The Heel Of The Boot

A taste of Salento and a recipe for peppers

You don’t get Italian restaurants in Italy. You don’t really get Italians, either. Ask an Italian where they’re from and they’ll answer Naples or Milan or Palermo. I have never heard my Aunt describe herself as anything other than ‘Sicilian’. The closest we come to this in the UK is a Welshman or Scott correcting the American who just called him ‘British’ because that, God forbid, could also mean English.

The most unifying thing about Italy is the national football team. Everything else is from this region, that province or those parishes, and nowhere is this more evident than when you look down at the menu of whichever osteria, trattoria, rosticerria or any-other-ria you’ve wandered in to. France has regional food, Spain has regional food, so do Portugal, Germany, Albania and Poland but nowhere (in Europe) is food regional like in Italy. There are two overarching reasons for this, historical and geographical.

Unity

Below you can see an animated map of the unification Italy from 1829 until 1871, the year the country became the Italy we recognise today. Although the borders between Principalities, Papal States and Kingdoms were scrubbed from the map, psychologically, culturally and linguistically they remain as pervasive as ever. When you combine this mentality with the extreme variation in geography and climate along Italy's longitude, the result is a culinary jigsaw that crams the food of 4 or 5 countries into 1. The sunbaked, Arab-inflected cuisines of Sicily and the South, the rolling hills, temperate climate and balanced cooking of the Centre, the wet, green pastures of the Northern plains that enrich dishes with butter and eggs, and the cool Alpine terrain of the border with Central Europe, where the food is rich and takes on French finesse to the West and an Austrian accent to the East.

This is why you don’t get ‘Italian’ restaurants in Italy. What you do get are Bolognese restaurants in Bologna, Roman restaurants in Rome, Pugliese restaurants in Puglia and so on. But even then, things become more granular, more local. Last week I went to Puglia, but really I went to Salento, a region in the South of Puglia that runs roughly from Brindisi until you reach the very bottom of the heel of the boot. And so I ate Pugliese food, but really I ate Salentine food. The more you zoom in, the more the borders bleed into each other like lines in a watercolour, fuzzy but tangible.

What, Not Where

On trips like this, I often get asked for recommendations of where to eat, but I thought what might be more interesting and useful is to talk a little bit about what to eat, those dishes and ingredients that define the flavours and traditions and history of Pugliese (or Salentine) cooking. The cuisine of Puglia is shaped by its climate and ingredients, and by its historical poverty and lack of aristocracy or royalty. What this means in real terms is that you find a highly local, seasonal and simple cuisine which is not shaped by the fashions and fancies of the nobility in the way that Northern Italian food has been. ‘Rustic’ as an adjective for food is sometimes mistaken for roughness or lack of sophistication but to me the food of Puglia is rustic in the best way possible; it’s a simple expression of the land, it tastes of where you are.

Bread

Bread is central to Pugliese cuisine, and is mostly made using durum wheat, the hard (high protein) wheat grown all over Southern Italy. Look for Pane di Altamura and Pane di Laterza which has a thick, dark crust and golden yellow interior.

While focaccia in Liguria is thin and really just a vehicle for their beautiful light olive oil, focaccia in Puglia is thick and fluffy. In the capital you will find focaccia Barese which is topped with tomatoes, olives and oregano and tastes like summer.

Any cuisine which eats a lot of bread inevitably finds clever ways to use the leftovers. Variations on pancotto (cooked bread) are found all over Italy, and they always reflect the flavours of the region you’re in. In Puglia, this means vegetables like tomatoes, potatoes and cime di rape the beloved green turnip tops which turn up a lot here. The best version I ate had cubes of bread fried in olive stirred through at the end which were nice and chewy.

Left to right - Pane di Altamura, Focaccia Barese and Pancotto Pugliese

Pasta

Pasta in Puglia, like in other parts of Sicily and Southern Italy, is made using only durum wheat and water. Orecchiette (‘little ears’) is the most famous and frequently found shape and it usually shows up with either a simple tomato sauce (which can have a little meat added, don’t be surprised if this is horse meat) or with cime di rape. Other pasta shapes to look out for are sagne ‘ncannulate, cavatelli and perhaps most interestingly minchiareddhi, which you will really only find in Salento and are made with barley flour.

