European

We had been in Puglia and its environs nearly a month. Sapped from our journeys, our palates debauched into slumber from the opiate of too many chile peppers, our wits palled from nightly Circean cups, we needed redemption from the table. We asked each other what would soothe. Surely we needed to stop driving. Fernando wanted pastina in brodo—tiny pasta cooked in broth. I wanted a small custard pie, warm, soft. I wanted bread and butter. We both wanted to be in a place with not one more three-thousand-year-old olive tree. We wanted sympathy more than we wanted supper. And there we were, lost in Otranto. When finally we asked the same giornalaio, newspaper seller, for directions to our intended destination of Melpignano for the third time and got the third different answer, we thought it a good thing to surrender our search for the unnamed, unsigned place there that had been pressed upon us by our friends in Lecce and simply brake at the next and nearest little place with even the thinnest promise about it. Finding it, we tumbled out of the car, shuffled up the drive and asked if there might be a room for us. The cheery little man took our things, showed us up the stairs, started up the heater for the bathwater and began the reverent story of his wife’s genius in the kitchen. I saw Fernando’s face fading a bit toward citrine. Swooning, I tried so to smile at the even cheerier little man through my narrowing vision. He began his pastoral roundelay with her pigeons braised in red wine and juniper, on to her lamb roasted with potatoes and wild mushrooms, before coming to the rhapsody of her way with goats’ hearts poached in white wine and lemon. Fernando was nearly able to deflect him with an inquiry about the era of his handsome stone house before he began the lip-smacking tale of the pigs’ livers roasted on branches of bay. We closed the door. We took a bath. As we were dressing, the cheery little man knocked gently. They were waiting for us—he, his wife the cook, his son the university student, his brother the hunter, his friend the winemaker. They’d thought, since there were no other guests, we might dine together, make a real celebration of the evening. They had laid a beautiful fire and lit candles upon a narrow, wooden, unclothed table set for seven. They were so sweet, so excited by our presence, for their own clever spontaneity, for the prospect of a long winter’s evening to be passed at table. Fernando rallied and began nibbling at a creamy heft of new pecorino sitting on a crisp white cloth next to our aperitivi. I followed the lady into her kitchen, unraveling our adventures in a nervous sort of monologue. Rather than sympathy, she offered her envy. “Beati voi, tutti questi giorni in giro, sempre a ristoranti.” “Blessed are you, all these days running about, always in restaurants.” I thought to be more direct. “You know,” I said, averting my eyes from the legs of lamb she was basting, “what I would like most this evening is to eat something simple and comforting. I feel like a tired child.” She looked at me for the first time, really looked at me, heard me. She wrapped her great, fleshy arms about me, crushing me to her moist, rosemary-perfumed bosom. She had understood. She marched me back to the table with instructions to sit quietly, sipping at the winemaker’s best red and to wait. After a half an hour’s sashaying to and from the kitchen with the first of the feast’s plates, the lady, her broad olive cheeks blushing up to the corners of her dark eyes, carried in a small, white porcelain bowl with its own cover and set it down before me. I lifted the lid, unloosing the scents of cinnamon and butter and perhaps of chocolate, which curled up through a tangle of pale yellow noodles swathed in a curiously dark sort of sauce. “Ecco la pasta in nero,” she exclaimed. “There it is, pasta in b...

Creamy evidence of how savory and seductive can be a naïve little pap made from a handful of dried beans.

...Anchovies, and Black Olives) Brindisi, the ancient Brundisium of the Romans, is a sort of rough, emotionally bankrupt port city. Still, we like to walk and sit, sometimes, on the edges of its rickety old wharfs early of a morning to inhale the bright, briny tableau of the place. And round about eight-thirty—high noon for the fishermen, who rise before the sun—we wait to see the baker’s boy running down the docks, toting a great basket of puddica—traditional Brindisino flatbreads—just born and sending up great hungering perfumes for the fishermen’s lunch. It seemed to us the highest form of ceremony left in the dour old place.

Made with bruscandoli, hop shoots, should their wisp of a season embrace Easter. If not, one searches out the first, slimmest shoots of asparagus.

Mussels unfettered by garlic taste more like their own sweet, turgid selves. On the tiny porch of the seaside bar where we ate this pasta, the cook who was the mussel gatherer who was the bartender who was the pastrymaker added crushed, dried seaweed to the finished dish. He cooked the mussels and the pasta over a fire he’d built of driftwood a few meters from the bar. It was a fairly good-sized blaze, ample enough to heat an old cauldron along with the mussel pot, it bubbling with a potion of wild myrtle berries in which he immersed a great, gray fish net, tinting it, cooking it to a deep, bright blue.

