Eating Up Italy

Voyages on a Vespa

Matthew Fort

Dedication

FOR LINDSAY

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Note

1 Whetting the Appetite

Melito di Porto Salvo – Reggio di Calabria

2 King Pig

Reggio di Calabria – Vibo Valentia – Pizzo – Pianapoli

3 Getting Stuffed

Pianapoli – Castrovillari – Diamante – Scalea – Maratea – Sapri – Sala Consilina – Naples

4 Turbulence, Tripe and Taralli

Naples

5 One for the Road, Again

Naples – Piedimonte Matese

6 Sweet Charms

Piedimonte Matese – Sulmona – Fara San Martino – Guardiagrele

7 Olive Branches and Potato Passions

Guardiagrele – Penne – Ascoli Piceno

8 Pulses from the Old Year

Ascoli Piceno – Serra de’ Conti – Portonovo – Ancona

9 ‘Sara Un Si Ameno Giorno Propizio Ai Viaggiator’

Ancona – Cervia – Comacchio

10 The Supreme Sausage

Comacchio – Ferrara – Mantua – Cremona

11 The Mozart of Mushrooms

Cremona – Casale Monferrato – Asti – Bra – Turin

12 Mixing Memory and Desire

Turin

Searchable Terms

Acknowledgements

Other books by Matthew Fort

Copyright

About the Publisher

NOTE

Italian cooks are not so obsessively concerned with precise measurements in recipes as the British tend to be. Expressions such as ‘a handful of’ and ‘the right amount of’ abound, and cooking times seem non-existent. This stems partly from the natural confidence of people who cook on a daily basis, and partly from the fact that no two cooks can agree on ingredients, let alone the proportions in which they should be added to a dish. I have tried to formalise the recipes that I have collected without losing the character of the originals. I may not have succeeded in every case, but it seems to me better to respect a living culture than opt for arid exactitude.

1
WHETTING THE APPETITE

MELITO DI PORTO SALVO – REGGIO DI CALABRIA

Crostino di pane di grano con pomodoro, peperoncino e origano

The biscuity gold slice of toast was heaped with tiny cubes of cardinal-red tomato, shiny with oil and juices, and flecked with dark green particles. The crostino was explosively crunchy, with a slightly malted flavour. The tomato was clean and sweet, its flavour sharpened by the exhilarating intensity of the dried oregano, the warmth of chilli rising up through fruit and herb.

1
WHETTING THE APPETITE

MELITO DI PORTO SALVO – REGGIO DI CALABRIA

First came the antipasti: neonati, minuscule fish no bigger than a toothpick, fried to crisp little nuggets; a couple of slices of burly prosciutto di Calabria; fleshy, acrid black olives; and some chewy hanks of melanzane sott’olio, aubergines preserved in oil; tomato, chilli and oregano, on crostini. The biscuity gold slice of toast was heaped with tiny cubes of cardinal-red tomato, shiny with oil and juices, and flecked with dark green particles. The crostino was explosively crunchy, with a slightly malted flavour. The tomato was clean and sweet, its flavour sharpened by the exhilarating intensity of the dried oregano, the warmth of chilli rising up through fruit and herb.

Next there was the primo piatto, tagliolini with tiny artichokes and fennel braised to an amber, emollient, vegetal softness. It had a sensuous, sybaritic luxury, slithering down my throat. Another plate, the secondo piatto: a random selection of very fresh grilled baby cuttlefish and fat prawns, their caramelised, marine sweetness cut by the sharp acidity of lemon juice. Finally a salty, sharp young pecorino and a couple of early nectarines, full of juicy sweetness that trickled down my chin.

An agreeable sensation of repletion suffused my being from the tips of my toes to the remote corners of my brain. This was what I had come for. Each mouthful was a reminder of the essential plainness, and grace, of Italian food. There were no extraneous sauces, no distracting garnishes, no mint sprigs or dashes of fancy oils. The flavours were clean and clear. The beauty of each dish lay in the quality of the ingredients, and in the understanding with which they were cooked. I mopped my chin and finished off the last of the red wine, which tasted of chemicals and damsons. Lunch was done. There was time for an espresso.

‘I think you need a glass of bergamino as well, signore,’ said the waiter.

‘Bergamino?’

