Eating Up Italy: Voyages on a Vespa. Matthew Fort
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Americas that led, in the final analysis, to Cadbury’s Dairy Milk.
Of course, Britain can legitimately claim to be the world leader in puddings. No other country can match the wealth and variety of our pudding tradition, from fools to roly-polies, tarts to trifles, syllabubs to creams and custards. By comparison, the Italians are limited in their pudding horizons. True, zabaglione, the velvety combination of beaten eggs, sugar and Marsala, is a great pudding; panna cotta, happily adopted by contemporary British restaurants, passes muster in its finest form; and ice creams reach a degree of perfection in Italy that we can only dream of. But for the rest? That ludicrous confection, tiramisu? The trifle of an impoverished imagination. Crostade? Tarts as heavy as manhole covers. Panettone? Better turned into bread-and-butter pudding.
It was time to hit the road again. I knew it was time because it had just started to rain for a change.
‘Peperoncino – chilli – is most important to the cooking around Cosenza,’ Silvia Cappello had told me in Reggio di Calabria. ‘I know you find it everywhere now, but really, Cosenza is the capital of chilli. We in Reggio’ – her voice indicated that there was an unbridgeable gulf between Reggio and Cosenza – ‘are more influenced by Sicilian cooking, and the Sicilians don’t use chilli so much.’
Enzo Monaco did not agree entirely with Silvia’s authoritative statement. Enzo was the Presidente dell’ Accademia del Peperoncino. He was a plausible, agreeable fellow, with thinning hair that crept like ground cover over the curve of his head, a long nose and, behind his glasses, sloping eyes that gave him a mournful look. He was a journalist and a fluent publicist for his cause. So fluent, indeed, that he had turned it into a minor industry, employing three or four people, organising festivals, colloquia, demonstrations, promotions and a newspaper from an office housed in a stump of low-rise flats in the dishevelled seaside town of Diamante.
Peperoncino, he said, fresh, dried, flaked or powdered, was the one essential of Calabrian cooking. It cropped up everywhere, in sauces, sausages and soups, in antipasti, primi piatti and secondi piatti. It lent light and shade to fish, meat and vegetables, to pastries, pasta and even puddings. Indeed, he assured me that there was peperoncino ice cream and peperoncino cake, and proudly showed me some peperoncino biscuits that were about to come on the market thanks to his efforts.
The chilli, or capsicum, arrived in Europe from Mexico in 1492, along with potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, tobacco, corn, turkey and sundry other delights. What on earth did the world eat before the treasure store of the Americas was opened up? The capsicum made its way to India and South East Asia by 1525, by way of Spanish and Portuguese merchant ships. The Italians gave chilli (the name is a corruption of the Central American nahuatl) a warm welcome in 1526, a passion for its qualities taking particular root in southern Italy, which at that time was yoked to the Americas by the compass of the Spanish Empire.
According to Signor Monaco, the spice was taken up by the poor to start with, to put a spring into the step of their otherwise boring and monotonous fare of pulses and vegetables. Before peperoncino there had been other spices, principally vine pepper, but vine pepper had its limitations, notably price – it had been far too expensive for any but the better-off to afford.
Peperoncini, on the other hand, were easy to grow in the Calabrian climate, with plenty of sun and plenty of water. Not only did peperoncino make the local diet look lively; it also added a store cupboard of vitamins and minerals to the mix. In Enzo’s masterwork, Sua Maestà Il Peperoncino (which translated, I think, means His Majesty the Peperoncino), he claims it’s great for acne, dull hair, cellulite, heart problems, massage. Oh, and sex, naturally. No wonder peperoncino was known as ‘la droga dei poveri’, the poor man’s drug.
But what, exactly, I longed to know, was this peperoncino or that? Was it habanero or jalapenõ or Scotch bonnet, or one of the 2,000 other members of the pepper family? Was it better fresh or dried? Were certain dishes made with one or the other? Did you find one variety being used in one place and another elsewhere? And why did it come to have such a hold over the Calabrese kitchen (not to mention the kitchens of Basilicata, Campania and the Abruzzo)?
