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08/13/2007 Archived Entry: "Two Great Restaurants in Sila, Calabria"

The best traditional cook in Camigliatello Silano, according to Barone Maurizio Barracco (see In Sila, two entries ago, Aug. 6) is Angela Valente, who owns the Aquila & Edelweiss Hotel with her husband, Giuseppe (Pepe) D’Amico. As Maurizio most appreciates home cooking, traditional dishes, and he said Angela knows all the antique recipes of Sila, Calabria, I knew I had to meet her. He graciously called ahead and put in a good word for me so I could spend the morning watching Angela cook, and pump her for local food lore and recipes. That she turned out to be an adorable, energetic, and generous 75-year-old was a bonus. It was impossible not to admire every one of her 58 inches.

After spending the morning learning how she roasts Sila’s superior lamb – stuffed with herbs and basted with white wine -- turns chick peas into the best chick pea soup you’ve ever tasted, stuffs her baked tomatoes, seasons eggplant the Sila way – with wild mint instead of the more usual basil and/or oregano, and/or parsley – and bakes pears into an ambrosial dessert -- my crew came for lunch, of course.

I have to say it was really, really difficult to stay on my diet. However, I knew that I could eat a big bowl of Angela’s pureed zucchini soup. She’d given me the recipe for it in the kitchen, so I knew it was nothing more than onions, olive oil, zucchini, and a few cherry tomatoes. Its color wasn’t gorgeous -- a sort of grey-green-brown -- but it tasted great. And it was filling, so I could better resist some upcoming courses.

After all these years coming to Italy, I continue to be amazed at how much flavor and interest cooks in Italy can render from a few ingredients. Of course, this is in good part due to the quality of the produce, which is almost always grown nearby, is at the height of its season when cooked, and is grown in just the right soil, in just the right climate for that variety of plant.

Okay, the zucchini soup was garnished with croutons fried in a combination of butter and oil, but I ate only six tiny cubes. How many calories and carbs can that be?

I also ate one – yes, just one – of Angela’s half-moon-shaped pasta (mezzalune) filled with chopped braised beef and topped with sautéed slices of fresh porcini, but then there was, I confess, a second pasta course. They are what is locally called raschiatelle, but we can buy them in the U.S. as either gemelli or casarecce, a name that doesn’t really mean anything but homemade, which they obviously are not when you buy them in a box or bag at the supermarket or specialty store. These were dressed with more porcini and with chopped zucchini flowers. As I have mentioned before, the abundance of porcini in Calabria is one of the region’s gastronomic secrets. It makes sense, though. With more forests than any other region in Italy, Calabria has more mushrooms.

Even after eating this delicious dish, and, in my life, quite a number of other dishes with zucchini flowers – fiorilli -- I still contend that zucchini flowers are way, way overrated. To me they are mainly an excuse for having something filled and fried in batter. I love them with ricotta or mozzarella and anchovies, as they often make them at Seliano. I loved them the other day filled with a bit of tomato and anchovy. But they are never about the flower container. They are about the filling and the batter and that they are fried. In truth, they are even more tasteless than zucchini, which, as we all know, have practically no flavor except when they are extremely young and fresh. And even then! Zucchini flowers are pretty. I’ll give them that. They can give a nice golden cast to a pot of soup, or a risotto, or a pasta sauce, but I think people like them mainly because they like the idea of eating flowers.

For a main course, I tasted two things that you would never find on a menu in the States, and for good reason. I suppose I am being somewhat self-congratulatory when I say you have to be pretty adventurous to eat pork skin that has first been preserved under salt in a crock – thus making it a bit funky tasting – then long cooked in a sauce of tomato, oregano, and hot red peppers until the gelatinous skin melts in your mouth. Ditto on the adventurous aspect of eating lamb’s intestines wrapped around, actually tying up, bundles of tripe strips. These were braised in a much lighter tomato sauce and spiked with somewhat less hot pepper. Have I yet mentioned that Calabrians are notoriously in love with incendiary peperoncini?

I also had a few spoonfuls of a cranberry bean (borlotti) soup with cured pork cheek (guanciale), and another of whole spelt (farro) and cubed potato. Just tastes, then a taste of a saddle of rabbit, a very white and lean meat, cooked as if it was porchetta, meaning it was roasted with a very flavorful sausage-like stuffing.

I did not eat dessert, good boy that I have been, although I did succumb to a sweet when we returned for dinner the next night. I couldn’t help but try those baked pears. And Angela is famous for gelato made from the local wild mint. I don’t even like mint ice cream – well not much, and not when there are other choices -- but hers was sensationally intense, and streaked with nearly liquid chocolate. At dinner, I was also was bowled over by her ravioli, also shaped like a half moon, colored green with nettles and filled with ricotta and ground prosciutto, dressed only with butter and sage. For a main course I had a small, thin slice of roasted veal. One of the saving graces of trying to diet in Italy is that portions are naturally much smaller than American. On the other hand, there are often many more courses.

At first, I resisted going to La Tavernetta, the other restaurant that Barone Maurizio and his wife Mirella thought I should try. They were, however, sounding a bit ambivalent, without actually verbalizing their ambivalence, about what owner Pietro Lecce is trying to do, so I didn’t get there until our last night in Camigliatello, after Cecilia, Iris and Cecilia had left. Contrary to her parents, Chiara Barracco thought Bob and I shouldn’t leave the area without going to La Tavernetta. Now I know why the elder Barraccos weren’t sure if I would appreciate it. We had discussed how we much preferred eating food of the place rather than international-style fancy food, and Lecce and his wife Denise have turned what used to be a very traditional and traditional looking country place into an international wannabe destination restaurant.
You can see what the premises used to look like by going to their old website, as yet not updated to feature the new look and menu.

