Le
Orecchiette, Oh How I love Thee
The Month's Food for Thought Cover
Story
 I
recently spent two months away from my home in
Italy, eating and drinking like the dickens in
a surprising number of the world’s culinary
capitols. Not a week into the trip, I starting
missing my own bed. I missed a third pair of pants.
I missed laughing with my barista, Gracious
Antonio. I missed the sing-song beauty of the
Italian language and how the local version here
turns everything into a ‘u’. I missed
it all, I missed my home. Friends would ask, ‘Two
months away, wow! What‘s the first thing
you want to do back?’ I’d answer this
or that, not really thinking about any particular
order, I just wanted it all. Then the day finally
came: I travelled nineteen hours just to find my
front door. I dumped my luggage, left the keys
dangling in the lock, passed the stack of mail
next to the blinking answer machine and started
kneading out fresh pasta. I say ‘pasta’ but
what I really mean is le orecchiette and at this
point in my life, nothing else feels more like
home.
Le orecchiette are Southern Puglia,
the dish defines the place. And the people.
Ask any Italian school child: French men walk
around slapping each other with flaccid gloves,
Germans wet their blond moustaches and worn
leather britches with tankers of beer and the
Pugliesi eat le orecchiette. They
are synonymous with the place, so entrenched
that you can’t talk about one without
sooner or later talking about the other. And
not only do I live here but I actually earn
a living teaching others how to make them.
You’d think I’d be tired of them
by now.
When my grandmother died I made le orecchiette all afternoon,
sipping red wine from a coffee cup and listening to Cole Porter,
her favourite music. I made them the last time my parents came to
visit, when a famous writer came and the time I was filmed by the
television crew, the menu my own choosing. I make them for holidays,
for first dates and for those nights when nothing grabs me while
perusing the public market here in Lecce. I taught my two young beautiful
sisters how to make them and people from quite literally all over
the world, from every continent on the planet except the poles. Maybe
part of the reason I make them so often is because I never learned
to knit or play the guitar, never learned that sort of manual busy-work
that allows the human mind to function on a higher, freer level.
It’s the only thing I do that could be described as that of
an artisan, some that satisfies some sort of deep, unnameable extinct,
the way bees are driven to make honey, even in a time of surplus.
I had thought my devotion had passed unnoticed until my best friend
came to dinner one night, took off his coat, put on a woman’s
pink apron, poured a pile of brown flour and started to work it.
He said, Dicevi. You were saying, and I realized that I had never
said we were going to make le orecchiette for dinner. It was just
that it was my house and that is what you eat.
And
ask those Italian school children again about what
goes on top of those famous le orecchiette and
they will tell you le cime di rape, and in the
winter months, they wouldn’t be wrong. Imagine
a genetic mix of broccoli and mustard greens, tossed
with peperoncino, good olive oil and garlic, and
you have not just a pasta sauce but a philosophy
of life. It’s Italy’s soul food, a
sort of unrepentant explanation of a place: We
used to have almost nothing and look what we created
from that. We are different that others. And we
eat this to remind ourselves of that. Now that
women have entered the work force, the cost of
the dish has changed, if only because things truly
prepared at home now imply a level of status that
few of us can afford. It’s a new kind of
food budget: 2 euro for ingredients, 2 hours of ‘manual
labour’, in the truest sense. The dish has
been inverted and is now a luxury. Anyone that
makes his or own pasta always goes easy on the
sauce, but still, what that little bit of sauce
is, changes radically with the seasons. In winter
it’s either preserved tomatoes or le cime
di rape. In the early and late autumn it’s
cabbage, pancetta and toasted bread crumbs, easily
my favourite pasta sauce of all time, the sautéed
slivers of slippery and insanely savoury cabbage,
unctuous with the local, extra virgin olive oil
and crispy nuggets of brick-red pancetta. Students
love it. When tomatoes come into season, we dress le
orecchiette with raw shards of the blood red
fruit, just enough to stain them, never enough
to cover. We’ll mix in some bitter and jagged-toothed
salad greens, which wilt instantly, providing a
perfect foil to the sweetness of the ripe tomatoes.