Signor Monaco was charming, he was voluble, he was a mine of arcane information about the history, the uses and the benefits of chillies, but when it came to identifying specific varieties and their uses, ‘È peperoncino’ was about the best I could get.
Close study of his hagiography of the chilli proved slightly more revealing. He identified six significant sorts of Capsicum annuum: abbreviatum, which is small – not exceeding 5 centimetres, and conical; acuminatum, fasciculaatum, cerasferum, bicolor and the distinctly non-Linnaeic ‘Christmas Candle’. The smallest, hottest chillies are known as diavolilli, and are a speciality of the Abruzzo. Then there is a long fat chilli, known as the sigaretta; a small, pointed chilli that is dried and ground to make pepe d’India or pepe di Caienna; and capsico, a round chilli shaped like a cherry. On the subject of which chilli is used for which dish, it is impossible to provide a definitive answer because I rarely got the same answer from two different cooks.
I had other problems on my mind, too. Over lunch I told Enzo about my failure to find La Golosa, a pasta manufacturer where, I had been told, certain types of pasta were still made by hand. He smiled.
‘La Golosa. No problem. I am working with them to develop some pasta with peperoncino in it. We’ll go there now.’
It wasn’t entirely surprising that I hadn’t been able to find the factory. It was heavily disguised as a block of flats in Scalea, a Calabrian coastal Longridge or Basildon. In fact, it took up the whole of the substantial ground floor, deliveries being made on one side and the finished product being shipped out on the other. But there was no sign, name or indication of any kind that there was anything going on. As the lively and forceful Signora Golosa explained, what with the bureaucracy of a complexity and insanity that Kafka would have had trouble describing, complete with multiple sets of tax authorities, hygiene inspectors, planning offices, etc., they were not too keen on drawing attention to themselves. Hence, no signs outside.
Golosa was the family name, and the business involved husband, wife, son and the son’s girlfriend, who shared the marketing, product development and administrative duties between them. There were four ladies doing the hands-on work, all properly dressed in white coats and regulation hats. Like many small-scale Italian producers, they managed to maintain a careful balance between preserving the essence of artisanal production while also making use of the most up-to-date technology. The production area comprised a couple of large, high-ceilinged rooms with white walls and marble-tiled flooring. It was well lit, with windows back and front, and cool, and so suitable for handling pasta. Odd bits of machinery – mixing machines for working the dough, rollers, cutters, vacuum-packing machines, drying frames – were scattered around the wide open spaces.
Not all the production was strictly artisanal, but the ladies were rolling a local pasta called fusilli (with the accent on the first ‘i’) round a short, metal spike called a ferro, or firriettu in dialect, literally by hand. These fusilli were not at all like the compressed corkscrews I was used to in England. More confusingly still, I had already come across them as maccheroni and fileja. Not that it was like what we think of maccheroni, either. And piling mystery on confusion, different parts of Calabria cut their fusilli, fileji or maccheroni to different lengths. Just to complicate the issue further, according to Signora Golosa, the metal spike was sometimes squared off, and the pasta called something else, and, that, naturally, needed an entirely different sauce. Sometimes I suspect Italians of inventing subtle variations in pasta, and insisting that each is better suited to this sauce or that, in much the same way that theologians squabble over minute differences in the interpretation of some text or other. Take that class of stuffed pasta known generally as ravioli, or agnolotti to the Piedmontese, which becomes tordelli to a Tuscan or culingiones to a Sardinian or tortelli to an Emiliani. That is before we get to tortellini and tortelloni and other sub-classes. Each is favoured by a particular part of Italy, stuffed and sauced differently, and each claimed as superior by the natives of whatever particular region it comes from.
These fusilli were made by taking strips of pasta made of just grano di semola (ground durum wheat) and water about as long as a