The Food Maven Diary
[Archives]

[Previous Entry] [Diary Home] [Next Entry]

06/16/2006 Archived Entry: "Italian Report"

“Un uomo senza pancia e come un cielo senza stelle.”

Translation: A man without a paunch is like the sky without stars.

I spied that saying on a T-shirt as I was walking down a street in Lipari, the most touristic of the Aeolian Islands, an archipelago off the northeast point of Sicily, and politically part of Sicily. This was at the beginning of my month-long trip and this saying turned out to be quite a useful bit of business. Whenever someone commented, sometimes rudely, about the considerable size of my paunch, I could pull out this line. With Italians it always worked to bring a smile or a laugh and diffuse the awkward situation, most notably one night in Campobasso, the main city of the region of Molise, where I went with my friends to explore.

We had just finished a spectacularly good meal at Da Concetta (also called La Grotta, The Grotto). I was in the kitchen with Concetta herself and some local admirers, telling her what a wonderful cook she is. Concetta’s kitchen is like a home kitchen, not a restaurant kitchen, and she does indeed attend to every plate that leaves it. Standing around a kitchen like that, with Concetta seated at her big wooden kitchen table, everyone gets friendly. An ebullient middle aged man wearing a very sharp, bright green suit asked me how I enjoyed the meal.
“Ottimo,” the best, I answered.
“What did you have?” he then asked.
But Concetta answered: “Tutto!” Everything!
He patted my belly. Then I pulled out that line. Everyone enjoyed it, Concetta smiling so broadly that you could see she is in need of some serious dental work. The man was ecstatic. He laughed hard and said, “Cosi romantico! Cosi poetico!” So romantic! So poetic!

So my goal for the rest of the summer, until I return to Italy in September, is to lose some of this pancia. To that end, I am walking and exercising every day, and eating mainly vegetables and fruit. I know how to do it: Eat less, move more.

Among the treats on this trip were nespole, which is the Italian word for medlar, which is another word for loquat. Sort of. The fruit looks something like an apricot and has a taste slightly like an apricot crossed with an orange and a melon. It is the size of a small apricot and has two large, smooth, shiny pits or seeds. Picked off the trees I saw on Lipari, even off a tree I encountered in a garden in Rome, the fruit is very sweet. However, around the corner from the tree at my hotel in Lipari was a fruit market that sold nespole from Spain. I asked why anyone would buy these when they could just pick them off a tree. The market man noted that the Spanish cultivated fruits are larger than the wild fruits, and that they were not as bruised. It seems nespole-medlar-loquat is prone to black bruising. You could see that on the tree, but the bruises don’t affect the taste. Anyway, I kept seeing both Spanish medlars in the markets, and ripe, incredibly delicious medlars on trees. Back home on Flatbush Ave., I found loquats in my local fruit market. They were 79 cents each. The price being so high, I bought only one, just for research. It was different. It tasted more or less the same, except not ripe and sweet, but it had five stones instead of two. I don’t know where they are coming from. They are obviously another variety. But the taste was not much better than an unripe apricot. Forgetaboutit, as we say in Brooklyn.

The main Aeolian Islands are Lipari, Salina, Panarea, Vulcano, and Stromboli. They are all different. Lipari is the most developed, with a big town called Lipari. It is very, very nice, with beautiful old buildings, plenty of cafes and restaurants, stores – not all for the tourists -- street life, and night life. Salina is agricultural – wine and capers being the main crops. Panarea attracts the rich. I only looked at it from the ferry, but I hear there are some beautiful hotels and homes there. Vulcano, a dormant volcano, has sulfurous waters, and fumes, and mud, and a quick walk around (still off season at the beginning of May) the small main town revealed many old German tourists covering themselves with steaming mud. Not my thing. We left before lunch. Stromboli, which we also only viewed from the ferry, is a black lava volcano coming out of the sea, still erupting continually, spewing dark gases and red flames into the sky, with just a little development around the base. Watch “Stromboli,” the infamous Ingrid Bergman-Roberto Rossellini movie of 1950 and you will see. The place hasn’t changed much since then. It stills seems god-forsaken.

