North of Naples, South of Rome

by Tullio, Paulo;

  My mother has a great friend from her school days who lives in Aversa, about half-way between Gallinaro and Naples. Romilda, a beautiful black-haired lady, has three gorgeous daughters, all roughly my age. During those teenage years I spent a lot of time in Aversa, and as soon as I had a driving licence I drove my Fiat 500 there as often as I could. For once it was not testosterone driving me, but rather a chance to talk to girls as an equal, with few if any barriers between us. It was while I was staying in Aversa one year with Mimma, Giovanna and Valeria that I made a discovery. The girls were having a party and that night I was awestruck at the gathering. All the boys and all the girls seemed so amazingly sophisticated, well-dressed, confident, while I felt distressingly dull. For what seemed like an eternity I found reasons to be in the kitchen, the bathroom, anywhere but where I would have to confront these beautiful people. The girls’ father, Rafaele, was a competent pianist and had a good voice. He began playing Neapolitan songs wonderfully, but this was the era of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles. In desperation he singled me out.

  ‘Paolo, you can play that Americano “hippy-hippy yay”, can’t you?’

  I knew what he meant by this curious phrase and said I could. I played. Suddenly the mask of sophistication that surrounded me on all sides became transparent. I could see young faces no different from I those I would find in England or Ireland and my discomfort vanished. The simple truth that people are much the same no matter how they appear was a revelation to me that night. I found myself fêted and appreciated by the very creatures who had seemed so remote, so unattainable. Since that night that peculiarly Italian ability to create anxiety in less beautiful mortals no longer affects me. I now see their beauty not as a threat – indeed it was never intended to be so – but rather as a part of what makes Italy so interesting and exciting.

  12

  The Italian Larder

  By now it must be abundantly clear that food figures largely in my life, and in that of the Comino Valley. What follows is foodie indulgence: a guide for basic gastronomy Lazio-style.

  To eat Italian food on a daily basis you need a cantina, or larder, stocked with some basic ingredients: prosciutto, salsicce, both fresh and preserved in oil, curd cheese, herbs either dry or in oil, pasta, and several kinds of sauce. I know of no books on Italian cooking that tell you how to make these staples, so here is a quick tour.

  The main principle is that whatever keeps should be made in quantity at one time and then stored for later use. It saves time in the long run and you eat better. The other point to remember is that there are no short cuts; the preparation is labour-intensive and takes time, but if you care about how you eat, it’s worth it.

  In the Comino Valley, as elsewhere in Italy, the yearly cycle starts in the winter when the pig is killed. It’s done in winter because the process of salt-curing works better when the weather is cool and dry. The two back legs become prosciutto, the sides are cured rather like bacon – pancetta – and, apart from what little is eaten fresh, the rest becomes sausages. Should you wish to try it, the process is easy enough. Buy the biggest haunch of fresh pork you can find: 7 kilos would be the minimum, over 9 is better. Lay the leg on a bed of coarse salt in a tray that allows the liquid pickle to drain out. Now cover the top of the leg with salt, working it well into the shank end and into the crevices around the hip bone. Leave it there for twice as many days as it weighs in kilos, checking it occasionally to ensure it remains covered in salt. When the time is up, wash it clean of salt and dry it thoroughly. Now hang it up in a cool and airy place and watch it carefully. Any sign of mould, or any hint of rot around the hip bone must be treated immediately with fine salt, worked into the crevices. After ten days to a fortnight it should have a dry exterior; all drips should have stopped. What is happening is that the salt is drawing the moisture out of the meat. The drier and airier the environment the faster this happens.

  At this point you can try one of two techniques for the next stage. I prefer to wipe the exposed flesh with olive oil and then pat it with powdered chilli, which will give the ham a red colour, a lovely smell and will eventually flavour the prosciutto. Try to avoid getting the chilli powder on the skin – it spoils the look of it. If you wish, rub olive oil into the skin, which will, over time, give it a golden colour. Now hang it up again and wait. How long you wait depends on your patience, but don’t start cutting into it until it has lost at least a third of its original weight. This will usually take a minimum of seven to nine months, so watch it carefully as the summer comes for signs of rot or mould. More salt is the cure.

