European

Raised up seven hundred years before Christ on the Mar Ionio, the resplendence of Sybaris eclipsed Athens. Tenanted by unredeemed voluptuaries who roasted songbirds, wove cloth from gold, slept upon rose petals, and indulged every hunger, even their appetite for peace, these Sybarites vanished, as if by some peevish smite from the gods. All that remains is a farming village of sweet, sleepy folk who roast lamb with lemons. Still, I think theirs is a dish upon which an old Sybarite could smile.

Whaling and swordfishing have been the tempestuous business of Bagnara for three thousand years. Wedged as the port is twixt great rocks and the Mar Tirreno at the savage hem of the Aspromonte, it forms a fittingly folkloric tableau for the lumbering black ships trudging out for the hunt. A tower, higher than the masts, is the tight, trembly perch from which one man sights the fish. As did the Greeks from whom they are descended, the harpooners tramp out onto walkways hinged a hundred feet out from the ship over the sea, spears at the ready, to wait for the fish. Once the ships are sighted from the lighthouse, the fishermen’s wives gather on the beach with carts and wagons, transport to take the fish to market. Sometimes, fires are laid right there by the water, one fish whacked into trenchers and roasted, a barrel of wine propped against the rocks, the unfolding of an old ceremony. One fishes, one builds a fire, one eats his supper.

Perhaps the most elegant version of Sicilian tuna for us was this one that we ate in the kitchen of a tiny, chalk-white house set in the curve of an alley and whose arch-walled garden looked to the sea. The lady who cooked it for us—the owner of the house—was born there in that most ancient parish of Trapani more than ninety years ago. Warm, insistent winds—the breath of Africa, one thinks—billowed up the old blue curtain that was her back door, bidding in the damp, balmy spice of her wisteria as she sat there, beatific, talking and working. It was as though pressing peppercorns into the flesh of a fish was a most magnificent task.

To tear at a beautiful, newborn bread and eat it with fat, salty olives, a potent red wine sipped between them, is a meal everlasting in its innocence and sensuality. Here follows the simplest of recipes that pairs the soft creaminess of roasted garlic with the olives for a lush result. The dish asks only a little dalliance in the oven. Roasting the olives plumps them, renders them voluptuously fleshy, tender. And when whole, fat garlic—caramelized in a long, slow roasting—confronts the salt-tinged meat of the warm olives, the whole becomes quietly paradisiacal. As beautiful as it is, stray for a moment from the red wine idea and consider a fusion, instead, with an iced Marsala Superiore Riserva or Marsala Vergine or Marsala Soleras Stravecchio—altogether different wine from the often industrially produced sweet varieties that find their way to the States and are used to make zabaglione or to splash sautéed veal. The crackling, almost dry golden chill of them leaves just a point of sweetness on the tongue.

Deep in the Gothic tangles of the Aspromonte sits the fourteenth-century Santuario della Madonna di Polsi, a refuge culled by an ancient order of cloistered sisters dedicated to the honor of the Madonna, through a life of acetism. Once a year, though, in the early spring, when pilgrims from faraway parishes walk over Monte Montalto to the sanctuary to celebrate the festival of the Madonna, the nuns sacrifice a flock of newborn lambs to the glory of her, braising their flesh in old, shallow coppers and feeding the faithful at long, rough-hewn tables set out on a meadow floor.

Here, the Calabrian fashions a rough paste of flour, sea salt, and water and perhaps an egg and a spoonful of oil, rolling it out thin and cutting it into wide, uneven ribbons, calling it maccarruni i casa—maccheroni made at home. It is married to a well-made sauce flavored with some precious trimmings of pork and left to braise and plump in its liquors. The whole offering, pasta, meat, and sauce, is carried to table and eaten, one hopes, with the lush hunger it deserves. Here one uses a good piece rather than a few trimmings of pork. One might choose an acquisition from a good pasta shop or specialty grocery or make the good maccheroni alla mugnaia (page 37) for this dish.

Zagara—flower, in Greek—is the name farmers call their precious agrumi, they, it seems, likening the sweet, spicy perfumes of their oranges and lemons to the scents of blossoms. Thus, citrus fruits are Calabrian flowers. One farmer dared me to try to cook this luscious dish with bergamot rather than oranges and lemons, assuring me that it was the one and only fruit with which the massaie (housewives) braised pork long-ago. Finding none to beg or buy, I cannot tell you how the dish might have been with the ambered flesh and juices of the mysterious bergamot. One day I will.

A dish a hunter might prepare for his family even if his sack holds only a few birds, the quail are pan-roasted, pasta is added to its good liquors, the whole roasted in the oven, and carried to table as a piatto unico—one-dish meal.

It is fitting that on a most divine jot of the Tyrrhenian coast, on a promontory between the limpid gulfs of Sant’ Eufemia and Goia Tauro, there would glint the small, golden precinct of Tropea. Fitting, too, that there in its rich, black fields would be raised up Italy’s sweetest onions, and that they be long and oval like great lavender pearls. One peels them and sets to, with knife and fork, a dish of sea salt, a pepper grinder, and a tiny jug of beautiful oil, a perfect lunch with bread and wine. Too, we saw the folk of Tropea simply fold back their papery skins and eat them raw, out of hand, layer by layer, like a magical violet fruit. Sometimes, one finds them all softened, smoothed into a delectable potion made of garlic and bay leaves and white wine. Evident in its resemblances to French cousins, the soup of Tropea, though, is a minestra strepitosa—a magnificent soup—say the Calabrian cooks, belittling the goodness of the French soup. Here follows a version that softens the garlic, caramelizing it into sweetness with the slow cooking of the onions, before the illumination of the soup with red wine and grappa and the finishing of it with pecorino and a heavy dusting of fresh pepper.

