The Hat Trick
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August 2006
The Awaiting Table Newsletter
Two Hours and 59 Minutes in the Life of the Tiny Cookery School Here in Italy.

12:48. Someone loads Otis Redding into the stereo just as the rest of us gather around the stable table to pour out the piles of flour, 30 percent barley, 70 percent hard durum wheat, our standard, everyday pasta recipe. We take turns passing around the brilliantly- painted pitcher of water, adding some to the centre of our flour-formed ‘fountains‘. The simple, local flour and water-based recipe produces a chewy, pleasingly brown pasta, perfect for our robust, largely vegetable and olive oil-based sauces that you find down around these parts.

1:06 Otis has apparently had his heart broken again. We commiserate by opening a little Salice Salentino, then roll out our pasta into sheets, a highly-irregular practice here in the Salento. (Unlike Northern Italy’s heart-clogging egg yolk and soft, cake flour-based pastas that are rolled out into sheets and then cut into ribbons, the south’s low-gluten, high-protein, unprocessed wheat pastas tend to be chewier, toothier, healthier even, and are usually formed or modelled, usually with a butter knife. What’s always understood in Italy but rarely outside is that matching sauce to pasta form is never willy-nilly or a personal preference, anymore than mashed turnips would best accompany newspaper cones of fried fish after lots of beer out or the fact that you could easily swap pineapple for the carrots in your mother’s next pot roast). With antique olive-wood rolling pins we begin to roll out the kneaded mass. The table legs squawk.

1:12 A song and half later we notice that Otis seems to always to be making the same questionable decisions in the love department. Still, we show both our support and disapproval of the floozy/she-devils by sipping the spicy wine and by pulling out an empty hermitic bottle and thick- lipped water glasses. He really should know better.

1:16 Just like making biscuits, with upside down water glasses we cut the pasta into thin discs, then cut them half again, forming perfect half moons. We form them into cones and stick the pointy ends down our empty wine bottles. Young James from Scotland enthusiastically brings his palm down onto the cone, effectively forming a perfect little Mexican hat. Un cappelletto messicano. Rose, the Chinese literature professor from Taiwan, cheers. A pleased grin forms on the lips of Sarah, an anesthesiologist from England, perhaps while remembering past occasions when she herself has been the said she- devil.

1:38 My assistant Giuseppe and I set the table in the garden while the Mexican hat factory turns out enough pasta for our lunch. I fill a big pot of water, and bang it on the hob, just next to the French enamel wear filled with tenderly-fricasseed rabbit. Simmering in a robust sauce of white wine, local green olives and fresh sage from the garden, still warm from the summer sun, it’s heady and some how seems like the Salento itself, as if you could reduce the place down to a single plate.

1:56 We construct a quick sauce of red onion, our home- made, de-cased fresh sausages, a little chilli and some tomato. I spin the corkscrew down through the soft spongy flesh of another cork just as Otis starts whistling like a sea gull, sitting, well, you know where. Everyone bellies up to the table out in the school’s garden just as Giuseppe lets the pasta slip down into the rolling water: it slides in as discreetly as a crocodile.

1:58 Tossed and stained with the sauce and a glug of raw, green-green oil, the pasta platter hits the tables as a series of digital camera mimic mechanical sounds. Rose cheers again. Giuseppe stands over the gorgeous platter and begins to serve, proud of the pasta shape indigenous to his city of Casarano (click here for a map of the region).

2:00 The pasta is exquisite, bursting with wheat and barley flavours, bordering on that of breakfast cereal. Hearty. Robust. Like Italy's Soul Food. The unctuous pork and tomato sauce is zippy with chilli and sweet from the white wine. It is, in fact, excellent.

2:36 Sarah retrieves the rabbit and explains the dish to everyone around the table. There are questions but everyone is benefited by having the dish explained by their peer, who tends not to use words like ’braise’ or ’reduction’ preferring ’happily bathing in a white wine Jacuzzi’ and ’giddily simmering away’ and ‘and then Bob‘s your uncle, it‘s just about perfect‘. It’s a process we always use at the school, making a complex culinary technique seem like the easiest and most natural thing in the world.

3:49 Leaning back in our chairs under the big and blousy bougainvilleas, we make our dinner plans while sipping limoncello, our menu as easy-going as a thumb nail sketch in the loose, summer sand. But first, some perfect fruit, so ripe as to seem almost obscene in a way. Then we’ll take long naps. Then a trip to see Alessio my wine guy, who will occasionally deliver wine to me from the basket of his noisy and ancient bicycle. Then a cheese maker that makes excellent burrata, his wife making your change in a hairnet, her short-shorts and knee-high white rubber boots. Then we’ll come back to the school and start on dinner. Then more and more meals like this one. And on. The week coalescing, setting up, gelling nicely, until, well, Bob’s your uncle and it’s just about perfect.

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