Nine recent moments in the life of our school:
an update
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
December 2004

Close your eyes and think about the ideal diet. Go ahead, take a few seconds. You’ll probably quickly have one of two images in your head, that of that little food pyramid, where a pencil-drawing of bread represents grains, then fruits and vegetables, followed by meat, fat, sugar and oil way up at the tippy-tippy-top. And second, if you kept them closed long enough, might be the little slice of heaven in the south of Italy where I live, in Puglia, the region where folks actually eat like
that everyday, without ever really trying. And normally it’s all true, every word. It’s just that today is San Martino and everyone in Italy will be eating like rock stars and vikings, wolfing down stacks of bloody, red meat, washed down with buckets and boatloads of the new wine. Listen for it come dinner time tonight and you’ll hear 60 million Italian livers threatening to pop, producing that same sound as a finger across an over-inflated balloon.

The green groceries and fish-mongers knew enough to bring gossip magazines and betting sheets to work today, a few even took the day off. The butchers though, they were up early this morning, joking and hoisting carcasses, steeling their knives and loading reels of paper numbers for all the jovial customers now lined up, usually several deep.

As for me, I talked with each of them, the busy and the not so busy, (mostly the not so busy), then bought my pork belly and shoulder and went home to make fresh sausages for San Martino, just like I do every year. It’s just that this year- after Mario, the car ride and the forward-tongued Venuzeluan- it all felt very, very different.

Still no less vivid today, my first memory of sausage was as little brown disks, invisibly sizzling and sputtering high above my head in a shiny cast iron frying skillet, my grandfather, a railroad conductor, happily whistling, Take The A Train. He’d fry potatoes right in the rendered fat there left in the pan and for some reason at the time I thought it the height of cleverness. The same pan left my grandmother’s anemic potatoes nearly flavorless, a non-flavor I now recognize as vegetable oil. But I loved my grandfather’s potatoes, filled with flavors I know now as black pepper, pig fat and factory-ground dried sage, the hallmark of breakfast sausage patties. Just like I now know that his cartoonish, over-gestured, spatula flips- and his undulating Ellington- were actually less about his slippery-lipped love of sausage, or even his low-fi satisfaction of cooking with cast iron. It was, in fact, a kind of taunting, common among older men. To my worried grandmother, to his’concerned’ doctor and to all the serious scientists on his evening news, the people that told him that at his age he shouldn’t be eating like that, he whistled and flipped the patties, occasionally even cracking a few eggs over it all. To an eight year old, none of it ever seemed like the retaliation of an old man emasculated by a nagging wife and his own turn-coat heart, yellowed with fat.

As it would take me years to understand the dynamics of sausage, older men, their wives and doctors. I just remember sitting in a little red wooden chair next to his easy chair, watching him watch television, enjoying the exotic flavors of sausages alongside my grandpa.

The first time I ever actually made sausage myself was in provincial France, while staying a month in a wooden house with aspiring priests and nuns, just a morning’s walk outside of Dijon. It was incredible. On Sunday’s we’d have a big boiled dinner after mass, the giant pot filled with turnips and wedges of sweet cabbage, little wiggles of bone marrow, carrots, celery and the perfect, concentric rounds of leeks. Someone would pray in pretty, sing-song French, then remove the enam-eled cauldron top, sending a massive plume of steam and beefy-goodness up into the blond timbered rafters. Tuesdays they’d expertly roast chickens, serving them with succulent thumb-sized carrots in parsley and butter. But Saturdays, we’d make sausages, drinking Kronenbergs while listening to vintage rockabilly, everyone laughing and giggling and pitching in. We’d take turns rinsing the intestines, frying up chicken livers, grinding the meat, adding the spices, cranking the handle and
catching the fat speckled flesh coil as it noisily ripped from the nozzle. For twenty-three days I actually thought of staying on, moving to France and joining them in their training, I liked it there that much. And I probably would have too, had it not been that the morning walk into town passed by a tiny beauty shop, where a thick-hipped black French woman stood behind her
clients, rolling coils of thinning hair into tinfoil sheets, her meaty hip cocked in such way that would pretty much render the priesthood a non-starter.

Well her, and the fact that Monday night was Pasta night and theirs was overcooked easily by seven minutes, served as a fatty sludge at the bottom of the pot, an idea that makes me deeply sad even ten years on. With the bottom of a wooden spoon in downtown Istanbul, I rammed ground lamb through a blue plastic funnel with my then girlfriend, a young Turkish student that had large brown eyes and brown hair, cinnamon fingers, knees and toes. She slowly fried the sausages in a thin aluminum pan until the air in entire apartment simmered with the smell of heady lamb fat, garlic and wild oregano, the exact smells I had had always expected from the Islamic part of Aegean. We sipped cloudy glasses of raki, rinsing away the warm gush of saliva brought on by all the pungent smells. And while standing naked in front of the stove, drinking from the same glass and eating with our fingers, we listened as an elderly man pushed a groaning, obviously-overloaded cart thru the streets, his tired voice bellowing the practiced cry of a street salesman, the kind that emanates from deep down in the diaphragm. What’s he singing, I asked. She slowly chewed, swallowed, took a long sip, handing back the glass. ‘Watermelons, watermelons, so fresh and so cool. Watermelons, watermelons, refresh yourself and your family.’ She took another bite. ‘The man that sells lemons has a monkey’. And I’ve had various experiences cranking out sausages everywhere I go, from southern Spain, where the traditional Muslim spices mix with the less tradition addition of piggy-parts, to Switzerland where the veal sausages grill up ghostly white, eerily resembling the tender, waterlogged skin of a drowning victim.

