aprile duemilaventi

Silvestro's So Italy: April 2020

Out of troubled times comes new ideas. Read more below.

Table of Contents for the Newsletter Magazine

We’ve started a magazine. Well, not a magazine but something bigger than a blog but smaller than a newspaper. Somewhere in between. What makes this stand out though is that all of this is focused on you and how to help you get the most out of Southern Italy when you visit.

My Favourite place in Lecce, Puglia
my new favourite place in southern italy.

At least once a year I take my favourite walk, from Trapani (one of Italy’s best cities) to Erice, both on the northwest corner on the island of Sicily. It takes about 5 hours and it’s all uphill but like all great walks in Sicily, seeing the land and sea below always seems to make everyone feel more noble. I’ve been doing the walk for 30 years now and while both cities have had ebbs and flows (Trapani is influenced by the opening and closing of minor airports and those that arrive by boat, and Erice is now considered a spiritual home of molecular gastronomy). That this part of the island is also home the world’s best pasta dish and many of my favourite white wines makes coming down each time almost painless.

New Films from AwaitingTable.com

To streamline my filmmaking skills (and there are a lot of skills to learn) I’ve been making a series of short films here during the quarantine. You might find these odd but keep in mind that I’ve been locked into the school by myself for a month already. If you have some time to kill it would mean a lot to us if you would subscribe to our YouTube channel and leave ‘likes’ and comments on as many videos as you care to watch (most are very short).

We’re going to be launching a free live weekly web-based wine lesson and tasting but we need to get 1,000 followers to be able to host it on YouTube Live. Your comments and subscriptions (free) will really help us arrive at those numbers. (Comments can be a single word and in general, short, simple comments have value much more than poetry never posted.

If you like what we do and you like these little films please leave a ‘like’ and a comment on our YouTube page. It affects Google and it really helps others see them.

Three Books

Encyclopedia of Jewish Food: Books We are Reading

As I’ll be spending Easter alone this year I decided to cook a Jewish version of it, just to post to our Facebook group dedicated to The Jewish Cooking of Southern Italy. We’ll be offering the Jewish course again in 2021 (the 2021 calendar is already posted). While most of the dishes satisfy the same way that most Mediterranean food does- lots of sun and olive oil- it’s the presence of so much vinegar that jumps out to modern tastes (a sort of quick pickling, so as not to have to cook on the Sabbath).

Hybrids like us
Every month we’ll hear from those that have lived large parts of their lives in two different countries, one of them, Italy. Some moved here long ago, others moved away long ago.  What can we learn about life from those have lived two versions of it?

Elizabeth Minchilli.



The questions:
Do you think of yourself as an expat or an immigrant? What’s the difference for you?

Neither. I consider myself equally Italian and American. 

In which ways do you feel foreign when in Italy?

I don’t really feel foreign in Italy. I’ve lived here for almost all of my life, and so feel very much Italian. 

In which ways do you feel foreign in your other country?
At this point I feel like Italy is my home. I’ve lived here for most of my life, and when in America I feel American, but like a tourist. 

What would we be surprised about in regards to your average work day?Mmm..I think I share so much on Instagram stories that it would be very hard to surprise anyone about anything I do. It’s all out there!

What does one country just not grasp about the other? What concepts are just too foreign to be embraced?
I think the concept of time is quite different between Italy and the USA. But that has more to do with work culture, which I think Italians have a much healthier attitude about. 

Which Italian wine do you drink the most? Which non-Italian wine do you drink most?

The kind that’s called gin and that is my martini every night. 

What are you currently working on?
I’m currently planning week long tours to Emilia Romagna and to Abruzzo, and hope to add other ‘off the beaten track’ regions soon. So doing lots of research. Which in my case means pretty much eating my way through Italy.

Elizabeth Minchilli is the author of 9 books on the joys of Italian life. Her latest book, The Italian Table, was published by Rizzoli in March 2019. Her other books include Eating My Way Through Italy, (St. Martins 2018( and  Eating Rome: Living the Good Life in the Eternal City (St. Martins 2015). Minchilli’s passion for Italy led her from her native United States, where she studied architectural history, to Italy in 1987. She writes on food, travel and culture on her blog, Elizabeth Minchilli in Rome, as well as her best-selling app, Eat Italy.  Elizabeth also leads delicious food tours in Rome and the rest of Italy. Elizabeth is active on all social media platforms including Instagram and YouTube where several of her videos have gone viral. 