What the school children of Italy don’t know
is that while le orecchiette are deeply loved in
Puglia, there is nothing remotely unifying about
them. In Bari, the capitol of the region, le orecchiette
are 100% semolina, and so tiny that virtually any
male with normal-sized hands would find them impossible
to make. They’re yellow, flatter, and if
they hadn’t already been called ‘little
ears’, ‘contact lens’ might have
been a good choice. Towards Gallipoli they are
bigger, the arch is deeper and they’re made
with the addition of enough refined, hard wheat
flour to almost resemble dog kibble. They’re
toothy, chewy and satisfy completely. Still, they’re
not as good as those of Lecce and the towns just
outside. In Lecce, we make le orecchiette with
the addition of barley flour, or sometimes a little
farro, which translates as emmer wheat, an ancient
strain gutsy enough to have almost exclusively
fuel the Roman empire. In Lecce they are as big
as bottle caps and the addition of the barley or
emmer wheat germ gives them a gravely and pocked
texture. Odds are good, you’ve never seen
pasta like this before. And odds are better than
you won’t find it outside of Italy, or even
an hour’s car ride away from my house.
I
was in England recently and the man next to me
wanted to convince me that he really loved Italian
food. His favourite, he said, was spaghetti Bolognese.
I nodded and let it go. He asked if it was different
in Italy. I looked deeply into his features and
could tell that he was genuinely interested. I
said, ‘Well, you can’t compare it to
what’s in Italy because you’d never
find Spaghetti- a southern noodle- with un ragù Bolognese-
A northern, butter based sauce. It doesn’t
exist. I told him about making le orecchiette and
how the barely cracks the surface of the pasta
and collects little microscopic pools of cabbage
and pancetta fat and how each mouthful seems like
real food, like cook and nature were working in
tandem. He sipped his coffee and just looked me.
It was obvious that we were talking about two different
things. He was just talking about pasta. I was
talking about home.
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Not
Jumping From the Roof: You making le orecchiette in
Lecce
Step right up
 Your's
will be ugly. Accept that. Just like mangled
rowboats, in all likelihood. That’s
just part of the deal. Watching a skilled
hand make le orecchiette is like watching
an Hawaiian on a surf board or a Texan ride
a bull: it seems remarkably easy until it’s
your turn. And maybe too, like riding a bull
or a surfboard, it’s one of those things
that can’t be expressed on the written
page. It’s muscular, a manual concoction
of one part smear, one part curl, one part
smush, all focused on a pea-sized piece of
flour and water.
From
a teacher’s point of view, it’s the best
pasta to teach, if only because making le orecchiette
almost borders on an Eastern religion. First, the pebble-
snatching seems easy enough. Then when the butter knife
changes hands, there is frustration and an almost magical
reverence for the teacher’s skills: ‘Wait,
do that again, I want to see what you were doing’.
Things will eventually enter the mangled rowboat phase.
But then, slowly, one by one, PhDs, business- owners,
dignified silver-haired grandmothers, 25-year old back-packers
all begin to talk like 3 year olds. ’If I add
a umph, when I’m doing the ugg part, it comes
out.’ and ’Oh, I see! You need to add a
oo- ga right after the umpha and then Bob's your uncle’.
The
second best thing about making le orecchiette is that
the learning curve is short enough that even half an
hour produces incredible leaps forward, even if some
only progress from 'mangled rowboats’ to just ‘rowboats’.
And of course you can figure out the very, very best
part yourself, even long before the pot of water comes
to a boil.
 The
New Newsletter
Food for Thought
Starting with this, the charter issue, Food for Thought
will focus on a particular dish of Lecce and Salento, something that
merits a more thoughtful look from an insider.
 Saucing
it up.
Less is more.
You may have had le orecchiette in
restaurants outside of Italy, but in the colder months
around here things are very different. Add sausage to
le cime di rape? You must be joking. Sausage, goat cheese
and red bell peppers? You ARE joking. The most beloved
vegetable in all of Puglia are le cime di rape, a sort
of primordial broccoli with a hint of the bitterness
of mustard family, a vegetable that could be described
musically, with a bass drum. In the colder months, come
to Lecce and
you’ll stand knife- to-thumb over the pot, adding
the greens right to the pasta water (a very atypical
method of saucing pasta, in any part of Italy). We’ll
take a saute pan and float some whole garlic cloves and
a few small fiery-hot chili peppers in some very green,
local extra virgin oil. We’ll slide the pasta you
made into the water, stir until tender, maybe 3 or 4
minutes, drain the water and toss it all together. The
combination of intense greens (which actually flavour
the pasta as they mingle), the heat from the pepper,
the lush silkiness of the good green oil and the toothy
chew of the pasta, together are so emblematic that they
not only describe a place but a people. Serve this to
an émigré from Puglia and
expect songs and tears. Open a bottle of Salice Salentino
and follow your pasta with a grilled sea bass just pulled
out of the Mediterranean and you’ll want to add
a ‘u’ to the end of your name and talk about
your Motherland by pointing to your heel.
 Testo
e fotografie da Silvestro Silvestori, Lecce, Italia,
febbraio, 2006.
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