Gluten Free

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.

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.

Perhaps the essence of Campania is this, of the countryside, of the pastoral innocence of the good, pure foods one eats there. Search, beg, grow, procure these few ingredients, first eating them with your eyes, dashing all record of plastic mozzarella and dusty-fleshed fruit masquerading as a tomato. This is not a recipe as much as it is quiet illustration of one fine way to eat in Italian.

Traditionally, the gatekeep of an apartment building in Napoli is a widow or a widower of a certain age, one of whose missions, as spiritual guardian of the palazzo, is to slot the mail—after fastidious palpating of its contents, lifting it to the light of the sun, trawling it for heretical intelligence, and generally shadowing the recipient’s movements by it, to diligently rouse, invent, and unbosom internal gossip. The good gatekeep only breaks from these industries to stir at or baste some one of his legendary little potions, all of which signal to the tenants as they cross the threshold what will be the old watchdog’s supper.

It was not often,that one was plump enough in the purse to buy a kilo or so of meat from the butcher, carry it home, and cook it up into some luscious, soulful dish. When fortune placed in one’s purse a few centesimi more than were necessary for subsistence, one sought out the carnacottaro (an itinerant seller of cooked meat).

Insalata di Pesce Dove il Mare Non C’è (A Salad of Fish in a Place where there is no Sea). Though the Teramani, in truth, live not so far from the sea, their cuisine is one of the interior, of the highlands, with sea fish playing an insignificant part. And so when we were served this divine little salad in a backstreet osteria in Teramo, it proved a light, breezy surprise for an early spring lunch. When we asked the old chef why he had made such an unexpected dish, he answered that sometimes, even in a place where there is no sea, one can have a desire to eat some good, bracing, and briny-tasting fish.

It seems unclear why a dish characteristic of Napoli should be called after a Ligurian port. Some say it’s because a Genovese sailor cooked it for some locals and the goodness of it was hailed throughout the hungry city. Others will tell you that Genovese is nothing more than a torturing of Ginevrina—of Geneva—hence giving a Swiss chef, one from the tribe of the Bourbons’ monzù, no doubt, credit for the sauce (page 84). The truth of its origins, adrift forever, holds less fascination, I think, than the patently simple recipe and the lovely, lush sort of texture the meat takes on from its long, slow dance in the pot.

Another dish often prepared for the panarda (page 50), the sausages are rubbed with olio santo, wrapped in Savoy cabbage leaves, and grilled over wood. Because lamb fat can give up an aggressive, even disagreeable, flavor, overpowering the savor of the lamb itself, pork fat is recommended to keep the sausages full of juices and to support their intricate spicing.

La Coscia della Sposa (The Bride’s Thigh). Once upon a time, the panarda was a rustic sort of feast hosted by a farmer for his neighbors and friends, for his tribe. A feast whose substance was bread and lard—pane e lardo—the words meshed, dialectically, as panarda. Lard was a precious comestible, a potent winter fuel that could keep a body whole up there in the mountains. Thus, if a family had a pig to slaughter, it was a family blessed. And if this family was wont to share its sainted beast, even if only the herb-scented renderings of his fat spread on a trencher of honest bread, it was a festival cheered. Time and greater plenty swelled the proportions of the panarda, it growing into a flushed reveling, a Pantagruelian episode staged by one who desired to give thanks for some plague disarmed, some spiritual wound soothed. The panarda became a gastronomic pageant, a devout rite of Christendom quickened with mystical invocations—a duality, then and now, with which the Abruzzesi are at their ease. A wake, a wedding, a generous harvest, an homage—all these became motives to unfurl the festival, to illuminate, throughout its thirty courses, the inextinguishable Abruzzese ebullience. So fraught is the feast with the host’s honor and the honor of his forebears that guests at his panarda must take to heart the intricacies of the culture into which they have entered. He who does not is imperiled. Stories are recounted of one or another unwitting stranger, who, by the twenty-fifth or twenty-eighth plate, begged his leave from the table. It was then that the barrels of primitive muskets were leaned against the temple of the blunderer, these inspiring, pell-mell, the rediscovery of his appetite. Still, today, when one sits at a panarda table, one is bound to partake of any and all that is set before him. To this, I make personal testimony. Our induction into the rites of the panarda was at a country wedding near the city of L’Aquila, its thirty-two courses presented to nearly two hundred celebrants. Here follow the two dishes I loved best, the first for its straightforward symbolism and display of the ticklish Abruzzese humor, the second for its pure, seminal goodness.