The big food item on the Aeolians is capers. On Lipari, in the tourist shops, they say they are from Lipari, but actually almost all the capers are grown on the nearby island of Salina. They are flower buds, you know, and the bushes are set in rows between or at the end of rows of grape vines. If the buds flower, you have lost a caper, but after the flower, a fruit grows. We call these “caper berries” here in the U.S. They are known as cucunci in Italian. They are preserved, as the capers are, in coarse salt. I didn’t see them anywhere packed in vinegar, as they are for the American market. Used to be, the cucunci were not marketable at all. Sicilians would tell you that if you had the fruit, you had a mistake. Someone missed picking the precious caper bud. But some clever American thought a caper berry made a good cocktail garnish and that started the cucunci ball rolling. Nowadays, I find them in salads and as a garnish for fish.

I found the Salina capers to be particularly fragrant and mild. They were also way too expensive at any shop that caters to tourists. Driving around Salina, however, we came upon a house with a sign on its fence: “We sell our own production of capers.” We stopped, and after an hour of conversation with the woman of the house and her (unmarried at 42) daughter, finding out about their capers, how they grow them, harvest them, and process them, we bought some at a very good price. Only thing, they were unsorted, meaning tiny ones were mixed with huge ones. But that’s okay. They are all delicious. I’ve already made Insalata Liparota a couple of times. It’s sort of the local version of Salade Nicoise – a composed salad, meaning arranged on the plate, not tossed. Its ingredients are hard-cooked egg, canned tuna, sweet onion, tomato wedges, a few green olives, and lots of salt-preserved capers soaked in water to de-salt them. One version I had on Lipari also included a few leaves of rucchetta, the wild and very small-leafed version of what we call arugula. This type of arugula exists in NYC, but I have only been served it in restaurants. I haven’t found a retail source yet, although I was told the other day that there are farmers selling them at the Union Square Greenmarket. I will have to look for them at my Greenmarket, the Saturday morning market on Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn. As a substitute, I shred some of our large-leafed arugula.

Olives and capers define Aeolian cuisine, although my friend Iris Carulli, who lives in Rome but likes to take her rests on Lipari, says the cuisine is so poor, “It consists of bread, seasoned with whatever you shake out of your shoe, then passed by olive oil.” That might have been true at one time, but a famous dish of the island, sweet and sour rabbit, tastes extravagant at any rate. Its rabbit poached in water acidified with vinegar and lemon juice and seasoned with bay leaf, then finished by sautéing the rabbit in olive oil, then making a pan sauce of vin cotto, which is wine must (grape juice) reduced to a syrup, and chopped almonds.

After the Aeolians, I was in Rome for a few days with our cruise group. Then we were on the western Mediterranean cruise on the Holland-America Noordam. The ship is brand new, but as one of my friends said, it looks like it was made in Japan and might fall apart any minute. What got to me wasn’t so much the cheesy decorations and workmanship – the electrical outlet in my stateroom was coming out of the wall when I arrived – but the ungracious, unhelpful, greedy attitude of the Holland America line and its higher level staff.

That one had to pay for soft drinks, plus a 15% service on that Coke, was bad enough but other little cheapnesses kept popping up. I have been on many cruises, but never was I asked to pay for a small bottle of water offered when I went on excursions. Here it was $2.

And this is indicative: One evening at a barbecue (the spit-roasted lamb certainly looked and smelled great, although it was overcooked and tasteless), a bar waitress making the round of tables offered “all you can drink” piña coladas. So a friend and I said okay. They were served in large plastic coconuts. The bill came after the drinks, so it was only after we had taken a few sips that we learned the price was double the usual. So, of course, we had to have at least two drinks to break even. Then we had to have a third, just so the ship didn’t get the best of us. After three of these huge drinks, however, not even a buzz.

