GROWING UP, my sister and I were never allowed to eat the soft, doughy bread that all our friends ate. My father would constantly remind us that our grandfather had all his teeth—well, almost all—until he died at the age of ninety-eight. “And it’s because he ate bread with a good, thick crust.” And now Giuseppe, on my second day in Calabria, would take me to see bread made, Calabrese style.
The bedroom in which I was staying narrowed toward the front of the house, where it ended at a window framed and divided into panes with heavy wood. A curtain danced lightly about it.
I got up, walked to the bathroom, washed my face in cold water. The shower was a square plastic basin with a ring of shower curtain that did not entirely enclose it. On the wall, a frayed wire ran from the light switch to a naked bulb dangling above the shower. Someone had attached a piece of thin aluminum foil at the socket to reflect the light. The gallon-size hot-water heater hung above the sink; my showers would be short.
Out the window, an old man wearing a tweed coat and snap-brim hat let his cane lead him down the alley. A distinct chill had
settled in Calabria. Having never traveled to the south in spring, I couldn’t have anticipated the drastic temperature changes in the mountains. I dug through my bag for a sweater, until I remembered setting it aside at the last minute before I left for the airport, opting for yet another short-sleeved shirt.
Giuseppe knocked at the door at seven-thirty exactly. I would come to realize that Giuseppe did not play into the Italian stereotype of always being fashionably late—or any other stereotype, Italian or Calabrese.
“Un momento,” I called out. The toilet was missing the flush handle, and I realized that the only way to flush it was to fill it with water from a bucket that had been placed next to the toilet.
Giuseppe’s wife, Elena, got out of the car and kissed me on both cheeks. I crawled into the back, where Alessio, their eleven-year-old son, curled up against the door half asleep. He offered a pouty “Ciao,” then closed his eyes again.
We eased out of the sleepy piazza, following narrow streets, through Gimigliano on our way to the village of Simeri Crichi. As the car wound down the mountainside, we passed the local plots of farmland and, just beyond, the village’s cemetery. Here, as throughout Italy, the buried bodies are dug up after the last member of the immediate family dies and are replaced by the newly dead. In a country that has been densely populated since antiquity, and one whose religion forbids cremation and the scattering of ashes, this is the only way to preserve land for farming.
Alessio opened one eye, hesitating. I smiled and reached into my backpack. His eyes followed, and when I pulled out a Pokemon toy, he leaped up suddenly awake and opened the box.
“Grazie,” Alessio said. “How do you say ‘Jessie’ in English?”
“I think that is English,” I said.
“Do you know Digimon?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Alessio,” Giuseppe said, “leave him alone,” turning almost entirely around, careless of the hairpin-curved road ahead of us.
Eventually, he turned the car onto an even narrower road, his
eyes still on me. “Marco, now we will take a scorciatoia. This way we don’t have to go through Catanzaro.”
“If there’s a shortcut, he’ll take it,” Elena said, rolling her eyes. Her young face, framed by dark hair, was warm and friendly.
“Of course, because not everyone else knows the shortcuts. This will cut twenty minutes out of our trip. Just think of all that traffic we would miss in Catanzaro!”
In Catanzaro, buildings are constructed along a sinewy, slender mountain ridge, meaning all the streets going in are extremely congested. Giuseppe switched the subject. “You’ve never made bread before, have you?”
“No, but a lot of people in the States now have small bread ovens,” I explained, miming a box shape with my hands.
“But Americans have never had it like this,” Giuseppe scoffed. “Fresh yeast, brick oven, the profumo of burning olive branches.”
At eight in the morning the streets of Simeri Crichi were empty. Giuseppe pulled up in a small piazza, got out of the car, and walked up a staircase to someone’s house, where he disappeared around a balcony to the other side of the building. He returned five minutes later. “She must be at the farm already.” And we got on the road again.
“How’s your family?” Elena asked.
“Good.”
“Martha?”
“Great. She wishes she were here.” Martha, who was of Dutch and English descent, was far from being Italian, yet was immediately accepted as family. She found our new family more exciting than my sister, Michelle, did. I knew she would have loved this trip.
“It’s too bad you couldn’t have brought her,” Elena said.
