Seasons in Basilicata

by David Yeadon

“Well, Giuliano said he thought it would be very nice if you could talk to our pupils about yourself and what you do.”

  My smile suddenly felt very tight and tense. “Oh, he did, did he?” I looked around for Giuliano, who was now conveniently half hidden behind two of the teachers and studying some framed documents on the hallway wall with rapt attention.

  “So, if you would like to come with me…” the headmaster said, indicating the way down the corridor to the classroom, which resounded with the giggles and shouts of young pupils, doubtless delighted by a chance to miss afternoon lessons.

  And there they all sat, fifty or so of them, with expectant faces—some smiling, some as solemn as little magistrates—and ranging in age from seven to eleven. Then the teachers marched in and arranged themselves, sentrylike, along the walls and by the door. Barring a hasty exit on my part, which I must admit seemed a tempting “fight or flight” option for a moment or two, I realized I was now expected to entertain these youngsters and the teachers by…by doing what?!

  It’s not that I was unfamiliar with the lecture circuit and expectant audiences, but usually I was well prepared, with notes and even a slide show. In addition my listeners were usually adult and ardent lovers of travel and adventure tales, relatively familiar, at least vicariously, with many of the countries Anne and I had explored, and possessing patient attention spans…and were invariably fluently English-speaking!

  I realized that I was faced with a black hole of experience. I had the distinct feeling of being sucked into sensory oblivion. I had never before talked to a gathering of very young schoolchildren. I think my sister’s experience as a schoolteacher and her descriptions of the terrors of “keeping the little darlings focused and amused for more than thirty seconds at a time,” had convinced me that such a challenge was one I was quite happy to forgo for the rest of my natural life.

  Until today.

  And no one was helping me. Teachers had hissed and cajoled the room into timorous silence, and were now watching me intently, with anticipatory half-smiles on their faces. The headmaster gave a brief speech in Italian, presumably a promo-pitch for my appearance, and then nodded smilingly to indicate that the floor was now all mine. And, of course, Giuliano was by the window, giving me one of his broad, encouraging grins.

  It was at that moment that I spotted Rocco, Giuliano’s physically disabled grandson. He was sitting in the front row in his wheelchair, his face beaming with expectation and pride as he indicated to his friends that “this is the man I’ve been telling you about who is always eating far too much of Nonna [Grandmother] Rosa’s food at our house” (or something along those lines). His smile—always a beautiful smile that seemed to glow with the pure pleasure of living and learning—did the trick. He and I had been chatting a few weeks previously about the things he enjoyed most at school and the dreams he had for his future. And suddenly I knew exactly what I would try to talk to these eager young pupils about: I’d talk about dreams and how the life that Anne and I were trying to live (propelled by serendipity, luck, and pure bloody-minded zaniness) actually still seemed to reflect our earliest dreams.

  And so, assisted by the English teacher, who offered to interpret (I have no idea how well, but she seemed to enjoy herself), I began.

  “When I was a very little boy, I remember having this fantastic dream. I was in this big, big balloon painted with red and blue dots and floating high above the ground and being blown along by warm breezes all over the world…” (Fortunately there was a big map of the world on the wall behind me—the perfect prop.) “Whenever I wanted to explore somewhere—mountains, lakes, deserts, big cities—I could pull on a little rope and the balloon would float down out of the sky and rest on the ground, and I could get out and go off to meet the people who lived there and eat strange foods with them and dance their dances and listen to all their wonderful stories. And then, when I had learned and seen lots of things, I could get back in my balloon and pull another rope and soar back up into the sky again and go looking for somewhere else to explore and to learn about. And you know what happened? That dream—the dream I had when I was about your age—came true. And for a long, long time I have been exploring the world—anywhere I want to go—sketching, writing, taking photographs, eating really strange foods, and listening to lots and lots of people tell me about their very different, but always very interesting, lives.”

  And I had them! I could tell by watching their faces that the idea of dreams actually becoming real had somehow struck a chord in their young heads and hearts. There was no whispering or yawning or sudden trips to the bathroom. They just sat there, staring at the map as I told them about all the places Anne and I had explored in our thirty or so years of traveling together. But I also made it clear that Anne had her own special dreams, too. Inspired by the adventure travel books she read during her childhood, she had decided she wanted to explore Africa and other developing regions of the world. Through her work with people who were blind, she’d traveled extensively and loved what she did. And somehow, during her many years of overseas work, the two of us had always been able to combine our mutual dreams of traveling and exploring together.