So unlike the exquisitely wrought sweetmeats of other southern pasticcerie, pastry in Basilicata is often in the form of some rustic fried fritter, its batter honey-sweetened and studded with raisins or nuts. The most luscious version, though, is the one that asks for ricotta and dark rum. We found them being made in a small shop with an even smaller selling counter on a little street off the Via Pretoria, just before one reaches Piazza Mario Pagano in Potenza. On more than one iced winter’s morning have we stood outside its doors and waited for the sugar-dusted, crisp-crusted warmth of them.

A medieval fastness above the Mar Tirreno, Guardia Piemontese is a thirteenth-century village raised up by a band of French-descended, Waldensian heretics in flight from papal justice. Pursued into the pathlessness of Calabria, they resisted the Church’s soldiers then and again and again. Two hundred years had passed when, flush with the dramas of the inquisizione, Pius V dispatched a brigade up into their serene agrarian midst, calling for, in the names of Christ and the Holy Ghost, their massacre. Those few who escaped the flailing of the Church’s swords stayed. And those who were born of them stay, still, speaking a Provencale dialect and celebrating the traditions of French country life, gentling their patch of the earth as though time was a stranger. Too, they are true to their own and simple gastronomic heritage, having obliged no transfusion of the coarser Calabrian kitchen. Here follows a thick mountain soup, so like a Béarnais garbure (a thick cabbage soup from Béarn) even to the blessing of its last smudges with red wine as the French are wont to do à la faire chabrot—pouring a few drops of red wine into the last spoonful of soup, stirring it up and getting every last drop as both a blessing to the cook and a thank-you to God.

During the sovereignty of Byzantium over southern Italy in the tenth century, it was in the workshops of Catanzaro that the silks that emblazoned the courts of Costantinopoli were loomed and crafted and tinged. Thus it was that from these handiworks, humble Catanzaro, its cheek brushing close upon the Ionian, lived its few lustrous moments after the glory days of Magna Graecia. But save the lacy Oriental architecture raised up by the Byzantines, nothing of the comforts of that epoch endured. And so Catanzaro, as did all of Calabria, pressed on in the severest of lives. And when, late in the 1700s, an earthquake felled the city, its fierceness left but dust. Reborn then, Catanzaro is now all of eighteenth-century alleyways, the parishes of the people insinuating upon the palaces of the nobles, the whole formed of a crooked, good-natured charm. And everywhere—round each curve and set into the arms of every angle wait the beloved putiche—the taverns—of the workingmen. Small, dark-wooded dens are they, wrapped in sharp, grapy vapors breathed up from the fat, brown barrels of gaglioppo (a local red wine) over these past hundreds of years. Traditionally le putiche were the dispensaries of only three balms—honest red wine, compassion, and a hellaciously spiced mash made from the viscera of pork, veal, lamb, or goat, sometimes from baccalà, the flesh braised in tomatoes and wine with peperoncini then cradled in a leaf of soft, flat, chewy bread, folded and devoured out of hand. And these morzeddu—dialectically, morsels—made the breakfast, the later morning’s merendina—snack—a consolingly juicy partner throughout the day and evening with stout doses of purply wine. Sadly, there seems of late a flurry of gentrification among the putiche, the work of those who would sophisticate them into whitewashed osterie with wine lists and menus translated into English and German. The cooks, too occupied with carpaccio and tiramisù, no longer make morzeddu. Even the compassion has perished. Enough of the old and crusty taverns endure, though, their comforts unfaded, at least for a bit longer. Here follows a version of morzeddu made with lamb—its shoulder rather than its spleen or its lungs—and a fine terra-cotta pot of the mash and a basket of warm breads are the rustic stuff with which to open an outdoor feast while some other meat or fish might be roasting on the fire.

Unlike the ricotta forte of Puglia, prepared laboriously, asking that the fresh cheese be left to drain off its opaline waters and to acidify, the dry cheese to then be kneaded, worked each third or fourth day for at least two months until it takes on a burnt ivory sort of color and its perfumes come up stinging, pungent, this version is prepared in moments. Yielding a condiment less punishing in its aromas, the Calabrian ricotta forte is still of an assertive and keen savor, which when smoothed over warm, crusty bread, glorifies the richness of spiced sausages and salame presented as antipasto. A few dollops of it, thinned with drops of pasta cooking water and tossed with bucatini or spaghetti, make a fine dish. Tucked away in a crock in the refrigerator for a week or so, the vigor of ricotta forte ripens and intensifies.

A humble prescript that flaunts the goodness of summer tomatoes, that asks their roasting over wood, concentrating, ennobling their sweet juices. Propped, then, on crusty seats of bread with a gloss of good green oil and the grace of basil and mint, they soothe hungers for purity.

Riso nero—black rice—is the dramatic name for a nursery dish offered to children as a light supper or as a sweet after a bit of broth or soup. It is most often just made with rice poached in milk that has been scented with cinnamon and mixed with a few shards of chocolate, the latter giving the dish its name as it melts and turns the rice a deep, dark color. Surely there are lovely similarities between it and pasta in nero della consolazione (page 118). Here I offer its comfort in a more adult version. The same prescriptions apply, though, as this is best presented after a light, reviving soup or, better, after no soup at all, so one can justify slipping one’s fork into the spiced, chocolate depths of a second or third piece of the sweet little pie.