Alessio returned to naming the characters of Pokémon, pointing out each one on the back of the box.
As soon as we left the last building of the village, a beautiful mountain range appeared before us. The sun was already bright, quickly burning away the clouds from the previous night. Alessio had moved closer to me and snuggled up against my side like a puppy.
Fifteen minutes later we reached the gate of the farm, which was little more than a newly built cinder-block house with a garage attached, the same size as the house. A Siberian husky lurched from behind the bed of a red pickup truck and ran toward our car, barking more of a greeting than a threat. Two abandoned, wheelless Fiats seemed to sprout from the ground: a dark gray one missing its side panels and doors and a larger blue wagon sitting without its front end, stripped of its seats. Low-lying green pine brush hid yet another car frame, bellied on a green patch of weeds and grass, surrounded by rich red soil that appeared to have been recently plowed. If the ground had been covered by Chevys or Fords, and the mountains a deep forest of green, I could have been in the Appalachians.
Giuseppe pulled up the large aluminum garage door. I had expected to see a couple of cars or, at least, some spare engine parts. Instead there was a wall-length brick oven. The cinder-block walls behind it were only partially cemented over, as if the builder had run out of compound halfway through.
On the far side of the oven hung a hefty red winch with a solid chain and a thick hook. “That’s to hang the pig after it’s slaughtered,” Giuseppe said, pointing to a drain directly below There wasn’t a spot of blood on the floor.
Giuseppe directed me to a door that led to a kitchen. There was a simple dining room set with eight chairs, a counter and cabinets from the 1950s, and in the middle of the floor, the centerpiece for this day’s activity, a giant blender of sorts, with blades as long as my forearms dipped into a knee-high trough.
Giuseppe’s eyes bulged, and he took a step back.
A woman’s voice bellowed, “Allora, now you see how easy it will be this time.”
“Ciao, Rosetta,” Giuseppe said, still staring at the bread contraption. He introduced me to a woman who reminded me of my aunt Rose, my father’s sister who had died several years before. Her face seemed to rest in a smile.
“Before, we did this all by hand,” Rosetta said.
“Before? How about just last year! My arms would be tired for days,” Giuseppe said as his arms kneaded the air into dough. He
looked back at the bread machine. I could tell he was disappointed, that he wouldn’t be able to show me how to make bread the way he had made it.
The room next to the kitchen was cool and dry and smelled of concrete and red pepper. The walls were corrugated metal, and on shelves in front of me were five-gallon jugs of wine like the ones I remembered seeing in my grandfather’s garage in Connecticut. From the ceiling dangled what I recognized as pieces of pig.
The most obvious, and largest, was the prosciutto, the pig’s hind leg. There was capicola, hung in a net, the neck section stemming from just below the head (capo) down along the spine (cola). A squarish piece of meat bound with string was the pancetta, the fatty stomach area just below the ribs. A wide slab of ribs, called costata, lined the far wall. Coarse grains of salt and pepper blanketed the pipe organ–like set of ribs. Two long pieces of salsicia, or shoulder meat, dangled close to the prosciutto. Hanging in the center was a piece of meat that any Calabrese would know—soppressata, ground pork that’s been infused with red pepper and stuffed inside intestine lining. Wrapped in a mesh of string, the soppressata widens to about four inches at its thickest point in the middle and tapers at both ends.
By the time I was old enough to participate in the meat-drying process, my grandfather was too old to slaughter his own pig and smoke the meat, but my father told me stories from his childhood in Connecticut. Every October my grandfather would trade wine with a Portuguese friend for a pig.
Right there in downtown Danbury, my grandfather would slaughter the pig in his driveway and hang it to drain in front of the garage. Once the pig was bled, he would carve it up and hang the cuts of meat in his smokehouse, which was built onto the back of the garage. Decades later and living in Florida with two young kids, my father would proudly point out all the cuts of meat hanging in St. Petersburg’s only Italian deli.
Here in Calabria I could taste freshly cured meats. I could taste the only flavors that my grandparents had known.
