Eating Up Italy: Voyages on a Vespa

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 at the WI or, indeed, an Englishman capable of holding his own on the proper filling 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 MINCED BEEF

175G MINCED PORK

4 EGGS

A HANDFUL OF GRATED PECORINO

2 BASIL LEAVES

1 CLOVE GARLIC, CRUSHED

SALT, TO TASTE

EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL, FOR FRYING

Serves 4

Peel the aubergines. Cut lengthwise into strips about 2cm thick and toss into boiling water. When cooked, drain and dry thoroughly.

Chop the aubergines finely and mix with an equivalent amount of breadcrumbs. Add the minced meats, eggs, pecorino, basil leaves, garlic and salt. Shape into short sausages about 5–7cm long and 3–4cm thick. Fry 6–7 fritters at a time in extra virgin olive oil.

INVOLTINI DI MELANZANE

Aubergine rolls

Serves 4

Coat the aubergine slices in flour and fry in extra virgin olive oil.

Cook the tagliatelle in salted boiling water. When half-cooked, transfer to a frying pan with 250ml of the tomato sauce, the garlic, basil and pecorino. Mix well and leave to cool.

Spoon the cooked pasta mixture on to the fried aubergine slices and roll up tightly (securing with cocktail sticks if necessary). Cut off the tagliatelle sticking out at either end and use to stuff the next aubergine slice.

Place the rolls in an ovenproof dish, spoon over more of the tomato sauce, sprinkle with the Parmesan and bake for 30 minutes at 180°C/Gas 4.