43. Three Beautiful Towns on the Salento Peninsula

March 18, 2023

Lunch in Tricase Porto--south of Lecce

Visiting a gluten-free store, a mozzarella store, Basilica di Santa Croce.

Visiting Ostuni, Lunch in Gallipoli

Extolling spumoni:  Gallipolian versus Sicilian versions.

Carnevale in Gallipoli:  the story of the lethal meatball.

Notes about Tiramisu, cannolis, anchovy pizza and the search for perfection.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 2:34

That was Chopin's Prelude Number 16 in B Flat Minor. We will finish with a Bach prelude like the last time in the same key. And it's a little intellectual exercise in appreciating the differences between romantic and classical. Welcome to podcast number forty-three. Today we are going to visit three beautiful towns on the Solento Peninsula, which is the part of the peninsula that's of the Italy that sticks down, and you might call it the the the heel of the high heel. On Sunday, we started our trip by having lunch at Bolina Restaurante in Tricase Porto. Tricase is down uh south from Leche along the ocean. And then later we drove to Tricase itself and walked around. Tricase Porto just means the port of Tricase. The port is small and quite lovely, and we found the restaurant. Uh not much to look at from the outside, but it offered some really nice food. And when we got down on the terrace, it was quite lovely overlooking the water of the harbor. The restaurant itself is Greek. Everything that is on tablecloth, napkins, etc., is blue and white, which of course are the colors of the Greek flag. Inside, the walls are covered with models and pictures of sailboats. Obviously, the owner does not limit himself or herself to just cooking or serving. We had uh fried anchovies, uh, which were very lightly breaded, flash fried, and with just a wedge of lemon on the side. That was quite tasty. Not oily, uh, very delicate in flavor. Frito misto, mixed fried things, in this case calamarian shrimp, which were quite delicate and crispy with a mild seafood flavor. Everything's mild seafood flavor because everything is incredibly fresh. Seafood, as you probably know, gets stinky as the uh fats oxidize. Potato fennel cream soup was another dish that we enjoyed. It was a giant bowl of creamy fennel, with uh, and of course, it had a delicate anise flavor. And the fourth dish was eggplant moussaka uh or moussaka, uh, and that was the least inspired, which is ironic since it's probably the most Greek of the four dishes. It was overcooked, mushy, and the meat had no flavor. I was surprised because this is uh practically the Greek national dish, and I've cooked it many times, and I've always used uh uh lamb, ground lamb, not beef, uh fruity olive oil, oregano, and pine nuts. And this just really lacked uh flavors along that line. To accompany the mostly good food, three out of four ain't bad, we drank a local rose. Julia told me that Apulian roses were quite until recently overpressed and uh overflavored. But after a market study by uh modern vintners, it was determined that to be more competitive with world standards along the line of roses, they needed to apply less pressure to the grapes and press over a longer time in order to achieve uh greater subtlety of flavor. And that's what they do, and now Apulian roses are among the best in Italy. In the Salento Peninsula, there is an annual contest for best Salento Rose called Rosati in Terra di Rosati, Roses and the Land of Roses. On Monday, Eve and I did a day in town. We started by taking a long walk to a gluten-free store, Senza Glutine in Italian. To get there, we walked to the Porta Napoli and then followed via Taranto for maybe a quarter mile. Taranto, by the way, is an old Greek port, which unfortunately we did not get to visit. The store was on the right side of the street. We found fresh tortellini stuffed with prosciutto and made with a corn-based pasta. It was quite excellent when we got it home and cooked it. We also found some chocolate chip cookies made with the usual mix of non-wheat flours, and instead of palm oil, they used a blend of sunflower oil and cocoa butter. On the way back, we stopped for coffee in a cafe popular with the locals. Two very good cappuccinos cost 3 euros, and we each snuck the gluten-free cookie from our basket instead of ordering a pastry. In Italy, home to pasta, bread, and pastries, gluten-free is increasingly in demand as more and more people develop wheat sensitivities due to their daily exposure to an inflammatory protein called omega gliodin that is found in the modern wheat varieties. We continued back on Via Toronto toward Porta Napoli and found a small cheese store selling burrata, mozzarella, and other fresh and briefly aged goat sheep or cow cheeses. In the back room, separated from the front