"It has always been true for me that to know a place, I must first know how it eats and drinks. Everything unravels at the table." --Marlena de Blasi
Marlena de Blasi's lifelong affair with cooking began at age nine on a beach along the coast of southern Italy, where she met an elderly woman roasting potatoes coated with olive oil, rosemary, and sea salt over an open fire.
Now, in A Taste of Southern Italy, de Blasi brings to life the spirit as well as the cuisine of this bountiful region. With de Blasi we travel down remote country goat paths in tiny island villages and along sun-washed avenues of great cities in search of some of the most treasured recipes in the world. This is as much a storybook as it is a cookbook: a gathering of small rhapsodies, impressions, and romantic notions from a land where such delights are plentiful. In our journey through the kitchens of southern Italy we find tantalizing recipes for a host of mouthwatering dishes, including
Gnocchi di Castagne con Porcini Trifolati Insalata di Pesce Dove il Mare Non C'é Pane di Altamura Frittelle di Ricotta e Rhum alla Lucana Peperoni Arrostiti Ripieni La Vera Pizza Pomodori alla Brace Pesce Spada sulla Brace alla Pantesca Ricotta Forte Pasta alla Pecoraio La Torta Antica Ericina Un Gelato Barocco
With these authentic recipes at your fingertips, you can master the luscious tastes and rustic ambiance of southern Italy. These dishes are sure to become a tradition in your home, and will fill it with tantalizing aromas and love.
From the Hardcover edition.
Excerpts
From the book...
LAZIO As we cross over the sweet, southern Tuscan flanks into the region of Lazio, we must trim our expectations. Light thins, impressions narrow, and the silvered rhapsody of Tuscany smudges into the blacks and greens and browns of the humble countryside of the Alto Lazio. Pastures and sheepfolds separate sandy-eyed villages sleeping through time. Some of them, rich with untrumpeted pasts unhunted by travelers, are hemmed by Etruscan necropoli, tombs excavated, preserved, beckoning small, whispered ingress into an elegant and precocious culture. The city of Tarquinia, the villages of Sorano, Sovana, Pitigliano, Sutri, Vetralla, Nepi, Civita Castellana, and Tuscania hold up smoked looking glasses into the essentially impenetrable story of Etruria.
And then there is Rome.
An ecstasy of secrets wrapped in lies and dreams is Rome. The ages ache in our throats as we float on her memories. Raised up from pagan huts huddled on wooded hills,
Rome is the sublime issue of grinding wills and destinies dyed in blood, and into her earth are planted the most splendid conceits of power and beauty. Know them, touch them all, and still you shall not know Rome. One can recount her story, trample over her breast--never touching her heart--feel the shifts of her mood shivering one's skin. Still you shall not know her. Look up at her. See a splendid ruin of the Republic containing a medieval church that, in its turn, was re-dressed for the Renaissance, then persuaded into the Baroque--one springing, tumbling forth from another--in an unfading rhythm of resurrection from spoils. If you search her well, she will give up to you some shard of her mystery. But never mistake her smile for transparency.
It is enough, I suppose, that we are of her, of her crooked, confounding descendance of demons and heroes and saints. Perhaps, then, it is first our own shams and treacheries we must loosen, all the better to illuminate her. It helps to approach Rome as an innocent.
Even Romans will tell you they know only the places of her in which they live, where they walk, where they buy bread and take coffee and go to Mass. Pieces of her enchant them as they do us. Yet she is not a crumbled and ornamented old dame to be held gingerly, unclose, as if she were only her unembraceable stones. Rome is new and young and becoming, she is of kindness and possibility. Guileless midst the improbable drape of her ruins, she is gold-dusted and bewitching, engaging life, daring it, ravishing every bittersweet crumb of it.
A morning in March offers a walk to the Teatro di Marcello and a nearby temple dedicated in 431 b.c. to Apollo. Pediments, pilasters, remnants of the Empire are the precious litter strewn about the wooded patches of weeds and grasses. And there among them is one taking the sun. Her headrest is a fragment of marble column, supine, lustrous in the grass. Unself-consciously pivoting her amplitude under the cupolas of black pine and oleander, she bathes her face in unshaded heat. A string bag filled with nodding, long-stemmed artichokes, and lavender roses waits beside her on the smoothed stump of another stone. In a single one of her moments, she has gathered up to her the sunlight, artichokes, roses, and some quiet, undesigned reckoning with her past. She is, after all, a Roman and would have nothing less.
Go at nine of a morning to a bar in Piazza Sant' Eustachio to drink Rome's best coffee, and standing there with you, upholstered in cashmere and Scottish tweed, lips powdered in sugar from his custard-filled croissant, will be a prince. Too, you will find the neighborhood's...
Reviews
Publishers Weekly...
"Cooks whose culinary adventures have heretofore stopped at Tuscany will discover a whole new world of Italian food."
from the Introduction...
"Southern Italian food has a range of style and savor that sweeps from the piquant to the delicate, embracing restraint and sensitivity as often as it demonstrates aggressiveness. It is created by cooks with the courage to let a food be, to let it taste like its own good self. Southerners revere the purity of flavors and textures of a food. They are content to tear a few leaves of a wild mint over a roasted fish, to grill fat prawns in lemon leaves, to roast suckling lamb in a terracotta pot with a great heft of sweet butter. It is a cuisine that aspires to dignity even in the midst of insufficiency."
About the Author
Marlena de Blasi is a chef, a food and wine consultant, a restaurant critic, and the author of A Thousand Days In Venice, A Thousand Days in Tuscany, and Regional Foods of Northern Italy, which was nominated for the James Beard Award. She lives with her Venetian husband, Fernando, in the restored wing of a seventeenth-century palazzo in the Umbrian hill town of Orvieto. Between endless jaunts into every region of the country, they and their son, Erich, host culture and cuisine courses for travelers.
