The Apennine Spine and the Cooking of the Mountains

The Apennines run down the length of the peninsula from the Ligurian hinterland to Calabria, and they divide the country into slopes that face the Adriatic and slopes that face the Tyrrhenian. Molise, a small mountain and hill region between Abruzzo and Puglia, is one of the clearest places in which to read the cooking of this range, and the regional volume of Slow Food Editore, Molise in Cucina, is the source on which this essay rests.

The cooking of the high Apennines is shaped first by altitude and by the movement of flocks. Sheep and goats, and in places pigs, supplied the principal animal foods of the mountain districts, and the dairy and cured-meat traditions of the interior follow from that. Pecorino, ricotta, lamb and mutton, and pork preserved as salami, soppressata and lard belong to this economy, and they are the fats and proteins around which the cooking is arranged. The coast is close in Molise, yet the table of the interior is a table of pasture and household pig. The second constant is the dependence on what keeps. Dried pasta, cereals, pulses, preserved meats and aged cheeses carry a household through a winter in which roads close. Pulses such as lentils, chickpeas and beans, and wheat in the form of pasta made at home without egg, recur throughout the interior of the region. Hand-cut and hand-shaped pasta of flour and water is characteristic of these mountain districts, and its forms are plain because the ingredients are few. Bitter greens and wild herbs gathered from the slopes supplement the store. The third constant is seasoning. Chilli, in the form of peperoncino, gives the cooking of Molise and the neighbouring Abruzzo much of its heat, and it is used dried, in oil and in cured meats. Lard and olive oil, garlic and pork fat provide the base of many sauces, with tomato added in the cooked dishes of the lower country. Sauces of meat, particularly of lamb, mutton and pork, are cooked slowly and served over pasta, and the meat is often eaten afterwards as a second course. The transhumance, the seasonal passage of flocks between summer mountain pasture and winter lowland, left its mark on the territory through the drove roads known as tratturi, which cross Molise and link it to Abruzzo and Puglia. The cooking of the shepherds, built from bread, cheese, preserved meat and what could be carried, is part of the inheritance of the whole range. The reader should take the Apennine table as a system of hill and pasture in which each product answers to a season and a store, and not as a collection of isolated local dishes.

The taste of the Apennine table is that of sheep's milk, pork fat, wheat and chilli, with the bitterness of wild greens set against them. Salt and heat do the work that variety of ingredient cannot, and the dishes are filling, savoury and built for cold weather. The cheeses are firm and sharp when aged, and the sauces of lamb and pork are deep and long-cooked.