European

Traditionally, pettole are fried in bubbling oil, but here follows a version of the gloriously bay-perfumed breads—their faces glossed with diabolical olio santo—that are simply baked. The fat little breads are wonderful to serve with the Lucanian sausages (page 157) or some great platter of dried sausages, salame, and piquant cheeses. Even unaccessorized, they are wholly absorbing, their warm, crunchy goodness complemented by some cold white wine.

Shanks slowly braised like these composed a winter Sunday lunch served to us in a linoleum-tiled card room snugged behind a bar on the edges of Potenza. The players were sent off precisely at one so that the cook might lay the oil-clothed tables with yellow linens and set them with blue and white china. The eight or ten tables were all reserved, as they were each Sunday, the only day when the improvised dining room was open. We had heard about the wonderful food and asked the signora if we might wait until the table of one of her fixed clients might become available. “Impossibile.” She laughed. “Questi tavoli non saranno liberi prima di mezzanotte.” “These tables will not be free before midnight.” She explained that after lunch, the pretty linens and china would be washed and tucked away to await next Sunday, leaving the gaming tables free for cardplaying throughout the afternoon and evening. When one booked a table, one booked it for lunch and endless rounds of briscola, the high-stakes action to which even the women were invited on Sundays. A lovely and entrepreneurial program, we thought, but what about our lunch? The sympathetic signora made room for us, tightening up the seating around a table for four, adding two more place settings and chairs. And so we dined with the priest and his mother and a retired fruitseller and his wife, all of whom spoke only in dialect while we bumped along in Italian. The encumbrance of language soon dissolved in the mists of the signora’s beautiful food. Plates of local, dried sausages and farmhouse cheeses, baskets of just-fried, bay-perfumed breads, a soup of bitter greens, great bowls of rough, handmade pasta sauced only with the rich liquors from braised lamb and dusted with pecorino and, finally, the whole, braised shanks of lamb themselves, sending up sublime perfumes of garlic and rosemary. And as sustaining as is the memory of the company and the food on that Sunday in Potenza, it is another scene that plays more sweetly in my mind. A sort of coming-of-age for me—it was there that I learned, fast and well, the secrets of briscola.

Soppressato is a dried sausage of large, oval shape, refined texture, and vivid spice, the masterwork of the salumieri lucani. This sausage is a fundamental offering on the Lucanian table and its goodness is often celebrated, imitated—in longer, more slender shapes—in all the regions of Italy, under the all-encompassing name of luganica/luganega, after Lucania. Here follows a recipe for a fresh sausage that embraces the flavors and perfumes of the traditional salsicce of Lucania.

A sort of Lucanian stone soup, this is from Basilicata’s long repertoire of dishes built from almost nothing at all. Once the sustenance of shepherds who could concoct the dish with a handful of wild grasses and the simple stores they carried, too, it was often the family supper of the contadini—the farmers—whose ascetic lives asked that each bit of bread nourish them. I offer it here as balm, a pastoral sort of medicine, one of the thousand historical, wizened prescripts known to soothe and sustain.

The jots of coast and whatever sea fish they might offer have little embellished the Lucanian cuisine, yet the fat, brown trout from her rivers and lakes are coveted, stalked. The most characteristic prescription for their cooking is to scent them with the wild herbs one finds near the water, stuff them with a few crushed olives, wrap them in a slice of pancetta, and roast them, on site, over a beech or chestnut wood fire.

Rionero in Vùlture, a tiny village crouched on the hem of a quiet volcano, is where Basilicata’s worthy red wine is born. Ancient gift of the Greeks were the vines called Aglianico, still flourishing, somehow, stitched up nearly three thousand feet onto the shoulders of the long-sleeping Vùlture, their black-skinned fruit nourished by the volcano’s ashes and the nearness of the sun. The yields of the rich fruit of the Aglianico is each year less, not for the nature of things but for the dearth of a new generation of vine workers. Even now, the production is sadly small. Young, the wine is untamed, full of acid and tannin and potential. After five years, an Aglianico can ripen into a wine sitting on the fringes of nobility. After an all-night rain and the next morning’s mushroom hunt in the forests above Rionero in Vùlture, this dish, with a 1992 Aglianico and a half-loaf of coarse, whole wheat bread taken, warm, from the village forno, made our lunch.

A pastry reflecting the famous half-roasted, almond-stuffed, bay and anise-perfumed figs that Puglia exports to all of Europe, the ripe sensuality of it merits a true hunger, one not dulled by the prologue of some long, winy supper. Nibble only at a plate of fresh cheeses before it. Better, present it with no prelude at all.

