Seasons in Basilicata

by David Yeadon

  It was Friday night. Fish night (of course) at the hotel, and Bruno always tried to serve something different along with his more traditional, time-honed recipes. That night he’d managed to acquire an enormous salmon, and he was planning to prepare a rather interesting misto of fish, stuffed calamari, octopus, and prawns, served with potato-and-oregano gnocchi. I was particularly impressed by his pile of prawns.

  “Too many,” he said. “Good price, so I bought too much.” He laughed and his big belly shook like Jell-O. And without thinking, I said, “Well, give me half, and I’ll cook something up.”

  He stopped his meticulous filleting of the salmon, looked at me curiously for a moment, laughed, and then, without asking what my intentions were (I didn’t know myself), he pointed to the stove, chopping block, and vast array of herbs, spices, vinegars, wines, oils, and liqueurs, and said, “Va bene. Help yourself.”

  And that’s precisely what I did. As he continued refining his delectable misto, I began to make a reduction of white wine, butter, tarragon, lemon, and garlic. Then I added…Well, I won’t bother with the details of the recipe because I was improvising like I normally do and can’t really remember. I had a flavor in my head that blended the briny freshness of the ocean with the deep flavor of the wine-herb reduction, the sparkle of fresh lemon and local limonce liqueur (a splendidly thick, golden, sweet-tart concoction), the slight sweetness from some anise to reinforce the tarragon, the thwack of local Basilicatan hot pepper (peperoncini) sauce—which seemed to accompany everything in those parts—and then something not too bold but comforting to act as the “bed” for the purity of the prawns themselves. And since it was still porcini season, what better than wafer-thin slivers of those delectable mushrooms, glazed in their own “sweat” for a few seconds in a searing-hot dry pan, and then added along with a little cream to the sauce, which had been quietly simmering down to a rich consistency and texture.

  Bruno and I tested each other’s creations, savoring the subtleties we’d both tried to achieve. And then—surprise, surprise—he gave me a palm-tingling high five, and we proceeded to hug each other and slap each other’s backs and tell each other that tonight would indeed be a special night for the patrons of the Hotel SanGiuliano.

  Modesty should creep in at this point, but, no, let honesty win out. I’ve had many nights when my “improvising” at home has led to the need for hasty, last-minute culinary overhauls. I was even telling myself as I prepared my impromptu dish that day that if my prawn concoction didn’t work out the way I’d hoped, I’d throw in a lot more garlic and cream and tomato paste and call it “Provençale” or something that sounded foreign and mysterious, and hope for the best.

  But I’m happy to say that my “Prawns Improv” was happily devoured along with Bruno’s splendid salmon-and-seafood misto, and the enthusiastic restaurant crowd even stood and gave us both the honor of a toast, apparently a rather rare occurrence in those parts.

  It was one of those nights I shall remember for a long time, along with the next of my Accetturan adventures.

  Bricks, Pantiles, and Other Creations

  “So, tomorrow then,” Massimo told me as I sat drinking my second cappuccino of the morning at his hotel. “Tomorrow morning. Before breakfast. He wants to take us to his kiln and show us how to make pantiles and bricks. Is okay?”

  I’d almost forgotten that floating invitation to go and watch the ancient pre-Roman craft of brick-and pantile-making by the only man in the whole of Basilicata who still remembered and used these time-honored and once-revered processes. Giuliano Mingalone.

  “Great!” I said. “But why before breakfast?”

  “Because Giuliano says he has special breakfast he wants to cook for us. At his kiln. Not far out of town. Just a little way down in the valley.”

  A “LITTLE WAY” turned out to be a mile-long hike, and “down” was an almost head-over-heels scramble down the near-vertical sides of a canyon on the outskirts of Accettura, following a mulattiera (mule track) that even a mule would have had problems negotiating.

  ACCETTURA’S MAGGIO FESTIVAL

  “Bit too steep for jeep, with all three of us in it,” Giuliano said happily as we all met around eight o’clock on a brisk, blue-sky morning and began the tortuous descent.

  “You have to walk up and down this track every day?” I asked Giuliano, whose stumpy legs seemed almost to float over the rough stone-and-pothole surface, while I skidded and jarred my way down. Massimo wisely remained in the rear, carefully and adeptly learning from my disconcertingly amateurish performance.