‘The liquore from the bergamotto.’

In my ignorance I had always assumed that oil of bergamot, a staple for a thousand perfumes, eau de toilettes and aftershave lotions, not to mention the fragrant, vaguely medicinal liquore, came from a flower. Indeed, the fragrance of the flower, la zagara, filled the blustery breezes here in Melito di Porto Salvo, the southernmost point of the southernmost coast of mainland Italy. But it was the large, rounded, lemon-yellow fruit that was the basis of a substantial industry in the area, with a consorzio del bergamotto based in nearby Reggio di Calabria and a tightly controlled group of producers.

Prominent among them was Signor Enzo Familiare, whom I met later that afternoon. He was a short, handsome man of around seventy, I guessed, with the lively manner of an elderly leprechaun. We wandered among the ranks of immaculately maintained trees in his groves tucked away off the main road, just outside Melito. As he pottered from one tree to another, he caressed their trunks or let the leaves trail through his fingers, speaking about them all the time with the fond indulgence of a kindly uncle. Words gushed from him. I watched his lips. I listened to his voice. I understood perhaps one quarter of what he was telling me.

‘The name “bergamot” probably comes from the Turkish begarmudi, meaning the Lord’s pear,’ Signor Familiare said. ‘The harvest is over for the moment. Picking the fruit lasts normally from November to March. The tree also grows in Central America, but there the skin of the fruit is not as productive or as fragrant as those that grow only on a narrow strip about one hundred kilometres long between Villa San Giovanni and Gioiosa Ionica and between the sea and the slopes of the Aspromonte a few kilometres inland.’ Bergamot, he explained, was ‘un incidente felice della natura’.

A happy accident of nature – it was a cheery way of describing the anomaly of this oddball member of the citrus family produced by spontaneous genetic modification. No one seems to know exactly how the first bergamot came about, although one account I had come across claimed that during the eighteenth century a tree was discovered growing in the gardens of the Archbishop of Naples which bore fruit that looked like something between a lemon and a grapefruit. Naples has an impressive record in the annals of miracles, but, if true, the sudden appearance of the bergamot may be counted as among the most enduring.

The qualities of the genetic freak were quickly recognised after its discovery, and during the eighteenth century a substantial industry sprang up to exploit it. In those days the essential oils were painstakingly extracted by hand, the skin of the fruit being striated to allow the oils to ooze out on to a sponge, which rested on a stick over a bucket. Little by little the oils would then drip out of the sponge into the bucket – a process that sounded soothingly ruminative. Needless to say, those days are long gone, and today the extraction is done by the quicker, more reliable, but less romantic machine, with the consorzio in charge of ensuring quality control. It takes two hundred kilos of fruit to make one kilo of essence.

Even Signor Familiare admitted that the gastronomic possibilities of bergamot were limited, although it had found its way into the food chain in the form of bergamino and bergamotto, and via them into ice creams and sorbets. It also has a curious connection with British culture through Earl Grey tea, which is perfumed with bergamot (a tea, incidentally, which is more likely to have been the product of some marketing man’s imagination than the favourite tipple of Earl Grey, an inconspicuous Prime Minister between 1830 and 1834). Otherwise the flesh of the fruit goes for agricultural feed, the thick pith to make pectin and the oils to the perfume industry.

‘But all my production,’ he finished proudly, ‘goes to Manchester for Body Shop products,’ and he showed me a photo of the Body Shop’s founder Anita Roddick standing among his trees.

From Melito to Manchester – it was difficult to associate the two in my imagination; but then it struck me that it is the true nature of commerce to act as a link between improbable parties and places. The association was certainly no more improbable than my arrival here from the cheery purlieus of Acton, a less than fashionable suburb of London. I wondered what other curious conjunctions this odyssey through Italy would bring me.

I have been in love with Italy for most of my life. It’s an affair that began in 1958, when I was eleven, and we took a family holiday at Cervia on the Adriatic coast. I remember little of the cultural side of things – the endless churches and monasteries around which we were dragged, or the celebrated mosaics and frescos that seemed to clutter up every available surface. On the other hand, I can still taste the ice creams with which we were bribed every step of the way, and visualise the vast cold buffets, complete with swans sculpted from ice, that appeared in the dining room of the Hotel Mare e Pineta at lunchtime each Thursday, and the grapes, slices of melon and segments of orange coated in light, friable caramel that we bought from a vendor on the beach who cried out ‘A-ro-via gelati e vitamine B-B’, brushing away swarms of wasps as he wandered past.

