The Food Maven Diary
[Archives]

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

12/05/2006 Archived Entry: "I Love Puglia"

Puglia grows in abundance the three staples of the Italian kitchen and table: Wheat, wine, and olive oil. Given this plenty, it is ironic that it has no ground water. All of its potable water is either rain water, collected in cisterns, or water that is brought into the region by aqueducts from the Apennine Mountains of Avellino in the neighboring region of Campania.

On this trip, I spent most of my time in Puglia on the Salento peninsula, which even the Pugliese describe as “the stiletto heel of the boot.” I hope you realize Italy is shaped like a boot. If not, look at this map. Note: My trip was based in Lecce, the lettering for which is cut off on this map. We flew in and out of Brindisi. We eventually traveled to just north of Bari, to Trani, which is not noted on this map.

Sometimes Puglia is called “the California of Italy.” I always thought this was because of its shape. It’s a long and narrow region – one of the 20 regions of Italy, the way we have 50 states – with a very long coastline, mostly on the Adriatic Sea, but also on the Ionian Sea. It is a land between two seas, and many people in the Salento have told me that, in the summer when the heat can be sweltering, they wake up on a weekend morning and decide which sea to go to depending on which way the winds are blowing.

I now find, however, that Puglia, which is also called Apulia, both in ancient times and in English, is also called the California of Italy because of its sunny climate. The sun, among other things, makes it the largest producer of wine in Italy. It is also the largest producer of olive oil. However, the wine and the oil were not considered very worthy until recently.

The wine, which is dark and robust, also because of the big-flavor of the local grape varieties –Negroamaro, Malvasia Nera, and Primitivo are the most important -- used to be sent north, even to France, to fortify the weaker wines of those cooler climates. In fact, at the wine cooperative in Manduria, where they produce what is now the impressive and popular red wine, Primitivo di Manduria, they have a sort of museum of antique wine, farm, and kitchen equipment, where one big copper vat, which I thought at first must be for distilling alcohol, was in fact a vat used to reduce wine must (grape juice) so it could be shipped north in a lesser and less expensively transported volume. Modern wine-growing and wine-making techniques are now applied to the region’s abundant crop, as became evident by visiting three wineries a day, plus tasting other Pugliese wines at the dinner table, not to mention viewing vineyards all over. Some very fine wine, at very good prices by the way, is now proudly being put into bottles and exported to our market.

Puglia also produces 40 percent of Italy’s extra virgin olive oil, and 13 percent of the entire world’s production of extra virgin oil. I asked Stefano Caroli, who owns a huge olive mill (frantoio in Italian), if anyone in Puglia still produced ordinary “pure” olive oil or even simple “virgin” olive oil. His answer: “Puglia produces the best, but it also produces the worst.” Then he went on to explain that all this oil that has been produced for hundreds, nay thousands of years used to be pressed and used for purposes other than human consumption. You can see as you drive around the countryside how old the olive trees are and imagine what to uses the oil was put. Crank oil, I kept thinking. Soap. Hair treatment products!?

As for the wheat, we ate orecchiette almost every day. They certainly do love their orecchiette in Puglia. As most Italian-food-loving Americans know, these little rounds of pasta – pasta ears – are most popularly eaten with greens, either turnip greens, as is most likely in Puglia, or with broccoli di rape, what we Americans call broccoli rabe. The greens are seasoned with olive oil –but of course—and a bit of garlic, and usually some hot red pepper. They can also be combined with crumbled sausage. I need to add here that the greens, whichever they are, are never, ever firm, never crisp-tender. They are always well-cooked, often falling into a creamy mass.

We ate orecchiette with ragu, too, meaning tomato-based meat sauce. And twice we were served orecchiette with tiny meatballs, debunking the myth, too often repeated by unknowing American food writers, that pasta and meatballs on the same plate is strictly an Italian-American invention. The big difference is that in Italy (I have also eaten pasta and meatballs in Calabria) the meatballs are the size of large cherries, not as big as baseballs.

Looking back, I am surprised we weren’t served more bread from what Italians call grano duro, what we in the states would call semolina bread. It is made from the same flour of hard wheat that pasta is made from, and the Pugliese bakers use it with abandon. It usually has a slightly yellow cast. In Altamura, the bread capitol of Puglia, the semolina bread actually gets a DOP designation, meaning its quality, including its special shape, which is like a huge, yawning clam, is protected by government regulations.

We did eat great bread, however. The Pugliese love focaccia in many forms, including what they call focaccia di patate, potato focaccia. This isn’t really focaccia at all, but two layers of well-season mashed potato enclosing a filling. The filling can be as simple as cheese, often Swiss Emanthaler, and sliced cook ham, or many other things. One of my favorites is cherry tomatoes cooked with minced onion in the fabulous, buttery Pugliese olive oil.

In Lecce, the gorgeous Baroque city in the south of the Salento peninsula, they make a snack bread called “pizzo.” It looks like an irregular scone or an American drop biscuit, but it is red-orange from powdered sweet red pepper (like paprika), and it contains onions and black olives. It is yeast-risen, not leavened with baking powder like scones and biscuits.

For my new book, I am trying to get recipes for some of the special breads we ate – like the vegetable studded, high-rise, moist focaccia that was in our bread basket in a restaurant in Lecce. I did bring home quite a few recipes, however. I will share a few choice ones as I develop American measured formulas for them, which takes some time and testing.

I have already made cotognata, Italian for quince paste. Quince, which is called mela cotogna in Italian, is one of the symbols of Lecce, and of Puglia in general. Cotognata is sold in many shops, but serious home cooks do still make it themselves. One morning, our guide, Daniela, brought me some cotognata made by her mother in law.

Quince are still in season here – I saw them in my local grocery yesterday – but they won’t be for long. If you care to cook some, I already have a recipe on my website, a simple recipe for baked quince. Another way to find a recipe on my website, any recipe, is to put a key word in the search box at the top of every pate. In this case, “quince” will do it.

More on Puglia at a later date. I didn’t even get to the cultural attractions, like the astounding mosaic floor of the cathedral in Otranto that tells Old Testament and astrological stories, the Gothic Frederick II castle and Romanesque cathedral in Trani, a city that used to have the largest Jewish community in the south of Italy and still has a synagogue in use, the trulli (conical buildings) of central Puglia, or the Baroque veering to Rococo masterpiece of Santa Croce in Lecce.

Puglia is, in general, a great vacation spot, with wonderful things to see, beautiful resorts and spas, not to mention particularly beautiful and friendly people, great food, and great wine. Maybe you’ll join me there next year. Baronessa Cecilia, Bob Harned and I will be leading a nine-day tour of Puglia and neighboring Basilicata in June. We’ll start with a weekend at Cecilia’s farm-inn in Paestum (that’s in Campania, by the way, not Puglia), then head south. The full itinerary is not yet set, but it will be modeled after the very successful Italian-American Roots Tour we led in early October. If you have any interest, write to me at cookatseliano@aol.com.