The Food Maven Diary
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Home from Italy, with a Bean Soup Recipe
I'm home now, back from a month in Italy, where I certainly covered a lot of territory since the beginning of September. It dawned on me as Cecilia and I were driving back from Umbria last week that I had been to six of Italy's 20 provinces in three weeks. Without even trying. I started in Rome, went to Camaiore/ Pietrasanta for a few days, then down to Naples. That's three regions right there – respectively, Lazio, Tuscany, and Campania.
Paestum, our home base for Cook at Seliano, Cecilia and my cooking classes and gastronomic touring programs, is in Campania, too. But then, the Tuesday after our class went home, we took a little trip to the border of Puglia and Basilicata – two more regions. It was Cecilia's birthday and Iris and I said we would go anywhere she wanted. La Baronessa loves nothing better than getting in the car and exploring. Well, maybe she loves going to flea markets more. In any case, for this birthday, she chose to go to Matera, in Basilicata, a town that we are all very fond of, and where there is a restaurant we wanted to go back to, Lucanerie. It serves very local dishes, some antique. She had an ulterior motive, however. We were to stop on the way and buy burrata – as she would say "one of my 100 favorite foods" – and, on the way home, buy pecorino from a prize-winning cheese maker. As often happens with us, we got a late start and underestimated the time needed to do all this, so in the end we stopped for the burrata, never got to Matera, but with great difficulty we did finally find the pecorino.
I should not fail to mention that we also, serendipitously, stopped at a few picturesque towns and visited a couple of gorgeous churches. In Rochetta San Antonio, besides visiting its beautiful Baroque country church with a 500-year-old gilded pipe organ, we climbed a hill to a castle and visited a taralli bakery where we watched the local women make both ring-shaped taralli, and braided ones. Naturally, we bought some.
Burrata is a kind of cow's milk mozzarella. It is a thin sack made of rolled mozzarella filled with strands of unformed mozzarella called stracciatella, which are suspended in very heavy cream. It is, as Italians say, da morire – to die for. "It's going straight to my hips," said an American friend who we shared it with the next day. By the way, we get this cheese in New York. Indeed, it has become fashionable. You can buy it at Di Palo, on Grand and Mott St. in Little Italy, and at Agata and Valentina on First Ave. and 79th St. And they serve it at Bond 45, the Italian restaurant on 45th St. just east of Seventh Ave., right off Times Square. I was even served burrata in Prague, at the Four Seasons hotel, where they have an Italian chef. But, as good as it can be in NYC (and Prague), it is never as good as it is on home ground, where you can buy it and eat it the same day it is made, when it is at its optimum. It's a fresh cheese that should be consumed as fresh as possible. Cheese makers in Paestum, where they are experts in buffalo mozzarella, try to make it, but it is never any good at all. It is strictly a cheese of Puglia, and of a few nearby towns in Basilicata. You realize that although Italian food is very regional, it does not follow municipal boundaries. It follows agricultural zones. It is cultural, historical, a function of land and climate and people, not politics.
Realizing that we would never get to Matera in time for lunch, we asked the saleswoman at the burrata production, in a town called Lavello in Basilicata, on the Puglia border, where we could eat lunch. We were now in deep country, surrounded by agricultural fields. Among the many crops, including the durum wheat used for pasta and the area's wonderful semolina breads, this is tomato-growing country. The restaurant she recommended was, in fact, across the road from what we were proudly told is Europe's second largest tomato canning facility. We wondered where the largest was. We figured it must be in the south of Italy somewhere. I'll have to research this sometime, but I suspect it would be in or near San Marzano.
The restaurant, called Il Rifugio, The Refuge, is in a town called Gaudiano, which is famous for its naturally sparkling mineral water, Gaudianello (coincidentally, Cecilia buys it for her agriturismo), and also has an industrial area, including a huge Fiat plant. We figured the restaurant, simple as it is, on a pine-lined road, in a three story pink building where the family who owns it also lives, must thrive on the executives from the industrial plants. We knew it was not where the working men ate because we had stopped at their even simpler restaurant-bar earlier in the day. There, I ate a sandwich of bresaola, which is air-cured beef, on an excellent roll with sliced, marinated mushrooms, which were certainly out of a jar but delicious. "You're in Italy," Iris reminded me, when I remarked at how much flavor someone had managed to give those plain, white mushrooms.
The food at Il Rifugio was truly homemade by the wife of the owner-waiter, from local ingredients that would be hard to match in the U.S. First we had her little antipasto plate of a few slices each of prosciutto, dried sausage, and soppressata. The difference between the dried sausage and soppressata is mainly a matter of how the meat and fat are cut, sausage being finer than soppressata, which always has visible chunks of fat and meat. The plate also had some mushrooms that we would call "straw mushrooms," the kind that Chinese restaurants get out of a can. But they were locally grown – not foraged but cultivated – and they are called piopparelli here. Being a fairly bland mushroom, albeit adorable to look at, they were marinated in olive oil with hot pepper and garlic.
After that little plate, which could easily have been lunch itself, we ordered small portions of homemade orecchiette in meat sauce and of a bean soup. We couldn't decide between them so the owner insisted we try both. The orecchiette, the flour and water pasta that looks like little ears – well, to an Italian – were tender yet chewy, thickish but not heavy. I know that sounds contradictory, and it is, but that's what made these so masterful. The sauce was rich with meat flavor and I would have liked it as is, but before I could say no, the owner-waiter drizzled hot pepper oil on it. A little too much. Which is why I decided to insist he put none on my bowl of bean soup, which he thought should also get a dose.
