Chalkboard diagramme 1), What you think you’ll want to learn before coming.
It’s often, ‘to learn to make pasta’, or ‘to pick up a few new recipes’. Or even, ‘to not feel foolish when talking about wine’.
Chalkboard diagramme 2) is what you’ll actually learn here. And while much depends on which class you take, one thing is certain: you’ll learn through context.
Come to ‘pick up a few recipes’, and you’ll learn how to walk into any fish market in the world and cook everything on the slab, and without a single recipe or even needing to know the names of any of it.
You’ll begin to stroll through a farmers markets, collecting some of everything for the pot. You’ll learn to see wild field chicory not as just an alternative to spinach, but as 400 years of civil disobedience, of the poor sticking it to the nobility. And that why it’s one of the healthiest foods on earth (for non ruminates, the secret lies in the cellulose).
Come to ‘learn to make pasta’, and you’ll learn how the history of grain, and the validity of the ‘beer before bread’, argument in regards in human civilisation.
Come for the week and you’ll make a different pasta shape every meal, all of them local, all of them made from a historical mixture of grains so low in their glycemic index that many of its calories are actually metabolised in the very digestion process.
But that won’t be why you eat it, nor why you teach your friends and family to make it. (Hint: the secret lies in, well, that you just love it).
Come to learn, ‘how to feel less foolish about wine’, and you’ll begin to see the Italian south as the most compelling wine region in the world today, paradoxically both ancient, and technologically hyper modern.
You’ll learn to see the Salento as one giant tongue of limestone composed of what’s left of millions of years of stacked mussel and clam shells. And that what that does to our nationally-adored pinks is nothing short of magical.
You’ll learn why one of Southern Italy’s great yet underpriced wines was secretly sold for Barolo and Barbaresco for generations, and how the world of modern banking changed that, even in the most recent vintages.
Our wine class motto: teach deeply, pour generously.
Or maybe you think you’re coming to to learn how to make our annual tomato sauce or our excellent extra virgin at the castle. What you’ll take away is how to critically taste olive oil, to know how to avoid being swindled.
You’ll learn about the role of the incandescent light bulb, and how it changed this part of Italy forever.
You’ll learn that it’s not only that the Mediterranean eats olive oil but that the civilisations were based on it.
And that learning how to treat it right in the kitchen might just be the most important thing that you didn’t know.
Come for any class you’d like. What you’ll take away will be more beautiful, useful and profound than you had imagined.