Without the knowledge of what it used to be, and the prejudice that might naturally elicit, I thought it was all superb. It is exactly the kind of contemporary restaurant I love. It has style and modern attitude while being extremely respectful of tradition and local ingredients. The food is simple, simple, simple, somewhat like the environment itself.

What used to a rustic-looking place has now been stripped of country kitsch and painted intense solid colors. In the dining room that I sat in two walls were a golden yellow, while there were accent walls of eggplant and orange. Sounds wild, but it was strangely restful, perhaps because plain wooden chairs were placed around plain wooden tables, on top of which were luxurious, basket-weave, off-white tablecloths set with wooden chargers with fine flatware and glasses. The only wall decoration were glowing, up-light wall sconces. (On the other hand, I would not have wanted to eat in the hideous green room, which might make you feel like you were dining under water.)

When you arrive, you are invited into the cantina, a room with grey slate floors, big natural wood Parson’s tables, and lined with simple red-painted shelving holding some of the best wines in the world. They were not only local wines, but rare Barolo from up north in Piedmont, the so-called super-Tuscans, very old Marsala, and even uber-rare and expensive French wines, like 1961 (vintage of the century) Bordeaux. With a glass of wine – which I had to unfortunately demure – you are offered warm cheese sticks scented with cumin, chips of old pecorino served out of the wheel, and prosciutto carved by hand at the moment and placed on rustic local bread.

Our first course was called sfogliatine di castagne, a fanciful name – like creative American chefs use the word napoleon for almost anything stacked and layered. In reality, the dish was paper-thin chestnut pancakes layered with sautéed finferli, another mushroom, a kind of chanterelle, that grows prolifically in the forests of Sila. Around the sfogliatine was drizzled a basil pesto without nuts or cheese – so just oil and basil with a hint of garlic. We also had a finferli salad, a plateful of the mushroom dressed with the almost buttery Calabrian olive oil and local wild mint.

Against my better diet judgement, Pietro sent us his antipasto cheese plate, an assortment of all fresh cheeses, including just-made curd, called giuncotta in Calabria, cagliata in Campania and elsewhere; primo sale, which is salted curd that’s drained more than giuncotta and a few days older; local fior di latte, which is cow’s milk mozzarella, and sheep’s milk ricotta. It was a vision in whites.

Before the pastas arrived, Denise brought over something I had never eaten before. Salicornia is also called asparagus of the sea. In this case, it was dipped in egg and flour and fried. I have to say, like zucchini flowers, the main interest here was that it was battered and fried, and that it looked like – let’s say green coral. It doesn’t have much flavor in itself.

One of my two favorite dishes of the evening was my pasta – malfatti, which literally means bad-mades because they are often the oddly shaped pieces of pasta left from cutting some other regular shape. In this case, however, they were well-mades, wide, short ribbons prepared with half buckwheat flour, half wheat flour, and dressed with porcini and yet another thing I had never eaten – tiny black wild anise seeds. I searched for these seeds in stores, but never found them. I was then told by a chef a few days later that you have to forage for them. They aren’t sold in stores. Now I am in possession of some – a gift. I’ll bring them home and see what I can find to substitute. Somehow, I don’t think regular anise seeds are going to do. These have such intensity and sweetness. The garnish on this pasta was long strands of chives, which I know were there just to make pretty, but they had more impact that many an onion. Pietro grows his herbs in a garden behind the restaurant. He gave us a tour of the plantings and he is rightly proud of they produce for his kitchen. At the same time, it is a beautiful – I forget the proper term – planned garden of concentric circles and decorative borders.

Bob ordered the porcini risotto, which is very unusual for him. He is rarely thrilled with either risotto or porcini. The fresh porcini of Sila had really gotten to him, however, and he now claims La Tavernetta’s was the best porcini risotto he has ever eaten. It was, indeed, letter perfect. In fact, I have to say that one of the attractions of this restaurant for me was its precise cooking – the meat was always done to the perfect degree, the pastas the same, the frying was clean, etc.

Pietro insisted we try another of his pastas, even if only one each – tortelli filled with freshguanciale (that’s pork cheek), and veal. Both are simmered before being ground together. Unlike most meat pasta filling, you really got a sense of meat in this ravioli-like pasta dressed with ricotta blended with olive oil, the Italian south’s answer to cream sauce.

I got the restaurant’s recipe for goat braised with potatoes and rosemary. I didn’t bother even asking how to cook the pork roast. It is from a local breed that is at once lean and succulent. It would not be reproducible at home. For dessert, I had a taste of the small Sila chestnuts in vino cotto, which is wine must (just grape juice), cooked down to a syrup, and the Bavarian-cream-like licorice dessert, served with a tile of crisp, paper-thin caramelized sugar. The town of Rossano, on the Calabrian coast of the Tyrennian Sea, is famous for its licorice, and it can appear in almost any course of a Calabrian menu, not just as a sweet.

I meant to write about one more outstanding restaurant in Calabria, but enough for now. Check out the next Maven’s Diary entry for a great experience I had near San Giovanni in Fiore, the largest town in Sila.