  The other technique to use when the ham is surface dry is to make a paste of flour, water and salt and spread this over the exposed meat fairly thinly. Like the chilli powder, this has the effect of discouraging the attention of flies, as well as improving the look of the ham. If by chance you should leave your prosciutto too long and it becomes as hard as iron, don’t despair. Leave it to soak in a mixture of half-wine, half-water and it will become delicious again.

  Sausages – salsicce – are a staple. They turn up in many dishes and are a snack on their own. Shoulder of pork has about the right mix of lean meat to fat for sausages – to cure properly they need a minimum of one third fat content. To start off with 5 kilos is enough, but if you’re feeling energetic, 10 kilos makes a lot of sausages. The meat should be cut into small cubes, preferably by hand. Machine chopping tends to heat the meat and you’ll end up with black sausages; the same holds true of mincing. Take a large mixing bowl and cover the bottom about 3 centimetres deep with the chopped pork. Sprinkle this well with salt, coarsely ground black pepper and chilli powder. A pinch of saltpetre helps the preserving but is not essential. Now add another layer of meat and repeat the salt, pepper and chilli. Continue until you have used all the pork and then mix it all together thoroughly.

  Next you will need casings for the sausages. They come in two kinds, natural and artificial. Either will do, but you need casings that will fill to at least 4 centimetres in diameter without bursting. Most butchers are happy to sell them. Now you must be ingenious. There are, of course, machines that fill sausages, but they are hardly standard kitchen appliances. You need a funnel with a long, wide spout, at least 2 centimetres in diameter. Tie a knot in one end of the casing and work the rest over the spout, like fitting a prophylactic, until the knot is at the end of the spout. If the casing is salted and dry, soak it and run warm water through it first. Now you must find a way to force the meat down the spout. A glass of red wine added to the pork will make it easier to push into the casing, but the sausages will take longer to cure because of the added liquid. The simplest device for pushing the pork into the casing, but the hardest work, is a piping bag with a nozzle wide enough to take the funnel. Squeeze the bag, or use a rod to plunge the funnel and the casing will slowly come off the spout as it fills with meat. It is important to make sure that the casing is well filled and taut; keep a little pressure on it to make sure it doesn’t slide off the spout too quickly, leaving you with half-filled sausage. Eventually you will end up with a tube 1.5 metres long stuffed with pork.

  Over the years I have successfully used an old Spong mincer with the blades removed and my funnel attached to the front with a jubilee clip. I have also used the device for squeezing silicon out of tubes, but best of all is any electrically powered screw such as on a mincer, modified to hold the funnel.

  If you get this far, you will now have a long sausage. Gently tighten a length of string about 10 centimetres from one end, making your first sausage in the line. Loop the string further along and make a second sausage, continuing until you reach the other end. Take your string of salsicce and hang them up as with the prosciutto, where it is cool and dry. Note their weight, and when they weigh half of their original weight, pack them tightly into storage jars and cover them completely with olive oil. If you don’t do this, the salsicce will continue to shrink and will eventually become so hard that they will be inedible. In a jar of oil they will theoreti
cally keep for ever; the trouble is that they taste so good, they go in no time. Slice them thinly with a diagonal cut to get larger slices and eat them on bread.

  Sausages made like this don’t have to be left to cure. Take a couple after a day or two and slice them lengthways. Cook them on a griddle iron for a real treat, or better still on wood embers. You can put them into your sugo while it cooks to add flavour. Their uses are endless. They can be made all year long if they are going to be cooked, but if they are for curing and storing, winter is the best time.

  There is a wonderful pasta dish that you can make using the salsicce, either fresh or cured. It is called spaghetti alla carbonara. Traditionally this was made by charcoal burners, who spent the summers in the high mountains cutting wood and making charcoal, returning in the autumn with their produce. Because they would normally have only one heat source – an open fire – and probably only one pot for boiling the pasta, this dish was popular, since it could be made with these limited resources. I have seen many recipes for this dish that include butter and cream, but they are gentrified versions of the original plain, delicious, rustic fare. The basic mountain recipe is this: boil the spaghetti, when it is cooked drain it, leaving it in the pot. Break four eggs per half kilo of pasta and drop them in, add some olive oil and some chopped salsicce. Stir well and eat.