This soup was made with beans that look exactly like navy beans, but I wonder. I will have to try it with American navy beans. He said they should be the current year's harvest because they should be beans you can cook without soaking. He also said that they were a rare bean, special to his immediate area, and that he had to reserve his order before the harvest because they well out so fast. I got the soup recipe from him and the next day, at our friend's house in Umbria, we bought local beans, fagiolina del Trasimeno, that also do not need soaking, but were otherwise totally unlike the beans we ate in Gaudiano. I think these tiny beans from Umbria are related to gandulas or pigeon peas, because the package label says that they come originally from Africa. I do know that almost all beans are from the Americas and that the only Old World beans are chickpeas, lentils, favas, which are all mentioned in the bible, and pigeon peas, which supposedly come from Africa. Pigeon peas came to the New World via the slave trade, which is why they are so popular in the Caribbean countries where slaves were brought to work the sugar cane plantations. These Umbrian beans certainly look like pigeon peas with their dot of black, only they are smaller.
The recipe for the soup follows. My feeling is that you can probably use any bean and have a great soup. The fact that the beans are not soaked and so produce a well-flavored broth contributes to its appeal, plus, of course, the flavorings of garlic, olive oil, and a small amount of tomato. The final fillip, however, is what really makes it unusually delicious. On each serving, you put raw red onion and dried oregano – and, if you dare, a little more full-flavored olive oil.
Like we could eat more, we had a taste of the beef braciole, which had given the ragu its good meat flavor, but by then we were so full we couldn't appreciate it. The small portions of pasta and bean soup were not all that small. In any case, we agreed among ourselves that my recipe for braciole in my book "Naples at Table" is better. Their flavor was fresh in our minds because we had just made them in class.
No dessert, just some apples called limoncelle, thusly named because they are small and the color of lemons.
Finding the prize-winning pecorino, officially Pecorino di Carmasciano, a three-month-old and heady tasting sheep's milk cheese, was no small feat. This is a table cheese, not a grating cheese. We were searching for a woman who makes the cheese in a small building next to her home in a town called Sant Angelo dei Lombardi. Except that she isn't really in the town. Fortunately, this prize-winning cheese maker is well known to her neighbors. We stopped a pair of teenage girls on the street to ask for directions, and even they knew exactly where she lived. Still, we had to repeatedly call her on the cell phone to clarify the directions.
"We must love pecorino," Cecilia kept chanting. "Yes, we love pecorino," Iris and I kept responding. It became our mantra as we kept searching. Even Cecilia, who is usually unflappable, was getting frustrated by our back and forth through and out of the town, up and down hills, off and onto the autostrada, to find the woman and her cheese. Was it worth it? What can I say? The cheese is excellent, and we have a great tale to tell about it.
Appearance Reminders
So now that I am back, let me remind you that on October 21, a Friday evening, I am appearing at Classic Thyme in Westfield, New Jersey. With slides, stories, a little music, and a cooking demonstration – to invoke Tenuta Seliano -- I hope to entertain and feed you well. Call the school for reservations: (908) 232-5445. Check the appearance schedule on my website, The Food Maven, for more details. There are still some seats left in the class.
Then, the next day, Saturday, October 22, I am judging the annual apple pie contest at Sickles Market in Little Silver, New Jersey, with my friends Carole Walter and Rozanne Gold. After we announce the winners in the afternoon, Carole and Rozanne and I will lead a discussion on the importance of shopping for the right ingredients. Then we are having a book signing. All my books will be available for purchase and autographs, as will some of Rozanne's 1-2-3 books, and Carole's baking books. I hope to see many of there. For more information about the contest, go to SicklesMarket.com , and also Maven's Appearances, my website's appearance schedule.
Il Rifugio's Bean Soup
What I think is essential here is your best extra virgin olive oil, oregano that is sweet and not too aggressive, and small beans that cook up creamy, such as navy beans, what we call "small white beans," or, say, the marrow beans that they grow in Maine to use for baked beans. I will try some other types, and report on the results some time soon. The owner of Il Rifugio insisted that a pottery pot, like a bean crock, was also essential, but when we tried the recipe at our friend's house in Umbria, we used stainless steel and it was still very delicious.
Note: Olio santo, or hot pepper oil, can be made by pouring oil over dried hot peppers and letting it stand for several days. It will keep for up to a year. Short of hot pepper oil, add ½ teaspoon or more hot pepper flakes to the oil with the garlic. Or do not use hot pepper at all.
2 large cloves garlic, finely minced
Enough extra virgin oil to cover the bottom of your pot
1 pound small beans (not soaked)
Water
1 ½ cups halved cherry tomatoes, whole grape tomatoes, or chopped fresh, ripe tomatoes
Salt to taste (1 teaspoon to start)
For each portion:
1 1/8-inch thick slice red onion, cut into quarters
Big pinch (or two) dried oregano
Hot pepper oil (olio santo)
In a 3 to 4-quart pot, preferably terracotta, heat the garlic and oil together over low heat. When the garlic is soft but not colored, add the beans. With a wooden spoon, turn the beans in the oil.
Add enough water to cover the beans by about 2 inches. Cover the pot and bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce the heat so that the water just simmers gently. Cook the beans, covered, for about an hour, or until just tender. Add more water as necessary to keep the beans well covered.
Add the tomatoes and at least 1 teaspoon of salt. Return to a simmer and continue cooking, covered, for at least another hour. The beans should be creamy and tender. The soup may need as long as 3 hours of cooking. It depends entirely on the beans, the type, their moisture content, etc. You may need to add more water and more salt. In the end, the beans should be covered with about a couple of inches of liquid.
Serve the bean soup with the raw onion and pinch or so of oregano on top of each bowlful. Pass a cruet of extra-virgin olive oil for those who want to drizzle it on their portion.