  “Si, si. No problem. Unless raining. Then is like river here. You gotta go careful then.”

  I nodded. I’ve gotta go careful now, I thought, and it hasn’t been raining for days. My challenge was to avoid the pockets of dust and loose pebbles that kept trying to trip and pitchfork me headlong into the sinister, shadowy depths of the canyon far below.

  Somehow we all arrived at Giuliano’s hideaway without traumatic incident, except maybe a little punctured pride in my case. We left the track to continue its tortuous descent and emerged onto a level shelf of pleasant, grassy land bathed in warm early sunshine.

  Scattered around the site were piles of packed clay bricks, thousands of them, fired to a delightful medley of ochres, bronzes, golds, and ambers, and standing six feet high or more under tarpaulins and other improvised coverings.

  I gasped. “You made all these!?” The enormous piles looked like the equivalent of a year’s production at a major brickworks.

  “Oh yes,” Giuliano said with a satisfied grin. “Sometimes much more down here. Depends when I sell them.”

  “And how do you get them out?”

  “Oh, no problem. We have special truck.”

  A truck? What kind of vehicle would it take to negotiate that deadly track? And loaded with bricks, too. And I thought, if indeed there is such a truck, why the heck couldn’t we have used it this morning and saved me the indignity of that descent and the inevitable trauma of the clamber back up?

  But “Ah” was all I said. After all, Giuliano was my host, and he’d gone to all the trouble of bringing us down here, while carrying a large hessian bag over his shoulder.

  “What’s in your bag, Giuliano?” I asked.

  “Oh, well, first we have breakfast, eh?” he replied with a mischievous grin. He reached into the bag and pulled out a large package wrapped in newspaper and tied with rough string. “What I wanna do for you and Massimo is very common, very old dish. Ciambutella. Mezzadro [sharecropper] breakfast. Is best breakfast anywhere. You think so, Massimo?”

  Massimo’s angelic face beamed in anticipation. “Oh, yes, the best. My father still does sometimes.”

  “For the hotel guests?” I asked, wondering if I’d missed one of the house specialties of the Hotel SanGiuliano.

  “No, no, no. He tried to do once, I think. But maybe taste too different for people from North and other places. This is real Basilicatan dish, so of course we use lots of hot peppers, peperoncini. Some people don’t like hot peppers at breakfast.” He shrugged a very “of course they don’t know what they’re missing” kind of shrug and then gave one of those knuckle-twisted-in-the-cheek gestures to emphasize that ciambutella was an acquired, but unforgettable, taste experience.

  “We can make it here? Outside?” I asked while watching Giuliano unpack his parcel. Its contents appeared slowly: eight deep-brown eggs that appeared to have been fresh laid (if bits of earth and feathers on the shells were any indication), a thick slab of purple-red–fleshed pancetta (bacon), two red onions, a small bottle of olive oil, four fat homemade sausages, four large tomatoes, two large frying peppers, another small bottle of what I assumed to be Giuliano’s special hot pepper cantina concoction, a bushy sprig of bright green basil, a two-liter bottle of his strong red wine, and various little paper twists of seasonings. Oh, and the bread: a huge golden-crusted beauty pulled from his bag.

  “Okay,” he said as he spread everything out by the
side of a hole dug in the earth and filled with twigs, small branches, and a couple of arm-thick logs. “First, nice fire, and then we start cook.” He pushed a couple of handfuls of hay and dead leaves under the pile and flicked his ever-present Bic. The flames began immediately sending clouds of pungent blue smoke into the early morning air. Memories of my Boy Scout days curlicued around me like the smoke as I smelled the scorching wood and remembered the thrill I used to get from wrapping primitive flour, water, and salt dough around thin sticks and toasting them to a crisp in the hot embers. I had been amazed then that anything so basic could taste so good. But now I sensed I was about to graduate to a higher appreciation of bonfire cuisine, to the ciambutella, the almost mythic dish of the South.

  Giuliano wandered off to gather a couple more small logs and his huge cast-iron cooking pan, which he kept hidden in a woodpile nearby. He returned, stroking its smoky-black rotundness. “She has been my best pan since I was boy. My mother gave me when I married Rosa. Nineteen fifty-two. She said all it needs is bit of olive oil to keep her nice and shiny. No, not Rosa, David, the pan! Not too much washing, she told me. She said washing is not nice for iron. Just wipe clean, very clean, and rub in some oil. That’s all. She will last forever, she told me. And just look.” He proudly held up the ancient pot, veteran of more than fifty years of marriage and alfresco outdoor meals. “Touch, rub her.”