I consummated the affair as often as I could thereafter, but perhaps its intensity was maintained by the short duration of my visits. A question always lingered in my mind as to whether what I felt was true love or merely another Englishman’s infatuation with sunlight, landscape, food, wine and people seen through the distorting glass of sentimentality and self-delusion. So this journey, from the very southernmost tip of the country to Turin, eating as I went, was to be an attempt to sort through the waffle of interior monologue. Food, in all its forms, was the medium through which I would try to understand this beautiful and baffling country. Of course the journey had a certain sybaritic appeal, too. Quite a lot of sybaritic appeal, in point of fact.

I had considered walking, or doing the trip on a bicycle, but dismissed them as being impractical. A car? Too boring, too conventional, too … middle-aged. No, a scooter, a classic Vespa, design icon, landmark of Italian culture, sound, sensible and slowish. A voyage of exploration on a Vespa – that was the thing. It was true that I had flunked my road test in England for ‘failing to maintain sufficient forward momentum’, or ‘Not going bloody fast enough’, as my taciturn tutor, John, had put it, but speed was not of the essence as far as I was concerned. Anyway, the Italians did not seem to worry unduly about road tests for machines under 150cc, and I wasn’t going to go near anything with that kind of zip.

To make things yet more practical, I had arranged to do the journey in three sections, allotting one month to each. The first would take me from the tip of Calabria to Naples; the second from Naples to Ancona; and the third from Ancona to Turin. Why stop at Turin? Well, the theoretical justification was that this route, from south to north, described the course of the unification of Italy.

That was why I had come to Melito di Porto Salvo. It was here that Giuseppe Garibaldi landed in 1860 with 10,000 men after his conquest of Sicily. He progressed northwards up the western coast, routing the forces of the reactionary Bourbons as he went. In fact, I had taken lunch in the dining room of the Casina dei Mille, un ristorante con alloggio, a handsome, imposing, cream-painted house that had served as Garibaldi’s headquarters.

The building had been preserved as a monument to the great man by the owner, Signor Romeo. The rooms had a certain gloomy magnificence: one barrel-vaulted, the other square; both had a red-brick ceiling complementing a brown tiled floor, and the walls of each were hung with various pictures, photographs of the great man and documents pertinent to his life. In most pictures, his distinctive dome-like forehead had an imposing nobility, in spite of the receding hair being brushed up and over. The eyes were quite narrow and slightly slanted. Much of the lower face was hidden beneath a beard, in different lengths in different photographs, but always conveying the same bushy masculinity. Even in apparent repose, he exuded tremendous energy. The force of his personality was palpable, his sense of his own rightness incontrovertible. I couldn’t help feeling that, inspiring beyond measure though he was in warfare, what a pain in the neck he must have been at other times.

For all its place in history, Melito di Porto Salvo was a queer place, devoid of any charm or notable feature that I could make out. On the town’s seaward side, a shingle beach, on which litter, detritus and brilliant wild flowers mingled with louche promiscuity, gingerly skirted the edge of the town. Beyond that, the flat grey sea and the flat grey coastal plain merged one into the other. The only thing distinguishing the two was the fact that, out at sea, there was no scab of indiscriminate construction of depressingly tawdry buildings. It may not be the most distinguished piece of coastline in the world, but any charm it might have had had been completely buried beneath a haphazard mish-mash of ribbon development, the consequence of bureaucratic corruption and the absence of civic control. The sad, transitory nature of the coastal plain was emphasised by the brooding magnificence of the tree-covered crags of the Aspromonte, the southernmost tip of the Apennine range, which could be seen rising up further inland.

I found it curious that, the Casina aside, no effort seemed to have been made to commemorate Melito’s place in history. There was no Garibaldi visitor centre, no Garibaldi heritage trail, no shops selling replica red shirts or mugs celebrating 1860, fake powder horns or plastic muzzle-loading rifles or memorabilia medallions. In fact, there was nothing to indicate that the first practical step towards the unification of Italy, which I thought might have merited a bit of razzmatazz and celebration, had been taken here, in this unkempt, dusty, down-at-heel town.