  I have always been hesitant to try to improve on this simple dish, but without over-elaborating it you can try this. While the spaghetti cooks let some chopped, fresh salsicce simmer slowly in a frying pan with plenty of olive oil and, if cholesterol is not a problem, some pieces of fat from the prosciutto. Again, for half a kilo of pasta, take four egg yolks, discarding the whites. Whisk these well with half an eggshell of water and grate fresh Parmesan into it. If the cheese is very dry the mixture will thicken – thin it down again with another drop of water. Add freshly ground black pepper and whisk some more. When the pasta is cooked drain it and return it to the pot. Pour in the salsicce and oil first and stir well. Now add the eggs, stirring quickly. If you have done this with speed, the residual heat of the pasta will cook the eggs and there is no need for further heat. Don’t let the egg cook until it sets; it should coat the pasta like cream. It is worth the effort of making salsicce for this alone.

  This dish embodies the philosophy of food in the south of Italy. Although much of what is prepared is labour-intensive, it is very rarely complex. What is appreciated is the quality of the raw ingredients, and the skilful use of flavour. Mixed herbs are not to be found in little jars in Italian supermarkets – Italians like flavours that are clearly defined. Using too many flavours is like mixing too many colours together – you get muddy brown. The best example of the careful use of flavours is gremolata, the traditional accompaniment to osso buco. Combine chopped parsley, garlic and grated lemon rind and you end up with a taste that is greater than its parts – it makes a new flavour entirely, just as a painter mixing blue and yellow makes a new colour.

  Now that the larder contains cured pork ready for use, we need some cheese. The only cheese that can be made at home with pasteurized milk is soft curd cheese, which makes a good substitute for ricotta. You can make a small amount with 4 litres of milk, which will yield about 500 grammes of cheese, depending on the habits of your dairy. Warm the milk slowly to 32 degrees centigrade, take it off the heat and then stir in rennet. This can be bought in chemists, and usually one tablespoon of rennet per litre of milk is recommended. In about half an hour the milk will set into curd. Leave it overnight; then the next day drain off the whey and break up the curd. Ladle it into a piece of linen or cheesecloth and tie it tightly, leaving it to drain for another hour. Untie it, and work 50 grammes of salt into the curds, adding if you wish some herbs for flavouring. Ricotta should be left unflavoured for use in cooking and, although this is not ricotta, it will be closer to it if it is simply salted and not flavoured. When it’s salted, tie it up again and leave it. You can eat it fresh, but you can also leave it to mature for a month or more if you brush the outside of the cheese with salted water regularly. If you have little wicker baskets, put the curds in those instead of tying them up in cloth. In baskets the cheese should be turned every two days.

  If you can get your hands on fresh, unpasteurized milk, you can make some real cheese, like mozzarella. Bring 10 litres of milk up to 30 degrees centigrade. Remove from the heat, add the rennet and cover. Cut the curds when they are set, and bring the curds and whey back up to 30 degrees. Cover and put somewhere warm. Now you have to be dedicated. Wait half a day, then start to test your curds for pitching. As the curds sit in the whey they become increasingly acid: this is pitching. Take a small piece of curd on a fork and dip it into boiling water. If when you take it out you can make it go stringy, it’s ready. If not, leave it and test every three hours until it is.

  When the curds are pitched, pour off the whey and put small amounts of the curd into really hot water. Work the curds and slowly you can make small balls of cheese by rolling the stringy bits around themselves. Make balls about the size of a lemon, and put them into salted water for an hour. Now you can eat your mozzarella.

  If you press your curds into moulds rather than immersing them in hot water, you will have caciotta. If you turn the cheese every two days and paint the outside with salted water regularly, after a month, your cheese will be hard enough to use for grating.

  To be really clever, take the whey that you poured off the curds and add either lemon juice or vinegar. Slowly heat this to near boiling point. Milk solids will begin to precipitate. When cool, pour through very fine muslin or cheesecloth and you have real ricotta, which, incidentally, means re-cooked.