  I realized after a while that half an hour had passed in nanoseconds and I decided it was time to wrap things up while the children (and teachers) were smiling and still seemingly attentive.

  “So, what do you think is the meaning of everything I’ve been talking to you about today?” I suddenly asked the children. I realized later that this was perhaps a risky thing to do, particularly as the silence that followed my question seemed to go on and on…until the responses began to flow, one by one. And I stood there amazed at their comprehension and moved by some of their interpretations:

  “You must try to find a dream for your life…”

  “You must try to make your dream true by what you do…”

  “You must not be frightened if you do different things from other peoples…”

  “Try to find someone to share your dreams with and see if you both can live your dreams together…”

  “Even when bad things happen, you must remember your dreams…”

  “It’s all right to have more than one dream or to change dreams…”

  “It’s good to try to understand and help other people…”

  Some of their other comments had everyone clapping and howling with laughter:

  “I would like to travel in a much bigger home than yours!” (a reference to the tiny, cramped VW camper I’d explained was our first “earth gypsy” home).

  “I will never eat dog!” (I don’t remember any reference to eating dog in my talk, but who knows? Maybe I got a little carried away in my monologuing…)

  “I don’t want to go anywhere with spiders.”

  “Is it all right to be a girl train driver?”

  “I want to plant lots and lots of trees and make the world very green…”

  “Do you think you’ll ever explore the moon?”

  I seem to remember that my response to that last question, when the giggling finally faded away, suggested that the moon was merely a stepping-stone to all the amazing galaxy-filled infinities beyond. I was going to try and offer a Carl Sagan “billions and billions” picture of the whole universe but decided that they’d all possibly had enough ideas and concepts dangled in front of them for one day.

  ON OUR WAY back to Giuliano’s house he couldn’t stop chuckling. “That was fantastic, Dave. They loved it! ’Ow many times have you done this kinda thing at schools?”

  I decided to be honest. “This was a first.”

  “No, no,” he said, still chuckling. “No, I don’t believe…”

  Me neither, I mumbled to myself.

  And then he switched roles and became my agent and general factotum again. “Look, ah, on the way back, why don’t I introduce you to our mayor? Only a few minutes. He’s very nice man.”

  “Giuliano!” I said as stubbornly as I could.

  There was a brief silence. But
then my irrepressible friend was off again: “You remember you and Anne was talkin’ ’bout lookin’ at ’ouses for sale ’round Accettura and Aliano? Well, friend of mine ’as got this ’ouse not far from ’ere. Right on the top. Beautiful views of everything. Not expensive to buy. So maybe you wanna take a quick look…now?”

  All I did was turn and give him my best attempt at the silent assertive look.

  “Oh, ’azright, ’azright, David.” He chuckled again. “We got work to do with Rosa.”

  “’Azright, Giuliano,” I said and started chuckling too. I felt stupidly, blissfully happy.

  And even happier when Giuliano happened to mention—maybe as compensation for his sneaky little conspiracy—that “Rosa is cooking for dinner tonight one of your favorite things, her sotto il coppo.”

  And as usual, he was right. This traditional masterpiece was indeed one of my favorite Lucanian slow-cooking creations. It consists of a sublimely fragrant and tender casserole of chunks of rabbit, small cubes of pork jowl (guanciale) and potatoes coated with olive oil, salt, pepper, and peperoncini. Rosa cooked this for three or four hours in an earthenware pot sealed with a clay lid (custom made and decorated by Giuliano as one of his new projects), in a nest of embers at the edge of an open fire—in our case Giuliano’s fine, handcrafted fireplace built entirely out of his own bricks.

  As the three of us worked together through the afternoon and into the early evening on the “farm calendar,” the dining room slowly filled with enticing aromas, and despite all my vows to forgo dinners after large lunches, I looked forward to breaking them. Over and over again.

  ROSA’S CULINARY MAGIC revealed itself in other ways later that day as we delved into the mysteries of maiale (pork).

