Why Italians Love to Talk About Food (50 page)

The tableland of Puglia is Italy's granary. Here, 800,000 tons of durum wheat, 600,000 tons of tomatoes, 500,000 tons of table grapes, 300,000 tons of olive oil, and 200,000 tons of artichokes are produced each year.

The land is flat, crops grow with ease, and the climate is good, but it is not Campania: water is hopelessly scarce in Puglia. Neither the oil nor the wine produced here are of the highest quality. In exchange, however, they are abundant. Thirty-three percent of the entire national olive oil production and 30 percent of all of Italy's wine production is concentrated in Puglia. The low cost of local agricultural production is also due to the abundant supply of cheap labor, often illegal, coming from North Africa. These seasonal workers cultivate all kinds of fruits and vegetables in the flat, irrigated fields: tomatoes, zucchini, broccoli, peppers, potatoes, spinach, eggplant, cauliflower, fennel, chicory, kale (
cavolo nero
), capers, figs, almonds, catalogna chicory, mulberries (a specialty of Oria), lettuce, and legumes (fava beans, lentils, white beans). Puglia exports sun-dried tomatoes, a typical product of Ostuni and Fasano.

Oats are also grown here. The local wheat is an excellent ingredient for the production of pasta, so pasta and bread are at the forefront in Puglia's cuisine. Toppings for pasta can be meatless or meat-based (beef and horse) sauces, with tomatoes, goat cheese, and any kind of vegetable, even potatoes.

 

The landscape of Puglia is characterized by severe silhouettes of farms with high stone walls, formerly a defense against brigands and marauders. Normans, Moors, and pirates passed through this land. At the center of the farm stood (we cannot say “rose,” since for security reasons the locals always tended to build structures that were not very high) the tower that housed the rooms of the landowners, more like a fortified stronghold than a dwelling in the common meaning of the term. The proprietors' tower was surrounded by the farmers' houses, stables, oil presses, granaries, cellars, and chapels. A moat ran all around the citadel. Today, many of these complexes have been restored, rebuilt, and turned into luxury hotels.

In addition to farms, orchards abound in the rural landscape of Puglia, laid out all around the city. Small farming towns were mainly designed around a radial type of plan, in order to facilitate entry and exit from the town (whereas military towns, from ancient Roman towns to St. Petersburg, were usually built on a chessboard plan, as a network of
cardones
, cross streets, and
decumani
, longitudinal streets).

No matter how small a given plot of land may be, a place will be found for both olive and almond trees, as well as for the cultivation of legumes. The last, a valuable source of protein, were often a guarantee of survival in times of famine. Until the end of the nineteenth century, the main legumes grown in Puglia were fava beans, chickpeas, and lentils. The twentieth century brought great changes: new plants, such as peas and white beans, became common. Also often present in the diet of Puglia's inhabitants today are puréed broad beans and chicory.

Turnip tops are everywhere, both growing in family gardens outside the city and for sale in large distribution chains. Turnip greens served and still serve as the base for the preeminent Pugliese dish, orecchiette pasta with turnip tops. (The Pugliese eat only the turnip greens that have not flowered: the opposite of the Friulians, who eat only the roots, feeding the leaves to the pigs.) The artichokes here are excellent and have no thorns; Mola's are particularly noteworthy. Recently, a trend of serving
lampascioni
has spread from Puglia into other regions of Italy: this is the common name of the wild bulbs of the species
Muscari comosum
, slightly more bitter than scal-lions, but lately much sought-after for elegant tables, boiled and seasoned with vinegar and olive oil.

 

The third pillar of Puglia's agricultural economy, after wheat and vegetables, is olive oil. The local oil is distinguished from that of Liguria and Tuscany, and from the oil
of the lake region of northern Italy, by its fruitier aroma and higher acidity (that is, a lower quality). Fifteen percent of the world's oil is produced in Puglia. Experts are able to distinguish the taste of each local variety: the one produced in Foggiano, the one that comes from the province of Bari, and the one from the Salento Peninsula (in the provinces of Lecce, Brindisi, and Taranto).

The varieties of oil take their names not from the farms or estates, but from the cities: “oil of Trani,” “oil of Barletta,” etc. This type of designation is very common in Italy, where every city boasts its own gastronomic emblem, but it is particularly characteristic of Puglia, where the majority of the land is cultivated by city farmers, who in the evening return within the stone walls of their town.

The most famous “oil cities” are Giovinazzo, Molfetta, Bisceglie, Trani, Barletta, Canosa di Puglia, Andria, Castel del Monte, Ruvo di Puglia, Gioia del Colle, and Bitetto, all adorned with splendid Romanesque cathedrals (much more rarely, Gothic, as in Ostuni), and often with Norman castles.

The fourth pillar of Puglia's cuisine includes all the products of the sea. In the waters of the Adriatic, small fish are caught with nets and larger ones with harpoons, while in the Mar Piccolo of Taranto (an inlet of the Ionian Sea), colonies of oysters and mussels are farmed.

 

The towns of Puglia are rich in history: although the twentieth century has changed them, their old facade is still recognizable. In Barletta, Bitonto, Monopoli, and Polignano a Mare, centuries of poverty can be felt, as well as the memory of ancient Greece. Puglia (its southern part, Salento, with the city of Taranto, the ancient and powerful Tarentum) was part of Magna Graecia. Saracen lookout towers have remained from the period of Arab domination (eighth and ninth centuries), and their appearance has not changed since the time the Arabs fought Byzantium for control of this territory. The Angevins and the Aragons also left their mark on the local cuisine and dialect. In Faeto and in Celle di San Vito, a Franco-Provençal language is still used here and there today, having survived for a good eight hundred years, since the time of the Angevin conquest.