Eventually I tracked down a monument of a kind, just off a dirt road that ran along the shore. Its place was marked by a concrete pinnacle of peculiar hideousness, which stood on a low mound covered with trashy, 1950s crazy-paving ceramics. There was a stone set into the earth with an orotund inscription, much of which was lost among the cracks and weeds growing over it. It was a desolate spot. The wind blew stiffly, hissing through the sea thistle, gorse and mimosa that grew in clumps on either side of the monument, causing the mimosas to rock their yellow heads vigorously, and any number of plastic bags trapped between the stones and haphazard detritus, rusting cans and cannelloni of concrete piping to flap back and forth.

I wondered how far Italy was really unified in any social or political sense. Its post-unification history had been chequered to say the least, but the total neglect here of someone whom I had always thought of as one of the country’s true heroes struck me as very rum. Perhaps food might be a more accurate gauge of Italy’s unity. Pasta, prosciutto, pecorino (the ubiquitous sheep’s cheese) – those, surely, were universally recognised from Melito to Milan. Well, I would find out. I headed back up the desecrated coast to Reggio di Calabria beneath lowering skies.

‘This swordfish,’ Silvia Cappello addressed the proprietor of Baylik, one of Reggio’s suaver restaurants, through a cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘Is it Italian or Greek?’

‘Italian,’ he replied firmly.

‘Are you sure?’ Her voice rang with disbelief. ‘It’s very early for swordfish here. I think it must be Greek.’

‘Absolutely not,’ he countered with spirit. ‘They are just beginning to catch them in the Straits of Messina.’

‘Hrrummph,’ said Silvia. ‘I’ll have the sea bass.’

She was, if anything, more passionate about food than I. Her large, grey eyes sparkled when she talked about the differing qualities of this café or that, or held forth on the provenance of pastries or the distinctions between the multiplicity of Calabrese dishes. I had met Silvia at the Italian Institute in London, where she taught Italian to people like me. She was Calabrian born and bred and had offered to initiate me in the mysteries of her native cooking. She was in Reggio, visiting her mother, and I had contacted her to take her up on her offer.

‘What was all that about?’ I asked, when the battered man had beaten his retreat with our order.

Silvia explained that the swordfish made their way up the Calabrian coast through the Straits of Messina to spawn. Usually they only arrived at the end of April or the beginning of May. That’s why she was suspicious about the provenance of the swordfish. It was too early for the true Italian catch.

‘So? What’s the difference between a Greek swordfish and an Italian one?’

‘As they come up through the Straits, they are getting amorosi, ready to spawn. It makes their flesh più dolce, più delicato, più morbido – sweeter, more delicate, softer, better in every way.’

‘Can you really tell?’

She looked scandalised. ‘Of course,’ she said in a manner that brooked no further argument. I wondered how many British teachers or food enthusiasts could pontificate knowledgeably on the mating habits of salmon or trout, let alone on how these may affect the edibility of the fish.

I had the swordfish, and I couldn’t have told if it was Italian, Greek or Turkish. But to regard that as important would have been to miss the point. In a sense it didn’t matter whether or not there was a difference. It was believing that there is a difference, believing that quality matters; that was what was important.

Silvia had abiding high expectations in all matters to do with food. For most Calabresi, indeed for most Italians, that I had met, excellence was assumed to be a common goal when it came to eating, and their critical faculties never seemed to rest. Italians discuss what they have eaten, what they are eating, what they are going to eat, with the same matter-of-fact passion that we reserve for the weather; and, in absolute contrast to the English, they criticise openly and fearlessly if they think that food or drink is not as good as it should be. The expectation of gastronomic virtue is as natural as breathing.

I learnt another valuable lesson about swordfish, which applies equally to tuna. If you cut a swordfish or tuna steak about three centimetres thick and cook it right through to bring out the flavour, the flesh dries out and becomes fibrous and tough. So British chefs came up with the bastard concept of the seared tuna. This produces a nice brown crust about half a centimetre deep, beneath which is not nearly so nice, cold, raw and virtually tasteless fish. They tried to persuade us that it was a good thing, when we knew, in our heart of hearts, that it was really pretty nasty. The Italians have been at the business of cooking swordfish and tuna rather longer, and have got it worked out. They cut the fish into slices about one centimetre thick, and cook it very fast by grilling, frying – a padella – in olive oil over a very high heat, and then add salmoriglio (which is no more than olive oil, lemon, garlic and oregano), or just a splash of lemon and a dash of salt. The result is that the fish is cooked through, which brings on the flavour nicely, and still tender and toothsome.

