[Thespiritexpress] Fwd: An Invitation to Dinner

[Ron Nadeau]

This from our Cucina Verona in the down Town area

of Fort Bragg (Noyo) 

Bon Appetite 

Ron
🍽️

> 
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>  
> An Invitation to Dinner
> For Kirsten Powers, somewhere in Puglia
> Kirsten, I hear you found a trullo.
> 
> Good. You always struck me as someone who understood that the best decisions
> look slightly irrational from the outside. Moving to the heel of Italy’s boot — that
> narrow, sun-hammered peninsula that juts into the Adriatic like an afterthought
> — is exactly the kind of move that makes complete sense once you’ve walked
> your own land, stood among your own olive trees, and tasted the bread.
> And that is where we need to begin. The bread.
> 
> Puglia grows roughly eighty percent of Italy’s durum wheat. Let that settle for a
> moment. The rest of Italy — the north with its risotto pretensions, Tuscany with
> its bistecca self-regard, Naples with its entirely justified pizza pride — feeds itself
> largely because of this flat, dry, relentlessly sun-drenched region that the rest of
> the country spent centuries ignoring. The irony is not subtle. The heel feeds the
> body. The body rarely thanks the heel.
> 
> From that wheat comes the pasta. Not the egg-rich tajarin of Piedmont or the
> silken pappardelle of Emilia. Puglia’s pasta is made with semolina and water and
> nothing else — orecchiette, cavatelli, troccoli — shapes that cup and catch and
> hold whatever they’re given. Honest architecture. The pasta doesn’t perform. It
> works.
> 
> This is a region that has never had the luxury of performance. Puglia was Greek
> before it was Roman, Norman before it was Spanish, perpetually peripheral to
> whoever was running the peninsula at any given moment. What it developed
> instead of prestige was depth. The fava bean slow-simmered until it becomes
> something close to philosophy. The lamb braised until the argument is settled.
> The shrimp and rice and potato layered in a clay pot and slid into an oven and
> left alone, which is, it turns out, usually the right answer.
> 
> Tuesday night at Cucina Verona we are cooking Puglia. All of it — the fava soup
> with bitter radicchio, the Tiella alla Barese with its coastal layers of Carnaroli rice
> and shrimp and Pecorino, the pork rolls braised in passata with broccoli rabe
> standing in as the honest green vegetable that refuses to be charming. We close
> with Pasticciotto — warm shortcrust pastry filled with lemon-vanilla custard —
> and a glass of cold Limoncello, which is the Pugliese way of saying the
> conversation should continue but the argument is over.
> 
> The wines are Pugliese. The Primitivo — the grape the rest of the world knows as
> Zinfandel — comes home to the table where it always made the most sense.
> You can’t be here, Kirsten. You’re in your trullo, among your olive trees, which is
> the right place for you to be. But the rest of you — Fort Bragg, the coast, anyone
> paying attention to what’s actually on the table in this country — can be here
> Tuesday. Twenty-nine dollars. Family style. The way Puglia intended.
> Come hungry.
> Joseph Harris is the owner of Cucina Verona Ristorante & Osteria, 124 East Laurel Street, Fort Bragg, California. He also writes The Uncomfortable Truth on Substack — politics, culture, and the things nobody wants to say out loud. Find it, read it, and subscribe at substack.com/@josephharris811953 <http://substack.com/@josephharris811953>.
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