room by a glass wall, we saw the owner's son making nodoni, which means uh knots. And they weigh about the same as bocconcini, little mozzarella balls that you may have had, which are popular in American and European supermarkets. They're made of the same way except that uh with the nodoni, the cheese curd is uh stretched and then uh tied into an overhand knot. The owner's son uh offered us a handful. Um I found them quite delicious, and I love the rubbery, squeaky texture on my teeth. In the afternoon we walked over to the Basilica di Santa Croce, Basilica of the Saint Cross, which is considered to be one of the best uh tourist destinations simply because of the extraordinary sculptures on the outside. I described this in the last podcast, but this time we wanted to go inside. However, all the churches now charged money to enter, um, so uh we didn't go in because we didn't feel like spending that money. So we walked over to the Giardini Publici Giuseppe Garibaldi. As you probably know, Garibaldi was the father, like the George Washington of Italy, uh, I think in the about the 1850s or 60s. And uh all around the garden were pedestals with sculptured heads atop them, and we got to read about ten famous Italians sitting patiently uh looking out over the garden. After that, we walked over to the street connecting Porta Napoli with the Duomo, hoping to find a place to have coffee. I ordered two cappuccini and a pasticciotto for us, and when they arrived, a highly aggressive pigeon flew onto our table and proceeded to attack my pastry. He was obviously an old bird as his feet were quite malformed. Taking pity on him, as I too suffer from malformed feet, and I'm also an old bird, I broke off a small bit of the pastry's crust and gave it to him. Other pigeons, sensing an opportunity, joined us. That was a mistake for me. Wednesday, we spent the day with Juliet and Jem driving north from Lece to the beautiful white town of Ostuni, about 20 kilometers north of Brindisi, and perched on a hill separating the Adriatic side of the Salento Peninsula from the Gulf of Taranto, Taranto T A R A N T O, which is part of the Ionian Sea. That's the gulf between the heel and the rest of the foot. Ostuni has been inhabited since the Stone Age, and it is very white because the local stone is a powdery white limestone that is easily ground and made into paint. The whiteness of Ostuni might hurt the eyes, but it is a popular retirement community for expats, mainly British and German, who revel in making everything extremely neat and tidy. Seems to go well with the whiteness, I guess. It's fun to follow the narrow streets and admire the external decorations of their homes. There are also several spots along the eastern edge of the town where one can peer over the walls and admire the landscape that falls away to the Adriatic, only eight kilometers away. We refueled at a local cafe and enjoyed the usual iced coffee and sweetened with almond milk and a cornetto. While the cornetto is made with palm oil rather than butter, it was at least baked to a rich brown and topped with a few pieces of crystalline sugar, and then filled with maybe just a tablespoon of orange scented pastry cream. To my way of thinking, it's better not to engorge cornetti with pastry cream. I'm beginning to think that cream fillings are very Italian and they're found in Tiramisu, Cornetti, Pasticotti, Spoliatelle, and so on. And it becomes a little tiresome. I do appreciate the contrast between crispness and creaminess, however. While we sat there, we also enjoyed some 1940s American jazz. Listening to American jazz uh in Italy is uh both complimentary and sad. Complimentary because it compliments American culture, but it's sad because it doesn't really belong there. But I guess it beats the corny music that they might play from old Italian movies. We sat on the shade uh in the shade of a mammoth pillar topped with a statue of Saint Orantius, Oranzo in Italian, whom I've already talked about, the patron saint of both Lece and Ostoni. He was born in Rudiae, the former name of Lecce, probably near the Porta Rudii, where we bought fish uh the few days before. While walking on a beach near Lece, we met he, uh that this is back around 40 AD. Uh, while walking on the beach near Lece, he met Eustace, who had been sent by Saint Paul to carry a letter to the Roman church. Eustace converted Oranzo to Christianity. As a young adult, he replaced his father as Nero's treasurer, but he lost his position when he converted to Christianity. After that, he traveled the Salento Peninsula making converts and often hiding in caves with other Christians. Eventually he was caught, decapitated, and his head and body were delivered to Lecce and buried under a pillar in the Duomo, the main square. Our hunger and thirst