  There are two types of pasta: fresh and dried. The dry pasta is the one in every shop; it keeps for ages so there is no harm in having the larder stocked with a variety of shapes. Italians are very fussy about what shapes go with what sauce and there is sense in this. Every sauce has different properties when it comes to coating the pasta; for example, thick sauces do not work well on the cut pasta such as penne or rigatoni, since the insides of the tubes don’t get covered. You end up eating a high proportion of pasta to sauce. Thick sauces that contain little oil or butter work best on fusilli or spaghetti, where the surface area is large in proportion to the volume. These are not hard and fast rules, but are worth observing.

  Fresh pasta does not keep for long, so it is usually made for immediate consumption. It makes a change from the other and is not hard to make – it is only flour and eggs. Any white wheat flour will do, but the best results come from using hard durum wheat flour, type oo. Four eggs to half a kilo of flour is normal; depending on the size of the eggs, you may need to add a little water or more flour to make a stiff dough. Work it long and hard and then roll it out into thin sheets. Use a knife to cut it either into thin strips, tagliatelle, or into pieces about 15 by 5 centimetres, lasagne. Fresh pasta like this cooks quickly – about four or five minutes.

  You can make more than you intend to eat right away. If you hang your tagliatelle over a line it will dry quickly and keep for a week or so with no problems. Lasagne will need plenty of work surfaces where you can lay out the pieces on floured boards or trays until they are dry. After that they can be packed loosely into boxes until they are needed. To make a good lasagna cook the pasta first, before you tray it up. If you don’t, all the starch remains in the pasta instead of in the cooking water and your lasagna will be a stodgy lump.

  On occasions gnocchi make a change from pasta. They are made from potato and flour. The secret for good, delicate gnocchi, as opposed to hard little bullets, is using as little flour as possible. The principle is straightforward: stiffen mashed potato with flour to make a firm dough. The less water the boiled potatoes contain, the less flour you need to make a stiff paste. Waxy potatoes work better than floury ones; steaming works better than boiling.

  As a rough guide, the ratio of potato to flour should be four to one, that is, for a kilo of potatoes you’ll need about 250 grammes of flour.
Mix this together with two eggs and a knob of butter and roll it out into pieces the thickness of a finger. Cut the roll into lengths of about 2 cm and give each piece a squeeze in the middle with your forefinger and thumb. Put them one at a time into simmering, salted water and remove them with a perforated spoon when they float to the top. Treat them as pasta, but ideally serve with a strong, full-bodied sauce, such as a meat sugo.

  The other farinaceous dish eaten in Italy is polenta, boiled maize meal. Depending on how thick you want the final product to be, take one measure of maize semolina and add between two-and-a-half and three measures of water. A mug of semolina makes enough for six smallish portions. Put the maize into a pan of boiling water and start stirring. Add three teaspoonfuls of salt. As you keep stirring the polenta will begin to thicken, making disgusting noises as it does so. Turn the heat low and let it make plopping sounds, stirring occasionally. When it is thick enough to stand the spoon in it, turn off the heat. There are many recipes to be found for this, but the best is simple. Have prepared a good tomato sauce with plenty of olive oil in it, in which you have cooked some salsicce. Spread the polenta out in a flat container, about a centimetre thick. Cover it with sauce and sausages. If you have any left over, cut it into squares and fry it in oil the next day – nearly as good as cold pasta.

  Preserving food in a jar of oil is an ancient tradition. It keeps your salsicce until they are devoured, but is excellent for many other uses. If you grow basil, drying it loses a lot of flavour. Pack the leaves well down into a jar and cover them with oil, taking care to get air bubbles out. Not only will the flavour keep better, but you’ll have a jar of basil-flavoured oil as well. This property of olive oil can be put to use with chilli peppers. Many Italian recipes need a touch of chilli and gauging the amount to use is never easy. A simple solution is to break dried chillis into a jar, and cover them plus that height again with oil. After four or five weeks the oil will be red and fiery. Now you can dose yourself by the teaspoon and the fire of the chillis is easier to disperse throughout the sauce.