Finally—Giuseppe told me—there is the magularu, dialect for all the stuff that’s left over, from the fat to the ground gristle, ears, and snout. It’s boiled in a large pot and mixed with hot pepper, as every meat in Calabria is, then refrigerated. The spicy paste is then mixed with ground roasted peppers, salt, and olive oil. This is called ’nduja, and it is spread on panini, on homemade pizzas, or mixed with a marinara to heighten the intensity
Giuseppe pulled me over to two large wood barrels covered with a fringed tablecloth. He rolled up the tablecloth and slid the thin wood cover to the side. A mixing spoon appeared in his hands, and he dipped it into the barrel, then carefully handed it to me, motioning for me to put the entire thing in my mouth, which I did. The flavor of nuts and butter burst in my mouth as I gulped the olive oil.
“Each barrel is four hundred liters,” Giuseppe told me. “The olive trees are down the hill. They bring it to a press once a year, paying them in olive oil.”
We went back to the kitchen, where Elena handed me a cup of espresso, already mixed with a spoonful of sugar, then walked out to the garage.
Alessio appeared in front of me, daisies stuck out of his ears and one each from his nostril. His short cropped hair framed his large hazel eyes and thick eyebrows. He rolled his eyes back in his head and fluttered his eyelids. “Sono morto,” he groaned—I’m dead.
“Marco, let’s see the pigs,” he commanded, leaving the daisies in his face. He led me to the far side of the garage to a large doorway with a wood fence, four feet high. He reached his head through the opening of the pen and began calling out to the pigs. Five black-and-white pigs grunted and snorted, huddling together in the soft, moist dirt.
Now Giuseppe brought in dried olive branches and began snapping them into foot-long segments; each still had smaller leafy branches coming out of it. “You heat the house with the stumps … and bake with the branches,” he said. Because olive branches burn slowly and produce surprisingly little smoke, olive wood is perfect for baking and for warming houses. Giuseppe pointed to the red
bricks lining the circular oven walls, explaining that the lighter the bricks became, the hotter the oven was getting.
An old woman walked down the rocky driveway toward the garage. She seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. She was stooped over, her eyes fixed directly on us. Giuseppe waved. She smiled back. A dark blue fazzoletto, handkerchief, covered her head. Wisps of gray hair poked out. She wore a dark blue skirt and a dark gray sweater.
She was Rosetta’s ninety-three-year-old mother, Giuseppina. As Rosetta introduced us, Giuseppina grasped my hands with both of hers and held them tightly as she looked into my eyes with a nearly toothless grin. She spoke to me in a dialect very similar to Gimiglianese. “He speaks only Italian, Giuseppina,” Giuseppe said, as if Italian were Urdu. She pulled me into the kitchen. There she plunged both hands inside the metal basin and pulled out two masses of dough and plopped them on the counter. She tossed a couple of pinches of grain flour on long sheets of wood, then lightly patted the palms of her hands in the flour so they wouldn’t stick to the dough. She set the balls of dough on the wood planks and began to roll them, first one, then the other. With a solid, forceful push she rolled out the dough with her fingers, then gently returned the dough to her palms with the outside of her thumbs. Push, roll back; push, roll back; push, roll back. Alessio sat on my lap; both of us were transfixed by the balanced, rhythmic motion of her hands.
Like my grandmother, Giuseppina followed no recipes, just techniques handed down for centuries. This day she rolled three types of bread: the typical large round loaf, or simply pane; an oblong roll called a filone; and finally, with the smaller, leftover dough, several flat, thin pieces called pitte.
Meanwhile, the oven was heating up; once the bricks had turned white, Giuseppe spread the ashes evenly along the bottom. Elena stuck a half dozen red, yellow, and green peppers in the center to roast. We all carried out to the oven long planks of rolled bread. We balanced them between chairs.
Now Elena took out the peppers, their skins blackened; in the kitchen she peeled off the skin and mixed them with sausages and olive oil.
Giuseppina pulled out a serrated knife, and with five quick strokes, she sliced the top of a large round loaf into a pentagon. She stuck the knife in her mouth pirate style—clenching with her molars—and put the bread on a flat paddle with a long handle for Giuseppe to slide it into the oven. She repeated these cuts with each loaf, each quickly executed, each exact; Giuseppe followed her.