There was the time in Gascony, when I aided a friend’s mother in making duck ones loaded with cognac and goose liver. We ate them late night on a chilly balcony after attending a traveling circus of eight men, two women and a single ‘ring’, composed used automotive tires. And there was North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee. Mexico. And I’ve recreated
all of them, from time to time, in my various kitchens, all over Italy. But today, when buying the meat from Giovanni and Sandro, I somehow knew which kind I’d make, and that they’d very different than last San Martino’s.

III
‘Have you ever had these before’, Mario asked me, sucking air to cool the giant bite of sausage between his teeth. ‘I brought 40 kilos of them in the boot of car, all the way from Catalonia. The ice never-melted. But you know, Silvestre, in
my opinion…they are the best in the world’. His wife nodded soberly, as if what he had just said was something that just had to be accepted, like the cost of raising children or the unpleasantness of the Franco years. The conversation was during a long lunch last summer, when fifty of us gathered together in the French countryside for the marriage of my English-Italian
college buddy, to his red-headed French-Spanish-Venezuelan bride. French. Spanish. Venezuelan. English. Mexican. French-Lebanese. Cuban-French. Belgian-Spanish. Over the long weekend, the languages spoken were fluid and never pure, often starting in one tongue and ending in another, pocked and peppered with a third: everyone eager to understand, everyone eager to be understood.

It was rural France at its best: children played in the fields, filling the shady trees with their disembodied voices. We played Petanq in the afternoons while families napped on blankets. At night, with a laptop and a few large speakers, we converted a
dining room into throbbing dance hall, where the Latin women wiggled in ways that non-Latin women never learn. And there was my constant meal companion, a black-haired Venezuelan cousin that spoke each language exactly the same way, her tongue in that tell-tale, overly-forward-in-her- mouth way, indicative of mother-tongue Castilians. In my short but significant
thirty-five years, they were the best four days of my life. I even knew it at the time. Yet that is where my problem started, with Mario, or more to the point, the look on his face as he forked in a second blistering bite just after burning himself with the first,
a child-like move that charmed me completely.‘In my opinion, these are the best in the world’, he said, which really troubled me
because:
a) He’s Spanish, and so were his chorizos, which makes him one of those provincial-types that believe that everything from his
own little neck of the woods is the best there is. It’s always annoying when anyone says that what he knows best, also happens to be the best. It’s like confusing great art with art that you recognize, thinking them the same.
b) I really liked Mario, envied him his life.c) His chorizos were, in fact, excellent.
d) The up until he took a bite, squirting bubbling orange oil over his wife’s blouse, I would have said that chorizos were my favour-ite sausages too.
e) I realized that that was no longer the case.
f) That as much as I’d like to see myself as an International Man of Mystery, my preference is also now driven by where I live.
g) I honestly believe that I make the best sausages I’ve ever had, which, H) puts me in exactly the same boat as Mario, like it or not.
IV
All of this had flashed through my brain in the time it took for some nice guy to take a few bites of his hand-made sausages, yet oddly, it was the first time in my life I ever really felt homesick for the foods of Puglia… while eating chorizos with a raven-haired Venezuelan in France. Had it been during a bad experience, I would have understood completely. My ride back to Lecce was with Sergio from Sicily, another college buddy from ten years back. His girlfriend had just broken up with him with a cell phone call, just as we climbed into his car for the twenty-three hours back to Lecce. Slouching in his bucket seat, we rode in perfect silence, all the way home. Low to the ground and passing through the rolling, French countryside, I started to think about my French Priests and nuns, their rockabilly days and how they smiled, yet resisted my suggestions to spice things up, to add what I had in Umbria, Calabria or Tennessee. Eating and making sausage with them somehow seemed to be about the opposite of individuality, not making your own to produce a superior product, but a similar one. They weren’t opting out; they were tapping
in, making them exactly the same way as their neighbors in the next house did,the same way as the folks at the bottom of the hill. As the car hummed, traveling underground for the half hour it takes to pass under the Swiss-Italian mountain, I thought about the
beautiful Turkish woman, and how of all things, she always ordered simple, grilled sausage during each of her Italian visits, insisting that all of Italy smelled just like one giant sizzling frying pan of pancetta, and how exotic that that was for her.