The hefts of lamb, perfumed with aromatics and roasted over a wood fire, speak of a primordial innocence. Make a feast of them. Bake some pettole (page 153) and offer a great wedge of young pecorino and a jug of honest red wine.

An inordinately rustic dish, it asks so little of the larder and the cook and gives up good, potent flavor. The Lucani are wont to add another crushed chile to the pasta at table or under a tree, as the case may be.

From Lecce and its environs, quince paste—a deeply bronzed jelly molded into plump squares and tucked inside wooden fruit boxes—is our favorite Puglian treasure to take back to Tuscany. Here follows a lovely sort of pudding made from quince that, though it offers a less-dense dose of the fruit, yields one with all its beautiful, apple-wine sort of autumn savor.

A perhaps four-thousand-year-old, pre-Mosaic formula, the name of the dish is derived from its cooking vessel, caldaro—cauldron. A characteristic preparation of Gravina in Puglia, this is the ancient dish thought to be denounced in the Old Testament: “Thou shall not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk,” forming the Orthodox Hebrew proscription against dishes that combine meat with milk. This version sautés suckling kid or lamb until golden in fennel, parsley, and garlic-perfumed oil before its milk braising.

Foggia is the city studding the largest wheat fields of Italy’s south—the tavoliere—it being the ancient, present, and endless granary of the peninsula. Too, are potatoes cultivated there, soothing the Pugliese penchant for them in breads, tarts, stews. Our maîtresse d’hôtel in Foggia baked a reprise of this luscious tart evening after evening, sometimes filling it with minced lamb or thin slices of poached sausage or crumbles of smoked ricotta, and presented it barely warm as our first course.

If I were given the task of choosing one bread from all the bakers of Italy, one that I could eat everyday and forever, it would be the golden-fleshed bread of Altamura, its thick skin, parched, crackled, its form a fat, crisped heart, cleaved nearly in two.

Once Kallipolis—“beautiful city” in Greek—Gallipoli is a tumult of white-chalked abodes heaped up under a feverish sun. A fishing village three thousand years ago and now—after its episodes with pirates and slavish dominions, its risings and its fallings—it is a fishing village still. Affixed to the newer town by a bridge, its oldest quarter is a quaint islet in the Ionian. And it was there that we first saw Rosaria. It was in the pescheria (fish market). It was the late-afternoon market where the day’s second catch—and what might have remained from the morning, at a smaller price—was offered. Admiring her confidence, her stroll over the slippery, sea-washed stones of the market floor, inspecting the gleanings—silently, unerringly, one thought—and transacting prices with the fishmongers only with her eyes. When she was convinced by something, she pulled coins and bills from a small pouch hung around her like a necklace, then positioned the parcels in a basket she carried atop her head, leaving her small, elegant hands free to repose on her hips, to move in agreement or discord or exclamation. We dared to ask her the names of the more exotic offerings and, so encouraged by her gently spoken responses, we opened discourse on the celebrated fish soup of Gallipoli. Through her laugh, she told us that the allure of the soup seemed perplexing to her. It was, after all, a potful of humble fish. Nearly everyone cooked it, in one form or another, every day. “We cook what the sea gives up to us. It’s our garden,” she said. She told us she had cooked the soup for as long as she could remember, and that the perfumes of it being cooked by her mother and grandmother were older yet in her sensual memory. She volunteered news of her evening’s program and said we might join her if we wished. She was to prepare a supper for three old friends, widows all, and molto simpatiche—most pleasant. She said we might meet her at 7:45 in front of Sant’ Agata. Timid, pleased, we sealed our agreement. By then, the weak February sun was readying itself to slide into the sea, rosying the clouds in its path, bedazzling them in washes of gold. We watched her climb the curling road farther up into the old town until her narrow, top-lofty form melted into sweet lilac dusk. We looked at the last of the sunset from the terrace of a little bar, adding jackets and sweaters and scarves against the winds, sipping at red wine, imagining what would be our evening with her. We found her in front of the cathedral and, following her the few meters to her door, were welcomed into her apartment in whose parlor we sat whilst she collected, arranged the soup’s elements. Only then did she invite us into the kitchen. First, though, the ceremony of gli aperitivi—cold, pink wine poured into small, rounded crystal cups. Then was Rosaria ready to dance. She set about by whacking the filleted fish—sea bass and red hogfish—into great chunks; she warmed oil in an old coccio, adding garlic, onion, and crushed salt anchovies. In the scented oil, she deftly browned the fish—removing it to await the second act—adding fat prawns, heads removed, tails intact, and rolled them about, flourishing her wooden spatula with a sort of spare drama and sending forth great sea-scented mists. She made the sauce by adding peeled, seeded, chopped tomatoes and white wine. After ten minutes or so, she reunited fish to sauce, rubbing peperoncini—I saw three for certain, but there might have been four— between her fingers into the pot and leaving the soup to gently simmer while she fried trenchers of rough bread in sizzling oil. I flashed a moment upon the contortions I’d suffered to build a bouillabaisse, one whose directions filled more pages than a play by Pirandello. I thought, too, to the flushed, moist faces of cooks—spent, brokenwinded&mdash...