Reggio di Calabria was the urban equivalent to a veteran boxer, not without dignity and a sense of history, but scuffed, tatty and rather beaten up. Long, long ago, as part of Magna Graecia, Reggio had been prosperous, but the combination of earthquake, war and political and criminal exploitation seemed to have knocked the stuffing out of the place. Most of the architecture was of the general-purpose neo-classical style of the 1920s–1940s. In spite of the odd elaborate detail – wrought-iron balcony, cornice or frieze emerging from the broken plaster like that on a social security building – it had a rather Victorian feel.

But among the streets that scrambled up the hillside from the edge of the Strait of Messina were hidden glories to which Silvia introduced me: cafés – Caridi e Lagana, Caffé Malavenda, Le Cordon Bleu. They were efficient, immaculate, gleaming, with pristine display cabinets stuffed with voluptuous pastries: cannoli, kind of boat-shaped, pinched in the middle and stuffed with sweet ricotta; sguta and cuddhuraci, traditional Easter pastries of Greek origin; fancy cakes of chocolate or strawberries; mostaccioli, mzuddi, brioche ripiena di gelato – buns stuffed with ice cream; and sfogliatelle, like pastry oysters, stuffed with ricotta again and dusted with icing sugar. The variations on pastry, almonds, ricotta, candied fruit and sugar seemed endless in their refinements.

The shapes, combinations and ingredients, in particular the use of almonds, were a continuous reminder of how much the cooking of Calabria owes to the Arabs, both directly, through the control that the Moors exerted on the coastal regions in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and indirectly, through Sicily on the far side of the Strait of Messina. It was curious, although, on reflection, perhaps not surprising, to discover just how closely Sicily and this, the western, side of Italy, had been linked to the culture of northern Africa, while south-eastern Italy, the Adriatic side, owed more to Byzantium.

For obvious reasons it would be inaccurate to blame the Moors for one of the most distinctive features of cafés and pastry-shop windows: the high-kitsch Paschal lambs formed out of marzipan, covered in white chocolate and decked out in the most fearsome colours, that filled the windows and display cabinets around Easter. These were a reminder, possibly a remainder, of the eighteenth-century southern Italian passion for the more vivid and gruesome aspects of baroque art.

Taking pity on my solitary state, Silvia invited me to lunch on Easter Sunday at home with her mother and her mother’s sister. Signora Cappello was a handsome woman, with a powerful and decisive mien, and her sister, a civil servant, had a dark languor and sharp intelligence. Home was a large flat in up-town Reggio, cool and dark. The walls were hung with an extensive collection of pictures, and the furniture had the heft of old-fashioned virtue. This taste for shade seemed odd given the prevailing weather conditions, but, for most of the year, blinding light and severe heat are the principal enemies. Houses had been built as fortresses against the sun, just as they had been in Britain in the nineteenth century, when it was the fashion for them to face north for fear that too much sunlight would cause curtains and carpets to fade quickly.

I had always thought that my own family’s tribal feasts were pretty substantial, but nothing prepared me for the majestic sequence of dishes of a traditional Calabresi Easter feast. This one started with rigatoni al forno, the kind of dish that anchors you to the table in more ways than one. It consisted of fat, short, ridged tubular pasta with meat balls, mozzarella, provola, cooked ham, Parmesan, melanzane, hard-boiled eggs and sugo – tomato sauce – and it had been baked in the oven.

The difference between sugo and ragù had been something of a mystery to me, but Signora Cappello briskly cleared this up for me.

