40 Blog Post, October 14, 2024 “Food”

We spent the day in Bari, about 30 minutes north of Monopoli, also located right on the Adriatic Sea, a much bigger city than Monopoli and it was a sharp, clear, bright day with temperatures in the low 80’s.

I have been thinking about my reaction to the Isle of Mull and how much I loved being there, and then my reaction to Minori and how much I loved being there, and I realized that what I loved about Mull is that it required me to be a survivor of the elements. It is beautiful but harsh. And the weather was familiar, like upstate NY in the fall. In contrast, Minori and now Monopoli, are allowing me to relax into the weather and stretch out. To trust the weather, not treat it like an adversary. My skin feels healthier, not pinched. My body feels more comfortable without additional layers of clothing—today’s skirt and short sleeved shirt were perfect for every hour of the day—cool in the morning, hot in the daytime and cool again in the evening. I don’t have to survive the weather, I can exult in it. This is a really different experience from my normal life stateside where weather is often the adversary in the form of hurricanes and snowstorms, floods and frost. I’ve seen the posts about Whiteface and Mt. Washington receiving their first snow of the season, and it’s always a warning to us, isn’t it? Get ready--winter's on its way!

We happen to be in Southern Italy at a great time when the weather is not oppressively hot, as it is for much of the year, so I know that this is a temporary experience, but it is a good one for me and is creating a vacation not just for my spiritual and intellectual self, but for my physical self, my skin, my muscles, my brain.

I know, I know, this is supposed to be about food, because today really was all about food, as is much of this journey. Today was unusual because it was an immersion day rather than just a consumption day. Bari is famous for its food—warm focaccia with roasted tomatoes and fresh basil leaves, panini with warm crusty bread, cured meats, olive tapenade, fig jelly and ripe cheeses. In fact, Bari overwhelmingly smelled like garlic and tomatoes and warm bread. This is a good sign to me!

Bari is also known for orecchiette, a type of pasta shaped like a little ear, which is what the word means. As part of a tour of the city, we went down a street lined with women making fresh pasta outside their homes, then drying it on screened racks before selling it to the public. What these women wanted was for us to buy bags of their pasta, but I can’t bring home pasta. The Big Suitcase already has enough in it. Plus I’m not sure it would get through customs.

So we learned how to make it ourselves. We went to Porzia’s house, an imposing and assertive Italian woman in her 70’s who spoke no English at all. She had been one of the women on the street earlier, and a small group of us came back at 3 pm for our lesson. Porzia made it look simple. Starting with a pile of semolina, she made a well in the middle and poured in a small amount of warm, salted water, and then she mixed it up on the cutting board with her hands until it was the right consistency. From that ball of dough, she gave each of us a small piece and we made a long skinny snake out of it, then cut the snake in half so we had two pieces. Using a particular serrated knife, we cut off small pieces and dragged the knife through the small piece, causing it to curl. The key part of forming orecchiette is to reverse that curl so it forms a little hat shape. In fact, one woman, who was very good at rolling out her dough, made 10 little hats for her fingers. Porzia was not amused. Alistair happened to be very good at it as well and he earned a grunt of approval from Porzia for his efforts. I did ok, but mostly I just loved doing it. In my mind I was making plans for a grand dinner party and homemade pasta for everyone!!!

After our efforts at making pasta, we were served warm bowls of Porzia-made orecchiette (ours was going to be thrown out—too imperfect) with homemade tomato sauce and freshly grated Parmesan cheese. Porzia brought out a pitcher of wine and began to pour small paper cups of wine for all of us as well. We chatted, ate pasta, drank wine and learned about each other.

Two of the women had flown in from Florida after the hurricane. I learned that one of them lives very near my sister—small world, right? She told me that she just got word that her power is finally back on. Another couple, two young women, were visiting from Paris and celebrating their anniversary. Three of the people around the table were Italian and spoke easily with Porzia.

As we sat there, Alistair leaned over and said to me “Where’s the bedroom?” The house we were in had two rooms, a kitchen and a sitting/dining room. The sitting room, where we were making pasta on a wooden board spread over a table, was ringed with photos of grandchildren and photos of Porzia and her husband, who was nowhere to be seen. We wondered if he was still alive. Alistair then pointed to a bed/couch and said, “I think this is the bedroom AND the dining room.” In other words, we weren’t just learning about how to make pasta, we were learning about someone else’s life in someone else’s home. It’s easy to romanticize these experiences, to talk about ‘authentic tourism’ (I just made that term up), but when someone welcomes you into their home, it becomes very personal, and very sacred. I didn’t just learn how to make little pasta ears, I got to meet a woman who does this for a living. We saw her family photos and the giant bag of semolina she uses to make pasta as well as the bags and bags of dried pasta she sells at her table on the street. A hand painted sign outside her house said this: “Ingredients: semolina flour, water, salt, hard work with love!”

Later in the day, after some harrowing driving on Italian roads where drivers are aggressive and pedestrians don’t bother checking to see if cars are zooming by, we picked up Alistair’s son, Peter at the Bari airport. From there we headed back to Monopoli, dropped off his stuff, and headed out to dinner. Having Peter enriches the whole experience of being here. I felt oddly proud showing him the beauty of the harbor at nightfall, as if we were residents there rather than visitors. We then gathered together around a shared table, stopping at one of the local restaurants around the corner for wood fired pizza, good basic food with fresh ingredients like buffalo mozzarella, olives (with pits included!), arugula and cured meats. We don’t have a dining room of our own, so this will have to do, and it did.

What is it about food? We need to eat to survive, but for most of us, the experience is much richer than that. Food is about thanksgiving, or eucharist, which is the Greek word for thanksgiving. That certainly sounds familiar to us, doesn’t it? And it implies that we not only consume food to live, but that we are grateful to God for the food, for the experience, the ingredients, the gathering of friends and family. At every meal, Alistair and I hold hands and give thanks, simple thanks, nothing elaborate, because we are aware of the gift, the privilege, the abundance, the blessing. We are aware of the nourishment that each meal provides, even the weird octopus on my pizza last night. We are aware of the love that binds us together as family, of the work that people do to make sure we have our meals.

I look forward to cooking again, to making food, to planning meals, but I will carry the memory of the women who make the ‘tiny ears’, of the waitress who knelt down tonight because our table was wobbly and she fixed it, of Peter flying all the way here from Scotland, of the friends with whom we have shared our meals since the beginning of September. Food and memory entwined will enrich and nourish me in a richer, more vivid way after this sabbatical, and I am grateful that I will be able to close my eyes and remember this, I will be able to look at pictures of places we’ve been and remember how they smell and taste. Nourishment is a multi-sensory experience, and I continue to learn more about what it means in my life.

Eat well. Share your table with others.
Blessings,
ML+