Silvestro’s So. Italy

Norway lobsters is what the books call them. The English[...]

This is the first part in a series of posts dedicated to fish and fish cookery, and especially how it's done here in the Salento, the thin slice of gorgeous land dangling out into the middle of the seas that make up the Mediterranean. Like you, I had always tended to fall back on a handful of recipes, virtually neglecting the rest of the monger's case. This summer, all of that is going to change.

No pasta in all of Italy is harder to make. As a teacher, I push them back later into the week, introducing the easier shapes first. This cuts down on the frustration that usually accompanies learning how to make le orecchiette, nearly always dictating a rich, Rococo-like stream of blasphemy, free-styling profanity featuring donkeys and broomsticks, followed by the tearing of one's own hair and garments.

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.

Like so much food preparation here in Southern Italy, this is a technique more than a recipe, a way of thinking about ingredients more than it is about a way of cooking.

Great wine, no barrel.

That's what a good Primitivo di Manduria can offer, and Fino's is that, plus. At 16.5 percent alcohol, it's a marching bass drum of a wine, yet perfectly balanced between acids (not easy to do, as with the sun's heat, the acid tends to fall away rather quickly) and still youngish tannins (this, the 2007).

And this lack of sweet sweets is true of the Salento as well, although every once in a while, a holiday will roll around and someone will offer you a piece of la cupeta, the dialectical version of il croccante, an almond brittle so sweet that 10-year olds and humming birds would even reject it for being too sweet.