Last day of the trip. After a leisurely breakfast and a long wine talk with Francesco, we load the car, not forgetting passports! Orsara, only thirty-two kilometers away, is another of the many highly individual villages in the Foggia province. This one has a particular lure: bread. Pane e Salute, Bread and Health, is the object of our quest. Francesco told us that this forno has been baking bread since 1526. We find it in a lane that looks unchanged since then. Crude small buildings, stony street. No one home but the door is open, so we step into a dingy room with a black oven in back. Ladders are hung sideways on the wall and enormous loaves of dark brown bread rest on the rungs. Into the top of each has been slashed a cross.
Crude sink, iron-burnered stove, large basket of eggs on the floor, and an antique madia with cutting boards inside. This is a classic Italian open-topped chest that no household in the past was without. Usually chestnut, the madia lid opens into a trough for letting the dough rise, and for storing bread. A cupboard is below. (Now you often see these used as drinks cabinets in restaurants.) A table is set for three. Two blue chairs, one red, checked napkins, and a white tablecloth. Could be 1717, or 1817.
While Ed tries to call the phone number on the sign, a glistening woman comes in, carrying a bag of groceries. The owner, Angelo Trilussa, is away today. She calls him. “Americans are here.” She asks if she can cook for us even though we’ve just turned up unexpectedly. In the adjoining room, another table is set. “He says yes,” she calls out in Polish-accented Italian. This is an unexpected pleasure; we’d thought to buy bread to take home to Tuscany.
She starts to cook in the primitive kitchen. She plops a pitcher of red wine and two tumblers on the table, and a selection of flat breads filled with ricotta, tomatoes, and herbs, another with wild greens, and, our favorite studded with olives, almost-blackened tomatoes, and onions. A log of salume and a bowl of olives. From a back room she hauls in ingredients and soon she brings in two round loaves of bread, each with the top sliced off. Inside, the bread has been hollowed out and is filled with steaming fava, chicory, and potato soup. A basket of the house special bread. It’s cooked in a straw-fired oven; the quick flash of flame gives the crust its darkness.
The cross makes it seem even more special. When baking for the community, initials were cut into the dough for identification. These loaves are tremendous! They weigh around six pounds, an armful! Beneath the brown crust, the golden cake-like interior. Bread like this they eat every day around here; for us it’s a phenomenal treat. I see big flour bags by the door: Molino Campanaro, semola rimacinata di grano duro. Hard wheat semolina twice milled (fine grind) in nearby Castelluccio dei Sauri. They probably have their secret mix of flours; their “mother” yeast is seventy years old. I’m terrible at bread baking and have no wood oven but I’m inspired to try again, although my bread is, historically, best for doorstops.
Old photos on the wall: two soldiers young and smoking, a couple on a motorcycle from the 1930s, a contadino group of eleven farm workers, four of whom are holding ducks. Several pale hang on the wall, the flat peels for poking into a deep oven to retrieve the pizza or bread. A line of sausages dangling from a pole, bunches of tomatoes drying on strings—I love this place. And she is shockingly good. She brings an omelet with bitter greens. A beef stew appears, too, but we have to say no. She’s shocked that we don’t want our secondo. “Truly, we are too happy,” Ed tells her.
When we want to pay, she calls the boss again. “They didn’t eat,” we overhear. He tells her what to charge. So little. We are happy that we get to buy three of the enormous loaves. My preferred breakfast is a piece of buttered bread toasted under the broiler. I can freeze hunks of this bread and have perfect breakfasts all spring.
WE ARE SIX hours from home. We decide to drive a couple of hours into Le Marche and spend the night in Ascoli Piceno, one of our favorite towns. We munch on bread as we drive through the countryside.