Two Steps Away
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October 2005
The Awaiting Table Newsletter,part 6 of 10
No Feast without The Famine

The racket is deafening as I enter the market. It’s somehow the exact sound of a herd of lumpy cows rolling down a steep hill, their dented and flat-pitched bells clanking with each tumble. I round the corner to find my butchers whacking their line of mangled cowbells with the backs of their knives, so hard in fact that all four of them are baring their teeth and grimacing in physical exertion. One bell comes unteathered and goes flying into Simone’s nearby vegetable stand. ‘OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHHHH’, yells Giovanni, in a thirty-second long war cry. Slouched on his stool in front of his stand of vegetables , Old Man Luigi’s eyes flutter open briefly, a proud smile crosses his lips. Sandro cuts a small piece of veal lip and tosses the bristly grey morsel from one end of the meat case to the other, where it lands perfectly in Stefano’s mouth. Both their arms fly up in victory: last time it took four tries.
‘What was that for’? I ask Giovanni, when the commotion dies down, referring to his war cry. ‘Cosi’, he says and smile, which in this case could translate as, Why the hell not?

These are the men that sell me my meat and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

‘What’s good today’, I ask Sandro, Giovanni’s son. ‘Veal muzzle’, he says, chewing, half a rubbery bovine nostril hanging from his mouth, for effect. ‘Or’. ‘Or the mutton that just came in. Like you like it. Very dark meat. Very flavourful. Tripe? It's excellent. No, but try the muzzle. You love it, and it loves you. Lip to lip.’ ‘Eight portions of mutton then. Big dinner party tonight’.
Sandro opens the cooler to reveal 10 entire lamb carcasses hanging upside down, their intestines inflated like long beige balloons, the kind that street clowns tie into animal shapes. He grabs a severed leg and treats the body as if it were bread or cheese, starting at one end and cleaving it, with no regard to bone or muscle, the way lamb is portioned here. Raising the mammoth cleaver higher than his ear, he slams it down hard enough to cause his cheeks to wiggle from the impact. Even across the meat case I can hear his nasal breathing change as he strains to swing the weight. He packs it up and his sister in law, Catia- the only woman in all three of the butcher shops here in the market- takes my money. I linger for a while and watch the flashy hand movements through the warbled glass case, my envy, visible to everyone.

I should probably tell you up front that I worked as a butcher in my student years and something inside me still identifies deeply with butchers, everywhere. I fixate on the craft, even own a shelf of books on the subject. It’s the only old job I ever really miss. Go to any market anywhere in the world and the butchers will be the most gregarious vendors there, laughing and joking in that brand of bawdy humour that appeals to nine-year olds, and those of us that never developed past that. They flirt openly with women of all ages and treat stray dogs to meaty bones with the same pleasure they’d take in buying a best friend a beer. Here in my market here in Lecce, I tend to hang out longer in front of their glass cases, watching the steely and perfect flash of their knives as they meticulously manuver through muscle, and pirouette around rosy-pink bone.
But for all my profound love of butchering, this is not the land of meat. Not remotely. Meat dishes tend to come in two sobering varieties. 1)There are second courses that aim to stretch meat to feed as many people as possible, tasty dishes like twice-ground meatloaf that can be stretched with the addition of twenty to twenty-five percent breadcrumbs. And 2), those that walk in the front door, the staggeringly simple second courses that want to taste like themselves and nothing else, dishes like baked chicken squirted with half a lemon, grilled lamb or thinly-sliced horse meat steaks, the kind that brown before you can even get them to flip in the pan. At first glance the two varieties might seem at odds with one another- mamma’s thrifty kitchen tricks for feeding eight out of what should have feed three, versus, some brown, unadorned meat on a plate- but in fact the same factors formed both, and indeed formed every true cuisine in the world. It was about dealing with scarcity, and how a people came to resolve that, as a group, over time.

After a small crowd clears I decide to ask Giovanni a few questions, figuring that I already know the answers. ‘So you’re selling less organ meats these last few years’. ‘Hardly. Just after the things we prepare here ourselves-you know, the little pork parcels stuffed with onion, parsley and a cube of local cheese, or the new sausages we’re making with porcini and rocket, things that working mothers no longer make for themselves- I’d say that organ meats represent the biggest increase of all'. Turns out I didn’t.
‘Why is that, do you think’? ‘Ten years ago you’d have to buy the tripe, then boil it yourself in milk for 12 to 18 hours, just to be able to think about eating it. Now it arrives already clean and as white as snow. It’s delicious’. ‘What about horse meat?’ ‘What about it?’ ‘Is that on the decline as well’ ‘Not that I know. Why would it be?’

