Australia loves the Salento and Puglia!
Recently there has a been a lot of literary interest in the food of the Salento, and in Puglia in general: I'll be publishing two books on the subject in the next two months. And last week a few Australian friends came by to take...
video: cooking in candle light in a castle in Italy.
We've been making a lot of videos lately. Here is one made for Italian television. It's the week of San Valentino, when we cook each dinner by candle light. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mI3P_Pkr80&feature=youtu.be If you want to get a hold of us, just respond to this email. We'd love to...
la rapa 'nfucata: suffocated turnip tops (SIC) or wilted rapini
It is perhaps the oddest part of my job as the owner of a cooking school in Italy that I'm asked so often for the recipes for the food of the Salento by those that have never even been to the school (departing students receive...
fae e cicureddhe (fave e cicoria: broad beans and chicory)
'OK, Angela, tell me how you make this dish', I say as we walk Lecce's market together, her cheeks plummy from the recent cold. 'OK. First you select a perfect chicory, this one is a real looker', she says. She tucks the vegetable beneath her arm...
….overheard at this year's olive harvest in the deep Salento…..
(Translated from dialect- and occasionally Italian- late November 2012) 'It's not like it used to be, now that the machines arrived. When I was a boy, we made honest oil, with brooms and fiscoli (the jute mats still occasionally used in the production of virgin and...
stop to pickle the flowers: hyacinth bulbs in the Salento
Come San Martino each year, we take to the castle, turning the holiday into something approaching a food festival. We roast our daily vegetables, the sea bass for lunch and the local DOP rabbits for dinner. We simmer legumes in our earthenware vessels, so that...
pane nella pignata: bread baked in earthenware
For Christmas this year I was given a massive series of books dedicated to molecular gastronomy, which I read over the course of four days, 15 hours a day. The scholarship alone positions the books as unlike anything ever written before, as if NASA and...
carciofi salentini: salentine artichokes
If you take the train from Roma to Lecce, just about everything you see the second half of the trip will be the gray-green shaggy plants that flash on the other side of the train window. Field after field after field. For hours. And in fact, here in the Salento come late January each year, we find artichokes everywhere: the markets, sold in intersections from the backs of trucks, but no where more so that at the table, already prepared.
If you don’t know how to do that, well, here’s how:
Artichokes rust very quickly, so pour yourself a pot of tea or open a bottle of wine and then toss a few cut lemons into your largest bowl of water.
From the point, you cut the artichoke about half way up, right in half. Then you start to peel away all the course leaves. Once you arrive at the softer leaves, you can clean it up with a knife, rounding any rough edges. Then you place that in the lemon water. They actual technique is easy. It’s staying entertained that’s the trick.
A good gossipy friend is the best, but if she has to work, consider Italian radio and ‘French Breakfast tea’ your companions.
li lampascioni: hyacinth bulbs
It used to be that when students booked, I'd ask them what they expected to find with regards to the food of the Salento. The initial answers back were always vague but every once in a while someone would put the foreign take on Italian...
la cicoria lessa: boiled chicory
'So tell me, what is the biggest surprise about your job to those that don't work in the field', is the question I always ask when stumped for a good question at a dinner party, whenever there is painful lull. I like the question because...
- 1
- 2
