Eating Up Italy: Voyages on a Vespa. Matthew Fort

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СКАЧАТЬ somewhat overshadowing campanile of 1671’.

      I can testify to the quality of the campanile, and, indeed, to the classical elegance and beauty of the outside of San Michele, but of the rest – nothing. Every church I passed that wasn’t being done up with EC grants was shut. I banged on doors. I pushed. I prayed. No good. So, no strange baroque pulpit, no Madonna and Child attributed to Girolamo Santacroce, no stucco work, no bas-reliefs. So much for higher culture.

      But who needs higher culture when agriculture is to hand? Quite by accident, I came across an unheralded market of dazzling variety. Here were broad beans, ready podded, like tiny green opals; fat, busty fennels; early season artichokes piled in spiky ziggurats; boxes of mixed cicorie selvatiche, bitter wild salad leaves; a great log of tuna, its flesh purple/carmine; and tiny red rock mullet, neatly laid out like a pattern in a kaleidoscope.

      The two cheery brothers with blood-stained hands who ran the Macelleria del Mercato treated me to ’nduja vibonese, a local variant on one of the classic pig products of Calabria: a creamy, fiery sausage of pork and peperoncino or chilli, in this case liberally laced with fennel seed. It was eaten, they said, with raw broad beans, bread and wine. One of the brothers then carved me a long, thin slice of zingirole, the brawn of Vibo, from a large bowl, the inside of which was mottled with a blue, green and cream swirled glaze, like sunlight shining through sea water in a rock pool. Curls and whorls of ears, snout and other odds and ends were set in a pale amber jelly. The zingirole had a dainty, delicate flavour and a gently chewy character. They made zingirole only in winter, he explained, when the pigs were in the right condition. It wasn’t suitable for hot weather. This was the last of the season.

      

      The pig has an almost sacred place in the food chain in southern Italy. Pig-loving traditions of Italy go back to the earliest times. The Romans, Martial and Cicero, recorded their partiality for pork products, especially those of Lucania, the modern Basilicata, a little to the north of Vibo; the omnipresent luganica is a descendant of that sausage. Both Norman Douglas in Old Calabria and Carlo Levi in Christ Stopped at Eboli write of the reverence with which pigs were treated, observing how they had the run of villages, and, in many cases, houses as well, until the day of retribution, of course. It was still true in Calabria that pigs enjoyed wide appreciation, even if they didn’t have the freedom of the houses and village streets in the way that they used to.

      In common with most of Italy, Calabria is home to a bewildering diversity of salumi, cured pork products – capocollo, soppressata, ’nduja, ’nnuglia, frittuli, salato, scarafogli and spianata calabrese, to name but a few. These, in turn, generate their own multifarious families through geographical associations. So Spilinga and Poro are famous for their ’nduja, Cosenza for its frittuli, Acri for its salsiccia. Each is made with very express cuts of meat and with very precise techniques, but varies according to local custom in the use of spices, herbs and wine. Invariably, however, all contain chilli in varying quantities.

      The most famous of Calabria’s salumi are capocollo, soppressata and ’nduja. Capocollo is the neck and shoulder of pork, boned out, packed into a pig’s bladder, cured, lightly smoked and then aged for at least one hundred days. It is eaten only as an antipasto, sliced thinly like salami. ’Nduja (apparently ’nudja is the Italianisation of the French andouillette – a reminder that southern Italy was regularly part of greater France) is a paste of pork fat and pork meat infused with sweet and fiery chilli, and other flavourings depending on where it is made. It can be spread on bread or heated up to make a sauce for pasta, typically maccheroni. Soppressata is an altogether more sophisticated number, and I had hopes of meeting up with a maker further north.

      I said goodbye to the cheery butcher brothers. They wished me well and joy with the ’nduja that they had given me to complement the zingirole. A skinned calf's head peered at me mournfully from behind them.

