Typical recipes of the Puglia region

Lands washed by Homeric seas. Lands marked by the silver spots of the centuries-old olive trees and by the soft green and wrinkled red spots of the sacred vine. Puglia has essential cuisine. Sometimes different dishes, here fish soups with garlic, there without (garlic is replaced by onion), sometimes identical; here recchietelle, there riche; here lampasciuni, there cipiduzzi; always the same in respect of tradition, of the centuries-old toil of the fields or the sea.

Poor foods, which find in the immediacy of cooking and in the original flavors of the foods, the vegetables picked a few minutes earlier in the field; sacrificed, with an expert and ruthless hand, the lamb or the chicken; taken off the fish darting from the net a few minutes earlier, their excellence.

Lands also marked by the immense countryside of the Tavoliere. Here is the ancient kingdom of wheat; and wheat is the basis of its diet. Statistics show the love for bread unchanged. The frisedda, a donut with a narrow hole made of wholemeal or white flour, is baked, cooked and cut in two horizontally and placed in the oven to brown; it is then immersed in cold water and, once tender, seasoned with olive oil from the mill, red pepper and salt (the addition of tomato and onion is optional). With the same ingredients, but with boiling water and not cold, you have the cialledda.

It goes without saying: there is also plenty of room for flour-based pastas. The women still prepare, at home, recchie, strascenate, troccoli, chiancarelle, pociacche, pestazzule, mignuicche, fenescecchie (but the names change, sometimes not at all, sometimes a great deal, at every corner). The recchie or orecchiette are small pieces of pasta made from whole duiro wheat flour or semolina, hollowed out in the shape of orecchiette, obtained by rotating the thumb against the flattener. The strascenate are rectangles of pasta strascinate on a knurled cutting board. The troccoli have their name from the special tool used to cut them: a rolling pin equipped with circular blades. Chiancarelle: small orecchiette. Le pociacche: bigger orecchiette. The pestazzule are small disks like the pociacche but without the recess. Mignuicche are semolina dumplings. Fenescecchie are macaroni rolled up with the help of stocking wires. He then takes care of the imagination (almost always with poor ingredients at hand) to create the sauces to season them.

Among the meats, those of lamb have the privilege (vaccine meat, warns a proverb, sbrevogne a ci ‘a cucine; cow meat makes those who cook it look bad; despite this, the chop is a pride of Apulian gastronomy. So that you find them, in almost all the butcher’s shops in the countryside, not only raw offerings, but also cooked.In a small stone oven the butcher roasts the “notches”, the pieces of lamb, ordered by the customers, and cooks them, skewered on skewers , only seasoned with salt.With the offal of the mutton the shepherds prepare the “quagghiaridde” based on mutton offal and the “gnemeriidde”, balls of lamb or kid intestines enclosing the innards of the same, cooked in the oven or stewed in a pan earthenware.

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