After the fast demise of Sybaris, it was Taranto that grew up, the city most splendid of Magna Graecia. And it was there that oysters were first cultivated, for the coddling, I suppose, of true sybaritic cravings. Taranto was and is quite perfectly situated for the business, sitting, rather like an island, between the mar piccolo—the little sea—a coastal lagoon fed by both fresh and sea water and the mar grande—the big sea—part of the Gulf of Taranto in the Ionian Sea. And it is this very shifting in the salinity of the waters around Taranto that builds up the sweetest, fattest oysters. Nothing better can be done to a fine oyster than to slip it down one’s throat, chasing it with sips of some crisp, icy white wine. But here follows a recipe for barely roasting oysters that, if not ennobling them, at the least takes nothing from their own natural goodness.

We had been in Puglia and its environs nearly a month. Sapped from our journeys, our palates debauched into slumber from the opiate of too many chile peppers, our wits palled from nightly Circean cups, we needed redemption from the table. We asked each other what would soothe. Surely we needed to stop driving. Fernando wanted pastina in brodo—tiny pasta cooked in broth. I wanted a small custard pie, warm, soft. I wanted bread and butter. We both wanted to be in a place with not one more three-thousand-year-old olive tree. We wanted sympathy more than we wanted supper. And there we were, lost in Otranto. When finally we asked the same giornalaio, newspaper seller, for directions to our intended destination of Melpignano for the third time and got the third different answer, we thought it a good thing to surrender our search for the unnamed, unsigned place there that had been pressed upon us by our friends in Lecce and simply brake at the next and nearest little place with even the thinnest promise about it. Finding it, we tumbled out of the car, shuffled up the drive and asked if there might be a room for us. The cheery little man took our things, showed us up the stairs, started up the heater for the bathwater and began the reverent story of his wife’s genius in the kitchen. I saw Fernando’s face fading a bit toward citrine. Swooning, I tried so to smile at the even cheerier little man through my narrowing vision. He began his pastoral roundelay with her pigeons braised in red wine and juniper, on to her lamb roasted with potatoes and wild mushrooms, before coming to the rhapsody of her way with goats’ hearts poached in white wine and lemon. Fernando was nearly able to deflect him with an inquiry about the era of his handsome stone house before he began the lip-smacking tale of the pigs’ livers roasted on branches of bay. We closed the door. We took a bath. As we were dressing, the cheery little man knocked gently. They were waiting for us—he, his wife the cook, his son the university student, his brother the hunter, his friend the winemaker. They’d thought, since there were no other guests, we might dine together, make a real celebration of the evening. They had laid a beautiful fire and lit candles upon a narrow, wooden, unclothed table set for seven. They were so sweet, so excited by our presence, for their own clever spontaneity, for the prospect of a long winter’s evening to be passed at table. Fernando rallied and began nibbling at a creamy heft of new pecorino sitting on a crisp white cloth next to our aperitivi. I followed the lady into her kitchen, unraveling our adventures in a nervous sort of monologue. Rather than sympathy, she offered her envy. “Beati voi, tutti questi giorni in giro, sempre a ristoranti.” “Blessed are you, all these days running about, always in restaurants.” I thought to be more direct. “You know,” I said, averting my eyes from the legs of lamb she was basting, “what I would like most this evening is to eat something simple and comforting. I feel like a tired child.” She looked at me for the first time, really looked at me, heard me. She wrapped her great, fleshy arms about me, crushing me to her moist, rosemary-perfumed bosom. She had understood. She marched me back to the table with instructions to sit quietly, sipping at the winemaker’s best red and to wait. After a half an hour’s sashaying to and from the kitchen with the first of the feast’s plates, the lady, her broad olive cheeks blushing up to the corners of her dark eyes, carried in a small, white porcelain bowl with its own cover and set it down before me. I lifted the lid, unloosing the scents of cinnamon and butter and perhaps of chocolate, which curled up through a tangle of pale yellow noodles swathed in a curiously dark sort of sauce. “Ecco la pasta in nero,” she exclaimed. “There it is, pasta in b...