Puglia: Food!
To understand the cooking of an area takes a couple of small steps. Both of them, in Italy, are fortunately pleasant. If you know the basic tenets of Italian cookery, and if you never let yourself get sidetracked, you can cook anything from any part of the country as long as you can find the ingredients. For someone who lives in a small place far from big cities, it can be more difficult to find the “right stuff” than for someone who lives in an American city. Add to that that American supermarkets and food shops are a lot more eager to order something a bit unusual if you ask them to, and the ticket to Italian regional home cooking is yours. Big cities throughout Europe also carry lots of Italian ingredients, as well, I hear, as Australian markets. Anywhere Italians have gone, some of the “made in Italy” products will follow them. The regionality will probably depend on which regions are represented in the immigration. Some items can be made, too, and substitutes can be made, just as foreign expats in Italy can make or substitute here in Italy.
To repeat the basics, I’ll briefly say that the number one idea is to use the very best ingredients. The following one is to treat those ingredients with respect for their individual qualities.
How do people get sidetracked? The biggest and most common error is to get complicated. That one is responsible for the poor quality of most pizza around the world. It is also responsible for how heavy and fattening many Italian dishes become in foreign hands. Even restaurateurs do it when they play to their audience instead of winning eaters over to the real thing. Italian ethnic restaurants make the same mistake.
Now, how to learn a new region? First eat the food. It’s unfortunate that this will usually be in a restaurant, but if you ask people where to get real homemade food, they will fall over themselves to tell you. Thursday night we went to a simple restaurant recommended by the man we collected our house key from. Last Saturday I asked a farmer at his son’s cheese stand, and he had a place to recommend. He turned to his son and said, “Isn’t that right? Isn’t it just like your wife’s cooking?” The son agreed, and it wasn’t until later that I remarked to Alison that we forgot to ask if his wife was a good cook.
Next step is to go food shopping. That’s where the market comes in. You can read pages and pages about the local eating habits and it won’t be real until you see what there is to buy and what people are buying. I had read that the cuisine of Puglia was rooted in very poor times and so included lots of legumes and grains, loads of vegetables, some local cheeses, some of the tons of fish they bring to shore, and very little meat. And this is what we found as we entered the market Saturday morning.
I was dazzled. My hometown market has lots of cheap clothing and hardware at this time of year, and little in the way of fresh produce. What fresh produce there is comes from other areas in crates. My market in all the six and a half years I have been here has never had a counter of grains and legumes. For those I have to buy what the supermarkets and food shops sell. We have never had a spice stand, or a dried fruits stand, and I have only seen nuts in the shell when they are coming off the trees in the neighborhood.
In the market at Ostuni, which is a fraction of the size of my city, there were multiples of all those things. The produce stands had vegetables I’d never seen before and had to ask about. There were piles of something I had heard of but couldn’t find in a dictionary. The fresh fish was sparkling and firm and the prices were one-fourth or less what I pay at home. People were eager for us to taste things we didn’t know. It was a food lover’s Paradise with food-loving vendors. There were no cheap fashion trucks and no porchetta trucks. All the hardware and fashion was in a separate place, on the playing field of the football stadium, where they couldn’t interfere with food shoppers. There were flower stands and customers lined up to buy them. People left the market burdened with swollen plastic carrier bags and I wanted to follow them.
I bought some local wheat that I’ve not seen before. The ones I know were well-represented, and there were also many different kinds of rices. I bought round cucumbers that look like watermelons, and whose name is what other Italians call watermelon – cocomero. Puglians call watermelon anguria, and we do too, but there cocomero is a crunchy and delicious, fat salad ingredient. Lampascioni, it turned out, were an onion-like bulb from a wild hyacinth. Unlike an onion that can grow in six months, it takes five years to mature to edible. I am in the 3-day process of preparing those now. They were available raw, pickled, canned and packed in oil. The local cheeses are very nice, indeed, and we ate tastes of many of them.
That little jaunt through the weekly market of a city of 35,000 people was like a magic show to me. It made me want to be a magician. It made me want to see more and more of how they eat, now that they are prosperous and can eat as they like.
We decided on the spot to have Sunday lunch at the place recommended by the farmer at the cheese booth.
10 comments April 4th, 2007