temporarily slaked. We drove southwest from Ostuni toward the Gulf of Taranto and Taranto, and toward our second destination, Gallipoli. The land became flat and open, and farms grew much larger than the tiny plots typically found in the southern part of the Solento Peninsula. For over an hour we passed olive orchards populated by some of the ancient trees so common in that area, part of Italy. At first we saw only occasional evidence of the devastating Xylella fastidiosa, but the closer we came to Gallipoli, the more dead olive trees dominated the landscape. Gallipoli is a port on the Gulf of Toronto, and like Toronto, it was one of the Greek colonies that lined the Gulf in the years before the Romans conquered the Salento Peninsula. As you enter the Centro Storico or Historic Center, you can't help but marvel at the beauty. Lots of spots for boats, which, it being February, are still stuck on land. We walked along a seawall and found a restaurant called La Puritan, which means purify her. Not sure who her is, but we did have an excellent meal. We started with antipasti misti or mixed appetizers, and a bottle of Donna Lisa White made with the Malvasia Bianca grape, one of the grapes grown in that area. Each of the five antipasti was served on an orange slice. The individual antipasti included raw purple shrimp, gratinate mussels, raw langustine, they called them scompy, a potato crostini filled with cooked fish, and pulpo or octopus in red wine. All five appetizers were fresh and flavorful. I like the pulpo the best, although after seeing the Netflix movie My Octopus Teacher, I now feel guilty each time I consume uh the poor mollusk. For the next course I enjoyed grilled tuna served on a braised cabbage with lemon, olive oil, parsley, and caper berries, the fruit of the caper plant, but unlike the flowers, the fruit is milder in flavor. Another dish we ate uh had a turmeric sauce with roasted eggplant and swordfish. Quite excellent. And another had linguini with bonito, tomatoes, basil, parsley, and in a reduced crustacean broth. One thing about Italian food is they love to do use broths, they don't use gluey sauces so much, which I find very attractive. For dessert, since they were out of everything on the menu but ice cream, I ordered spumoni, which is one of my food memories that I had that had to be revived. As a youth, I lived in a Greco-Italian neighborhood in the suburbs of Detroit. And back then I particularly enjoyed spumoni, which was an almond-flavored ice cream punctuated with candied fruit, raisins, and pistachios. This version of spumoni, however, was quite different. The ice cream flavored with amaretto was molded into a hemisphere at the bottom of which were dried figs and almonds soaked in amaretto. It was quite delicious, but I still prefer the Detroit Sicilian version, possibly because I was young and it was new, uh, because it was exuberant in its lack of subtlety. Uh and maybe today I would not like it so much. We left the restaurant at about 3 p.m. and walked along the seawalls around the port. At one point, eleven black cats made a beeline for some trash sitting on a rock. I found out later that every day an old man buys cat food, brings it down to the rocks, opens the can, and sits there watching the eleven cats. The old man must have stepped away. We entered the center of historic Gallipoli. As we walked through the streets, the concentration of humans increased dramatically, especially children wearing costumes of modern day heroes such as Superman and Wednesday, the girl from the Adams Family movie. Children threw handfuls of confetti at each other and at the adults, including me. We found the place to sit, and at about 5 30 in the afternoon we heard a procession making its way up the street. At the front of the procession were a couple drummers followed by an old woman and a hearse. Lying on the hearse was a young man wearing white makeup to look dead, uh, with something bulbous projecting from his mouth. People on the street screamed and cried and shook his body, trying to revive him. This was the day of Carnivale. Every city celebrates its own version. For Gallipoli, the procession of Carnivale commemorates the story of a young soldier, Lu Titoru, who goes off to war and returns unscathed. His mother joyously feeds him his favorite meatballs to celebrate his survival. However, he chokes to death on a meatball. Of course, the children at Carnivale don't understand this particularly poignant theme that life is indeed precious and can be taken away from you at a moment's notice. At seventy-two, the sad irony of this story does not escape me. The next day, Wednesday, was spent in leche. In the late morning, we went to the fish market to pick up something for dinner. We then had lunch at a raw fish restaurant