ABOUT THIS BOOK

Organization

The recipes in this book are divided by courses, to reflect the traditional structure of a meal in the south, but you can mix and match dishes in your own kitchen based on the season, occasion, and ingredients you have on hand, or your appetite. The Antipasti chapter covers starters served to usher in the beginning of a large weekend meal or holiday feast. Zuppe e Minestre covers hearty stews and brothy soups that provide delicious and nutritious ways to consume plentiful seasonal produce and legumes. The Pasta chapter includes instructions for making and shaping fresh pasta, as well as recipes made with dried pastas and suggestions on how to perfectly pair condiments with pasta shapes. The Pesce and Carne chapters deal with secondi (mains) made with seafood and meat, respectively. Contorni encompass a wide range of side dishes and, like Zuppe e Minestre, are a celebration of seasonal produce. The Pane, Focaccia, e Pizza chapter is a survey of loaves, flatbreads, and buns you might encounter in a bakery in Bari or Matera and even includes a pizza napoletana recipe (this page) adapted for the home oven. The Dolci chapter offers cookies and tarts, and highlights the almonds and spices that pastry lovers in the south crave. Finally, the Liquori e Cocktail chapter is filled with herbal and fruit-based digestifs essential for processing dishes from the aforementioned categories.

While these recipes were developed alongside home cooks, chefs, farmers, and bakers in Italy’s five southern regions, all were tested in the United States and have been adapted for a home kitchen.

Measurements and Seasoning

I documented recipes of the south in the spirit of rustic cooking, which doesn’t get bogged down with precise ingredient amounts or proportions. Flip through any Italian cookbook and you’ll find lots of references to a pinch, a handful, or simply “q.b.,” meaning quanto basta, “as much as you need.”

While South Italy’s truly authentic recipes might just be a list of ingredients without defining precise quantities, I have written the recipes using US measurements. But feel free to treat most as guidelines that can be adjusted to your personal palate. Do, however, stick closely to the quantities in the baking recipes unless you are an expert baker. I’ve also listed metric measurements for bread and pizza baking recipes. Please use them! They are more precise than imperial measurements and are key to achieving the most successful results.

When salting water for cooking dried pasta or vegetables, use enough salt so that the water actually tastes salty; 3 tablespoons salt for every 6 quarts water should do it. I don’t expect you to actually measure every time, but do it once, taste the water, and aim for that salinity every time. For cooking fresh pastas, the recipe will instruct you to “heavily salt the water,” meaning to add more salt than you would for dried pasta. You want the water to be nearly as salty as seawater when you taste it. The reason for this is that fresh pasta only spends about 3 minutes in the water (as opposed to anywhere between 8 and 16 minutes for dried pasta), so it has less time to absorb the salt. Three minutes in very salty water should result in moderately seasoned pasta.

Always read the entire recipe before beginning to cook. Some recipes require prep work in advance, which will be mentioned in the headnote. I almost always recommend salting proteins before cooking them. Salting meat and fish in advance gives the salt time to penetrate and flavor the meat. Tough cuts and whole muscles benefit from salting a day ahead, while smaller cuts and fish can be seasoned for a shorter length of time. I often give instructions to season throughout the cooking process as new ingredients are added to a dish. This step is important for building flavors. South Italy’s cuisine doesn’t shy away from salinity and finds it in various forms—salt itself, anchovies, capers, cheese—but of course feel free to adjust to your taste.

Cooking Pasta

Most of the pasta dishes here yield four to six servings per pound of pasta. Traditionally, Italians eat in courses: first antipasto, then primo, followed by secondo. If you plan to do the same, the pasta course should yield six servings. If you are treating the pasta as your main dish, the recipe will serve four.

Cook pasta to the recommended doneness. Al dente means the pasta still has some firmness and bite to it. Taste the pasta as it cooks, and cook until it is still firm and most of the white part in the middle has disappeared. The ’O Scarpariello (this page) calls for “very al dente” pasta. In this case, the pasta should still be partially raw, as it will finish cooking in the sauce with some pasta water added.

Baking

Follow the process photographs throughout the baking section to learn the basic mixing and kneading methods, and make small changes in your cooking as necessary to accommodate any differences in flour—all flours behave slightly differently depending on their freshness, fineness, and even the environment they are in. Understanding how each type of flour behaves requires experience, so while each recipe is written and tested to ensure success, the outcome will improve through repetition. (See this page for more information about types of flour.)

Higher temperatures cause bread to rise faster at the cost of taste, while lower temperatures contribute to a slower rise and more complex flavors—that’s why I suggest cold fermenting many doughs in the refrigerator before baking. When I say “room temperature,” I always mean 71°F to 77°F. With a bit of tweaking to adapt to your environment, you should be able to reproduce these doughs just about anywhere.