‘Normally sugo is simply tomato sauce, and ragù is a sauce with meat in it, like a ragù bolognese, but down here ragù is a bit different. First I make a soffritto (the great Mediterranean base flavour of onions, or onions and garlic, stewed in olive oil). Then I put a piece of beef and a piece of pork on top, then add the tomatoes. Now I let it bubble quietly for four hours or more. The meat is kept nice and moist, but also it gives up some of its flavour to the sauce. So you can eat your pasta with the sugo, and then eat the meat as the secondo piatto. It is a very practical way to cook, no?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

Braised lamb with potatoes came next. ‘It must be pecora – ewe,’ said Signora Cappello with the certainty of an ex cathedra Papal bull. ‘It is more tender and tastier than agnello – ram.’ For a moment I wondered if, like swordfish, it was più amorosa as well.

Then there was a salad of Romaine lettuce and fennel; involtini di vitello, thin slices of veal stuffed with breadcrumbs, parsley, garlic, Parmesan and then grilled; fried artichoke, which had been sliced, dipped in egg and breadcrumbs, and fried; and a classically unctuous melanzane alla parmigiana – ‘The melanzane must to be female,’ said Signora Cappello, which prompted a long discussion about how you can tell whether a melanzana is female or not.

My mental grip rather loosened by too much of everything, I foolishly suggested to Signora Cappello that it was inevitable that even in Italy traditional cooking and eating habits would gradually become like those of the rest of the world, manufactured and microwavable.

‘Never!’ she replied with considerable force.

‘But,’ I pointed out, ‘neither of your two daughters cook. Both of them have responsible jobs during the day. So who will have time to shop, harangue the shopkeepers and cook in this way?’

‘I will,’ she said, in the same tone of voice as before. Unquestionably she would, but I wondered about the rest of Italy.

Finally we came to la pastiera, the classic Easter tart made with ricotta, pecorino, grano (a special wheat) soaked in milk, eggs, tiny pieces of candied peel, custard, a little mandarino liqueur and the beaten white of an egg. It was rich, but, thank God, comfortingly light.

Even the Calabresi don’t eat on this scale very often, but in the light of this trial by calorie it struck me that northern Europeans have a rather distorted view of what we loosely call Mediterranean cooking. We have been led to believe that the Mediterranean diet is light and healthy, made up mostly of vegetables, pulses and olive oil with a few grilled dainties by way of protein. Actually, with its roots in a recent, and in many cases contemporary, peasant culture, it is hearty, hefty, filling and loaded with carbohydrates. If you have spent the day in the fields under the broiling sun, the last thing you want is a plate of tomato and mozzarella followed by a grilled sardine and salad. You want something to fill you up. And by the same token, on high days and holidays, you celebrate the richness of your larder, not its meagreness.

By the time we had finished, it was definitely the moment for the armchair, the paper over the face and the long snooze. Instead of which, Silvia badgered me into another of the great Italian traditions, la passeggiata, the stroll through public places, the leisurely tread along a prescribed path. This is a quite different ritual from walking in Britain. We British go for walks, mostly in the country. It’s an expedition. It has an objective and a specified time frame. We even wear special clothes (usually because it’s cold, muddy or raining or all three). The Italians also wear special clothes, but they are the marks of civilisation, designed for display. The Italian passeggiata is purely social. Normally it is framed by the end of the workday and dinner. It signifies that the tyranny of labour is over for the day, to be replaced by the tyranny of the family, but it has no purpose other than to show, to meet and to talk; in particular to talk.

That night I lay on the bed in my hotel, marvelling at the size of my stomach and the gastronomic riches I had already uncovered, and contemplating what lay before me. I began to feel decidedly queasy.

It was clear that I should have done this odyssey when I was twenty-five, or even younger, rather than fifty-five. The notion of riding a scooter through sun-drenched landscapes was essentially a romantic one. It went with a sense of freedom, adventure, personal exploration and sexual possibilities; wind in the hair, sun on the back, the road winding down to the sea, unknown delights around every corner. It fitted less easily with the trembling jowl, thinning hair, spectacles, a tendency of the stomach to flow over the top of the trouser, deficiencies of short-term and long-term memory, job, wife, child, mortgage, responsibility and all the other clutter of humdrum existence.