Agnello Piccino, Piccino, Picciò (Delicate, more Delicate, The most Delicate Lamb of all). Just outside the village of Campo di Giove—Field of Jove—southeast of Sulmona, there lives and works a butcher who is also a chef of sorts, roasting and braising, as he does, some of his wares in a great, old stone bread oven that sits behind his pristinely stuccoed shop. His clients come sometimes to buy their lunch or their supper still warm and fragrant, readied for the table. Though it was achingly cold on that February morning when first we came upon the butcher at work in his outdoor kitchen, we joined the long, decorously kept line that wound its way from his ovens down the country road. We offered our good-days to the mostly women in whose midst we now stood, women typically Abruzzese, with serene, high-boned faces. They carried their pots and casseroles in sacks or against a hip and, when they felt our interest, they talked to us a bit about the dishes for which the old butcher was celebrated. Mutton braised overnight with tomatoes and onions and red wine; pork braised with bay leaf and garlic and peperoncino in Trebbiano d’Abruzzo; tripe and pancetta with tomatoes and yet more peperoncino; kid roasted with centerbe (an artisanly distilled liqueur made with mountain herbs). Long and reverent was their litany, but when one of them spoke of his agnello da latte—of suckling lamb that he braised only with butter in a sealed copper pot—there came a swift agreement that it was his piatto prelibato—his dish of greatest refinement and delicacy. As the gods would have it that day, the butcher had not prepared agnello da latte but intinglio di agnello allo zafferano (page 47), which, when it came our turn, he packaged for us in a little plastic tub and on which we later lunched in the car with the motor running. It was luscious. We returned in the afternoon, forsaking the day’s program, to beg its formula and to know when the mythical angello da latte might be forthcoming. Il macellaio, the butcher, shook his head on both counts. The suckling lamb in the sealed casserole he prepared only when he found lambs of just the right plumpness and age whose mothers fed only on certain grasses. He turned to the next question. “Una ricetta è una questione di cuore, signora mia; è molto personale,” he said. “A recipe is a thing of the heart, my lady; it is most personal.” I simply looked at him, neither beseechingly nor with delusion, and proceeded to tell him how I thought it had been accomplished. I spoke for a long time, I suppose, he never interrupting even as clients accumulated around his cold white cases. I sealed my discourse by asking why he’d used imported saffron rather than the milder one harvested locally up near Navelli. By now, he was laughing, mostly at my accent, I thought, which is distinctly Northern and often unpleasant to southern ears. At a point much later, after we knew each other longer, he confessed it was only my determinazione—determination—that had made him laugh. The butcher, at least with words, never told me if my understanding of his beautiful lamb stew was correct, but each time I make the dish, I know that the pungent, melting result is a fine tribute to him. And so, when Campo di Giove sits even remotely on our route, we visit, happy to see our friend and hoping to find agnello da latte. We are always a day too late, a week too early. Someday our timing will be divine. Curiously enough, though, the butcher, without my asking for it, one day told me its formula.

There is a simple sort of glory about handmade scamorza (a semifresh cow’s milk cheese very much like mozzarella) charred over a wood fire, all plumped, swollen, its skin blistered black and gold and barely able to contain its little paunch of seething cream. Anointed with olio santo and taken with oven-toasted bread, it can make for a fine little supper, a sublime one, even, if the cheese is genuine.

Perhaps until the beginning of this century, there came always, in the severe mountains of the Abruzzo, a haunting desperation with the first days of May. Bankrupt of the thin stores conserved to abide the incompassionate winter—their handkerchief-sized patches of earth sown a few weeks before—the contadini (farmers) waited then for the land to give up its first nourishment. Often it came too late and many died. And even as time brought more mercy, these terrible days were remembered, the pain of them soothed by a simple ritual. The story says that on the first of May, sette fanciulle virtuose—seven young virgins— went from house to house in a village in the Marsica, the area that suffered most in the past, and begged whatever handful of the winter food that might remain in the larders. And, then, in the town’s square over a great fire in a cauldron, the fanciulle prepared a beautiful pottage to share with all the villagers, to bring them together, to warm them, to keep them safe. The potion was known as la virtù—the virtue. The soup is still made, ritualistically, faithfully, each first of May in many parts of the Abruzzo—most especially in the environs of Teramo, as well as in the Marsica—now more extravagantly, brightening the humble dried beans with spring’s new harvests. Employing even a handful or so of all the ingredients results in a great potful of the soup, assigning it thus as a festival dish. On some sweet day in May, invite twenty-nine or so good people and make the soup for them. The tail of a pig and one of his ears, though they are traditional to the soup, seem optional to me.

