Our Produce Guy
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April 2005

“You want the yellow or the red”, Simone is asking the tiny woman in front of me in the public market here in Lecce. “Just onions”, she replies. “You know, those that are ‘Ours’, ‘Nostrano’” the word she actually uses, shouting it over the top of all the mongers’ voices and thudding meat cleavers. My eyes scan the baskets of unwaxed lemons, ‘whistle’-shaped tomatoes, and snails hibernating in boxes of sawdust, over the two stacks of cantaloupes- those that are perfectly ripe for today, those that will be perfectly ripe tomorrow. They drift up over the bundles of dried marjoram, woven garlic clusters and unadorned light bulbs as I stand there marvelling at her word, and how few in either language seem to so densely packed with layers of meaning.

I first heard it ten years ago on an island of the coast of Sicily, where I stayed for the summer with an Australian woman, one pan, one knife and a Sicilian cookbook, written by a famous American author. I had packed the book as my practical guide, a sort of owner’s manual for the tiny kitchen, tiny store and tiny outdoor markets, which, often, were nothing more than some old guy selling four jars of capers on crumbling stone wall. Renting the place, I had envisioned dedicating myself to the recipes the way twelve-year olds do those piano-lesson work books, banging out scales and ‘Froggy went a’ courtin’, until it came naturally, and I was ready for the Met. But not long into the first month I started to notice that the smells we produced in our tiny kitchen were very different from those that drifted out the open window, down to the streets and our upturned, quizzical faces. In pathetic Italian I’d ask the women in the markets what I was doing wrong, why their food smelled differently. Mostly I got shrugs. But before leaving I started to notice that what they took home from the market was different, less ‘Gourmet’, less fancy than what I did. And that they always answered Nostrano when the fruit guy asked, which, at the time I thought it was just a form of dialect, the word nostro coming out of a Sicilian mouth.

A few years later the word gained real importance, on a hill not far from where discreet, land-locked Umbria turns into over-crowded Tuscany, where I studied and I cooked for four years, in one university and six different kitchens. Always scraping by financially, I learned to appreciate the word for its thrift: products labelled as Nostrano were almost always the cheapest. Our ham came from nearby Norcia, our lentils from Castluccio, both, it goes without saying, were excellent. But too, the word switched from my passive to active vocabulary for decidedly-ugly, snobby reasons, much the same way I’d utilize the local dialect: passwords to distinguish myself from tourists and other foreigners. Me, I’m different from them. I live here. I’m almost one of you.

Eventually the word came back to bite me, after graduation and while teaching school in Bologna, where I somehow ended up in charge of making pasta for the one-armed lady upstairs in my building, Signora Non-cosi. The combination of a sharp, detail-oriented mind, coupled with her loss left ‘Mrs. No, not like that’, cranky yet somehow eager to answer all the questions I posed up the staircase. In her meticulous kitchen, with nothing but a never-sharpened pencil and an ancient but unused comb, she coached me through garganelli, No, not like that. No, not like that. I’d buy the flour, eggs and sauce ingredients, each time making a mistake that she always treated as insurmountable. ‘Eggs are eggs. Which kind should I have gotten’, I’d ask. The look on her face is something by then I was used to, a sort of ‘well if you don’t know, then I can’t tell you’. Next time ask for Nostrano, she’d always say. The thing was, was that you only had to look up into her third-story window to see the eager young American learning fresh pasta, the old lady teaching it. Anyone could see that we were different, there was no ‘we’, no ‘ours’. If I had been able to scan the market shelves, picking out the our products from the non-ours, I wouldn’t have been there, always pestering her with questions. Nostrano pasta ingredients made as much sense as the Glen Miller we always listened to was Nostrano music, or the comb as nostrano, a tool I hadn’t had a use for in ten years.

Here in southern Italy, where I now live, the word appears in our every lesson plan, in every recipe, on every printed page. It’s the first word we teach right after ‘good day sir, good evening Madame’. It’s the basis of everything we do and teach and learn, as fundamental as orecchiette, Primitivo and Negro-amaro, as tell-tale as the excellent cherries and peaches.

