Dairy Free

Deep in the Gothic tangles of the Aspromonte sits the fourteenth-century Santuario della Madonna di Polsi, a refuge culled by an ancient order of cloistered sisters dedicated to the honor of the Madonna, through a life of acetism. Once a year, though, in the early spring, when pilgrims from faraway parishes walk over Monte Montalto to the sanctuary to celebrate the festival of the Madonna, the nuns sacrifice a flock of newborn lambs to the glory of her, braising their flesh in old, shallow coppers and feeding the faithful at long, rough-hewn tables set out on a meadow floor.

Zagara—flower, in Greek—is the name farmers call their precious agrumi, they, it seems, likening the sweet, spicy perfumes of their oranges and lemons to the scents of blossoms. Thus, citrus fruits are Calabrian flowers. One farmer dared me to try to cook this luscious dish with bergamot rather than oranges and lemons, assuring me that it was the one and only fruit with which the massaie (housewives) braised pork long-ago. Finding none to beg or buy, I cannot tell you how the dish might have been with the ambered flesh and juices of the mysterious bergamot. One day I will.

A dish a hunter might prepare for his family even if his sack holds only a few birds, the quail are pan-roasted, pasta is added to its good liquors, the whole roasted in the oven, and carried to table as a piatto unico—one-dish meal.

A medieval fastness above the Mar Tirreno, Guardia Piemontese is a thirteenth-century village raised up by a band of French-descended, Waldensian heretics in flight from papal justice. Pursued into the pathlessness of Calabria, they resisted the Church’s soldiers then and again and again. Two hundred years had passed when, flush with the dramas of the inquisizione, Pius V dispatched a brigade up into their serene agrarian midst, calling for, in the names of Christ and the Holy Ghost, their massacre. Those few who escaped the flailing of the Church’s swords stayed. And those who were born of them stay, still, speaking a Provencale dialect and celebrating the traditions of French country life, gentling their patch of the earth as though time was a stranger. Too, they are true to their own and simple gastronomic heritage, having obliged no transfusion of the coarser Calabrian kitchen. Here follows a thick mountain soup, so like a Béarnais garbure (a thick cabbage soup from Béarn) even to the blessing of its last smudges with red wine as the French are wont to do à la faire chabrot—pouring a few drops of red wine into the last spoonful of soup, stirring it up and getting every last drop as both a blessing to the cook and a thank-you to God.

A humble prescript that flaunts the goodness of summer tomatoes, that asks their roasting over wood, concentrating, ennobling their sweet juices. Propped, then, on crusty seats of bread with a gloss of good green oil and the grace of basil and mint, they soothe hungers for purity.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mussels unfettered by garlic taste more like their own sweet, turgid selves. On the tiny porch of the seaside bar where we ate this pasta, the cook who was the mussel gatherer who was the bartender who was the pastrymaker added crushed, dried seaweed to the finished dish. He cooked the mussels and the pasta over a fire he’d built of driftwood a few meters from the bar. It was a fairly good-sized blaze, ample enough to heat an old cauldron along with the mussel pot, it bubbling with a potion of wild myrtle berries in which he immersed a great, gray fish net, tinting it, cooking it to a deep, bright blue.

...in the Manner of Saint Mary of the Bath.

Made from handmade whole wheat or egg pasta cut into wide ribbons—half of which are sautéed until golden in garlic and chile-scented oil then, along with the poached pasta, tossed with roasted almonds and chickpeas softened in a rosemary, garlic, and bay-scented bath. It is a beauty, the crisp, garlic-scented pasta against the soft, delicate ribbons of it with the mealy, nutty little chickpeas and the bitter almonds stitching them together into a plateful of fantasy conjured from homey stuffs.

A smoky char permeates the potatoes and the onions and this, fusing with the brininess of the capers and olives and anchovies, gives up luscious flavors.