After he had placed all fourteen loaves in the oven, he scattered olive branches in between them. The leaves would absorb the heat so the bread wouldn’t burn.
As the bread baked, we all stood nibbling on the roasted peppers. “I remember your grandmother,” Elena offered. “I was very young, of course.”
“What was she like?”
“She was very young then, too.” Elena said. “She was large. She was always laughing.”
By now it was time for lunch. In the meat room, Rosetta climbed onto a footstool and with a serrated table knife cut a few of the ribs from the costata, putting them on a plate. Rosetta’s husband, Nicola, was home, having just finished the night shift as an orderly at the hospital, and his red eyelids showed his fatigue.
“Looks good, huh?” he asked me, extending his hand toward the hanging meats.
“Yes, I can’t wait to try some.”
“This will last another seven months.”
We walked outside into the pigpen. He pointed to the largest pig, fat and pink with a few black spots on his back. “We’ll slaughter that one this fall,” he said. “You cut his throat and let him bleed to death. Then hang him by his heels, and with an ax, you cut him in half, evenly, from anus to snout.” He made short, precise hacks with his hands, demonstrating the motion of the ax.
Nicola tried to open the door to the kitchen, but the metal latch wouldn’t slide. Giuseppe spotted a liter spring water bottle filled
with olive oil. He poured a few drops on his fingers, then rubbed the latch.
“Olive oil fixes everything,” he said.
I found it was true. From door latches to getting rings off fingers or getting rid of a squeak, olive oil was the multipurpose salve. I remembered my father asking me if I knew why Grandma’s face was so smooth and soft: “It’s because whenever she got olive oil on her hands, instead of washing it off, she would rub in into her skin.”
We settled around the table. Nicola poured me a glass of his wine, which was actually a chilled, bubbly rose. I finished the glass, and he poured me another. And then another.
Elena and Rosetta first served Giuseppina’s homemade bucatini, long, thick hollow tubes of pasta, with a tomato sauce called sugo. We each grated our own pecorino, or sheep cheese, onto our plates. The pancetta was passed around, as were bowls of pickled porcini and eggplant, and anchovy in oil. The assorted peppers that Elena had cooked in the oven were served with drizzled olive oil.
Then came the bread, which Giuseppina had taken from the oven. Giuseppe cut off a triangle of bread for me, sliced it open, slathered olive oil on the inside, sprinkled salt and red pepper on it—he looked at me to make sure I could handle the spice—and then, with a big smile, sprinkled on some more. As I bit into it, olive oil dribbled down the corner of my mouth. The bread was light, soft, and airy. I could taste the salt, then the welcome bite of the red pepper. My teeth rested in the crust. It was substantial, without being too thick; it crunched, but it wasn’t too crisp. “It’s all about the crust,” my father always said. “You can tell the quality of the bread with your first bite into the crust.”
The meat course followed: sliced hard sausage, freshly cut from the meat room and simmered in the sugo.
Everyone talked about this year’s peppers and tomatoes. How the greens were doing. And the beans—the fava beans had gotten even bigger this year. And of course a little about how dry the spring was and how pazzo, crazy, the temperature had been. Eighty degrees in March, and now, April, they expected a cold front to come in.
The chewing spread the flavors around my mouth. My belly
warmed. The sound of their dialect—an Arabic mixture of hard h’s and words ending with u—mixed with the peppers, tomatoes, and wine.
Late in the afternoon we loaded Giuseppe’s car with four long loaves of bread and said goodbye. I felt good and full. Alessio fell asleep against the door, and I closed my eyes, breathing in the comforting smell of the freshly baked bread, emanating all the way from the trunk.
I took one last look across the valley. Not a single electrical wire broke my view. Only in the distance, on top of the tallest peak, stood a lone telephone tower.
“Gimigliano is on the other side of that mountain,” Giuseppe said.
That evening, as I was about to fall asleep, I smelled fresh-baked bread again. Surely no one was baking bread at midnight! I sniffed until I realized that the scent was coming from my clothes, gathered on a chair next to the bed. I was struck by how fitting it was that one of the first things Giuseppe had shown me was how to make bread—in Italy, life’s basic necessity.