  Massimo and I rubbed the pan’s smooth, oil-glossy flanks and admired its durability. Giuliano was pleased. “She gives special taste to everything. Makes better. Everything I cook.”

  THE FIRE WAS now roaring splendidly, and we pulled back a little into the cooler air. The thick grass provided a perfect cushion, and the early sun over Montepiano bathed our faces in golden light.

  Giuliano started chopping the peppers, onions, and tomatoes into bite-size pieces, dicing the pancetta and sausages (“I make these sausages with fennel and peppers,” he boasted. “My own recipe”), and arranging all his other ingredients in a half-circle around the fire.

  “Okay, so now we go,” Giuliano said, carefully pressing his huge pot deep into the fire and pouring in a good half-cup of olive oil.

  Before the oil began to smoke, he added the vegetables. They sizzled and spat and quickly began to brown. Then he rolled in the diced pancetta and sausage, pulled the pan away from the main heat of the fire, and gently tossed and turned the ingredients for ten minutes or so, letting the sugars slowly caramelize but not burn. The aroma was primitive, earthy, and utterly seductive. My hunger pangs arrived.

  “No garlic?” I asked.

  “No. I don’t like for breakfast. Gives me…” Giuliano gave a pseudoburp. He tested a couple of pieces of the meat and seemed satisfied. “Now, some vino and some of my sauce…” He poured almost half a liter of his deep-red, almost black, wine into the pan and stirred rapidly. Then he added his special pepper sauce, maybe a couple of tablespoons, flecked with tiny pieces of bird’s-eye pepper, one of the South’s most potent delights. “Add more later,” he mumbled half to himself. “Always keep tasting. That’s the segreto. Keep tasting and testing.”

  And this he did constantly, with a large, very burnt and chipped wooden spoon, while adding trace amounts of salt and herbs from his paper twists. (I spotted oregano, thyme, and parsley.) The mixture thickened as the wine evaporated, and its aroma was zesty and rich.

  “David, you wanna taste?”

  I did, and my mouth became firecracker-alive with such a magnificent melding of flavors, enhanced by the zing of those hot peppers, that I knew that given half a chance, I could quite easily have devoured the whole dish.

  “Fantastic!” I gushed, as different blendings of flavors bounced around my mouth. Massimo took a spoonful and said nothing at all. He didn’t need to. His grin virtually wrapped itself around the back of his head.

  “So, eggs now, and then eat!” Giuliano said, pleased once again by our reactions. He cracked the eight eggs straight into the pan, then added a little salt, black pepper, and torn segments of basil leaves. While he slowly stirred and scrambled the succulent mix, Massimo cut huge slices of bread from the crisp-crusted loaf, pulling the knife toward himself as he held the bread out from his chest, in the traditional, although one would think potentially lethal, fashion.

  Giuliano gave himself one more generous spoonful sampling of the creamy ciambutella and then pulled the pan off the fire and let it rest on the grass. “We leave coupla minutes. Gets better taste.” He reached into his bag for some plastic glasses for the wine and then suddenly mouthed a vehement little Italian epithet (“Porca putana!” or something along those lines). “Forks! I forgot forks!”

  Massimo, being a country boy himself and well versed in the art of improvisation, leaped up and scampered off to a nearby cluster of thin, bamboo-like reeds. A few quick cuts with his pocketknife and he was back with three foot-long hollow sticks. With another few deft strokes, he fashioned these into two-pronged forks. (I still have mine in my box of Basilicatan souvenirs at home.)

  All that remained now was for us to devour the gently steaming creation by forking soft segments of this colorful (green, red, and yellow, with pieces of dark, glistening meat) mezzadro masterpiece onto the slabs of fresh-baked bread. We did this with unabashed delight while Giuliano passed around the bottles of olive oil and hot-pepper sauce—“If you like more”—along with brimming glasses of his rich, dark red wine.

  Hardly a word was spoken for ten minutes. Only when the last fragments had been mopped up from the pan, moistened by a little olive oil, did we let out one long communal sigh and lay back in the grass like satiated satyrs. I did so knowing that I had just enjoyed one of the finest breakfasts I’d ever had anywhere in the world.

