Baking

These just might be the first s’mores you’ll ever eat that don’t come dipped in ashes. And it takes only eight marshmallows to make eight s’mores because none are sacrificed in the fire. A quick dip in bottled smoke and a sprinkling of Cheater Smoked Sweet Salt are the other secrets to bringing adult sophistication to this kiddie camp classic. Mix and match cookies and graham crackers with different chocolates and candy bars. The marshmallows will burn in the oven, so watch them carefully and don’t leave your post. Cookie Sheet S’mores don’t need to be served hot. We were surprised at a winter birthday barbecue for Min’s daughter, Elsa, when we laid out a platter and guests of all ages kept sneaking just one more s’more until they were gone. Use a variety of smallish store-bought cookies so everyone can try different combinations.

Every province on the island claims its own version of this ethereal sweet to be the one-and-only true sospirus. The Olienese hand seems the most gentle with them, though. The very old woman from whom I learned to make them shook her small, kerchiefed head throughout the ceremony, moaning, keening, really, that the confections could only be made from the eggs of Sardinian chickens. Her theory, perhaps valid, was that Sard hens feed on myrtle berries and whey from cheesemaking and that these nourishments render the substance of their eggs less viscous and thus better suited to the construction of delicate pastries. All I know for certain is that I can bake gorgeous sospirus with the eggs of Tuscan hens who eat worms and bugs and corn.

Sculpted into the shanks of the Sopramonte in the barbagia is Oliena. And drifting toward it from the Nuorese road at sunset, the golden lamplight of the village bedazzles the mountain, splendoring its old, cold grayness as would the gleams of ten thousand torches. Later, inside the village as we sat with our aperitivi, we told a local man how the approach had pleased us. He said that it was ritual for the Olienesi to walk down from the village at crepuscolo (twilight) turning back to face the mountain as the sun softened, sobered down to sleep, before they strolled back up the hill to suppers. And it is from these romantic Olienesi that was begun the tradition of two celebrated Sard dolci—sebadas and sospirus. Sebadas are typically made with a fresh ewe’s milk cheese cushioned inside leaves of pastry, tumbled into bubbling oil, then given a dose of bitter honey. This version asks for ricotta and mascarpone-plumped pastries to be baked, then given a wisp of a honeyed sheen. Present them after some simple supper, such as mazzamurru (page 233), with a tiny glass of icy Malvasia di Cagliari.

In the south near Cagliari, in the town of Sant’ Elena, is staged a September festival—a tribute to their patroness and a celebration of the vendemmia—the harvesting of the grapes. There are four ascendancies in the week’s pageantry. The ancestral dress of the townsfolk, the great, pendulous, ambered muscat grapes, called zibibbo, with which the whole, humble precinct is festooned, the wine pressed from their honeyed juices, and, finally, the luscious breads baked from zibibbi left to dry and crinkle in the sun. Though the bread is sweetened and ornamented with raisins, it is most compatible with game dishes such as fagiano arrosto alla Saverio di Nulvi, (page 240) or braises such as the cosciotto di maiale al coccio del pastore Sassarese (page 237). We ate pane di zibibbo in Sant’ Elena with the sweet, white flesh of a myrtle-roasted pig. The bread, still warm from the oven, or roasted over a wood fire, makes for a gorgeous fine pasto with a piece of young pecorino and a glass of moscato. I reserve the bread’s golden-crisped fringes for the baker.

In the Sard dialect, the town of Villagrande is called Biddamanna. There, a vast parcel of Sard earth is su cumonale—owned by everyone of the community. Shepherds can pasture their sheep, townsfolk can collect wood for their fires, a family can cultivate a small orchard, a garden of vegetables. The Biddamannesi can walk kilometer after kilometer through forests, into the mountains, onto the moors, hunting, foraging, gathering, as they have done forever in this town with no walls, no fences. And, too, they cook for each other over great fires laid in the piazza near the village hall on feast days. Cauldrons of thick soups, mutton poached with wild grasses, and beautiful handmade pastas are offered with baskets of pane carasau and barrels of rough, purply cannonau. Though all Sards seem passionate about making packets of their food, these Biddamannesi seem more devoted, even, to the pursuit. They urge rough doughs into pouches and pillows plumped with all manner of savories and sweets, the bundles tumbled into gurgling oil or baked over wood embers or gently poached. Culingionis are raviolo-like pasta typically stuffed with bitter greens and an acidy, fresh ewe’s milk cheese or a paste of potatoes, nutmeg, cloves, wild mint, and pecorino. Though these are luscious, it is a half day’s ceremony to make them. Hence, I sometimes wrap the good potato paste in a crisp quilting of cheese pastry, a quickly done deed that gives up all the savor of the culingionis plus the prize of a gorgeous scent as the crostata bakes to crispness.

Bestriding the shoulders of the island’s western verges is the perfect borgo medievale (medieval village) of Erice, called so after he who was the mythical son of Venus, sired by the king of the ancient tribe of the Elimi. There is a fascination about the village, its apocryphal tales and its truths—gifts, one thinks, of the cults that once worshiped the gods of beauty and love there and carved into the village walls scripts still undecipherable. Limpid, sweet is its air, and from its sweeping lofts one sees Mt. Etna, her fury diffused in far-off mists. And there on a small piazza sits the pasticceria of Maria Grammatico, who fashions the most gorgeous, most delicious evidences of rustic Sicilian pastry. Many of Signora Grammatico’s formulas are borrowed from the epoch of the Ericina convent pastry-making—it, too, having once practiced a temperate rather than a Baroque style. This is a version of the celebrated Ericina ricotta pie.

