Two Steps Away
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November 2005
The Awaiting Table Newsletter,part 7 of 10
Big Show and His Counter Argument

‘Just hold up the baccalà at your sides’, I tell him, eyeing him through my ancient viewfinder. ‘Like this Silvestru?’ ‘A little higher’. ‘Hurry up, I feel like an idiot’, he says as my lens racks him into focus. ‘I’ll be hearing about this for weeks as it is.’ ‘What, for holding up some salt cod?’ But as he sharpens into a real image, an expression flashes across his face revealing that maybe he knows what he’s talking about.
I thank him and even before he can return to his place behind the counter the comments come flooding in. Sandro the butchers starts up, all the predictable testosterone-tinged, blue-collar comments pertaining to the peculiar smell of salt cod and Big Show’s apparent lack of experience with the opposite sex.

‘Sorry about that, I had no idea’, I say. ‘What, forget about it. He says the same things if I sell too many anchovies. What can you do?’I search his face for a second, and there is his hammy features I see the hint of something I can't quite place, a content smirk, a smirk that suggests, well, maybe he does know.

Maybe only after Gracious Antonio (see the site for back issues of the newsletter) Big Show is the sweetest, most gentle man I know here in Lecce. But you wouldn’t know that to look at him. Named after an apparent professional wrestler (a North American sport making inroads among a certain Italian demographic), he has multiple tattoos and a head that looks like it was shaved in an institution with a dull pocket knife.
You half expect him to rock, to wear bunny slippers, to be chased by orderlies. And the man is huge, so big in fact that tourists in the market often ask to have their picture taken with him, the back of his white t-shirt easily mistaken for a cinema screen. Contrast that with the fact that’s he’s actually highly intelligent and warmly engaging, an incongruence that causes many in the market to do a double-take. Even his very voice is gentle and softly-cadenced, and although his Italian is pocked with the strong, strong Leccese dialect, his use of the Italian subjunctive is flawless, a rarity even among college graduates here in Italy.

He’s also excellent at what he does. He remembers my culinary prejudices and suggests accordingly, even remembering what I ate last week better than I do. ’Just like last time’, he’ll ask and I’ll have to cock my head to one side just like a puppy, trying to both remember what I had, and what, exactly, stood out enough to cause him to remember it. He graduated as a geometra, or what would likely enter the English as ‘land purveyor‘, but he started working here with his twin sister (tiny and blonde) and father, at his father’s salumeria right out of school.
Still, it wasn’t his first choice of jobs and those that still take pride in their jobs, even though they'd rather be doing something else, to me suggests deep character.

And over time, Big Show has earned my trust, more than any other vendor here in the public market. If, say, one day I come in, with or without the students, and I ask him for a mozzarella made from the milk of the Asian water buffalo (a remarkably fresh and fragile cheese, where even half a day can make a difference), if the cheese isn’t at its peak, he’d rather sell me something else, returning the mozzarella to purveyor as ‘unsold‘.
It turns out to be an issue I wrestle with daily: What’s better, to stick to the menu, or to only offer the best of the best of the best? Big Show’s way of thinking always wins out, and although the gesture makes me look unprepared- changing my menu while my desired hunk of cheese swims on the other side of the glass case- I’d rather students see what all the fuss is about, even if that comes at the price of me losing face in front of them

THERE IS AN old chestnut that cuisine is the transformation of ingredients into culture, and if that is the case, Big Show’s salumeria is the most cultured shop in the entire market, which is just another way of saying that its wares are the most manipulated by man. Simone and Luigi sell the vegetables, Sandro and Giovanni the meat, it’s Big Show that sells all the things you probably can’t find in your home country, even though you really, really wish you could. Good food always begins with the procurement and here is no exception.
Big Show sells eggs, their yolks tinted by the addition of marigold petals in the chicken feed. It’s why pasta made outside of Italy always comes out anaemic. You won’t find that written on any package here though, it’s organic so doesn’t need mentioning. Foreigner restaurants often add egg shade or even turmeric to the pasta water, but it’s never the same. Nor have I ever seen eggs for sell refrigerated. Nor have I ever heard first-hand of anyone contracting salmonella. Most egg shells in Italy still have chicken droppings on them, proving that they once really sat under a real bird.

