Puglia Italy Quotes

Real burrata is a creation of arresting beauty- white and unblemished on the surface, with a swollen belly and a pleated top. The outer skin should be taut and resistant, while the center should give ever so slightly with gentle prodding. Look at the seam on top: As with mozzarella, it should be rough, imperfect, the sign of human hands at work. Cut into the bulge, and the deposit of fresh cream and mozzarella morsels seems to exhale across the plate. The richness of the cream- burrata comes from burro, the Italian word for "butter"- coats the mouth, the morsels of mozzarella detonate one by one like little depth charges, and the entire package pulses with a gentle current of acidity. The brothers, of course, like to put their own spin on burrata. Sometimes that means mixing cubes of fresh mango into its heart. Or Spanish anchovies. Even caviar. Today, Paolo sends me next door to a vegetable stand to buy wild arugula, which he chops and combines with olives and chunks of tuna and stirs into the liquid heart of the burrata, so that each bite registers in waves: sharp, salty, fishy, creamy. It doesn't move me the same way the pure stuff does, but if I lived on a daily diet of burrata, as so many Dicecca customers do, I'd probably welcome a little surprise in the package from time to time. While the Diceccas experiment with what they can put into burrata, the rest of the world rushes to find the next food to put it onto. Don't believe me? According to Yelp, 1,800 restaurants in New York currently serve burrata. In Barcelona, more than 500 businesses have added it to the menu. Burrata burgers, burrata pizza, burrata mac and cheese. Burrata avocado toasts. Burrata kale salads. It's the perfect food for the globalized palate: neutral enough to fit into anything, delicious enough to improve anything.

According to a study done in 2011 by the welfare department of the CISL trade union, in the three-year period from 2006 to 2008 it could take as long as 540 days to have a mammogram scheduled (Puglia), 90 days to get a bone-density scan done (Veneto) and 74 days to see a geriatrics specialist in the generally well-organized Tuscany region. I myself know someone who had to wait seven months to get a heart bypass, and one of my next-door neighbors here in Rome waited almost a year for a hip replacement. Of course, this is not unusual for a country with national health; all the Brits I know decry their own system violently and even in Sweden, once a model for such things, there is considerable disorganization. The fact remains that the Italian national health system is often more virtual than real, forcing people who can afford it to look for an alternative solution.

Aside from including several of Irving’s recipes in her book, they shared a number of overlapping themes: foremost among them was the idea that they were recording recipes rooted in a way of life that was on the verge of disappearing. In Honey from a Weed, Patience likened the endeavor to that of a musicologist who records old songs. It was an apt analogy: Just a few years before she and Irving took their trip to Lecce in 1958, American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax and the Italian anthropologist Diego Carpitella had traveled through the south of Italy, including Puglia, recording folk songs. They started out in Martano, not far from Santa Maria di Leuca, and traveled north, documenting the songs of agricultural workers, shepherds, and peasants. In the text accompanying the recordings Lomax wrote, “It was a mythic time. None of us suspected that that world—made of music, songs, poverty, joy, desperation, custom, violence, injustice, love, dialect, and poetry, formed over the course of millennia—would be swept away in a couple of years . . . by the voodoo of ‘progress.’” Federman, Adam. Fasting and Feasting . Chelsea Green Publishing. Kindle Edition.

For iron and pep, I wanted to make a cold lentil salad with a zingy orange-ginger vinaigrette, handfuls of chopped herbs, and slices of white peach. (The purple-green Puy lentils, more common than the orange ones in France, just seemed too dark for a summer salad.) After unpacking half the kitchen while standing, against my better judgement, on a kitchen chair, I ended up not with orange lentils, but with a bag of yellow split peas. That would have to do. The split peas had been hiding up there for a while--- I'm pretty sure I bought them after a trip to Puglia, where we were served warm split-pea puree drizzled with wonderful glass-green olive oil and a grind of fresh pepper. Still hankering after a cold salad, I tried cooking the dried peas al dente, as I would the lentils, but a half hour later, where the lentils would have been perfect, the split peas were a chalky, starchy mess. I decided to boil on past defeat and transform my salad into the silky puree I'd eaten with such gusto in Italy. When the peas were sweet and tender and the liquid almost absorbed, I got out the power tools. I'm deeply attached to my hand blender--- the dainty equivalent of a serial killer's obsession with chain saws. The orange-ginger vinaigrette was already made, so I dumped it in. The recipe's necessary dose of olive oil would have some lively company. The result was a warm, golden puree with just enough citrus to deviate from the classic. I toasted some pain Poilâne, slathered the bread with the puree, and chopped some dill. My tartines were still lacking a bit of sunshine, so I placed a slice of white peach on top.

At first glance, the main display case at Dicecca today looks like a selection you'll find in any cheese shop in Puglia: tubs of milky water covering hunks of mozzarella in its many guises; strings of swollen scamorze dangling from the ceiling, bronzed by their stopover in the cold smoker; small plastic containers of creamy ricotta ready to be stuffed or eaten straight with a spoon. But look closer and you'll see some unfamiliar faces staring back at you through the glass: a large bucket brimming with ricotta spiked with ribbons of blue cheese and toasted almonds, served by the scoop; a wooden serving board paved with melting slabs of goat cheese weaponized with a cloak of bright red chili flakes; a hulking wheel of pecorino, stained shamrock green by a puree of basil and spinach. These are the signs of a caseificio in the grips of an evolution, one that started more than a decade ago when the brothers took the reins from their parents and began to expand the definition of a small, family-run cheese shop.

In the side refrigerators, where Vito so carefully arranges the morning's new attractions, you'll find even more examples of a traditional caseificio gone rogue: a wheel of aged goat cheese coated in a rough armor of wild herbs; a thick, blue-veined goat cheese soaked red with purple with Primitivo wine; goat yogurt in half a dozen international flavors. You won't be surprised to find that the early efforts of the Dicecca boys were met with opposition- both from the family and the regular clientele. Each brother has a story about the resistance he has encountered along the way- the parental eye rolling at the cacao-coated goat cheese, the sisterly skepticism about mango-stuffed burrata, the customers' confusion at the latest experiment to emerge from the lactic laboratory in back. Every story ends the same way: with one or all of the family members doubting the viability of another esoteric cheese, followed by the long, slow acceptance by enough customers to justify its real estate space in the display case. "When I started making cheese with the Nikka barrel, they made fun of me, said I was destroying the taste of the cheese. Now they're copying me. That's the pattern we always see: at first they make fun, then they start to copy.

Remember when we took that trip to Puglia?" He knows that I do. We'd gone for our anniversary a few years ago. We had stayed on the top floor of a small hotel impossibly cantilevered over an expanse of rocky shore. We'd eaten burrata, a Pugliese specialty, every morning for breakfast, with a slab of bread- arguably the best in Italy, still warm from baking overnight in the dying embers of the ancient oven. The cheese would arrive each morning on a tray outside our room, still warm, and wrapped in the customary thick blade of grass, swollen like a ripe piece of fruit.