The domination of the Holy Roman Empire (starting in 1043) had a decisive influence on the development of Puglia's culture. At the beginning of the thirteenth century Frederick II of Hohenstaufen erected eight castles in Puglia, the most famous of which is the esoteric Castel del Monte; its construction is based entirely on occult
codes, which experts are still trying to decipher. The castle looms in a remote, unpopulated moor, isolated from towns and cities. Other castles of Frederick's were also established in unusual places.

We have already encountered this extraordinary sovereign in Campania and heard mention of his eccentric urban planning philosophy in Abruzzo. Frederick did not build his castles as residences in a given area or for military purposes, but out of capricious personal choice, and he designed them exclusively for himself and his courtiers. Some said that Frederick chose his locations by following the spring and autumn migratory patterns of birds. Others thought this habit of bird-watching allowed Frederick to hunt more easily. Still others said that, by observing the birds' routes, he was trying to understand the unique structure of the world and of space.

Whatever the case, Frederick actually composed a treatise on the art of hunting that has come down to us today:
De arte venandi cum avibus
(The art of falconry). In calculating the routes of birds, Frederick took into account the celestial equator, the earth's axis, and the inclination of the sun's rays on the days of the spring and fall equinox. Castel del Monte, with its exacting geometric structure, is reminiscent of a calculus workshop. The scholar Aldo Tavolaro has reconstructed several designs of Frederick's, showing that the shadows projected by a vertical shaft (a gnomon) fixed to a certain point on the roof of the castle, depending on the time and day, form precise lines that confirm the emperor's zodiac calculations and measurements.

The unusual Norman castles, designed for aristocrats and astronomers, are found alongside some unique dwellings in the region of Puglia, the trulli. It seems incredible that people actually lived in these ancient domelike constructions, conical in shape, with no windows and a ventilation opening on top. But even more surprising is that these wigwamlike dwellings are still lived in today, in the villages of Polignano a Mare, Monopoli, Noci, Castellana Grotte, and especially in Alberobello, which has the largest complex of trulli, listed among the monuments declared by UNESCO as World Heritage Sites. Alberobello is a town made up entirely of rather large trulli, with hundreds of whitewashed cones that attract crowds of tourists. The trulli are rented to tourists in the summer, or transformed into luxury hotels. This type of dwelling was invented in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries, during the Spanish maladministration of Puglia, but spread to numerous towns in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Apparently the windowless houses were designed specifically to avoid the payment of taxes, since the various rulers of the occupants, Spanish as well as Bourbon, imposed a tax on every window.

Tourists who are architecture enthusiasts are also interested in the so-called
trappeti
, the ancient olive presses that are frequently set belowground in Puglia to protect the oil from harmful temperature fluctuations. Sheltered in caves of karstic rock with only one way in, these presses were protected from heat and from the cold winter wind, while the rock walls of the cave, strong and thick, cushioned the vibrations of the grindstones. The olives were poured into natural hollows in the rock, and the oil flowed along the natural grooves of the cave: the combination of nature and human labor was perfect. More than thirty of these underground presses have been preserved in the area of Gallipoli alone.

The main varieties of Pugliese olives are Cerignola (also called Belle of Cerignola) and Coratine. The first are common, especially in the southern area of the province of Foggia. The cultivation of these olives seems to have been introduced around 1400 by Spain. They can be either green or black and have a very substantial pulp; the weight of each olive varies from eleven to eighteen grams. The Coratine olives take their name from the town of Corato, but their very ancient origin is unknown. They are grown in the provinces of Bari and Foggia, but also in other areas outside Puglia. These olives are particularly rich in antioxidants (polyphenols); elongated and slightly asymmetrical, they weigh around four grams.

 

Wild landscape is still preserved in Puglia, and it comes together uniquely with more domesticated nature. This marriage is reflected in the distinctiveness of the local food. The cuisine of Puglia prefers raw products over processed ones. Bypassing oil production, the farmers and laborers of Puglia gladly eat their olives alone with bread. And what a bread! The bread of Altamura! Unlike in northern Italy, where they turn out crusty rolls that are delicious but stale in a day, the Pugliese make enormous round loaves intended to last as long as a month.

The tendency to eat unprocessed food is especially evident in the consumption of raw fish. In fish markets, for example, it is customary to set out plates of raw shrimp, cuttlefish, and mussels for customers who are waiting, to be eaten on the spot with a squirt of lemon. On the table of a Pugliese restaurant, as in Portugal, you will find raw
mazzancolle
(a type of prawn); raw octopus, freshly caught and vigorously clubbed on the stone pier; herring; sea urchins; starfish; and tellins (cockles). The fish (for example, mullet from the reef of Polignano) end up on the grill, but they don't stay there longer than ten minutes or so. Obviously, such eating habits would be unthinkable
without a confidence in the excellent quality of the ingredients. In Puglia, there is no need to worry: the quality of its fishing and fish farming is recognized worldwide, and the water of Puglia's coasts, in the area where the Adriatic Sea and the Ionian Sea merge, is of a rare clarity.