Cheese polpettine

...and other thoughts on springtime in Puglia

So what’s so special about Puglia - apart, that is, from sand, sea and sunshine? There’s forest and mountains, a curvaceous coastline (Italy’s longest), claggy red earth in which flourish thousand-year-old olive-trees whose tops are cropped flat against the wind, hard durum wheat, fava-beans – the regional dish is fava bean puree with bitter greens – and a wealth of weird plant-foods  I’ve never found anywhere else.

Puglia’s culinary reputation is for poor-folks' food, cucina povere - mostly vegetarian, a style admired throughout Italy for honesty, simplicity and respect for the seasona. Sophisticates from Rome and millionaires from Milan have converted the region's beehive dwellings,

trulli, built of unmortared stone by landless peasantry who worked the landlord's olive groves.  

In spring, there’s sporchia, an orchid-like plant of the broom-rape family parasitic on fava-beans and encouraged as a valuable crop in its own right. In autumn, there’s cardoncello, a dark-capped oyster-mushroom dependent the wild artichoke (now in cultivation to protect it in the wild); in winter there are lampesconi, bitter-flavoured tulip-like bulbs of a wild grape-hycinth, also prohibited from the wild, that's cooked like potatoes.

Puglia’s never been rich enough to throw anything away – she simply re-uses what’s there.  Norman fortresses bear the marks of prehistoric hammers. Under the altars of baroque churches, mummified saints sleep in glass cases, narrow streets overhung by rusting balconies open into medieval piazzas. Hidden away in corners are pillars and pavements of the Appian Way, fragments of marble deities abandoned by the Greeks, iron rings punched into ancient quaysides where the Phoenicians came to trade.

Then there’s the wine.  Walk into any neighbourhood restaurant, order a half-carafe, pour yourself a glass and savour the liquorice-flavour of primitivo – no need to translate - a wine so dark and dense it stains your teeth black, a disadvantage when conversing with a charming fellow-diner at the next table - something I’m more than prepared to do when travelling on my own (shameless, eh?).

Spring vegetables on sale in the Saturday market in Ostuni, a walled hilltop town about 10 miles back from the coast between Bari and Brindisi, are what you might find everywhere in Mediterranean markets but bigger and brighter (and better, if you believe the sellers). At the beginning of May, there's the last of the young peas and tender broad beans (fava, an Old World native, Puglia’s traditional store-cupboard bean).

Artichokes, medium-sized and just right for stuffing, on sale from the back of a lorry with their stalks still attached (Pugliese housewives wouldn’t dream of wasting the stalks).  Trade is brisk in what looks like overgrown flowering broccoli labelled cime di rape - roughly translated as turnip-greens. Less identifiable are bundles of stalks with leafy edges which come in red and white varieties, one thin and salad-like, one fat and full of odd little branches, both labelled ciccoria; even less familiar is a pile of round, prickly footballs which look like unripe melons when cut but are destined, as I'm informed by my neighbours in the queue, for the salad-bowl.

So how are all these things prepared and eaten? Prepare as your mother does, signorina, says the seller in quick-fire dialect. Didn't she teach you anything? This is not the first time I’ve been asked the question, and the answer is always “no” - an opening for information willing offered by the queue. The Puglian dialect sounds like heavily-accented Andaluz - at least to my Spanish-speaking ears - so I can usually work out what’s on offer, even if the spelling is something of a challenge

.

Fish is the real luxury - a cash-crop that sees the high-value catch shipped out elsewhere.  Available in Ostini marke in 2015 in late April, was baccala and stockfish for the meatless dishes of Lent, and mussels from the Golfo di Taranto sold on the rope by weight (cook with rice and potatoes in the tiella, an earthenware casserole that gives its name to the dish).  The inshore fleet lands on at Mola di Bari between 4 and 5, regular as clockwork (the Mediterranean is tideless), and sells (sold?) direct to customers in the harbourside market, with an emphasis on cephalopods - squid, octopus and cuttlefish, all of which can be eaten raw with a squeeze of lemon.

Raw fish is appreciated by the poor as well as the rich. Fishermen shouldering the catch for market can be seen quite casually peeling a prawn as an afternoon snack. And if preparing your own looks a little challenging, book into to the Restarant Da Michele in Torre Santa Sabina, one of the many watchtowers that warned coastal-dwellers against pirates, and they’ll prepare your crudo for you. Skinning a well-grown cuttlefish is not a task for the squeamish.  

 

P.S. There’ll be more from Puglia next week - yes indeed! Meanwhile, lay in a copy of Nancy Jenkins’ marvellous Flavors of Puglia. I scooped up a copy in foreigners’ bookshop in Lecce, where they serve the coffee with almond milk in the cafe by the Roman amphitheater.

P.P.S. Beloved paid-subscribers will shortly be in receipt of a recipe for mussel tiella and turnip greens cooked in the Puglian way, cime de rape stufato.