What to put in your mouth
Mediterranean Diet Salento

For every day during the quarantine (which many here in Italy have taken to writing ‘quarentena’ in italian like this:’40tena’, and working from home is now called ‘lo smart working’), I’ve had some version of this improvised soup. Soften an onion in a little olive oil, wilt some greens, a little piece of red chilli, a few pieces of leftover bread, simmer until soft, finish with raw oil. Here in the Salento the dish is often called ‘pancotto’, or ‘cooked bread’, but it’s my favourite kind of southern food. Simple and intense.

Week Long Cooking Class Lecce

We’ve had to cancel all our classes until at least September. It has been the hardest thing I’ve ever been through, on just about every level. So without any classes we’re dedicating ourselves full-time to the television show about Southern Italian wine. By ‘we’, of course I mean me and Anna (who has agreed to be my cameraman for the shots in which I need to appear).

We’ve started a crowdfunding to cover production costs, her salary and my profoundly reduced living expenses until cooking classes start up again.

If you think you’d like to see the show when it’s finished you can pre-purchase it now, and that money will go to help us produce it. But we’re also seeking armchair travellers that want to be more interactive in the project.

Stop in to learn more. And leave comments and share it on your social media platforms if you can’t contribute. There are many ways to help, not all of them are financial.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/terronia-the-television-programme/x/23227015#/

Film making Projects on South Italy and it's Wine, Food & Culture

Stay safe

Silvestro

Lecce

Helpful links

To our bicycle courses at the castle.

To our new How to eat and drink to be 100

Our The Jewish Cooking of Southern Italy

To our extra virgin course, Olive you!

To our classic Lecce course (the one that started in all, 17 years ago)

To our homepage

Italy's Best Cooking School in News

The Awaiting Table Cookery School in Lecce, Italy, is Puglia’s oldest cooking school, offering 12 different culinary courses based on bicycling the /food /wine of Puglia, Southern Italian wine, The Jewish Cooking of Southern Italy, Mediterranean fish, The Mediterranean Diet, home canning and How To Eat and Drink to be 100. Choose from a day, evening and week-long courses in either of our two locations- in our owner’s home in the historic centre of Lecce, or at the baron’s castle, an hour south of Lecce. Learn to make the fresh pasta of Puglia, take a class on the wine from Sicily, Calabria, Basilicata and Puglia. Or learn how to add years to your life through a healthy mix of life-extending, sun drenched ingredients.

Follow us on any social media platform and certainly drop us an email, just to say ‘ciao’!

Don’t see a course or a date that you’d like? Send us an email. We’d be happy to hear from you!

Silvestro Silvestori

Food & Wine: Your Guide to the South Italy & Sicily

Your Guide to South Italy Food & Wine
Silvestro's So Italy Blog

Strange times here in Italy.

Firstly, we’re fine. Everyone we know is fine. Yes, it’s odd to no longer kiss socially and that everyone needs to work and study from home for a few weeks but like most things in the post-social media age, there is a lot of reactionary panic that isn’t very helpful. I don’t want to wreck the surprise though, as you’ll likely be doing the same soon yourself. We’re concentrating on our TV show, reading, writing and filming. We appreciate all the sympathetic messages of solidarity but for 99.999999 percent of the population here in Italy, this is just one long snow day.

Now, onto our new newsletter….

Food and Wine Magazine of Italy

We’ve started an online magazine. Well, not a magazine but something bigger than a blog but smaller than a newspaper. Somewhere in between. What makes this stand out though is that all of this is focused on your needs and desires and how to help you get the most out of Southern Italy. Read on each month to learn more about Puglia, and the rest of Southern Italy. And please forward this onto your food and wine loving friends.

Favourite Places in Italy
Each month you’ll learn about a new part of the south that merits your attention.

Venosa. Easily one of Basilicata’s prettiest cities. Here in Italy the town is mostly known as the birthplace of Horace, the Roman era poet. To wine lovers it’s known as one of the five hundred-year old Albanian communities in the mountains of Basilicata (the region is most often still referred to by its old name here in Italy, Lucania). Its cuisine is decidedly mountain food, with lots of air-cured pork, lamb and of course l’aglianico, what just might be Southern Italy’s most impressive red wine grape. I’m there filming a few times a month this year and I always end up tacking on time just to walk the stone city. You will too.