Spaghetti all’assassina (assassin’s spaghetti ) is an unusual pasta from Bari where the spaghetti is cooked directly in a frying pan with olive oil and chilli, and small amounts of tomato sauce are added as you go, a bit like making risotto. As the pasta cooks and the sauce is absorbed the edges catch and fry to become burnt (in a good way) and crispy. The whole things is oily and tomatoey and spicy and feels very Pugliese. I sent my Dad a picture of this who described frying pasta like ‘shooting fish in a barrel’. Can’t go wrong.

Ciceri e tria is a dish from the city of Lecce which is wonderful example of cooking that is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s pasta with chickpeas, but some of the pasta is fried in olive oil until crunchy and then scattered on top. It is sublime.

Pasta in Puglia - left to right: Spaghetti all’assassina, orecchiette with cime di rape, orecchiette with tomato and horse, minchiareddhi with tomato and horse, sagne 'ncannulate and ciceri e tria

Seafood

Salento is surrounded on three sides by sea. Unsurprisingly, the fish and seafood is fantastic and much more prominent in the cookery than meat. A lot of the preparations are very simple and you can’t really go wrong with any kind of fish carpaccio, seafood pasta or fried seafood. An interesting and worthwhile dish to try is tiella, a layered, baked affair of mussels, potatoes and rice.

Left to right - Tiella, cavatelli with seafood and fried seafood

Pastry

My two favourite pastries in this part of the world are the rustico and the pasticiotti. Pull up a chair and I’ll tell you about them. I’ve spoken before about how pathetic the breakfast options of Mediterranean Europe are, and I must specify Mediterranean Europe because North Africa to the South and Turkey and the Levant in the East both start the day strong with a table full of real food. Fruit, eggs, honey, fresh cheese, bread, olives. But Italy before 11am is a barren wasteland of processed, bland kind-of-sweet biscuit/cake type things that you eat with a coffee, or so I thought until I discovered rustici a couple of years ago. A rustico is a hand-size round puff pastry filled with béchamel, mozzarella and fresh tomato which is baked until golden and served warm. Morning glory.

Pasticciotti are native to the town of Galatina, where you still find the best ones. It’s a very short, crumbly sweet pastry made with flour, sugar and lard and filled with a lemon vanilla custard and served warm. I tried to place it on a government issue food pyramid but the tip is too small. The British Heart Foundation is perhaps unaware of pasticciotti. There is a strange Sicilian variant filled with veal and almonds which sounds like something a Tudor might eat and I’m not in a hurry to seek out, but also a Neapolitan version that contains the usual custard with the addition of cherries. I’ve made a note to try it as soon as possible.

A rustico and a pasticciotto

Vegetables

The last thing on this list of what to eat in Puglia is also the inspiration for the recipe below. This is the best plate of vegetables I have ever eaten. They had been prepared ‘sott’olio’ which literally means ‘under oil’ and, like with so many techniques in this area of cooking, it exists as a way to preserve seasonal vegetables (with the added benefit that it makes them delicious in the process). It’s also very easy. Unlike pickling or fermenting, the preservation element of this technique comes from the vegetables being sealed off from the air by a layer of olive oil.

Peperoni Sott’olio (Peppers Under Oil)

Ingredients:

• 3 Peppers (I had 2 very large ones)

• 2 Cloves of Garlic

• 1 Stick of Rosemary

• 3 Tbsp White Wine Vinegar

• 100ml Olive Oil

Method:

Core and slice your peppers into roughly 2cm wide strips. You can leave them as long as the pepper, or half them.

Place a heavy pan over a medium heat, add all of the ingredients plus 3 tbsp of water and a tsp of salt. Cook, stirring, until all of the water and vinegar has evaporated (about 5 mins).

Add the olive oil and continue to cook, stirring occasionally, until the peppers have softened. This should take around 5-10 minutes. You want them to be sizzling gently but not hard frying.

Transfer the entire contents of the pan into a clean jar (you might need to snap the rosemary twig in half) and make sure the oil covers everything. Top it up if not. You can eat these straightaway and they’re delicious, but they get better with time. Keep them in the fridge and they should last for months.

This techniques works just as well for courgettes and aubergines too. You can vegetables like this in any way imaginable: as a side with a pork chop or piece of fish, tossed through pasta, in a salad. Enjoy!