  “Jus’ one more glass of wine,” Giuliano urged. “Daft to take back. Don’t forget, ‘U’vine iete ulatta di vecchie,’ ‘Wine is like milk for old men.’ And we’re all of us getting older y’know!” So we had that final glass and looked around, glassy eyed and utterly replete, watching butterflies flutter among the wildflowers and the last of the early morning mist, trapped in the deep shadowy canyon below us, melt in the coming heat of the morning.

  “So that was ciambutella,” I mused drowsily, half to myself.

  Massimo rubbed his stomach and said quietly, “The best.”

  GIULIANO

  Giuliano smiled, maybe a little complacently, as he indeed should have, and said nothing at all.

  At least, not about cooking or ciambutella.

  Because he was now ready for the next phase of our day together.

  “Okay. Let’s make pantiles, eh?” he said and trotted off up the grassy slope to a workbench shaded by a couple of ancient olive trees.

  “These are my own trees. Two hundred years old. Very nice fruit. I got fifteen more over there, also apple trees, pear trees, and almonds. Good place to work, eh? My clay is just over there,” he said, pointing to a large pit of scooped-out earth—pure, moist clay—covered with old, circular straw mats, once used in Accettura’s olive mill as part of the crushing process.

  “So, what I do is, I get my mold here.” Giuliano picked up a one-inch-deep wooden frame in the shape of a parallelogram, approximately eighteen inches long, twelve inches across at the widest point, and six inches at the narrow end. “Then I sprinkle it with this lime powder to stop sticking. Then I scoop up a big load of clay, throw in the mold like this, then I push into the corners to get a good shape and make sure no air bubbles. If you have air bubbles, it will explode—boom!—in the kiln. So, here I press, then take this stick and scrape off extra clay, then press again, then scrape. That’s ’bout right. Now I take off mold like this and then I lift the soft clay tile and put on this round wooden log, which gives it right pantile shape. Same shape used by Etruscans, Greeks, Romans—all of ’em. Then I put over here to dry for coupla days and make my next tile. Simple, eh?”

  “It’s simple, I guess, if you know what you’re doing,” I said.

  “If I gotta good day, I make fiv
e hundred pantiles,” he said, stroking the smooth glistening clay of his first tile as if it were a woman’s thigh, gently and with great feeling. “See how soft it is? Beautiful clay here. Beautiful.”

  “But five hundred? That sounds like a heavy day’s work.”

  “Well, see you gotta have passion for it. I got passion. This is in my heart. I am fourth generation of tile-and brick-makers in my family. But I’m the bad man.” Giuliano paused reflectively. “Y’see, if you compare me to my granddad, I’m the bad one for this job. My granddad spent all his time here. All his time. But I’m not. When I left here and stopped making tiles I was nineteen years old, and when I come back from England, after many, many years, I try it again, but I don’t feel so happy about that. My grandfather would smack me—you know what I mean—but, well, for the time now, I’m the best one. Because I’m the only one!” He quickly overcame his brief flirtation with guilt and was laughing again as usual.

  “C’mon. C’mon and see my kiln. Is beautiful thing. Over two hundred years old and still beautiful.”

  Massimo and I followed him past rows of piled bricks and pantiles and down a small grassy slope to the kiln entrance, set into the hillside. The kiln was a massive domed affair of brick and rock-hard clay, about nine feet high, with a great maw of a mouth leading into a dark, wood-smelling interior.

  Giuliano pointed to the ten-foot-high piles of twigs and logs by the side of the kiln. “Poplar and oak. Best for burner like this. It’s got two levels. I can get six or seven thousand pieces in here, and they cook at a thousand degrees centigrade for up to thirty hours. Very strong. Not like factory bricks, with salt that comes out when they’re used. That’s no good. You gotta have passion and respect for what you make. In the thirties, before the war, there were ten, maybe fifteen different people down here making bricks and tiles. It’s such a good place for clay. People used to come all the way by donkey from Pietrapertosa [almost ten grueling mountainous miles along near-impassible mulattiere] to buy bricks here. But now…” He laughed sadly and shrugged. “…now is just me. I try to get other peoples interested. But no one want to do this. They don’t believe you can make good living doing this. Even the schoolchildren. I invite the teachers to bring them to see old way we did things, but”—another sad shrug—“not interested.”