Sergio’s car banked steep curves between black, craggy mountains, those where teutonic Italians eat butter, seeing fit to end their words with clunky consenents. As we passed through flat, effluent and sleeping Emilia, down through haunted and rolling Umbria, on into drowsy Abruzzo, my silent Italian peninsula throbbed by on the other side of my window. An orange sun rose in Molise, and as we drove into the morning hustle in Puglia, I thought about it all, Mario, Meat, me and my way of eating. As we entered Lecce, I asked Sergio to drop me at the public market and I entered just as Sandro was laughing, switching on the lights in their meat case in the otherwise silent market. I guess the sausages I made that morning were breakfast sausages, because that’s when I ate them, grilled over a morning fire in my backyard, alone, at eight a.m. It doesn’t really bother me that I’ll never know how Mario’s sausages taste to Mario’s mouth, but I think I can guess. As for mine, I could tell you what they tasted like, but if you make your own, well, then you already know.

The Awaiting Table Update.
We knew even before we opened that we were onto something special. To those that visited this year, those that have turned out to be bigger fans than we ever expected, we offer our thanks. We knew we were thinking about a new way of seeing Italy, and a part of Italy little known, and that the beginning would be rough-going, if only because opening any business requires so much work that you wonder, like child-birth, how on earth anyone ever contemplates doing it a second time. Still though, it was a great year, by any standards. We’re going to take the holidays off and then open again in March of 2005, when the new brick deck of our dinning area in our walled city garden will be open at last. In April we have Clifford Wright coming for a few weeks, which for many of us, will be a lot like kicking a ball around the park with Roberto Baggio. You probably have a copy of his Mediterranean Feast in your library, or if not, should. We’ve also included weekend courses for everyone, but perhaps particularly for all our English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish guests, those that have been taking advantage of the unbelievably cheap new air fares, from London to Brindisi. We’ve included more day courses as well, especially in the warmer months, when the nearby deep blue seas seem to whisper your name. (Sunrises over one on one coast, sets over the other on the other) We’ve also extended the season out, ending next year- you guessed it- with San Martino and the festival of the meat. In short, there is something for everyone that loves food, especially those that are interested in the Italy that resides outside of Tuscany, which is still a beautiful place, even if it’s among the most crowded tourist attractions on earth.

If you came in 2004, thank you so much. We had a great year. If you’re slated to visit in 2005, we’re looking forward to cooking and eating with you. And not just sausages and red meat and the new wine, unless of course you’re here for San Martino, when it will be your liver making all the noise.
Making Sausage at home.
Aside from baking, written recipes don’t help much, so I’m reluctant to give one as it’d mean very little anyway. Still, a working strategy could be helpful, and here is one that is all but universal. You’ll probably never make sausages in small batches, so let’s use a kilo, or two pounds as our starting point. And aside from the occasional lamb version, sausage means pig and pig fat, as you really shouldn’t try to ‘lighten’ sausage with turkey or any other leaner meat. It’s best to just eat the good stuff, just less frequently (in general, a really good culinary philosophy). Salt should run somewhere between ten and fifteen grams per kilo, depending on who you ask (Even Sandro and Giovanni disagree: I use twelve). Cookbooks will tell you that casings should be soaked over night but I’ve found little difference between overnight and ‘the time it takes to thaw’ (I use salted casings but keep them in the freezer, already separated out into batches for two-kilo’s worth). The cut of meat should be a cheap but flavorful one, which for many means several cuts ground together: many use ground shoulder (the more a muscle works, the stronger the flavor, the less tender or fatty) mixed with pure fat. Fat should run between thirty to fifty percent, much of which falls away when grilling. With Italian, Spanish or French pigs, I’ve had great results using straight belly meat, which, eyeballing it, works out to be, say, thirty percent fat anyway. Many add a small glass of water as well. I don’t, and you’ll see why. The last few ingredients are the most important, and here is the other reason I’ve opted out for giving a recipe. As a rule, the last ingredients should reflect where you are (as opposed to ‘who’ you are). Here in Lecce I use a locally-distilled form of Anisette, fresh mint from the garden and a good dose of chili flakes. The anisette is sweet, alcoholicky and fennel-scented, which works out perfectly (the inspiration came as a college student in Umbria, where entire
pigs are stuffed with fennel bulbs before roasting. In reality, fennel seeds are used all over the Mediterranean, so it’s far from an invention). Mint and chili are great foils for one another and I couldn’t be happier with the combination (and our students rave). Hard alcohol is an excellent addition to sausage, and although I’ve used both sour mash and rye in the American south, marc and calvados in France and pear brandy in Alto-Adige, I don’t see a reason why UK readers couldn’t use Scotch whisky. I’d be shocked if it weren’t both traditional and still common. (UK subscribers drop a line). Making sausages really becomes much more interesting when you start to think of them as little meaty Global Positioning Systems, reminding you where on the earth you are, exactly, and how and why that place is special.

Would you like to be on our Mail List? Mail List Signup

Located in an 18th century aristocratic palace in the historic center of the South of Italy's prettiest city, The Awaiting Table offers Day, Weekend and Week-long courses, based on small classes of hands-on cooking and individual attention. If you'd like to see a different part of Italy, and see it in a different way, now you have an alternative.
To sign up for future newsletters, click here - Mail List Sign Up

Back to top - Previous Page