I have to say that my well-traveled, good-natured group, although initially disgruntled over the stinginess of the ship, got over it. In the end, we made a joke out of the whole thing. Still, never once did the dining room get my dinner order right. And, as a last straw, they locked the mini-bars the afternoon before our last night on board. After a long and hot day walking around Naples, I got back to my room to find I couldn’t have a glass of cold water. (I would dare you to drink the saline water coming out of the bathroom sink.)

Cruise over, I went with my Italian friends to Campobasso, in the region of Molise. It seems no one goes to Campobasso. The guide books tell you there is nothing there. My feeling is there is always something to learn from a new place, and Campobasso was no different. I actually had a special agenda in this case. I am writing a new book, “The Big Book of Southern Italian Food & Wine,” and Molise and Abruzzo are regions that I don’t know well. I needed to learn, for one thing, if they are truly Southern Italy. Maybe they are central. I asked many people if they considered themselves southern, and everyone said yes, even if a little reluctantly some times. The best answer, however, came from an antique dealer in the historic center. He was wearing a Levi’s 501 belt even though he must have been at least 70 years old. “I hate the Italian government, and the way Italians behaved in the election (it had been only days before)” he said, “so I now consider myself a man of the world.”

Campobasso is a thoroughly modern, middle-class town. It has a university and its own opera house and theater, which may be why the people seem educated and cosmopolitan. Almost entirely leveled by the devastating earthquakes of 1981, it has been rebuilt with contemporary and rather nice looking architecture. There is an ancient historic center, where Da Concetta is located, and a 19th century section where all the nice shops are. But most of the town is new, including the university buildings.

I am always happy to be back home in Brooklyn, but I am also looking forward to returning to Italy this fall. I have two Cook at Seliano groups – one Sept. 10 to 16, the other Oct. 15 to 21. These are the six-day programs of cooking and gastronomic and cultural excursions that I conduct from Baronessa Bellelli’s agriturismo in Paestum, Tenuta Seliano. You can check out all the details, including a sample itinerary, on this website. (Click on Cook at Seliano Culinary Vacations on the navigation bar to the left.) We still have room in both groups, and this might be the very year you really want to go: We have reduced our price to what it was when we first started the program in 2001, $2,950, which includes every last thing except air fare. Given that the dollar has slipped considerably since then, the price is really lower than it was then.

Between the two Cook at Seliano sessions, I am inaugurating what Cecilia, La Baronessa, and I call our Italian Roots Tour. That is almost fully booked, but we have room for two more people. I can send the itinerary to anyone interested, but basically we start with a long weekend at Seliano (in Paestum, just south of the Amalfi Coast), then travel to Basilicata and Puglia – the two regions just south and east of Paestum. In Basilicata, we are visiting the town of Accettura, the ancestral home of some of our participants, then moving on to nearby Matera. In Puglia, we will visit Altamura (famous bread in an antique bakery), Alberobello (for the Trulli – conical buildings – and gorgeous hand-loomed textiles), Lecce (for its Baroque beauty), Manduria (for Primitivo wine). Bari (for S. Nicola – Santa Claus – whose remains are in the cathedral), Otranto (for lunch), Trani (for its beauty), Andria (to see burrata cheese being made), Barile (for a great hotel, elegant dinner, and local Aglianico del Vulture wine), and back to Paestum via a small, beautifully preserved hill town in Avellino called Nusco, where we will have an elegant lunch at my friend Tonino Picciarillo’s restaurant Locanda di Bu. Tonino just presented his contemporary but traditional Campanian food at the James Beard House in Manhattan. All this (10 days) for $3,250 a person (double occupancy), excluding air fare.

If you are interested in coming to Italy with me on those dates – or next year, too – please send me a note at mavensmail@aol.com. We can email and phone to discuss it.

This has gotten pretty long, so I will close for now. Please tell your friends about my website, and please do sign up for my free email newsletter, if you haven’t already. There’s a sign-up box at the top of this page.