Eating Up Italy: Voyages on a Vespa. Matthew Fort
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FOCACCIA DOUGH (MADE WITH 1KG FLOUR, 25G FRESH OR 12G DRIED YEAST, 500ML WARM WATER, 1 TSP SALT)
115G SOFTENED STRUTTO (PORK FAT), PLUS EXTRA FOR GREASING
200G PORK RIND, BLANCHED AND DICED
6 HARD-BOILED EGGS, SLICED
250G SPICY SAUSAGE (PREFERABLY SOPPRESSATA), CUT INTO ROUNDS
200G FRESH PECORINO, FINELY SLICED
1 EGG, BEATEN
Serves 10
Mix the focaccia dough in a bowl, knead until smooth and elastic, then leave in a warm place to rise.
Put the risen dough on the work surface, pull open in the middle and punch down. Add the softened pork fat. Knead until the dough is elastic and silky. Put back in the bowl and leave in a warm place to rise again.
Roll out half the dough to cover the bottom of a round ovenproof tin greased with lard. Cover with the pork rind, sliced hard-boiled eggs, sausage and pecorino. Cover with the rest of the dough and seal with half the beaten egg. Prick the surface with a fork and brush with the remaining beaten egg.
Bake at 180°C/Gas 4 for 30 minutes until golden brown.
3
GETTING STUFFED
PIANAPOLI – CASTROVILLARI – DIAMANTE – SCALEA – MARATEA – SAPRI – SALA CONSILINA – NAPLES
Carne
Ah, but to taste, that was another matter. The chicken was redolent of the farmyard, the lamb robust with free-ranging and the pork subtle and unctuous as an undertaker.
3
GETTING STUFFED
PIANAPOLI – CASTROVILLARI – DIAMANTE – SCALEA – MARATEA – SAPRI – SALA CONSILINA – NAPLES
Federico guided me to the right road for Cosenza from Pianapoli and sped me on my way. Up and up Ginger and I climbed, heading north-east from Feroleto Antico, and passing by way of the straggling villages of Serrastretta, Soveria Mannelli and Rogliano towards the centre of the country. At some point I should have been able to see both the Ionian and Tyrrhenian Seas, but the cloud was low and thunderous, and I wasn’t of a mind to hang around for another drenching.
The Sila Piccola, which I had now entered, wasn’t as wild as the Aspromonte. The curves were gentler, the slopes not quite so fortress-like. The trees were much smaller, too, and only just coming into leaf. This area had been subjected to savage deforestation for several centuries, supplying wood for the shipping industries of many countries, including Britain. Now it was gradually returning in part to its former bosky glory under a process of planting begun under Mussolini, a little-sung legacy of Fascism. There were different wild flowers, too, yellow and red orchids, broom and gorse in flower, wild irises of a velvety, royal blue, rock rose, jonquils and campions. Jays and chaffinches looped along parallel to the road.
Then I felt as if I had suddenly come over the lip of a bowl and I swept down into new country of rolling, almost Alpine pastures, small squares of corn like mats and neat, gemütlich houses. I made good speed, and came within spitting distance of Cosenza, one of the provincial capitals of Calabria on the confluence of the Crati and Busento Rivers, by midday or so. Legend has it that Alaric the Visigoth was buried in the bed of the Busento, along with his treasure, but I hurried on, putting aside the urge for lunch in favour of the urge to make progress.
I surged on towards Castrovillari, up through the Albanian part of Calabria – old Albanian, not new, the Calabria of Spezzano Albanese and Santa Sofia d’Epiro. Albanians had been in these rolling hills since they fled Turkish persecution in the fifteenth century. In spite of five centuries of acclimatisation, they have kept their own customs, language and cooking. Albanians were now returning to Italy again, less welcomed than in previous centuries. European history has a habit of repeating itself.
I settled myself at a table at La Locanda de Alia in Castrovillari, and bit into a piece of bread. It was unusually good bread, rather chewy and full of bouncy, wheaty flavours.
While Italians don’t subscribe to the division between haute cuisine and bourgeois or domestic cooking with the same enthusiasm as the French, they have developed a sophisticated range of places of public rest and recreation – locanda, ristorante, trattoria, tavola calda, pizzeria, bar, caffè – each with its own quite precise set of functions. A locanda is the equivalent to the English inn, by tradition anyway, a restaurant with rooms. It is not as formal as a hotel, nor as cosy as a guesthouse, but the Alia version was rather civilised, not to say cultured.
A couple wandered in with a very small child, all dressed in holiday gear that was as garish as it was scanty. The child proceeded to make the most tremendous din, howling as if he had been kicked. No one seemed to mind, or to take any notice, other than to raise his or her voice to be heard above the hullabaloo. Such social tolerance is as normal in restaurants of all classes in Italy as it is abnormal in Britain. It reflects the social democracy of public eating in Italy. Everyone feels quite at home in a restaurant in a way that we do not.
Then something odd happened. Hello, I thought, what’s this? Carefully, and not wishing to attract too much attention, I eased what appeared to be a foreign body out into my hand. My eyes lit on half a tooth. The bloody baker had left a tooth in the bread, I thought. Disgusting. Then a second thought struck me. Gingerly I ran my tongue around my molars. I hadn’t detected anything amiss. But, oh my God, there at the back on the right it was as if a great section of the cliffs at Dover had fallen into the sea.
Before I had time to digest this shattering piece of news, the antipasto arrived: schiuma di zucchini con salsa di formaggi freschi. Silently I thanked the kitchen for the gentle and dentally unchallenging mousse of zucchini with a sauce made of molten ricotta.
The second course, panzerotti in salsa di semi di anice silano, was altogether more potent. Aniseed is native to the Levant, and was used quite extensively by both the Greeks and the Romans. On the other hand, it was also used to flavour cakes and sweets in north Africa and northern Spain, both regions intimately involved with southern Italy, so who is to know how it really came to take its place in the Calabrian kitchen?
I was relieved that the process of chewing and swallowing did not seem to have been unduly affected. Here I was, a thousand miles or so from my dentist’s surgery, in the middle of a trip which depended on the efficient functioning of my digestive processes, which begin with the teeth.
Carne ’ncatarata in salsa di miele e peperoncino followed, an idiosyncratic combination of honey and chilli with pork, which was, according to the maître d’, Albanian in origin. Hmm. I wasn’t convinced that chilli figured prominently in Albanian cooking, so perhaps this was a Balkan dish with an Italian accent. Heat and sweetness make for ruminative eating, but I decided that it was really rather wonderful, not least because the pork was so tender that I could have sliced it up with a sheet of paper. It was a thoroughly modern dish in appearance, albeit one firmly locked into local ingredients and traditions.
Such blurring of cultural boundaries was unusual. Calabrian cooking had been defined by an awareness of absolute locality that made a coherent understanding of its essence difficult. It wasn’t a pot-pourri, or a melting pot, because there was such a clear sense of identity tied up with each dish, product or ingredient. This fierce campanilismo was the result of the isolated nature of many communities, isolated by geography, politics and history. The homogeneity that rides on the back of integrated transport systems and the priorities of commerce that has affected so much of the rest of Europe has yet to make such headway in southern Italy.
I finished with the ficchi secchi con salsa di cioccolato bianco – dried figs with white chocolate sauce. It was difficult to know what to conclude from this weird confection. Decorated with a liberal dose of hundreds and thousands like tiny beads, it was as vulgar as some of the more lachrymose baroque Madonnas in roadside niches. To taste it was tooth-achingly succulent. All in all, the dish was a modern travesty of the classic ficchi al cioccolato, which unites the influences of Eastern spices, the Moors with their