‘Cucina povera’ is written about romantically, but there’s no reason why we can’t cook dishes that are frugal and delicious
Bernalda is a small hilltop town in Basilicata, in the south of Italy, the old centre of which even now (squint just a bit) makes you think of early Fellini: La Strada, say, or – my favourite – Il Bidone. The streets gleam white in the intense summer heat, every other building seems to be a tiny church, and after lunch absolutely everyone disappears, only reemerging at 7pm at the very earliest. And the food! Its inhabitants love to eat. In the late afternoon, from tiny windows there comes the smell of delicious sauces and soups. Turning a corner, we found two women in old-fashioned aprons, perched on a doorstep. The air was heavy with the scent of basil as they tore leaves from stems, tossed them into an old bucket, and talked tirelessly of their children.
Until last month, I’d never been to the south of Italy, and on the plane I wondered if the cucina povera (“poor cooking”) people write about so romantically still exists. But yes, it really does, I think. In a trattoria in Matera, we ate “meatballs” made entirely of stale bread and herbs that were delicious to an almost puzzling degree (if I tell you that we mopped up the tomato sauce that covered them with slices of the crusty, saffron-coloured bread that is special to Matera, you’ll have an idea of how wonderfully well disguised they were). Meanwhile, on the next table, some locals were eating, by way of a main course, huge plates of bitter greens, stewed until they were soft and dark, and doused with grassy olive oil – a sight that brought instantly to mind Patience Gray’s great Mediterranean cookbook, Honey From a Weed.
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