New Films on Southern Italy

It’s been a very difficult time here at the school with all the cancellations. Here is a video about that. Plus, pasta.

As always, please ‘like’, subscribe to our YouTube channel and leave a short comment. It really means a lot to us. Thank you.

Three Books
English language books we're reading
English language books we’re reading
For those that have seen our new relaunched website, you likely already know that we’re teaching a new course, How to Eat and Drink to be 100. We’ve teamed up with two longevity experts, Dr Michael Crupain and Dr Michael Roizen, both impressive for their dedication to the research for helping us all live longer lives but doing so with so much joy they both bring from their lives’ work. Dr Crupain and I have been friends for the last 15 years, as he came to the school in our early days. All three of these books were written for laymen, which is why they are so approachable to people like me. All three of these are worth reading.

Every month we’ll hear from those that have lived large parts of their lives in two different countries, one of them, Italy. 

Some moved here long ago, others moved away long ago. What can we learn about life from those have lived two versions of it?

An interview with Chef Stefano Manfredi

An interview with Chef Stefano Manfredi

Hybrids like us. 

Do you think of yourself as an expat or an immigrant?

It changes constantly. I’ve lived in Australia since I was 6 years old. At a certain point my family was offered citizenship. But at that time you had to renounce any other citizenship.

My mother and I refused to give up our Italian passports but my brother and father both became Australians.

So I remained on a permanent resident visa and have kept that status ever since. Even though I know Australia well and have had businesses here for all my working life, I still renew my visa every 5 years.

So to answer the question, technically I’m an expat even though I have been here for over 50 years. 

What’s the difference for you? 

The difference is in how one views oneself at any given time. It’s only in the last 10 years or so that, as my working life as a chef and business owner has slowed down (intentionally), I’ve been spending more time in Italy.

In spending more time there, I’ve found that I’ve connected effortlessly as I’ve made many friends and rediscovered not only the country of my birth but also the Italian parts of me. 

It’s not to say that Australia is more or less important to me – and vice versa with Italy – it’s that I constantly feel both an expat and an immigrant, depending on my circumstance and mood.

In which ways do you feel foreign when in Italy? 

Obviously, there’s the sense that I’m a foreigner when I get behind the wheel of a car in Italy. Australians drive on the left. But that feeling dissipates quickly. I do like driving in Italy.

Perhaps the most striking thing is the labyrinthine nature of the Italian bureaucracy. It takes a lot to navigate.

In which ways do you feel foreign in your other country? 

In all the time I’ve been in Australia, I’ve not gotten used to the lack of celebration in this country. There’s also an under appreciation of the arts, fine craft and beauty and I must give a dishonourable mention for the woeful food and coffee available on the road outside the major cities.

What would we be surprised about in regards to your average work day? 

I don’t have a particularly unusual or surprising workday. Perhaps it would surprise some who have a more structured and delineated day to know that at this point in my career I set my own agenda. 

My days are varied. I generally start after my morning espresso with a long, brisk walk. 

Then it’s emails, reading news and some menu development and writing. 

Gardening takes a good deal of time and a visit to meet with my chefs discussing dishes, ingredients, dough, flour and pizze. 

Visiting markets, suppliers, doing chores and cooking for my daughter and friends takes up the rest of the day. Pretty normal really. 

What does one country just not grasp about the other? 

Australians quite rightly don’t understand the politics in Italy, as a republic is vastly different to a parliamentary constitutional monarchy. The political structure in Australia is easier to navigate than that of Italy.

My Italian friends find Australia over-regulated, especially with a maximum speed limit on highways set at 110kph. They also think that because the continent is large, then Australia is like the USA. It isn’t. Australia has a population of 25 million and the US 330 million. Italy’s population is almost three times that of Australia in a fraction of the area.

What concepts are just too foreign to be embraced? 

Italians don’t get the game of cricket. When you point out that a game can last up to six days, my Italian friends look at me dumbfounded and incredulous.

Australians don’t get the prepayment system in the Italian bar. Their reaction consists of, “But I don’t know what I want.” Also, the concept of differing prices for coffee at the bar and at a table is a mystery.

Which Italian wine do you drink the most? 

I’ve been lucky enough to experience many of the great and ordinary-everyday wines of Italy over the last four decades. I’ve watched Italian wines go from quantity to quality over that time. 