  Along with a few trusted women friends along Via Galliano in Accettura and a couple of female family members, Rosa is one who can rapidly transform a just-deceased four-hundred-pound mature porker into a remarkable range of extremely tasty delights—at least eleven—all of which I’d seen on many occasions dangling from the rafters of the Mingalone cantina. And in addition to a hearty supply of cutlets and chops (braciole and bracioline) and huge roasts, she wastes not one iota of pig and even finds succulent ways of using skin, ears, tails, and all those other curious oddities.

  The following is a virtually unedited transcription of her commentary on the various casalinghi (home-produced processes) involved, presented in her unique blend of Nottingham, “South Italian,” and Accettura dialects and phraseology:

  “What you’ve got to realize, y’see, David, is that pork is really our main meat. We’ve plenty of lamb, too, because this is sheep country—you see the pastori [shepherds] and their white dogs everywhere.” (I remembered the white dogs all too well from my recent traumatic experience in Aliano’s calanchi canyons.) “But pork is king. There’s an old dialect saying around these parts, ‘Crisc’lu purch’ca t’ung’lu muss,’ ‘Keep a pig and you’ll oil your snout.’ In fact our Lucanian pigs and all the things we make from them was praised by a lot of them Romans—you know, Cato, Apicius, Pliny—I remember that from school. In fact, all across Italy you’ll hear sausages and salamis called luganega, which means that Lucania always produced the best. But funny thing is, it’s not difficult really. Good sea salt is your main item. And patience. You need quite a bit of patience. And muscle. You need a bit of that, too. If I need a lot, I get Giuliano.

  “I always start with the prosciutto because it’s the most difficult to get dead right. Some years we don’t make it, ’specially if there’s likely to be a real hot summer. Prosciutto has to hang for at least a year—better two—and it doesn’t like too many shifts in temperature. It can spoil, go off, if you’re not real careful. But generally this cantina of ours keeps a pretty even temperature year ’round, so usually it’s all right.

  “And what you do is this. First, I don’t bother with smoking. Some do, and they make that speck ham—a bit like the German aged ham, but you need a special smokin’ room, and most of us in Basilicata like it just salt cured. So I take the hams, the big back legs, cut the trotters and the hocks off them. I use those for other special dishes. Slow-cooked hock and cabbage—a beautiful dinner that. Trotters are good, too, but it takes forever to get them real tender so that everything just slips off the bone when you suck them.

  “Anyway, so I get this big cauldron and fill it with moist salt—about thirty grams per kilo of meat—and press it into the ham all over. Then you let it sit for up to thirty days or so, turning every two days in the salt. Some people mix in some peperoncini or black pepper with the salt, but we don’t. I like it pure myself.

  “So, then, after all that turning in the salt, which takes out most of the blood and water, you want it as dry as possible, otherwise it’ll spoil. You wash it really well in cold water. Then you lay it on a board on the floor and cover it with a tea towel or some cheesecloth, then put another board on top, and then you put a really heavy load on top of that—about four hundred pounds—to press it and squeeze it as dry as you can without breaking the flesh. Giuliano usually does this bit with his homemade bricks and whatnot. And you leave it for about forty-eight hours without moving it.

  “Now you’ve almost finished. What you do next is rub the exposed part of the meat—where it was cut off the trunk of the pig—with a sticky mix of hot peperoncini, salt, and lard, to keep bugs and flies off and to give it that special Basilicatan tang. Some people use just lard. Some use a mix of fat, paprika, pepper, and whatever other spices they want, really. It all depends on what you like.

  “Then you put the ham in a muslin or cheesecloth sack and hang it up for two years. I check it from time to time by just opening up the flesh a little bit and smelling it. Sometimes one’ll go off but usually, after two years, you’ve got a lovely purple rose–colored prosciutto that’ll last our family a good three months if you cut it real nice and thin.

  “Other cured meats like the round coppa, which is usually lean shoulder and lower neck meat, and capocollo—the upper neck meat—are a bit simpler. Basically you turn them in the damp salt for eight days, wash them, wrap them in a caul, and then hang them up for at least four months in those string nets.

  “Then there’s all kinds of salami-type things you can make. When you chop up the meat real fine, add salt and pepper, whole and crushed—peperoncini, too, if you want it hot—squeeze the meat into intestine skins, and hang it up for three to four months. Soppressata you do like that, too, using the meat from the back of the leg.