From the orderly safety of home, the journey had seemed so sensible, so straightforward, so intelligently structured. I had read Old Calabria by Norman Douglas, after all, the old goat’s account of his ramblings all over the region at the beginning of the twentieth century. I had been caught up by his enthusiasm and his perceptions on the nature of place. The range of his reading and knowledge continually astounded me, from reports on depopulation in rural areas to the Flying Monk, Father Joseph of Copertino, from the etymological harvests of his bed (‘which surpassed my wildest expectations’) to the consequences of the great earthquake of 1908 in Reggio di Calabria. The entertaining detail, the informed observation, the odd connection, nothing escaped the energy of his prodigiously curious mind, framed in prose that was elegant, masterly, humorous, at ease with itself. True, he did not have much to say about food, but, I had thought, what an example to follow.

Now I saw all too clearly that my breezy insouciance was chronically misplaced. Faced with the reality of diversity of the country, the inadequacy of my personal resources – not very good Italian, scooter terror, and cursory research and preparation – I found the reality of my undertaking, frankly, terrifying. And it was raining. It had rained since I had arrived. It looked as if it would rain for ever. It was less of Chaucer’s ‘Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to the roote’ and more of the kind of weather with which Noah had been familiar. Worse still, it had forced me to postpone my rendezvous with my Vespa, and take to a car instead. I had had a memory of a limpid Mediterranean shimmering like a dragonfly’s wing beneath skies of eggshell blue, of cheap wine and primal flavours, of heat soaked into the bones of my body, of singing crickets and long siestas. But that April the skies were the same colour as those in Britain in a particularly damp March, and there was a stiff, chill wind.

Still on the morrow, come hell or high water, and there was a good chance of both, I would collect the scooter and head north. But suddenly a great wave of missing family, familiarity, hearth and home washed through me. It’s an odd thing, but the great travel writers or explorers don’t give much time to homesickness. There’s not a lot of it in the works of Norman Lewis or Eric Newby or Wilfred Thesiger. Sir Ranulph Fiennes doesn’t seem to give it another thought, and it never seems to occur to Redmond O’Hanlon or William Dalrymple or Paul Theroux, ‘Oh gosh, I wish I was at home doing the washing up right now.’ Didn’t they ever feel it? Had Michael Palin never wanted to sob into his pillow when he was making around-the-world documentaries or David Attenborough wished he’d just stayed at home to walk the dog? Well, I did.

‘It is a very practical

way to cook, no?’

MELANZANE SOTT’OLIO CON PEPERONCINO

Aubergines in oil with chilli

This recipe, like those on the following pages, comes from the redoubtable Signora Capello. They are all as typical of her as they are of Reggio or Calabria, but that is the nature of Italian recipes. They are particular to a place and to a person.

Melanzane are a great testament to the power of trade and war. They owed their ubiquity in Mediterranean cooking to the Turks, who introduced the tame variety to Europe from India, where the smaller, wild variety originated. This should make about two 1kg Kilner jars. The melanzane should be the long, purple ones, and preferably female (don’t ask). The inclusion of celery is a typical Sicilian touch.

5KG AUBERGINES

250G SALT

4 CLOVES GARLIC

2 STICKS CELERY

2 SMALL RED CHILLIES – THE SMALLEST, REDDEST ONES (DIAVOLLILI) IF POSSIBLE

EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL

Wash, dry and then slice the aubergines into thin strips. Mix the strips with the salt and leave them for 48 hours.

Wipe off the salt and wring the aubergines out very thoroughly, squeezing out as much liquid as you can. DO NOT WASH (‘or you might as well throw them away’). Chop the garlic, celery and chillies.

Arrange the strips of aubergine in a jar in layers with the garlic, celery, and chillies in between, pressing them down to make sure that there are no air pockets. Cover with olive oil, pressing down again. Leave for 4 months at least.

SALMORIGLIO

Salmoriglio

There are no hard and fast versions of this sauce, which is brushed on to fish, meat and vegetables after grilling or roasting. This is Signora Cappello’s own trope. Variations on salmoriglio also crop up in Sicilian cooking.

290ML EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL

JUICE OF 2 LEMONS OR EQUIVALENT OF WHITE WINE VINEGAR

2 TEASPOONS FINELY CHOPPED GARLIC

3 TEASPOONS DRIED OREGANO

SALT

Beat the olive oil in a bowl, gradually adding the lemon juice or vinegar. Then stir in the chopped garlic, the oregano and salt to taste.