      Beyond Vibo Valentia, astride the coast road, was Pizzo. Scrambling up and down the precipitous side of a hill that eventually dropped vertically into the sea, Pizzo might have been designed by Piranesi and M. C. Escher. The streets and alleys above its piazza formed a maze of vertical disorder. The Vico Minotauro turned off the Via Minotauro; and the Vicolo Minotauro, scarcely wide enough to allow a plump English sightseer to pass with ease, turned off the Vico Minotauro. Stairs and steps and passageways fell up or down, round each corner, opening up a series of microvistas, truncated by the corner of a house, the basement or roof. There were no cars or scooters here. Feet were the only form of transport; and, as I explored, I eavesdropped on the patchwork harmony and disharmony of domestic life, and caught its accompanying smells.

      By any qualitative criteria, Italy is the world centre for ice cream, and Pizzo is its self-declared capital. The rest of the country would certainly dispute this claim, but at Pizzo there was certainly a lot of ice cream packed into a small area. I counted nine bars around the Piazza della Repubblica alone, each of which made its own ranges of ices.

      The history of ice cream, in which we must include granitas and sherbets or sorbets, the Moors’ gift to summer refreshment, is also a long and complicated one, going back to the sixteenth century, and, to be frank, only really of interest to the food historian. The point is that the ice creams in Italy have an intensity and freshness that are foreign to British and American ices, where flavour is sacrificed to sugar, cream and air.

      Angelo Belvedere was something of an ambassador for the ice creams of Pizzo. He gave off an aura not of romance or woolly artisanality but rather of canny commercial nous. He wore a Pepsi baseball cap and a many-pocketed waistcoat. Metal-rimmed spectacles framed shrewd eyes, and he seemed no stranger to the interview – ‘I am the grandson of the founder of the Gelateria Belvedere, which was established in 1901. My grandfather was un gentiluomo molto elegante – an elegant gentleman.’ Grandfather Belvedere had a sharp nose for business opportunities as well.

      ‘My grandmother started making the ice creams for family weddings, birthdays and christenings. She used snow packed into blocks to freeze the ice creams. It was very hard work.’ Then came technology, with freezing salt and a hand-cranked freezer. Her husband noticed that locals gathered in the Piazza della Repubblica on high days and holidays to listen to a brass band, sweltering in their respectable suits in the sun. ‘So he set up a kiosk on the corner of the piazza, and my grandmother, she made more ice creams and they became famous. I followed them and now my sons work the kiosk and the café.’

      The latest generation of the Belvedere family used modern technology as astutely as their ancestors. The ice creams were made in small batches of a few litres at a time, and contained only fresh fruit and high-quality flavourings. I rolled my tongue up and over a hummock of jade-green pistachio and glossy, dark mahogany chocolate held in a cone. The texture was smooth and lusciously creamy, the pistachio more intense and perfumed than any nut, the chocolate powerful, with a clean, penetrating bite.

      ‘Every producer has his own particular way of doing things,’ said Angelo, ‘but most of them use an industrial ice cream base as a stabilising agent, and add eggs and milk to that.’ He was vague about exact proportions. ‘They vary according to which ice cream you want to make. I am not going to tell you exactly what we do. There are too many sharks out there,’ and his eyes glittered.

      One of Angelo Belvedere’s sons was manning the kiosk. He told me that the reason the gelaterias were so consistently good here was that they were family businesses. In Palermo or Reggio, he said, gelaterias change hands every ten years or so and traditional recipes are lost in the process.

      ‘My family is an example of continuity,’ he went on. ‘I studied law in Messina, but in the end I came back to work here. I could never have been a lawyer. I’m an ice-cream man.’ He peered down at the ice creams lined up, brilliant and glistening, in their metal trays in the freezer display – cioccolato, nocciola, croccantino, stracciatella, zuppa inglese, cioccoriso, caffè, nutella, dolcelatte, fiordilatte, pistacchio, spagnola, melone, СКАЧАТЬ