...in the Manner of Saint Mary of the Bath.

Made from handmade whole wheat or egg pasta cut into wide ribbons—half of which are sautéed until golden in garlic and chile-scented oil then, along with the poached pasta, tossed with roasted almonds and chickpeas softened in a rosemary, garlic, and bay-scented bath. It is a beauty, the crisp, garlic-scented pasta against the soft, delicate ribbons of it with the mealy, nutty little chickpeas and the bitter almonds stitching them together into a plateful of fantasy conjured from homey stuffs.

A smoky char permeates the potatoes and the onions and this, fusing with the brininess of the capers and olives and anchovies, gives up luscious flavors.

Orecchiette—little ears—are a pasta made from grano duro, or semolina, and served often with a rough sauce of cima di rape, the bitter leaves of a variety of Italian turnip not always available in America. Do not mistake them for young broccoli, as some do. Should the real thing not be at hand, it is a better business to substitute dandelion or beet or turnip greens or red chard or even to make the sauce only with cauliflower, especially the grassy-green, purply-edged Roman variety.

A gastronomic heirloom of the coast, this is a humble recipe made from the bits and pieces of what was at hand, sometimes eaten as a principal dish or a contorno, a side dish, other times as a sweet. It is still presented— though in dramatically different versions—in cherished places such as Da Gemma in Amalfi. This take, however, is lighter, less vegetal than most of those with which we’ve been presented, the trick being the absolute thinness of the eggplant slices. This enables them to blend better with the other components, all of them then settling down together into a nicely married sort of flavor and texture. More eccentric than it is bizarre, this version of the ancestral dish turns out to be quite luscious.

Six hundred years before Christ, the Greeks raised up a grand colony on the verges of the Mar Tirreno, dedicating it to Poseidon. Now known as Paestum, the whole cadence of life, as it was then and there, sits in high relief, a phenomenal diorama, traceable, floating, gleaming. The great temples, barely wounded and without a haunting, invite one inside to stay among the rests of old dreams, to race among the open pathways between them. A cordial parish, a fair Camelot, it seems, while one sits awhile on the thick tufts of grass inside the Temple of Neptune, having slipped under the easy gate to watch the sunrise, to collect armfuls of the tall, thin spears of asparagus that grow wild, treasures to take back to Alfonso to cook for lunch. He, having spent the morning gathering clams, combined the collected booty with fusilli di Felitto—beautiful pasta, hand-rolled then wound, one string at a time, around the traditional, corkscrew-shaped wires, used and prized like jewels, by the women of the nearby village of Felitto. Dishes that marry wild vegetables with sea or shellfish are typical of the Cilentini, they thinking it a thing natural to prepare their suppers with stuffs foraged from woods that fall down to the sea.

In the autumn, as schools of swordfish swam south into the Bay of Policastro, the fishermen of the Cilento were often their conquerors, luring the great fish with oil-soaked bread and hauling them up from the sea—porting them like vanquished kings, high atop their heads up the steep paths from the water—to their camps to roast them or smoke them over smoldering fires of pine and olive and citrus woods. Sometimes, the Cilentini cured the fish under salt and foraged grasses and spiceberries, dousing the flesh with their own rough-made spirits. Served a dish such as this, one could think it the offering of some cultivated chef, yet, then and there, it was nothing more than the improvised handiwork of hungry men.

Alfonso cooks a dish much like this one, invented epochs ago by the Cilentini during the vendemmia—the harvest of the wine grapes. He tells the story of the fishermen who were also winemakers, who, after depositing the daily winemaking debris into the sea, set out their shore lines, much as they did every other evening. Serendipitously, they lured an abundance of fat, pewtery sea bass—branzino—the fish bewitched by the fermenting perfumes of the grape skins and seeds. The Cilentini then roasted the fish who’d fed on the grape must over cuttings from the vines. The flesh of the fish was scented, through and through, with essences of grape. Legend has it that the dish made voluptuaries of all who ate it. Stuffing the fish with cooked grapes likely gives it an even more luxurious savor than that taken on by his must-eating ancestors.

One must have a lemon tree or some harmonious acquaintance with someone who has a lemon tree, know a florist or a fruit seller who can procure untreated lemon leaves, or one can let go the idea of the lemon leaves and trump up alternate ones, such as those pulled from a grapevine or a chestnut tree. Lacking all of these, one must know how wonderful the dish will be with no leaves at all, just for grilling the fat prawns, beheaded but with their tails intact, over a good wood fire, then heaving them, all hot and sputtering, into an anise-perfumed bath. Though the lemon leaves, if they’re good and fresh, do add some flavor and keep the prawns moist during the roast, they are, in the end, only a pretty and clever sort of packaging.