INVOLTINI DI VITELLO

Stuffed veal escalopes

Makes 12

Lay out the escalopes on a work surface. Dust with salt and pepper. Mix all the remaining ingredients to make a stuffing, using enough olive oil to bind them. Distribute the stuffing among the escalopes, roll them up and secure each one with one or two toothpicks. Grill for 10 minutes, turning over from time to time.

12 THIN VEAL ESCALOPES

SALT AND PEPPER

12 TABLESPOONS BREADCRUMBS

6 TABLESPOONS CHOPPED PARSLEY

5 CLOVES GARLIC, CHOPPED

75G FRESHLY GRATED PARMESAN

OLIVE OIL

PASTA AL FORNO

Baked pasta

Serves 4

Heat the oven to 180°C/Gas 4.

Make the meatballs by mixing all the ingredients and forming small balls with the mixture.

Boil the rigatoni in salted water until cooked. Drain. Cut the aubergine into slices 1cm thick. Fry in hot oil until soft.

Grate the provola, slice the mozzarella, chop the ham. Cut the hard-boiled eggs into thin slices. In a baking dish put a layer of rigatoni. Place in order a layer of hard-boiled eggs, a layer of melanzane, and then a few meatballs. Cover with tomato sauce, cheeses and ham. Repeat until all the ingredients are used up. Scatter grated Parmesan over the surface.

Bake in the oven for about 25–35 minutes until the mixture is bubbling and the top is golden.

500G RIGATONI

1 AUBERGINE

OLIVE OIL

100G PROVOLA

1 MOZZARELLA

100G COOKED HAM

2 HARD-BOILED EGGS

400ML TOMATO SAUCE

100G GRATED PARMESAN

FOR THE MEATBALLS

450G MINCED BEEF

25G WHITE BREADCRUMBS

1 EGG

15G GRATED PARMESAN

PARSLEY, CHOPPED

1 CLOVE GARLIC, FINELY CHOPPED

WHITE PEPPER

PASTIERA

Pastiera

Serves 12

Sift the flour on to a work surface. Make a hollow in the centre and add the sugar. Chop the lard into small bits and add to the flour and sugar. Lightly beat the egg, egg yolk and vanilla essence together and pour into the centre. Using a fork, gradually mix the ingredients, drawing in the flour from the sides until the mixture comes together as a dough. Knead the dough with your hands until it is soft. Wrap in cling film and chill in the fridge for at least an hour.

FOR THE PASTRY

350G PLAIN WHITE FLOUR

150G SUGAR

100G LARD

1 EGG

1 EGG YOLK

1 TSP VANILLA ESSENCE

Soak the flour in enough milk to moisten, with the cinnamon, lemon zest and ½ tsp of the sugar, for 15 minutes.

Put the ricotta into a large bowl with the rest of the sugar, the candied fruit and the milk-soaked flour mixture.

FOR THE FILLING

100G PLAIN FLOUR

MILK

1 PINCH OF GROUND CINNAMON

1 PIECE OF THINLY PARED LEMON ZEST

100G SUGAR

200G RICOTTA (PREFERABLY SHEEP’S)

250G CANDIED FRUIT, INCLUDING CEDRO AND PUMPKIN (SUBSTITUTE LEMON OR GRAPEFRUIT FOR THE CEDRO, AN OBSCURE MEMBER OF THE CITRUS FAMILY)

Separate the egg yolks from the whites. Boil the milk in a saucepan and add the cornflour. Cook over a gentle heat, stirring, until the cornflour has been thoroughly amalgamated and the milk has thickened. Let it cool down slightly before beating in the egg yolks. Add the orange flower water and mandarino. Fold the crema into the ricotta mixture. Beat the egg whites until they are stiff, and fold them into the mixture.

Roll out the pastry and use to line a 30cm flan dish. Pour in the ricotta mixture. Bake at 190°C/Gas 5 for 1 hour. Serve cold.

FOR THE CREMA

3 EGGS

200ML MILK

1 TEASPOON CORNFLOUR

2 TABLESPOONS ORANGE FLOWER WATER

2 TABLESPOONS MANDARINO LIQUEUR

2
KING PIG

REGGIO DI CALABRIA – VIBO VALENTIA – PIZZO – PIANAPOLI

Soppressata

The soppressata was fine grained and the colour of roses and spicy and sweet, with aniseed coiling through it.

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