Piana degli Albanesi is the name of the city settled half a millennium ago when a band of oppressed Albanesi took flight from the Turks and, with the permission of Giovanni II, the then Spanish viceroy in Sicily, took refuge in the countryside near Palermo. A somewhat unmingled populace, cleaving still to its heritage, they perpetuate, in full dress and with great ebullience, the story of their gastronomy. And yet it is a fornaio, a baker, there who makes one of the finest examples of the traditional bread of Sicily. Heavy, cakelike in its wet, golden crumb, its crust is thick, hard, wood-scorched. And to cradle a hunk of it in one’s hand is to hold a piece of the ages, it seems. Insofar as things like this can be carried from one part of the world to another, here follows his formula.

An intriguing bread both sweet with honey and anise and savory with pepper and pancetta, versions of it have been baked for pagan and sacred and secular festivals since the epoch of the Greeks. Giuseppe Fazia sometimes bakes the gorgeous, fragrant bread at his forno in Via Tommasini in Reggio Calabria.

Sitting a few kilometers from the snarls of the city’s traffic, Mondello is Palermo’s beachfront. Less chic than it is drowsy, the tiny port’s center is paved with little trattorie that offer still-writhing sea fish from which one can choose a fine lunch. And at noon, just as bathers and strollers longing for some icy little aperitivo start off for the bars and caffès, a husky, microphoned voice seeming to come from the fat, dark leaves of the old plane trees intrudes on the operetta. With the precision of a corps de ballet, the cast of characters pivots in the direction of a small white truck, chugging slowly, then edging to a stop in their midst. Lo sfincionaro has arrived. In another place, he might be called the pizza man, though his is hardly some prosaic pie. His voice invites: “Just come to see them. They are warm and fragrant. I don’t ask that you buy one. I only invite you to admire them.” We watched as there came a fast gathering of his devoted. Mothers and babies, men in rumply Palm Beach suits, Australian fishermen on holiday, an Englishwoman with a great yellow hat and a silver-headed cane. Children clutching five-lire notes collected, each of them waiting for lo sfincionaro to enfold a great, warm heft of his beautiful onion-scented bread into a sheet of soft gray paper. A traditional confection of Palermo, it is called lo sfincione. It is a crunchy, rich, bread-crusted tart—and close kin to southern France’s pissaladière—that cradles sautéed onions, dried black olives, sun-dried tomatoes, anchovies, pancetta, and pecorino. Fashioning smaller sfincioni and piling them up, newly born, in an old basket and passing them about with jugs of cold white wine can make for a lovely summer supper.

Once used only to bake the fanciful soldiers on horseback given to children on the festival of San Martino, the short, buttery dough, in less fantastical shapes and forms, is a daily offering now in every pasticceria, luscious even with the slurring of its namesake.

Riso nero—black rice—is the dramatic name for a nursery dish offered to children as a light supper or as a sweet after a bit of broth or soup. It is most often just made with rice poached in milk that has been scented with cinnamon and mixed with a few shards of chocolate, the latter giving the dish its name as it melts and turns the rice a deep, dark color. Surely there are lovely similarities between it and pasta in nero della consolazione (page 118). Here I offer its comfort in a more adult version. The same prescriptions apply, though, as this is best presented after a light, reviving soup or, better, after no soup at all, so one can justify slipping one’s fork into the spiced, chocolate depths of a second or third piece of the sweet little pie.

Traditionally, pettole are fried in bubbling oil, but here follows a version of the gloriously bay-perfumed breads—their faces glossed with diabolical olio santo—that are simply baked. The fat little breads are wonderful to serve with the Lucanian sausages (page 157) or some great platter of dried sausages, salame, and piquant cheeses. Even unaccessorized, they are wholly absorbing, their warm, crunchy goodness complemented by some cold white wine.

A pastry reflecting the famous half-roasted, almond-stuffed, bay and anise-perfumed figs that Puglia exports to all of Europe, the ripe sensuality of it merits a true hunger, one not dulled by the prologue of some long, winy supper. Nibble only at a plate of fresh cheeses before it. Better, present it with no prelude at all.

If I were given the task of choosing one bread from all the bakers of Italy, one that I could eat everyday and forever, it would be the golden-fleshed bread of Altamura, its thick skin, parched, crackled, its form a fat, crisped heart, cleaved nearly in two.

...Anchovies, and Black Olives) Brindisi, the ancient Brundisium of the Romans, is a sort of rough, emotionally bankrupt port city. Still, we like to walk and sit, sometimes, on the edges of its rickety old wharfs early of a morning to inhale the bright, briny tableau of the place. And round about eight-thirty—high noon for the fishermen, who rise before the sun—we wait to see the baker’s boy running down the docks, toting a great basket of puddica—traditional Brindisino flatbreads—just born and sending up great hungering perfumes for the fishermen’s lunch. It seemed to us the highest form of ceremony left in the dour old place.

A gastronomic heirloom of the coast, this is a humble recipe made from the bits and pieces of what was at hand, sometimes eaten as a principal dish or a contorno, a side dish, other times as a sweet. It is still presented— though in dramatically different versions—in cherished places such as Da Gemma in Amalfi. This take, however, is lighter, less vegetal than most of those with which we’ve been presented, the trick being the absolute thinness of the eggplant slices. This enables them to blend better with the other components, all of them then settling down together into a nicely married sort of flavor and texture. More eccentric than it is bizarre, this version of the ancestral dish turns out to be quite luscious.