Eating Up Italy: Voyages on a Vespa. Matthew Fort

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      After Pizzo, I turned inland, vaguely following the erratic course of Garibaldi’s progress northwards through the foothills of the Sila, the next range north of the Aspromonte. The landscape became less dramatic and savage than that further south, more classical than pagan, more wooded than forested, more Lake District than Highlands. Rock roses, yellow brimstone butterflies, irises, ox-eye daisies, vetch, broom, borage and knapweed thickly populated the verges.

      Not far from Pianapoli, well off the beaten track and some way down an unbeaten one, I found La Carolee. The house stood on the edge of a sharp escarpment, looking out over voluptuous, tree-covered hills. Pinky terracotta new paint notwithstanding, it was formidable, square, with a round tower at one corner and a courtyard at its centre. It had a squat, purposeful presence. It also had a squat, purposeful past, having been built as a kind of fortified manor house, to be defended against the bandits who roamed the countryside in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

      Carolee was a local dialect name for a variety of olive that grew in profusion in these hills, and the house had been named after it. A few years ago, Armando Gaetano had bought the estate from the Catholic Church, restored it, and turned it over to organic production to provide olives for the family frantoio – oil mill – not far away. The nominal owner might have been Armando, but responsibility was shared by the whole family, with his son, Federico, running the estate, and his wife, Maria, a small, elegant, birdlike woman, and Federico’s handsome wife, also Maria, sharing cooking duties and other jobs.

      Federico Gaetano was a stocky young man, with soft brown eyes and thinning hair, the curve of his cheeks carrying the blue-black bloom of perpetual stubble. He led me away among the trees, wading knee-deep through lupins and beans mixed with ox-eye daisies, buttercups and clovers, all in full flower beneath the trees, a thick shag-pile of vegetation enamelled with colours. These would be ploughed back into the earth in the fullness of time, he explained, to fix nitrogen in the soil and so provide natural fertiliser.

      To anyone used to the chemical blitzkrieg methods of modern farming, the constraints of organic production seemed to require a disproportionate amount of trouble and ingenuity, but that was the way, said Federico, ‘to respect the integrity of the soil and the integrity of nature’. It was difficult to know whether this was simply an article of marketing faith or a declaration of a more profound conversion to the organic way. Either way, organic methods at La Carolee produced superb olive oil, rich, spicy, deep, dandelion-gold, which they could sell at a premium. High-mindedness had a sharp commercial edge.

      There are various grades of olive oil: extra vergine, the first oil from the press, which, according to Italian regulations, has to have a level of oleic acid of less than 1.2 per cent; the less fine vergine, which is made from olives that have been simply pressed, but which may have a slightly higher level of acidity – 2 per cent; straight olio d’uliva, a blend made by heating pressed olives, which helps extraction but affects the chemical balance in the oil, pressing them again and chemically treating the oil to lower the acidity; and finally a whole range of lesser grades of olive oil mixed with vegetable oils.

      The winter of 1985 was the worst in living memory for olive producers. Of twenty-two million olive trees, seventeen million froze where they grew. Many died (although olive trees have almost miraculous powers of regeneration). Oil production dropped by 40 per cent. However, the Italians are the most pragmatic of people. Faced with a shortfall in production, they set about reducing the damage in terms of income.

      To the hierarchy of oleic purity, the Italians, led by the thrifty Tuscans, began adding refinements. First came the single-estate oils in fancy bottles. Then came single-estate, single olive varietal oils. Then came, well, the whole panoply of food snobbery and marketing legerdemain. Since then, of course, olive oil has become one of the commonplaces of modern life. It is a culinary essential and fashion accessory. The bottle in the bourgeois kitchen is as socially defining as Nike, Nokia, Prada and Porsche. The distillation of Mediterranean sunshine and culture, olive oil occupies a central place in cultural iconography far removed from its peasant origins.

      Yet, by an ironic quirk of nature, it is made in the depths of winter, between the end of October and the beginning of March. In May there wasn’t much for me to look at, except for the high drama of the olive blossom slowly turning into olives.

      But olive oil production was not the only business at La Carolee. It was an azienda agriturismo, a farm or agricultural estate licensed to take in tourists or pilgrims like myself, or play host to vast family parties who came out for lunch and dinner on Saturday and Sunday. And lunch was not quite the modest affair that I was used to in England, and made me wonder why the British are so obsessed with the cooking of Tuscany and Umbria, which seemed limited and boring compared to the food of Calabria.

      Lunch at La Carolee started off with multifarious antipasti – crocchette di patate (potato croquettes), le braciole di carne e melanzane (meat and aubergine fritters), zucchini (courgette) fritters, mozzarella, dried tomatoes with anchovies inside them, melanzane sott’olio and soppressata. It moved on to a primo piatto of spaghetti con ’nduja, risotto con asparagi selvatici, and involtini di melanzane – Swiss rolls of melanzane stuffed with pasta and baked; before we came to spezzatino di capretto, bits and bobs of kids’ intestines, with broad beans and peas braised in a special crock in the embers of a fire; after which there was pecorino ‘da vero’ – authentic pecorino; with pastiera and strawberries by way of a finisher. All this was conjured up out of a substantial domestic kitchen equipped with the odd piece of professional gadgetry, and organised with beady-eyed attention by Federico’s mother, assisted by her daughter-in-law and a rolling cast of local ladies.

      In its way, this meal summed up the nature of everything I had eaten so far. From my perspective, the food had a variety, directness and intensity that was as refreshing as it was novel. In reality, though, it was the food of poverty, forthright and filling. It wasn’t that long ago, as Federico had explained, that people might have eaten prime meat only twice a year, at Christmas and Easter. So dishes were designed to make the most of whatever was to hand in a particular season, to stretch things, to make the most of the most humble ingredients – by mincing meats, creating endless variations on vegetables, by using offal and wild plants – to waste nothing, to create variety and interest by using powerful flavouring agents such as chilli, garlic, tomato puree and herbs. The character of the food owed more to the quality of ingredients than to technical artifice, although the cooks seemed to share the kind of casual, natural skill that comes from ingrained tradition, an inheritance of a society that changes only slowly.

      It was still a wonder that the customers could put away all this with apparent ease. Admittedly, there was a sense of leisure about the whole process. The Sunday lunchers had come to eat, and clearly took a rather Yorkshire approach to the concept of value for money. And to the division of the sexes as well: all the men sat at one end, the women at the other, with children whirling between the two. When I asked Federico about this, he smiled and said why on earth should men and women want to sit together when they were going to talk about quite different things? Judging by a ferocious dispute that broke out between one couple, perhaps separation was just as well.

      The argument concerned the filling of the pastiera, the traditional Easter tart, one version of which I had eaten at la casa Cappello in Reggio. The debate touched on, among other things, the correct mixture of crystallised fruits, the origins of ricotta, the use of crema, or custard, and the addition of orange flower water. It started off as fairly good-humoured banter, quickly brought out jeering dismissal of the other’s point of view, heated up into an intense exchange of views and finally erupted into ferocious barrages, which came to a head when the wife proclaimed with magisterial dismissal, ‘Ma questo è un piatto romano!’ in tones that suggested un piatto romano was some particularly vile extension of the Albigensian Heresy. I couldn’t help thinking that it was all rather heartening. It was difficult to imagine such passionate exchange СКАЧАТЬ