Sundays are for pasta

Lagani e ciciari

We walked into his house and I immediately recognized the smell of the wood burning in his woodburning stove. It was olive. He had on Italian jazz or maybe it was opera, playing low on his stereo. We walked through the front room with earthen walls and tiled floors and beautiful old art, ceramics, and photography placed throughout out. And we entered the kitchen, where the wood was burning.

 “Oliva?” 

“Si” He pointed out the big bag window, to the rolling hillside behind this home, the window a modern addition to this ancient structure, because why not?

“This tree” he says— and I could see the tree, an olive almost bigger than I had seen before, “This one is 800 years old. Some branches fell in the storm so I use them to make this aroma in the house. You like?” 

I nodded. My sister and I looked at each other in that way where we both knew exactly what we were thinking. Can we just live here with him? The olive burning. The great great great great grandmother olive tree. The music. The oh-so-italian scarf he wore around his neck. His welcoming.

Raffaele Ricco was not my blood family, but he might as well have been. He grew up in this little village along the Cilento coast of Southern Italy with my family, and they were close, very close, enough that he pulled out old photos from a hundred years ago and they included a mix of his family and my family, together. Village life is like that. Places where blood ends and neighbors meet are blurry. When everyone is there, on the same land, with the same olive trees, with the same grapevines, over the same coastline, struggling over and/or celebrating the same days together, this makes you kin. What is family anyone? For this culture - it is everything. In ways that I am not sure I can ever understand fully, but do know I experienced - different but the same- growing up in the enclave I did. At least until the 1980s. 

My cousin Ada who still lives here, brought us over to Raffeale Ricco’s place, because he had a good lot of photos and stories to share with us, but also because he spoke some english and also because he’s just an interesting man with a lot of cultural info on the area to share.

He passed us a book he wrote, after signing it for us, called “La Cucina del Cilento: Piatti, tradizioni popolari e curiosità gastronomiche". 

If you are interested in who you are, or where you come from, before here, before now, look at what people ate. You will enter a portal of wonder and curiosity and hunger and history. You will find out what your literally nourishment particles are made of.

Raffaele is a professor of story and philosophy at a scientific high school in Bologna, Italy, and we were lucky enough to catch him while he was visiting the village we both share as ancestral – his a hometown, and for me, it was the birthplace of my great grandfather, and where my nonna lived once she was about one year old. The “Unification” didn’t end when they say it did, it went into the 1900s, some say at least until 1918. After my Nonna’s mother suddenly died, my nonna went to spend her next 8-9 years on that land, the Cilento, most likely because it was safer than Sicily, where she was born, and where her father was from.

My great grandparents family tended that bit of land, it wasn’t small either —   the olive groves and the vineyards that are still on this land, the land Raffeale’s house is on, the land my cousins still live on, the actual house my great grandparents raised their family in. All of it was owned by someone who hired my great grandfather to “run” it. He may have even owned some himself. This was a huge deal at the time. And why I suspect my Nonna ended up there.

And I found myself standing there, looking at an 800 year old olive tree,  possibly one my greatgrandfather’s hands touched. One maybe my nonna sat under or climbed. Holding this gem of a book, full of stories and photos and “recipes”. Standing with family I never met before, family of my father that just died. Smelling the olive wood burn. Waiting for this moment for over a decade. Trying to take it all in. It’s impossible. The layers are endless. To go to a village and say “We are the great grandchildren of Sophia Caputo and Feliciano D’Urso.” And for the people to say, yes, we are family. We are cousins. Come. And then all of a sudden your life becomes a new story. With new people. And an understanding of who you really are, what soil and sounds and skin tone you are made of.

This book (yes I am going to share a recipe with you from it) is a dive into the culture and cuisine of the little but mighty area of the wild and rugged southern shoreline of the region of Campania. It does not get the hype of what is north of it (Amalfi coast)— those who don’t know or want the same thing everyone else has— go to Amalfi — I am not saying it’s not gorgeous there, I am just saying there is more than there, especially if you love unspoiled nature, wild undeveloped coastlines, and a very slow and rhythmic pace of being alive. It is spectacular. A blessing.

When I returned home with this book I said I was going to make one dish from it a week and try to incorporate what Raffeale Ricco (the author) claims as the foundation of what everyone talks about when they talk about “the mediterranean diet” — he says it all comes from the this region. This area of the Cilento - many villages clustered right here - are “blue zones” - meaning people there just forget to die. They live to be ages they don’t even really remember, 102, 103 etc… I am sure it’s the food — straight from the land still, the exquisite olive oil, the original biodynamic wine, the sea air, the slow mountain-above-sea living. But also, we cannot exclude the proximity of how they lived together, and cared for each other, especially during the hardest of time. If you are interested in these kinds of studies there was one done in the States around Rosetta, Pa - you can find the study: here.

Being together, generation after generation, in a way where there is an innate collectivism, a deep knowing of the other, through conflict and through harmony, makes for health of some kind that I barely remember in my body. Until I went there. Southern Italy in general. It woke me up. 

I have not made something from the book every week. My Italian skills make for reading and translating more than just a cooking session, which I welcome, but the time is always lacking. But I have made some things. And today, it’s Sunday. And Sunday is always for pasta.

And so I wanted to share the dish that I have been making, over and over again, because it’s so easy and so delicious. I am going to post some of it in Italian… but I will explain so it’s not entirely foreign.

Lagani di Ciciari (basically a simple homemade wide noodle pasta with garbanzo beans. Lagani is a typical pasta in Cilento and also other parts of the Campania region) 

Ingredients: 

• ½ kg di farina di grano duro rimacinato (hard grain flour, I use whatever flour I have that is good quality) 

• Una tazza d’acqua tiepida (a cup of warm water) 

The above is just for the pasta. You make a dough with this and you can set it aside while you make the rest. 

Here are ingredients for the zuppa - or sauce - it really isn’t like a soup, but it’s a tiny bit like one. I  make it drier, because I like it like a pasta dish). 

• 500 gr ceci (you can use dried or canned - this is 500 grams of garbanzo - you convert)

• 2 spicchi di aglio (2 cloves of garlic)

• Un rametto di rosmarino (sprig of rosemary) 

• Una foglia d’alloro (a leaf of bay) 

• Qualche pomodoro maturo (a few ripe tomatoes) 

• Olive oil 

• Hot pepper flakes 

• Pepe, una piccola manciata di sale grosso (salt and pepper)

  The best way to make this is to use dried ceci beans, but I did it with canned and it was delicious. 

Basically, you make the pasta. Make the dough. Roll it out until thin. Cut it  ½ inch wide, and about 6 inches long. Set aside. That’s how I do it at least. 

In a large saute pan, add a little olive oil, the garlic, the ripe tomatoes smashed or cut up, the rosemary sprig and the bay leaf, some red pepper flakes, and allow them to cook down. Add tiny bits of water here and there until it is simmering like a sauce. It shouldn’t be a heavy red sauce, but a lighter, fresca kind of sauce.  After it’s simmered for like 20 minutes, add your ceci beans. Either from a can or made from dried. And let them cook in there for a bit. Add more salt, pepper, pepperoncini - if you like.  

Now you are going to cook your pasta very al dente! …. And of course save some of that pasta water because you are going to add some to your fresca sauce eventually. 

When the pasta is almost done - take a ½ cup of that pasta water and add it to your sauce. And let it simmer. Then strain your pasta and add it and toss it and let it cook. At more water if you want, top with some hard cheese grated (I like pecorino romano) and garnish with some rosemary. 

Xx MB