Eating Up Italy: Voyages on a Vespa. Matthew Fort

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ for a Bakewell tart.

      At La Carolee the notions of thrift and self-sufficiency still ran very deep. They used their own olive oil, their own passata (tomato sauce), their own melanzane sott’olio, their own pancetta and soppressata. That evening, I went up into the eves of the house with Federico, to fetch a soppressata and a flitch of lardo, the cured back fat of a pig. While wandering around this space, which was fragrant with the sweet richness of maturing pork, I stumbled over some narrow, slightly irregularly shaped bricks. I took them to be the original bricks of which the house had been built. No, said Federico. They were blocks of soap, made from mixing the pulp of the olives with caustic soda. It was very good for washing, he said, much better than the commercial stuff.

      We sat down to eat the slices of lardo, which folded like silk over my tongue, its richness cut by chunks of raw cipolle di Tropea, the red-skinned onion from the coastal area around the picturesque town of Tropea. The onions were so mild – not sweet – that they could be eaten like apples. The bread was baked in a wood-fired oven by two sisters in Lamezia, and was spongy and yeasty inside its black crust. The soppressata was fine grained and the colour of roses and spicy and sweet, with aniseed coiling through it. With a glass of red wine, it was the kind of stuff that I could have gone on eating until there was no more.

      Soppressata crops up all over Italy, but connoisseurs rate that of Calabria top of the lot. It has its own Dop (Denominazione di origine protetta) designation, Dop being to food what Doc is to wine; and Doc (Denominazione d’origine controllata) is to Italy what Appellation Contrôlée is to France, a guarantee of authenticity.

      Federico was president of the local soppressata producers association, so he took the business of making it pretty seriously. So seriously, in fact, that he had just started breeding the traditional Calabrese black pig with which to make them. He spoke of these elongated, dark grey or mottled, hairy creatures that lived in one corner of the estate with great affection. Perhaps his affection was in proportion to the splendid sausages they made.

      His soppressata, he said, was made from only shoulder and leg meat, which contains a good deal of fat and gelatine, which helped keep the drier leg meat suitably lubricated. It was chopped finely with a knife, not in a machine. The chopping with a knife was important because it didn’t denature the meat, or heat it up, as happens with commercial sausage making, when the machinery has to be cooled with iced water, which in turn gets absorbed by the meat.

      He mixed the chopped meat with 12–15 per cent pork fat, red wine, chilli, salt and garlic, stuffed it inside a short pig’s intestine, pressed it (hence soppressata), smoked it and then let it age for three to four months.

      This was the general recipe. Naturally every serious soppressata producer had his own secret ingredients, which made it so obviously superior to anyone else’s. Some added paprika or pig’s blood. Federico liked to mix salsa di peperone (home made, naturally) and fennel seeds into his. The soppressata was eaten on its own, and as an essential ingredient in a number of dishes such as pitta ripiena nicastrese, a divine form of savoury leaf.

      As we munched, we were joined by Umberto, a lawyer and a friend of the family, a neat figure with an elegant intelligence. I was curious as to why the agricultural muscle and co-operation in this part of Italy, which had been greengrocer to the Roman Empire, seemed to have disappeared. Why weren’t there co-operatives and associations similar to those in Lombardy and Piedmont? I asked Federico. They had been commercially pretty successful, to judge by the amount they supplied to British supermarkets.

      He gave a shrug of his shoulders and a look of helplessness. Because the contadini – rural smallholders – don’t trust each other, he said. ‘If I asked Giovanni to join in an arrangement of that sort, he would ask who else was in it, and if I said Giacomo and Claudio, he would say, why should I help them? Their olive oil is only good for car engines, anyway.’ But why did he say that when he could see the commercial advantages? ‘Because of history.’

      It was true that history hung heavy in the south. You couldn’t escape its consequences. Southern Italy had rarely displayed the kind of political energy of the north. It had always been a subject region, oppressed, suppressed, exploited, put upon and sucked dry. It had been battered by every shape of disaster, natural and man-made. It had never had a chance to develop a sense of political pride or maturity.

      Umberto explained that, until the 1950s, de facto control of the day-to-day destinies in southern Italy lay with largely absentee landlords and their estate managers, and the iniquitous system of latifundia – vast estates worked by landless peasantry. ‘Then the Christian Democrat government appropriated much of the land owned by the latifundia landlords, and they did something very clever. They distributed their estates among the contadini. Each contadino got a few hectares to add to those they already had. There were two consequences of this policy. It gave the Christian Democrats an enduring majority among the grateful contadini. And it kept us poor because you can’t build a successful agricultural system on a few hectares here and a few there owned by someone else.’

      ‘Why do so many politicians come from the south, and do so little for it?’ I asked.

      Umberto shrugged his shoulders again.

      ‘Do you expect things to change?’ I asked him.

      ‘No,’ he said.

      ‘Why not?’

      ‘Because they are difficult to change here,’ he said.

      There might have been a moment when things could have been different, he went on, when Garibaldi liberated Calabria from the Bourbons. All his life Garibaldi had been dedicated to republican principles. But then he sacrificed his principles in the interests of Italian unity, and ceded his conquests to King Victor Emmanuel II, as he had always made it clear he would. It wasn’t Garibaldi’s exploits in the process of unification that southerners deplored but the betrayal of the republican ideal. The wrong man got the top job post-unification, and, as a consequence, southern Italy merely exchanged the tyranny of local latifundia for that of northern Italy, which perpetuates itself to this day through its banks and financial institutions. That was why some referred to Garibaldi as ‘il traditore del sud’, betrayer of the south.

      That was why there were no Garibaldi heritage trails.

      I said goodbye to the Gaetanos at La Carolee with much emotion on both sides. They wouldn’t let me pay, in spite of having fed me like a king and talked to me like an Italian for two days. I wondered what they made of me, a short, portly, balding Englishman, who badgered them remorselessly for details on food, history, people and politics and then vanished. They had drawn me into the life of their family for a few days, and now I had to move on. I had the sense of a half-developed friendship which I wished to continue, but could not. It troubled me. The truth was that, in spite of weather and lugubrious anticipation, I had fallen in love with Calabria, with the exuberance of its cooking, the generosity of its people and the magnificence of its inland landscape.

      ‘Ai, mangia. Va bene.

       Buon appetito.’

      LE BRACIOLE DI CARNE E MELANZANE

      Meat and aubergine fritters

      Beef and pork? Once this would have been a dish for high days and holy days, although the addition of breadcrumbs and cheese is a thrifty way of stretching the expensive ingredients. The recipe comes from the Gaetano family, as do those that follow. It is interesting just how hearty this food is. It is mouth-watering, stomach-filling stuff.

      6 MEDIUM-SIZED AUBERGINES

      BREADCRUMBS

      175G СКАЧАТЬ