as difficult for me to comprehend as was his penchant for rough sport. He went on to assure us it was the best gelato in Nemi. We asked him if he might like to join us. He said he couldn’t, but thanked us, bowed rathe...

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.

The cooling green tint of the sauce, its reserved, sensual sort of piquancy, make this a pasta good for high-summer lunch or supper after insalata di cantalupo (see page 22).