  “And then there’s your normal luganega sausages and cotechino, also salsiccia, which all need minced-up meat. We used to do all that by hand before we got the machine, and that was really hard work. Then you can add salt, pepper, and some peperoncini if you want—some people use garlic, fennel, anise seeds, all kinds of things. You can make very rich salami al aglio, with garlic. I keep my ingredients simple; I like the taste of the pork to stand out. But we’ve got such a lot of wild herbs growing up in these mountains—cumin, rue, sorrel, forest fennel, pennyroyal, rosemary, and them small wild onions called lambascioni; you see them in all the groceries still covered in soil. So some people use them in the sausages and salami recipes. And they get very fussy, too, over which peperoncini—capsicum peppers—to use, too. I like pupon best, but you’ve also got your frangisello, cerasella, and diavolicchio—the one they say has a “devilish” bite. There’s another one, too. Real strong. Like Scotch Bonnet, but I forget the name…. Anyway, then you pump the mix with anelectric sausage maker into those yards and yards of intestines that you’ve cleaned real good. And that’s about it. Except—I almost forgot: There’s pancetta, which is the belly pork bacon, which you age like coppa for about six months, and Giuliano’s favorite, guanciale. That’s pig cheek or jowl, which is mainly fat and aged like coppa, but it tastes so good just plain with bread or fried golden crispy with bread fried in the fat that’s cooked off.

  “Now you’ve got to remember, like I said, with a pig you don’t waste nothin’
. The blood we don’t normally use for blood sausage—black puddin’—which we used to eat a lot when we lived in England, but not here. We make a kind of chocolaty-cream filling for cakes and things instead. We call it pezzente, beggar’s cake! It’s really very nice. You’d never know you’re eating blood. Honest. In fact, you had some last time for Sunday dinner and you said you really enjoyed it. Bet you didn’t know what it was though, did ya!?

  “And then there’s the ears and snout and all them other bits and pieces, which we chop up and layer in large glass jars separated by salt and bay leaves. You weigh it down like a galantine—press it—for a year or so. Then you take out what you want, soak it in water overnight to reduce the salt, and then boil it up with cabbage and potatoes. And it really is lovely. Melts in your mouth. We call it cantarata locally. I don’t know what they call it up north. Maybe they don’t like to eat them kinda things up there! We’re not so fussy as them, us who live down here.

  “Oh! And last of all. There’s a lot of ciccioli—that’s rendered-down pork fat to be used for cooking and other things. And my lovely little rolls of skin wrapped around garlic and peperoncini and salted for a few weeks. You wash them, too, and cook them—still tied in little packages—with lentils or beans. It may not sound like much, just flavored skin, but when I do them the whole family’s over in a flash!”

  SO, THERE YOU HAVE THEM. All the secrets of a self-sufficient contadino-type of family, courtesy of Rosa Mingalone, who offered them openly to anyone willing to play with the wonderful possibilities of pork.

  Rosa added her own postscript: “And what else do I do with my year? Well, I used to make cheeses—pecorino, ricotta, mascarpone—but I’ve got a friend who, I think, makes them better, so I use hers instead. I used to make butter, too—manteca or burro—but I’m gettin’ too lazy in my old age. But I’m always makin’ fresh pasta. I use the best pura semolino di grano duro—that really good flour made from the heart of hard, durum wheat grains. They don’t let me use packaged stuff much. They ask me for orecchiette, strascinati, ferricelle, cavatelli, and their favorite, those little, long strands you roll around a piece of wire, truchetti. I usually serve my pasta with a kind of ragu sauce, using very small pieces of chopped, not minced, meat. Oh, then I make at least two hundred liters of my own tomato sauce from our own tomatoes, although last year we got some kind of virus all around here, which killed them all off overnight. Lovely, big, juicy tomatoes all went black. So, I had to buy tomatoes. And I don’t use no basil or garlic. Just salt. You can add other flavors later when you cook. And I do all kinds of things with olives, too—bake ’em, pickle ’em. You know. Everybody does. And jams and bottled fruit. I do all that. And we dry those big red peppers, peperoni rossi—not the hot ones—and toast them a little bit in a frying pan until they’re dark red and as crisp as a cracker. Beautiful. It’s all so beautiful, really.”