I have many favourites up and down the boot, too numerous to mention, but in the last decade I’ve fallen in love with Sicilian wines like Etna’s reds and whites, the sweet and dry Malvasia whites of the Aeolian Islands, the Nero d’Avola and Frappato of the southeast. I’m also partial to Passito di Pantelleria and the unfortified Marsala of the west of the island. Recently I’ve also been delighted with some of the whites made from the Grillo grape.

Which non-Italian wine do you drink most? 

Once again, because of my work, I’ve had the pleasure of enjoying wines from around the world. Living in Australia has meant that I’ve watched the local winemakers shed their reliance on a handful of French varietals and embrace what the wider world has to offer. 

While I adore South Australian Riesling and Shiraz, Hunter Valley Semillon, Pinot Noir from both the Yarra Valley and Tasmania as well as Chardonnay from Margaret River, I’m excited by the new wines coming from Tempranillo, Vermentino, Nebbiolo in the cooler areas, Nero d’Avola and Aglianico.

What’s your favourite dirty word or insult in each language? 

Australian-English: ‘fuck’ is the one I use most but I do like ‘dickhead’ and ‘fuckface’.

Italian: ‘minchia’ or ‘cazzo’, there are lots but these are the ones I use most often.

Which dialect is spoken in heaven? 

Neapolitan, definitely Neapolitan is spoken in heaven.

What are you currently working on?

After writing six books on Italian cuisine, I’m working on a detective novel set between Rome and Sicily. And I’m constantly working on my bread baking.

*Stefano Manfredi is a chef, restaurateur, author of 6 books on Italian cuisine and has been a columnist and written articles for major newspapers and magazines in Australia. He has a coffee brand, Espresso di Manfredi, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. He leads tours to a different part of Italy each year that concentrate on food, wine, art, architecture and gardens.

He lives in Sydney, Australia. 

What to put in your mouth

Each month, these are the things that have us excited.

Amara, Sicilia, Italy
For years I’ve white-knuckled through buying the little bottle on the left here in Puglia, for 28 Euro (375Ml). I love the stuff, which is like a sunnier, bitterer version of Gran Marnier, made on an active volcano in Sicily. (They steep blood orange peels and then blend in mountain herbs of of Etna). Then I was in a large supermarket chain there last October and found a liter and half (1.5Ml) for the same price and bought 6 of them. I’ve had so much of it on Etna over the years that each sip is a little Proustian trip. No, I don’t know where you can find this near you. I promise.

A short essay on the subject of italian food and wine.

A short essay on the subject of food and wine.

The Hair on my Hands.

Not long ago I was walking through a large international airport when I overheard two line cooks talking in an open kitchen.

‘Well, he calls himself a cook but I don’t buy it. Not anymore, anyway. I mean, he’s like, well, he had hairy hands’, said one. 

The other cook just grimaced, completely aware of the implications. 

One of the things that I truly adore about my job is how many worlds it straddles. Italian newspapers and magazines always refer to me as a ‘chef’, not matter how much I insist against it in the actual interviews. (‘Chef’ is often used nowadays erroneously as a complement but it’s really a job title, the head of a professional kitchen, ‘chief’, in French). 

I occasionally teach university courses but I’m not a professor either. Those with tenure are curious about what I do but no one is applying the secret handshake. 

I write for a wine magazine but don’t have any journalistic training (and I’m not a member of the guild of journalists here in Italy, something that angers my friends that are).  When I send the drafts of my articles to my editor in New York I can all but hear him calling his wife to cancel his dinner plans. ‘This is going to need a lot of work’, I can imagine him saying.

Once a month I buy all the cleaning supplies for the school at a large, industrial supplier.  Waiting my turn in line with all the custodians, they never seem to like my answer when I tell them where I work when they ask. Their voices always cut off and their eyes drop to my shoes, which are decidedly not steel-toed.

Industry groups write me to encourage me to enrol into professional wine associations but I can’t because they ask for my employer’s tax number, which I don’t have, as the Italian government sees me as a teacher. (Many argue that ‘sommelier isn’t a nationally-certified title- which I have- but that the word is reserved only for those that head wine programmes in upper end restaurants, which I don’t). I fill in all the boxes on the online applications on the sites but without that last tax number, the forms never even send. 