Big Show sells anchovies and capers packed in salt, which is how all preserved capers and anchovies start their lives: if you buy yours in brine or oil, respectively, that means that some middleman has had a hand in them along the way. It also means that you can't regulate the salt (with salt packed you just soak them longer), nor vinegar taste (which over powers the flavour of the unopened bud, which is what capers really are), both of which are crucial to the good cooking of the Mediterranean. And while the best capers are cultivated versus wild (the best always are cultivated versus wild, a rarity in the world of food) you only need to step out the market door to see the ancient stone walls alive with the cascading and gorgeous plants.
They also explode on the stone wall out the window of the school's cookbook library, spilling from the space between third-story high balconies, all the way to the ground.

He also sells Italian olive oil, locally packed, often in reused water bottles, sweet, thick and yellow, it's the basis of all cooking here, even most desserts. And you only need to take a train ten minutes out of town in any direction to not only learn that, but everything else about the local olive culture: olive oil is predicated on the shape of the tree, the shape of the tree on the harvesting technique, the harvesting technique on the psyche of the local people, and on and on. Train your eye to see olive groves for what they are, and you can learn more about any group of local people in ten minutes with a guide book, encyclopedia or even menu. That Big Show’s oil is actually Italian is notable, since most foreigners have never actually tasted olive oil produced in Italy, despite what the label on their bottles appears to say, what those labels lead them to believe.
Poll An English, Australian, Canadian, American or South African and half will tell you that their supermarket oil comes from Lucca, a tiny walled city that couldn’t even produce enough oil to purvey a single trattoria there. Cut-throat Tuscan firms buy up super tankers full from much darker complected people along the rim of the Mediterranean, most of whom pray to a very different god. The Tuscans take it a step further and buy it on the stipulation that the locals never label their oil, thus effectively squashing the local markets, financially halting the very places that need to develop the most. The hand-drawn picture on the label though, that's Lucca. Italy can’t even produce enough for Italy, and actually runs at a deficit every year. Like everything Big Show sells, his stuff is quietly the real deal. And excellent.

YOU MIGHT BE tempted to translate ‘salumeria’ as a ‘salami stand‘, or even a ‘delicatessen‘, but you’d be missing out on all the deeper meaning inherently packed into the word. ‘Salame’ is only a single example of ‘Salumi‘, of which the word ‘salt, or (‘sale’ in Italian) is pivotal.

Back when salt was just about the only real way of preserving meat after the matanza, or autumnal pig slaughter, preserving with salt was an entire genre of food that any mind formed after the advent of the refrigerator can’t fully really appreciate. Prosciutto. Pancetta. Pig jowls. And also salt cod imported from the north Atlantic (for hundreds of years, the MAJORITY of the fish consumed on the Italian peninsula was in the form of salt cod, important from the North Atlantic. It's not a Mediterranean fish, contrary to common believe). Olives are salted. And capers. And anchovies. Up until very recently, for the majority of the year, if you ate protein at all, at some point along the line, whatever it was, was probably preserved in salt. Even today, the signs on the front of tobacco shops still say, in Italian, Salts and Tobaccos, the state ending the monopoly on the sale of the first in 1986.

WHEN I FIRST moved from, almost Teutonic northern Italy to the sunny, warm and gregarious, Mediterranean south, I took the very first apartment I could find, in part to give me the much-needed time to really find a home to call my own. It turns out that that first place was with four, first-year university students- classic mammas’ boys- four young men who had quite literally never even made coffee for themselves. Food-wise, they all knew that cooking pasta required hot water at some point, per se, but that was as far as any of them had ever thought it through. And while I’ve been cooking the food of Puglia to some extent all my life, it turns out that being the cook for four young Pugliesi was just what I needed to deepen my understanding of the regional differences. In short, they hated my food, only each for a different reason. Call me naïve but every meal I cooked for them broke my heart.
Add some barley flour to the semolina-based fresh pasta, and only one would find it acceptable. Add a tiny red pepper to the sauce pan and those from northern Puglia would shake their heads at me, their disgust ebbing towards pity. Only in retrospect do I realize that trying to cook for those that have only ever eaten Mamma’s cooking is a fool’s errand, even if I’m a much better cook today because of it. Then though, each tedious meal was an intellectual whipping and I’d crawl away to my room to lick my fresh wounds, with my stack of cookbooks, closing the door to muffle all the Heavy Metal and hashish fumes.

