The Food Maven Diary
[Archives]

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

08/11/2007 Archived Entry: "Still in Sila, Calabria"

Potatoes and pork sausage: They are both specialties of Calabria, and the combination keeps coming up. Here’s just one instance: In Nicastro, which is south of the high Sila mountains and nearly on the sea coast, when I asked a young local woman, an art gallery owner, about the town’s gastronomic specialties, she told me that sausage browned on top of the stove, then baked in the oven with potatoes was one. And a couple of days ago, Bob Harned and I ate sausage sandwiches in an Alpine-looking shack along a pine-forest road in Moccone, the next village from Camigliatello, and one choice of topping was sautéed potatoes and peppers. Fried peppers and onions on a sausage sandwich we all know about. Potatoes? Figuring it was a bit of carbo overload for someone on a diabetic/weight loss diet, I just had a one-bite taste of Bob’s – fabulous -- while I ordered my sausage topped with what was called caponata, not the Sicilian version, but strips of hot green pepper – peperoncini – sauteed with strips of eggplant and sliced onion – and, to be a good boy, I ate only half the roll.

If you should ever get to Moccone -- although there’s no reason you should other than for its beauty and tranquility, fresh air, mountain stream water (No one drinks bottled water here. What’s put in bottles to ship elsewhere comes out of the tap here.), the sausages and salami, capacolla, sheep’s milk cheeses, wild mushrooms (loads of porcini and chanterelle), great potatoes, and the three great restaurants nearby, not to mention the fabulous place where I have been staying (see Torre Camigliatelli in my last diary entry), the sandwich stand is called La Lumaca, The Snail.

The name is for good reason. Owner, cook, server, cashier, and, as I saw, reluctant dish washer, Franco Russo, reminded me of Dominick at Di Fara pizzeria on Avenue J in Brooklyn. Franco, like Dominick, prepares each order to order all by himself, so it can take 30 minutes to get your sausage sandwich, like a slice at Di Fara, even when the place isn’t busy. Franco also reminded us of the so-called soup Nazi of New York City and Seinfeld fame. For instance, we were told by Chiara Barracco (also see my last diary entry) that if you dare order one of Franco’s carefully constructed sandwiches with ketchup, he’ll throw you out and never serve you again. And I witnessed this myself: If you are not prepared with your order the second he is ready to make it, he’ll dismiss you and move on to the next customer. If you call out your order before he is ready to prepare it, he sneers. Customers tremble. But the sandwiches were great. The sausage are split lengthwise, put on the griddle with a weight over them. The rolls are heated on the griddle, too. The toppings are kept warm in an oven on the side.

Speaking of potatoes and sausage, I think I have failed to mention that there’s a potato and sausage pizza named for me at Café Fiorello, across the street from Lincoln Center. Back in March, when I was in Siracusa, Sicily, my friend Shelly Fireman, the owner of Fiorello, emailed me to ask if I had run across any good pizza ideas. I wrote back that we had just eaten a fantastic pizza at Castello Fiorentino, which is very popular with a local crowd in Ortigia, the historic center of Siracusa. It was topped with crumbled sausage, cubed potatoes, and rosemary, all on top of the usual tomato and mozzarella. Shelly’s version at Fiorello has sliced potatoes instead of cubed, and his crust is cracker-like, not with a puffy “frame,” as Italians call the edge, like a Neapolitan-style pizza, and the pizza in Siracusa. It doesn’t matter. Fiorello’s Arturo Schwartz pizza is an excellent pie and I am proud to have my name on it.

Back to Sila. We have a car so we drove from Camigliatello Silano to the biggest town in Sila, San Giovanni in Fiore, which, besides having a couple of cultural sites worth visiting, has a very famous goldsmith named Spadafora . In his enameled ruby red storefront, Spadafora’s specialty is gold set with seed pearls, a tradition of the Albanese, the Christian Albanians who came to southern Italy more than 500 years ago to escape the Muslim Turks. Because the Albanese have retained many of their customs over all these years, including celebrating the Eastern Catholic rite, they remain an important distinct and respected ethnic group. Their traditional jewelry is intricate and gorgeous, as is Spadafora’s, although his is more contemporary in design. My friend Laura bought a beautiful piece (it is called cocchio), a circular pearl pendant with smaller circles of pearls overlapping the larger one north, south, east and west. It has spiritual meaning and it looks like a Celtic charm, appropriate for a woman with Welsh roots, and as a present to herself for an upcoming birthday.

After jewelry shopping, it was time to visit the Abbazia Florense founded by Abbot Gioachino da Fiore in the late 1100s. It is a beautifully austere church. We assumed that at one time it was probably covered with plaster and Baroque decorations, as these medieval churches often were. Now it is stripped down to its rough stone walls, but it sports a vast, gilded, totally over-the-top Rococo altar (circa 1740). The contrast is stunning.

Behind the abbey, actually attached to it, is the Museo Demologico, a museum of materials from the economic, work, and social life of Sila. In other words, it displays antique artifacts of daily life in the area. The colorful handwoven textiles, from bed coverings to kitchen towels, look amazingly contemporary and folkloric at the same time. Sila is known for its woodworking and I coveted more than one piece of gorgeously rendered furniture, bedroom and dining room pieces from rustic to elegant.. And there were antique ceramics, kitchen utensils and pots, farm implements, etc. I was in heaven. In a separate gallery was a temporary show of late 19th and early 20th century photographs taken by a local photographer of people in Sila, many of them meant to be sent to relatives who had emigrated, mainly to the United States America, but also to Canada and South America. Many of the photos were very touching – men all dressed in their Sunday best, but with shoes that were dusty and worn.

To top it all off, I had an unforgettable travel experience. I have been needing a new hole punched in my belt (yes, I am bragging), and when I spied the museum’s display of an old cobbler’s bench with all its tools, I asked sheepishly of one of the women docents if I could use the hole puncher. I’d been looking for a cobbler and hadn’t found one. She was delighted to let me. She even helped me get the hole punched through. We struggled a bit with this old tool, identical to the ones still used. We talked about dieting for a minute, then, along with three other local women in the room, she shared a couple of recipes – the super-simple one for cranberry bean (borlotti), cabbage, and potato soup may well end up in my new book.

Next installment: Restaurants in Sila