As a teacher, I rarely if ever cook during our classes. Our school is hands-on for the students, which means ‘hands-off’ for me, and the normally scorched-off hair on the back my hands has grown back over the years. It seems foreign to me when I see it, the hands of someone else somehow grafted on at the end of my own arms. 

I like to think that I’m able to silently slither between all of this occupations, sneaking in the backdoor and just standing around until no one really notices that I shouldn’t really be there. But in my heart I know that I’m a charlatan, an interloper, someone that skims along many professions but that doesn’t really achieve any identify from any of them.

I can’t see the face of the man that the two cooks were referring to but I can certainly visualise his hands, the black bristly sprouts coming out of his knuckles. 

I wish I could meet him. To see if he’s anything like me

Helpful links

To our bicycle courses at the castle.

To our new How to eat and drink to be 100

Our The Jewish Cooking of Southern Italy

To our extra virgin course, Olive you!

To our classic Lecce course (the one that started in all, 17 years ago)

To our homepage

The Awaiting Table Cooking School in International News

The Awaiting Table Cookery School in Lecce, Italy, is Puglia’s oldest cooking school, offering 13 different culinary courses based on bicycling the /food /wine of Puglia, Southern Italian wine, The Jewish Cooking of Southern Italy, Mediterranean fish, The Mediterranean Diet, home canning and How To Eat and Drink to be 100. Choose from a day, evening and week-long courses in either of our two locations- in our owner’s home in the historic centre of Lecce, or at the baron’s castle, an hour south of Lecce. Learn to make the fresh pasta of Puglia, take a class on the wine from Sicily, Calabria, Basilicata and Puglia. Or learn how to add years to your life through a healthy mix of life-extending, sun drenched ingredients.

Follow us on any social media platform and certainly drop us an email, just to say ‘ciao’!

Don’t see a course or a date that you’d like? Send us an email. We’d be happy to hear from you!

Silvestro Silvestori

For All The Lovely Music

‘The twins will need to be fed and in bed by 7 pm, 8 at the latest’, said Saskia upon arrival, ‘and they really don’t like to nap’.

‘Of course’, I said, trying to hide two tremors of culture shock in one sentence, of the difference between Northern and Southern Europe mealtimes, and as a bachelor, what it’s like to raise two 8-year olds.

I had fallen in love with their YouTube channel, a Dutch professor and his librarian wife that had been taking advantage of the early bedtimes to record original music in their living room. With quirky choices of instruments- cardboard-thin ukuleles, glockenspiels and odd, toy organs- their music feels distinctly European but without any specific flavour from anyone one country. And that was just what I wanted.

‘New song. Uploading it now. Named it after the coffee I was drinking at the time’, a message will say. I’ll download it into my editing software and within a few hours there on the screen images will appear of my sweet Emiluccia, Her noisy little engine will be replaced with the sound of rubber mallets striking stainless steel keys and overdubbed strings, the sound file bounced off a satellite, uniting two extremes of Europe without even an audible beep.

So when I decided to make an entire 10-part television show about Southern Italian wine I sent the two a message.

1) Would they like to score it,

2) When are they coming to visit. ‘1)Yes, and 2) in a. month’, were the answers, which was how I ended up eating dinner for a week, about the time I’ve used to standing up from lunch.

As the kids ran sand dunes on the Adriatic coast, we talked music non-stop, from classical to jazz to world to sound tracks, especially those with original music. After they fell asleep, we’d continue, art and music, film and human development, it all bled together, beautifully

And the day before they were to head back, we made this little video together. I dare you to watch it without smiling. Just try.

If you’re interested in the upcoming television show (a 15 month long project) and you’d like to help shape it by becoming a beta tester, respond to this email with ‘beta tester’ as the subject.

The policy on beta-testing is simple.

1) Leave comments, anything you want to say. Could be a thought on wine, on what you see, about what I should include, edit out, etc. You can comment on the pieces or the whole. I’ll filter through these comments and make the show stronger.

2) But also please feel free to ignore each posting: no one’s feelings will be hurt. All that I ask if that you do ignore it, please feel free to do so without the need to give any excuses. Neither of us need feel guilty about the time restraints of modern life.

I’m also self-financing the show so if you’re interested in seeing your name as ‘executive producer’, send me a message.

Otherwise, expect the first few episodes to air in the early autumn. If you’re following us, you’ll hear all about it, every step along the way.

To our calendar
To our youtube channel
To WeTigers youtube channel.