But what was most memorable about my time with my four sons, even more than having my fresh pasta ridiculed, then accepted and finally praised by all the little old ladies in the building, was Sundays, when the boys’ mothers would come for lunch. They’d come to cook it, benevolently calling our joint venture a ‘summit’, pronouncing the word (it’s the same in Italian, inherited directly from Latin) in their marble-mouthed accents strong enough to make me squint. And each Sunday after we cooked and washed the dishes together, we’d can, bottle or jar something. It’d be just be the five of us laughing and chatting around the kitchen table, me the only one not in a skirt, a dignified cardigan or sensible, almost soviet-issued heels, the uniform of modest-meaned, rural southern Italian mother over forty.

Artichokes came into season and we’d darken and then stain our fingers turning them into perfect wedges before plunging them into acidulated water. Lampascioni, or hyacinth bulbs, simmered and then pickled under vinegar. Cauliflower. Cima di rape. Quince paste. Someone would turn on the tiny ancient television set in corner and the five of us would pass entire afternoons, answering the questions on the call in quiz shows. The capitol of Madagascar. The Italian title for a Tom Hanks film about a mermaid. Hitchcock‘s first name. The ladies would tell sober stories about the Puglia before grocery stores, before there was ever a choice whether you bought anything store-bought or not. If you wanted marmalade for your family, you made it. If you wanted pancetta for your family, you cured your own after your husband killed the family pig, with multiple blows to its head with a hammer (it’s true). Even grappa was illegally distilled, but in quantities so small that you wouldn’t even know it being in the kitchen at the time.

What impressed me most, aside from the sheer virtuosity that each woman possessed in every aspect of the kitchen, without a single cookbook among them, and even beyond the absence of any of the self-congratulatory domestic divinity you’d find in an Anglophones in the kitchen, with even half the skill. The thing impressed me most was the selflessness in everything they did. I don’t mean that in ‘sacrifice for the family’ way, but standing and watching the way their hands would work, the almost knitting rhythm of their knives, it was the most glaring display of instincts in humans I‘ve ever seen. Squirrels can’t help but bury nuts for winter, it‘s almost pathological, their desires to do so. Bees take care of the queen, no matter the cost. And these women put up, their quick fingers and wrists working independently from the rest of their beings. ‘Alfred’ one would yell out, her fingers and knife on blissful auto-pilot.

I ORDER A cube of fresh yeast for the foccacia I’m going to make this afternoon, some cat food for the tabby that lives on the windowsill of my library, a few hundred grams of solid chocolate for a birthday cake and some pink candles for my next door neighbor lady who turns ninety- five today. As Big Show bags the items for me, I notice that there is much more of that yellow, fowl- looking salt into the bottom of the anchovy tin.
And what do you do with all that yellow, nasty crusty salt?’, I ask. There is a pause and then his smirk returns.

‘That’s the funny thing. I put a little every day in Sandro’s street shoes‘. ‘How long have you been doing that’? ‘About a year and a half. Come to think of it, if I’m not mistaken, it was about the same time he started going to the podiatrist about his chronic foot odour problem. Apparently his wife won’t let him into the house until he washes his feet outside. I’m told she keeps a bucket of water outside on the balcony for him. I’d imagine that water gets pretty cold in winter. Do think it gets cold Silvestru’? ‘Yes, Big Show I suppose it does’, I say. 'Very cold would you say?' 'Yes, very cold'.
'Almost painfully cold, I'd say, assuming I had to guess'. The smirk spreads into a proud smile, or maybe even into something deeper, more profound, a part of him I’m only starting to get to know, after years. It’s a sign that behind his hammy face, cinema-screen breath and stature, that there is a fine mind at work. And that he always looking out for me, makes me appreciate him all the more.

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On Tuesdays of every week we can something at the school. Depending on the season, it can be marmalade, quince pasta, fig jelly, tomato sauce, ricotta schianta, giardiniera, pickled peppers, artichokes, aubergines, and on and on. For legal reasons I should point out that we never distil anything at the school, and we especially don’t do it in November.

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Testo e Fotografie Silvestro Silvestori, Lecce, Italìa, Novembre, 2005
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