Something new

 I've been doing way too much travel during this sojourn in Italy and not enough blogging. Now I'm just going to be tossing all kinds of miscellaneous stuff in here in an effort to work through my backlog.

Starting with a new-to-me vegetable I encountered in Fidenza's twice-weekly street market. It's sold only in the spring and is called barba di frate (monk's beard) but it's more widely known as agretti. 

I've seen it every spring but wasn't sure what it was or what to do with it. I mean, it looks weird and somewhat non-edible, doesn't it? Last year one vendor at the market told me it was "amaro," bitter, which sounded pretty unappealing. (I still remember the off-putting taste of that surprisingly bitter cheese I bought a few years ago.) But I was also guiltily aware that I haven't been doing much intrepid reporting lately, so I bought a bunch one Saturday and then started looking up recipes online.

There I learned that agretti is known as saltwort and has quite an interesting history. In Italy it's typically cooked by parboiling, then sauteeing with oil, garlic, and other flavorings, which is how a lot of vegetables are cooked here. I used a recipe that included anchovy paste and a little lemon juice.

The flavor reminded me of spinach, except more so, a strong but appealing, mineral-y taste. (Our daughter thought it was more celery than spinach.) The best thing about it is the texture, which stays firm through cooking and gives some of the same mouth-feel pleasure that pasta does. 

I combined the leftovers with a local variant of ziti, a little more oil, and lots of grated parmagiano-reggiano, and liked that version even better than agretti plain. I'm looking forward to enjoying it again when it reappears in the market next spring.   

Genealogy tour leftovers

 Here are a few random tidbits that I wasn't able to fit into the master narrative of our May tour of our ancestral villages in the Italian South.

A little more Fornelli. The lovely village of Fornelli, our first stop, home of countless di Carlos, is also full of cats. 

They were everywhere, and the smell of cat was pervasive in some streets, too. Giuseppina, our friendly barista, admitted that she personally feeds 15 or more of them every day. 

While we were in Fornelli we made a few picnic lunches that included mortadella, a family favorite. Unfortunately, we weren't there long enough to try their mortadella per i bambini, however.

Nancy! Nancy! Another thing about Fornelli that I neglected to mention earlier is that in addition to being the ancestral home of the di Carlos, it is also the birthplace of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's mom, Annunziata Lombardi. The Speaker recently visited the town and Giuseppina posted this photo on her Facebook page.

That's Giuseppina in red, presenting flowers and looking very dashing.

Sidetrack. We drove out one day to a Benedictine abbey in Volturno where we'd heard that church records from Fornelli had ended up. On our way there we found ourselves in need of lunch. My ever-resourceful daughter asked Google Maps for restaurant advice, which led us to Trattoria da Giocondo in the town of Rivisondoli. I'm not going to describe every good meal we had on that trip, but this place was exceptional, a kind of Platonic ideal of a trattoria.

As soon as we walked in the door our hopes for a good meal soared. It looked just the way a trattoria should, plus it was full of Italians happily eating. (This was taken as we left, having closed down the lunch service.) 

The menu was traditional but not at all dull. Along with some local red wine, we ordered handmade spaghetti with beef and pork polpette (meatballs) and a thicker pasta dressed with prosciutto, sausage, pancetta, and cheese. They were both sensational.

What torture to smell this without getting your own plateful!

When we complimented our youngish waitress on the excellence of the pasta, she said all credit was due to her mother, who'd just emerged momentarily from the kitchen. In many of the really good Italian trattorie I've been lucky enough to dine at over the years, the mom running the cucina has been in her eighties, if not older, so I was glad to see that a merely middle-aged mamma can turn out terrific food, too. It gives me hope for the future.

Feeling virtuous because we'd skipped the antipasto, we ordered a misto of roasted cheeses--scamorza, pecorino, and caciocavallo--as a secondo. 

God, it was good. Roasting brings out the richness of the cheeses and gives them a little extra flavor, too. (Italian cheeses are delicious but not terribly complex.) But the meat enthusiast in the group was feeling malnourished, so we had to order some skewers of veal, too. These were surprisingly dainty little sticks of roasted meat, wrapped in foil to keep them warm and served upright in a pitcher, along with some sauteed greens and a salad.

We topped this off with a little plain almond-chocolate cake, which we were apparently too full to take a photo of. By then I was wishing my daughter could dig up some relatives from this town, just so we'd have a reason to come back. 

I took this photo on the way out. The trattoria's entrance is on the right. The emblem over the church door opposite seemed appropriate to how I felt: dangerously overstuffed yet sinfully free of remorse.

Sidetrack, continued. After our terrific lunch we headed to the Abbazia di San Vincenzo, excited to see the Fornelli records of our forebears. It's a lovely spot. 

However, once we got there one of the nuns explained that we'd come to the wrong abbey: the one with the records we wanted was in Cassino. Nevertheless, the sun was finally starting to peek out and the abbey turned out to be a nice outing anyway. Of particular interest is its little museum about its very long history. The immediate area was home variously to a Samnite settlement and several centuries of Roman villas, estates, and so forth. Then in 703 some monks arrived and founded a monastery that quickly grew into a wealthy monastic city. But earthquakes, religious wars, fires, and other disasters, including bombing during World War II, diminished and ultimately emptied the abbey. In the 1990s it was revived and rebuilt by a group of Benedictine nuns from, of all places, Connecticut.

Thanks to the area's rich history, which has left all kinds of traces, archeological explorations are ongoing. I presume the arches in front of the abbey are Roman leftovers. 

Photo magic. Inspired by photos in this post about our return to Cantalupo, my friend Zach took it upon himself to age one of the 2022 photos so that it more closely matches the one of my father and grandfather from fifty-plus years earlier. Here's the old one again: 

And here's the one of my daughter and me in front of the same monument, now in black and white and subjected to a little artificial aging: 

Bello, no? I suppose the next step is to photoshop us and our ancestors into the same photo. But that seems a little too much like The Shining, so maybe better not.