la mia taieddhra: famous dish of mussels, potatoes and courgettes

I’m going to get hate mail on this one. Drive bys with rotten fruit. Perhaps Molotov’s through my front windows. If I had children, larger kids would pull their braids and push them down into the gravel. Folks would kick my puppy, if I had one. Cartoonists and late night television hosts are going to use me as the butt of their jokes. My friends’ wives will stop accepting my handmade pastries, their top lips peeling off their teeth in barely-hidden disgust. Local officials are going to ‘register’ me. Nope, this one is going to get messy.

But I’m going to post this anyway, no matter the mob that forms at my front door, their soily pitchforks shaken in rage. Here is my recipe for Taieddhra, a dish so entrenched in the cooking of the Salento, that folks not only disagree on how you make it, we can’t even decide what to call it.

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