…in the manner of Ellisabetta. Abruzzesi women seem congenitally beatific. They endure, they temper, they are faithful to their own notion of life and betray none of the gnashing dramatics of those Italian women who seem to burlesque passion, who remain in pain eternal, fanned if only by the postino’s tardiness. The Abruzzesi are intrinsically more dignified than those. As wives and mothers, the Abruzzesi seem more revered than leaned upon. Not the archetypal massaia, farmwife, a woman of the Abruzzo historically worked the fields, made bricks, and piled them up into rude buildings with the same good sentiments with which she told fables to her children and suckled her baby. There are many stories, in fact, of women of the Abruzzo that I might tell you. I could tell you about Francesca Cipriani. Well into her seventies, slender, of fine bearing, her long, silver hair pinned up under a kerchief, she speaks eloquently of what it is to live in an isolated mountain village at the end of this millennium. She knows very well that hers is the last generation with the will to stay there inside the small rhythms of its solitude. She is of the village of Campotosto, long and still famed for its plump, rough-textured sausages. She is one of the last artigiani—artisans—who build, by hand, the mortadelline di Campotosto. We were hard put, though, to talk her into selling a few of them to us. She said that this last batch had not yet had time to age properly and that she simply would not sell them in their unfinished condition. We told her that we had a woodshed much like hers and that we lived, not so high up as she, but nevertheless, in the mountains and that we would promise to hang the little sausages there in our own crisp, cold, oak-scented air. She consented. As we were driving away, she raced after the car, counting on her fingers and calling to us, “Lasciatele appese fino al giorno di Pasqua e a quel punto saranno perfette”—“Leave them to hang until the day of Easter, at which point they will be perfect.” We did exactly as she said, taking Francesca’s mortadelline from the woodshed on Easter morning, slicing them thickly, and eating them with a soft, buttery pecorino bread for our Easter breakfast. And then I could tell you about Elisabetta. We found her in the countryside between Anversa and Cocullo. We saw a sign fixed to a tree, penned in a child’s hand, we thought, that read, LA VERA CUCINA ABRUZZESE. COME ERA UNA VOLTA. THE TRUE COOKING OF ABRUZZO. AS IT ONCE WAS. It was, after all, nearly noon, and the invitation was, indeed, irresistible. We pointed the car, as the sign’s arrow indicated, down the narrow, scraggly lane. We stopped in front of the only house. There was a puppy sitting among the weeds and wildflowers, a starched, white napkin laid before him like a tablecloth and beset with various little dishes. After wishing him a buon appetito, we turned to the door. Another sign, in the same child’s hand, invited us to ring the bell if we were hungry. We rang the bell. And there came Elisabetta. A rosy wool skier’s cap pulled low over her brow, her thin, tiny body swathed in long skirts—one piled over another for warmth—and scuffed black boots composed her costume, all of it ornament to her caffè-latte-colored skin and the great, gray sparklers she had for eyes. Elisabetta, now seventy, began her career as a restaurateur at sixty-one. She was just coming into her stride, she told us. Since we had arrived much too early for lunch, she sat us down in the kitchen in front of an old whisky bottle filled with cerise-colored wine and two tumblers. She puttered about, chopping and stirring and such, talking about her life, her adventures, how, when her then twenty-year-old son was sent to Sicilia for his military service, she went along. Because she feared the boy would miss her too much and because she feared, too, she migh...