During the first market trips in our week-course I’ll often look out over the faces of our students, gauging the responses when I say that Nostrano is more a lifestyle than a type of tomato, more a creed than a way of selecting salad greens. Early in the week I often get appeasing smirks, as if I were a simpleton, the type to explain the cosmos using only surf analogies. But as the week progresses, each student comes around, each in his or her own way. Each comes to appreciate that the word contains the sober concept of really, truly living in just one place, and just one time, a simple way of living that nearly everyone whose job it is to sell something seems eager to stamp out. It’s about a conscientious decision to forgo the modern myriad of mediocrity for, say, just two variety of melons, those that perfect today, those that will be tomorrow.

And perhaps most beautiful of all, the word derivates from the first-person plural pronoun for Italian word for Our, a word that’s usage represents the concept of simple produce turning into complex culture: foods that are agreed upon, foods that unite, foods that reminds folks who they are. This is ours. This belongs to us. This is what we share. For me personally, the instant food shifts from cold product into living culture, nothing is more interesting, nor beautiful.

Simone has to ask Who touches - ‘who’s next’- three times before I snap out of the daydream and my eyes adjust back from the naked light bulbs among the garlic and bundled- herbs. “Silvestro, tell me”, he says, when it’s clear that I’m once again among the alert. “Oh, sorry, yeah, a kilo of potatoes, I’m making tajeddha tonight”. He smiles when he hears the name of the dish, so near to the cuore Leccesse. He spins away. Leaning forward over the peaches I catch him dropping potatoes into a bag, taking them from the open basket, the one marked simply, yet beautifully, in black marker on the wing of a cardboard box, as, Nostrano.

The Awaiting Table update.
Most everyone that doesn’t live here visits during the summer, remarking on the blindingly-bright blue sky, the heat that seems to cocoon your mind and the Caribbean-coloured sea, dotted with bobbing blue rowboats. And while it’s all true, for me the Salento is never better than during autumn, when the temperature cools just to ‘warm’, when it’s time to pick the black grapes and crush them, time to whack the tree, collect the olives and press them, a chuck of bread ready. Everywhere autumn has a distinct feel, a return to school and work and to foods with a bit more heft to them, the ones you couldn’t even think about during summer, but here, in Puglia- and perhaps in particularly the Salento- it’s the time of year that borders on the magical.

This year we’re adding a harvest course, weeks based not only the heavier, traditional vegetable dishes of the Working-Man Mediterranean, but weeks based on actually working the harvest, shears in hand. We’ve added cheese-making to our October and special November courses, the legendary ricotta forte. By your overwhelming demand, we’ve increased our participation in sagre, the small, local, decidedly relaxed food festivals where our students are often the only non-Salentini present (and just as you would be, locals are always endeared that someone from far away values the same things they do: Someone’s always sending over unmarked bottles of local wine).

We’ve also increased our staff, giving everyone’s sweetheart, Mela, a larger teaching role. She’s thrilled. We’ve included three, local old ladies in our lesson plans, now on a permanent bases. I have a cake in the oven for one of them right now as I write this: today is her birthday, today she turns 94.

And this fall we’re increasing our wine tasting component, even if we still believe that an everyday wine glass shouldn’t have a stem. We’ve been singing the praises of Salentine wines for years, it’s just now it’s more a fully-fledged choir, and we’re thrilled to have the company. We’ll also be attending the opening of world-class winery’s new flag-ship headquarters. I say ‘new’ but the building was built four hundred years ago, to house sheep (who apparently used to live the life of Riley).

We still have a few openings for September and October and we’d love to show you the part of the world that we love most, to see a part of Italy that still feels like Italy. This autumn…Whoops. There’s my cake.

Sylvester Silvestori owns and operates The Awaiting Table, a cooking school in the Salento, the fecund strip of land between the Ionian and Adriatic, Italy’s high heel. You can find out more by visiting awaitingtable.com.

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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.
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