called Losteria Ubriaca Ubriaca, which means the drunken oyster. We ordered and shared three dishes raw langustin, uh they call it scompy, um, mixed fried seafood with lightly pickled vegetables, and roasted eggplants and zucchini. On the menu, they advertised it as for those who don't eat fish. And we ordered it because we wanted some vegetables. We finished with one portion of tiramisu, which was mascarpone cream flavored with amaretto and topped with crushed biscotti. However, I prefer the mushy cake version. I find the texture contrast between cream and sharp dried cookies distracting. Langustine, cannoli, spomonis, tiramisu, and anchovy pizza are all ancient memories for me. Back in 1961, when we lived in Roubaix, a town in northern France, my dad came home one day effusing, I have tasted the most wonderful seafood, langustines. And from that day in 1961, until this day, in 2023, I never tasted them. But now I've had them twice, but raw. So I still have yet to have them the way he had them cooked. The Italians call them scompi. In the US, where langustines do not exist, large shrimp have taken the place of scompi. Really, the Americans should call them Gambieri, which is Italian for shrimp. Here's another ancient memory. Near our home in St. Clair's Shores, the Greco-Rubbin the Italian suburb I mentioned, there was a Sicilian bakery that sold cannolis. Ironically, I never tasted those cannolis, which always ended up heaved against some stop sign that kids like to uh target practice with. Years later, I followed a recipe from the Time Life Cooking of Italy book, and I found it quite excellent. Um, but I have tried hundreds of cannolis since then and have yet to taste a cannoli that was comparable in flavor and texture to the cannolis, my first cannolis that I made myself. One of my favorite students now uh who owns now owns a restaurant in Nairobi, Kenya, she uh added tiramisu recipe to the lab manual of the baking class that I taught at Cornell University's hotel school. I have tasted many dozens of tiramisu' since then, and I have yet to find a single one that is nearly as good as the one we used to make. I tasted anchovy pizza for the first time in a Greek grocery store just across the street from the Sicilian bakery where I discovered cannolis. Now I suppose you're thinking, and since then he hasn't found an anchovy pizza equally good. Ha! Well, surprise I have. I guess that breaks the pattern. When even I lived in Trumansburg, New York, a bedroom. Community of Ithaca, we weakly enjoyed anchovy eggplant pizza that greatly exceeded the quality even of the early Greek version. You might ask, where did I come up with the idea of seeking out foods and comparing them to some idealized initial version? Well, I would answer that question as follows. During my youth, after my weekly piano lesson, I sat on my piano teacher's couch and read her comic books. In my family, comic books were Fairbotan, so I had developed quite a hunger for them. One of my favorites was Scrooge McDuck, who wandered the world in search for the perfect whatever. Once it was a source of wood for Stradivarious violins. Another time he wandered Scotland for the perfect scone. And ever since I've been comparing new experiences to old experiences. And forty years ago, I even wrote an article for the Washington Post food section back when I wrote a weekly column for them, comparing croissant made at a dozen bakeries in the DC area. And I discussed what made one croissant better than another. Now at the age of 72, my search for perfection continues. Well, now back to chocolate and Project Open Fairness. I'm going to talk a little bit about our business that we're starting here in Court called Le Comptoir du Chocolat. The chocolate counter. And uh we're going to have a big counter and have different chocolates laid out on it. And Damien and uh the young man who helps me make chocolate is going to be working with me. And we're going to be using the Soco Plan chocolate that's made in De Pacote d'Ivoire that I import. And uh we're going to uh uh have four different categories of products chocolates, confections, uh, pastries, and cakes. Chocolates will include truffles, crystallized cocoa beans, candied orange peels dipped in chocolate, to name a few. Confections will include uh cocoa nougatine and pinuche. Pastries will include palmiers and chocolate chip cookies, and cakes will include chocolate lemon gamusa cake and chocolate raspberry brownies. These are all products that are not sold in cord that are not French but are American or from some other nationality. Um the palmier is French. Anyway, that's the end of today's podcast. We finish with box prelude number 22 and B flat minor from the well-tempered clavier. See you next time. Thank you for listening. Bye.