"La cucina pugliese nasce come cucina povera," says Paola Pettini who for
twenty-five years has directed a cooking school in her native Bari: The cuisine
of Puglia (sometimes called Apulia in English) was born as the cuisine of poverty. What this means, she explains, is
pasta made without eggs, bread made from the hard-grain durum wheat flour that
flourishes locally, and a diet based on vegetables, including many wild
vegetables like cicorielle, wild chicory, and lampascioni , the bulb of a wild tassel hyacinth, foods that are foraged from stony fields and
abandoned terraces.
Meat is not much eaten and beef until a few years ago, was
almost unknown on Pugliese tables, with horsemeat being preferred.
For Christmas
and Easter feasting, weddings and baptisms, Pugliese cooks look to what
are called animale da cortile, farmyard animals, especially chickens and
rabbits, although this rocky landscape being sheep country, lamb is the very
symbol of feasting, as it is in most of the Mediterranean.
The food of Puglia is in essence a home-based cuisine, not marked by the influence
of great chefs or restaurants.
Because it is based on home cooking, this is a cucina delle donne,
created by women cooking at home rather than male chefs in professional
kitchens. It is a cuisine without rules and regulations, based solely on what's
in the family larder, which is then stretched and expanded to feed those who may
show up all’improvviso, at the unplanned last minute.
Pugliese cuisine is based on
Apulian olive oil, one of the great products of the region. In any given year,
Puglia produces as much as two-thirds of all the olive oil in Italy, and while
much of it is shipped north, more of it stays right here to be used in Pugliese kitchens.
Source: Flavors of Puglia Nancy Harmon Jenkins Broadway Books
Compared to other Italian regions, Puglia cultivates most
types of wheat, but durum wheat is its main crop. Most dried pasta is
made from durum wheat, the hardest of all wheats. (The word “durum”
comes from the Latin word “durus,” meaning “hard.”) Durum wheat’s density,
combined with its high protein content and gluten strength, make it the wheat of
choice for producing premium pasta
products (Barilla pasta is made from 100% durum wheat).
Pasta made from durum
is firm and provides a consistent cooking quality. Whether it’s the appetizing
aroma of a steaming bowl of orecchiette
pasta or the warm, sweet aroma
of homemade bread, the Pugliese know how to produce magic from their bounty of wheat.
As essential to the Italian kitchen as a pasta pot,
Apulian olive oil is one of the finest olive oils in the
world. Olive oil and table olives are one of the main agricultural products of
this region, which accounts for 40 percent of Italy’s output of olive oil. For
a simple taste of Puglia, tear off a generous piece of a local rustic bread,
such as Altumura, and dip it into one of the many provincial varieties
that range in flavor and intensity such as Coratina, Cima di Bitonto, Cellina di
Nardo', Cima di Mola, or L’Olio di Peranzana.
Pasta and bread play a fundamental role in Pugliese cuisine and in Puglia food –
and Pane di Altumura DOP is at the helm of this
tradition.
Altamura bread—a staple food of the peoples of the Alta Murgia region in
Apulia—was traditionally made in very large loaves. In the old days, it
was customary to knead the dough at home and then take it to public
ovens to be baked. In order to distinguish the loaves, the bakers would
stamp them with the initials of the head of the family that owned the
dough before placing them in their ovens.
Pane di Altamura is a very crisp, fragrant bread. Its crumb, the soft part of
the bread, is the color of straw and soft to the touch. Its most
distinctive characteristic, however, is that it keeps for a long time,
an essential quality for a bread that, dipped briefly in boiling water
and dressed with olive oil and salt, provided nutrition to peasants and
shepherds for a week or more in isolated farms scattered in the hills of
Alta Murgia.
The earliest written document describing the Altamura bread is Horatio's
"Satires" in which the Roman poet recalls that during a trip to his
native land in the spring of A.D. 37 he tasted "the world’s most
delicious bread—so delicious, in fact, that the discerning traveler
stacks up on it for the rest of his journey."
In an era closer to ours, the 1527 statute of the town of Altamura dedicates
numerous paragraphs outlining the duties of the town's bakers, including
the taxes they had to pay to the authorities.
Puglia food - Apulia food.