That horse is widely eaten here shocks most foreigners, especially those that are of the belief that an accurate understanding of the food here can be had by the occasional consumption of what's on offer in Southern Italian restaurants abroad. And it's a bigger shock still that it's not considered remotely exotic here. Little girls ask for it for lunch. It’s what’s for dinner. It's what your grandmother prefers for Sunday roasts. It is, in fact, what I myself have for dinner at least one night a week. Seared over open coals or braised in purple-black wine and spicy tomato sauce, its one of the most beloved foods in the entire south of Italy.
But it’s just not consumed everyday, nor is any other form of meat, and that is not an easy concept to grasp by anyone that grew up in an English-speaking country, where What’s for Dinner, really means, What Meat’s for Dinner. Along with the satisfyingly brown, whole-meal, barley-based pastas, the deep green and bitter vegetables and the presence of so much fish, it’s the absence of meat that makes this diet seem remarkably modern, rather than just going without because you couldn’t afford it or just because the pope said so. This is how much of the modern, informed and wealthy world now wants to eat. This is the real Mediterranean diet, a concept much bigger than any cannon of recipes.

Like nearby Africa itself, it’s part of history’s irony that the parts of Italy settled longest by humans are today still the poorest. Here, deep in the deep south, on the Salentine peniusula, or lu Salentu- the dialectical name preferred around here, this land has never really left its agrarian origins. And while the soil here is rich and eager to produce, grass doesn’t grow under its own volition. Without grass, pasturage, in the northern sense, doesn’t exist. The animals that are raised for meat tend to be small, often referred to as ‘courtyard animals’ -rabbits, sheep, goats, chickens, and to a lesser extent, but still likely the first ‘cattle’, snails. Sitting down to a plate of meat here, means that even eating around the bones- or shells- even on ‘meat days’, you’re still consuming very little.
So why bother, you might wonder. It seems to me that it’s more about what meat used to represent, and what, here, it still does.

Unless you’ve lived completely acclimated in a profoundly catholic country for years, it’s difficult to really grasp the presence of the Church in the Italian diet, even if virtually no one thinks that way about it today. There were Fast days, and Feast days, and regardless of your pocketbook, you couldn’t eat meat on the first but you could on the second, assuming you could afford it. Go back just a few generations- when this was still largely observed by the masses- and you can see the calendar divided almost precisely in half. Ask yourself why the vegetable dishes here are so developed, i.e. profoundly delicious, and you quickly see that they not only had to time to figure it out, but also the motivation to.
And this is probably the thing that can never really be exported, this attitude here towards meat. Next time you're in the beautiful south of Italy and someone tells you that his or her daughter just graduated and that everyone is coming over for a big chicken dinner, hear that too in that deceptively-simple phrase is also that sober fact that last night, they didn't, but tonight they are. Here, that's what meat means.

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Even more than my birthday, my favourite day of the year is San Martino, a day when either you invite all your friends over or they invite you, and you gather around a long serpentine line of loud and rowdy, improvised tables, sitting upon impromptu chairs. Someone will retrieve the wobbly plastic table from the patio and extend the sitting by four. An orange crate on its side becomes your chair, a chipped coffee mug or a emptied-nutella jar your wine glass.

San Martino is the day to devour steaming plates of red meat and drain uncountable bottles of the new wine, and it may be the only day of the year when you’ll actually witness your grandmother eating her head’s weight of unctuous sausages, washed down with litres of the tart young wine, released in conjunction with the big day. We’re adding such a week this year, giving you a chance to see the most genuine of Italian holidays, in a way you never could as a tourist. You’ll learn to make five kinds of fresh sausage, and you’ll drink the 2005 vintage before any of your friends back home ever do. November 6th – through the 11th. As always, we’re limiting the week to six students, but we’re expecting twenty or so local friends for dinner the night of San Martino. Bring a pair of maturity pants and your cardiologist’s cell.

Located in an 18th century aristocratic palace in the historic centre of the South of Italy's prettiest city, The Awaiting Table offers Day 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, we encourage to find out more by clinking through to our site. You can also contact us simply by replying to this email. And don't forget to forward on this to your friends.
Testo e Fotografie Silvestro Silvestori, Lecce, Italìa, Ottobre, 2005

Upcoming events: On Wednesday, October 12th, take a look at our new site and tell us what you think! We've radically updated and expanded our site, including a place to read back issues of the newsletter. Your feedback is important to us, and we'll use it to make the new site even better.

On Monday, October 17th, we're announcing our Christmas special: Book before December 1st, and save hundreds of Euro per person, valid for any normal week in all of 2006. (When registering write 'Special offer' for the date. Your discount will be instantaneous). We'll even give you three months into the new year to choose your dates. In a few weeks after booking, you'll receive a copy of a famous local cookbook (formerly unavailable outside of the Salento), signed in Italian by the entire staff, and all our vendors, to go under the tree or Chanukah bush, announcing your gift.

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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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