“Is this really a restaurant?” she mimicked, with the barest hint of sarcasm.
About 15 years ago, when I was living in Florence with my wife and small son, we noticed that Puglian bread arrived each day from the town of Altamura, which is perched in the western hills known as the Murge. Now there’s obviously nothing wrong with Tuscan bread, yet the Puglians had somehow managed, using wood-burning ovens, to produce, by hand and in vast quantities, a different sort of bread—southern-style, using only hard wheat, yeast, and a little salt—and had marketed it all over Italy. We learned that just a few generations earlier all the bread in Altamura had been made at home. On Saturday or Sunday, toward midnight, the baker would collect the women’s loaves and bring them to the communal brick forno, shove them deep into their customary spot, and then retrieve them a few hours later.
Recently, on a swing through Puglia with my son, then 15, we stopped at Altamura, which turned out to be a beguiling town with several sleepy piazzas and a cathedral with a wonderful Gothic porch. At a large commercial bakery called Panificio La Maggiore, Antonio Barile and his father, Giuseppe, head of the local bakers’ association, showed us scores of beautiful, gold-domed loaves being slowly baked in oak-fed ovens—the organic wheat is of strictly local origin, and the wood is from neighboring Basilicata. After whetting our appetites with bruschetta drizzled with the regional olive oil, Giuseppe told us to try a restaurant called pein asutt, “the dry piece of bread.” (Its formal name is Antica Osteria, but no one refers to it that way.) “Ask anyone in town,” he said. We took his advice, and for a few euros we found ourselves presented with a splendid meal of fava purée, salumi, and a superb minestra of lentils and pasta, served with olio piccante (peppered olive oil).
The golden bread of Altamura stands in my mind as emblematic of a certain resourceful evolution. For unlike, say, the Tuscans, the Puglians never lived in great numbers on the land: Dwelling in towns and villages, they commuted every morning to the fields as day laborers. In part because of this, and in part because most of their terrain is flat, they began industrializing their agriculture—mass-producing bread, olive oil, and wine for blending—after World War II. Yet their food remains excellent.
In recent years, the region’s viticulture, in particular, has greatly improved, with three varieties of red grape being grown in large quantities: Uva di Troia; Negroamaro, which frequently turns up as house wine in trattorias; and Primitivo, its wines now popular in the U.S. Also grown in abundance, in addition to grapes, olives, and durum wheat, are vegetables, including tomatoes, fava beans, chicory, broccoli, cabbage, and potatoes. Together, these provide the Puglian kitchen with its staples: tomato sauce (which may, set in shallow pans, be thickened by the sun for whole days); bread and macaroni in many shapes, notably ear-shaped orecchiette; and olive oil of the strong, or fruttato, type, less suitable for salad than for flavoring the hearty local dishes derived from legumes, herbs, and tubers. These are many and various, the most common being the queenly fave e cicorie, the purée of fava beans accompanied by boiled chicory.
On the coast of the Salento, the southernmost peninsula of Puglia, which is rocky to the east and sandy to the west (and studded in parts with stone fortresses erected by Charles V of Spain to ward off the Ottoman threat), seafood of all sorts is served, with the scorpion fish imparting its distinctive savor to many kinds of soup. In fish restaurants in the sunbaked seaside towns of Otranto and Gallipoli, you can see the catch—which may include sea bass or grouper but also more-exotic eels, tiny mollusks, or various roes, including bottarga—and select what you want.
A good place to find a traditional table is in one of the old stone farmhouses or small manors called masserie, many of which are guesthouses. My son and I stayed almost exclusively at these inns, which were commonly fortified against pirates and tend to resemble miniature castles. Many are working farms, and—although you may have the same dish two nights in a row, or be awakened by roosters crowing at four in the morning—they tend to be fun and inexpensive.
At Masseria Marzalossa, a grand place near Ostuni, Anna Pantaleo gave me a lesson in traditional orecchiette-making. (Orecchiette are to Puglia what spaghetti is to Naples.) A terrific cook, Pantaleo is the eldest of 12 children, so she knows how to do pretty much everything, and she proved very, very patient with this novice chef. I watched as, with lightning speed, she made a snake of pasta dough, cut tiny disks from it, depressed them one by one against her marble tabletop with a dragging action of her thumb, and then with a spiraling motion detached perfect little earlets with the fingers of her other hand. I’m not sure I ever got the hang of this trick, which had to be done in a twinkling. “Think of it like this,” Pantaleo said, encouragingly. “Orecchiette are really only inverted cavatelli.”
Pasta geometry. A big help.
Another Anna—Anna Fedele, at a masseria called Lama San Giorgio—introduced my son and me to a different rustic dish. This Anna, fascinated by how wholesome and delicious the poor people’s cooking of old Puglia could be, had been rediscovering bean dishes and strains of pulses and found mills that still use stones. Fedele was especially keen on the black chickpea, a premodern source of iron for women nearing childbirth, and on the seldom-seen cicerchia, or chickling pea. She served us a robust first course of threshed and simmered wheat kernels with a sauce of herbs and mussels. According to Fedele, this bulgurlike dish was created during World War II, when milled flour couldn’t be had. (Though I later found numerous recipes for preparations of this sort, called cranu stumpatu, dating from far earlier, in Luigi Sada’s authoritative La cucina pugliese.)
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