Caligola, Caligula—the diminutive in the dialect of the Empire for shoe—was the name given to Caio Cesare, despot of the Empire in A.D. 37. And it was under the murky waters of the small volcanic lake of Nemi, south of Rome, that were excavated, earlier in this century, two of the emperor’s small sailing ships—toy boats, really—from which his madness commanded droll, demonic games played in the shadows of the lake forest, the once-sacred woods of Diana’s mythical hunts. Now the pine and oak forests about the little lake of Nemi seem serene enough, whispering up nothing of the old horrors of the place. There, in May, begin to push up from the velvety black earth the most gorgeous and tiny wild strawberries. We like to go there then, for the festivals that celebrate them, to eat them, cool and fresh from their woodsy patches. And on a Sunday last June, as the season for them was ending, we lunched in the town of Nemi, hoping to find one last dose of the berries for dessert. Sitting out on a shaded terrace that looked to the main square, we watched the promenading of the few citizens not yet seated at table. A little ruckus came up behind us from two boys jousting with silvered plastic swords. One of them was a robust sort of chap, thickset, his patrician black-eyed face in profile to us. His adversary was a waif of a boy, a miniature of the other with the same legacy of splendid form and feature. The small one was losing the battle. I tried not to feel every blow I saw him take, the bigger one thrusting the blunted end of the toy sword into his spare middle over and over again. The little one was crying, then, but hardly in surrender. His pain was evident, his fear, too, I thought, yet he stayed to fight. Then, throwing his weapon to the side, the victor began to use his hands to pummel him. The diners around were unmindful. I begged Fernando to do something, to stop them. He told me sternly with his eyes that we must do nothing. I got up and walked, nonchalantly, over to them. “Buon giorno, ragazzi. Come stiamo? Come vanno le cose?” “Hi, boys. How are you? How are things going?” I asked inanely, as though they had been shooting marbles. Gentlemen to the core, the bigger one said, “Buon giorno, signora. Noi stiamo bene, e lei?” “Good day, my lady. We are well, and you?” “What is your name?” I asked, playing for time so the little one might catch his breath. “Io sono Alessio e lui si chiama Giovannino.” “I am Alessio and he is called Giovannino,” offered the big one. I ventured further. “Alessio, did you know that you were hurting Giovannino, that you were hurting him so terribly?” “Sì, signora. Lo so di avergli fatto un pò male.” “Yes, my lady, I know I hurt him a bit,” he answered willingly. I asked him why he would want to be so violent with his little friend. Alessio looked at me full face: “Signora, siamo romani. Combattere è nel nostro sangue.” “We are Romans, my lady. To fight is in our blood.” Educated by the eight-year-old gladiator, I could only shake his hand, then shake the hand of Giovannino and walk back to our table. Fernando told me quietly that a Roman boy could never be Huckleberry Finn. During the lunch, I noticed that Alessio, now sitting on a bench between two people who were likely his grandparents, kept looking at me, waving once in a while, smiling at me with sympathy for my unworldliness. He strolled by the table a little later and asked if we were going to taste the gelato di fragole. It’s made with basil and pepper and vinegar, he proclaimed, as though that composition might be as difficult for me to comprehend as was his penchant for rough sport. He went on to assure us it was the best gelato in Nemi. We asked him if he might like to join us. He said he couldn’t, but thanked us, bowed rathe...

Should there be, one day in your life, both a handful of still-warm-from-the-tree ripe figs and the juice-dripping flesh of a melon, go quickly to find leaves of mint, some good green olive oil, and the juice of a lemon to make this little salad. Use only flawless components and arrange them for someone wonderful with whom to rhapsodize over it. You might, then, need heady, appropriate conversation. You could choose to speak of Platina—one Bartolomeo Sacchi—the Vatican librarian and author, in 1475, of Platine de Honestate Voluptate. The work’s argument concerns the history of Roman cuisine and was the first officially published cookbook since those written during the Republic. Or you might want to chatter a bit about Cantalupo in Sabina—the Singing Wolf of the Sabines—once a papal garden property outside the Roman walls where a strain of tiny, orange-fleshed melons were cultivated, they, no doubt, being the precursors to those we call cantaloupe. Perhaps you might choose not to speak at all, thus distracting nothing from the sweet little figs.

Abbacchio, a long-ago Roman term for a newborn lamb, is the prescripted dish of Easter. And older than history is the innocent, rousing scent of it roasting with branches of wild rosemary, curling out from the kitchen doors of the trattorie in the Trastevere on Sundays in the spring, beckoning one to table together.