When asked if I’d like to contribute a family recipe from Abruzzo to a charity cookbook, my first answer was, of course! That it will be helping save the dwindling population of Marsican brown bears in Abruzzo – wonderful! And that my recipe will be alongside those the likes of Niko Romito, a 3x Michelin star chef, Vincenzo’s Plate and food journalist, Rachel Roddy of the Guardian, I suddenly quaked. Ma dai! Really?! 👀
After some thought, the recipe I couldn’t go past is, Maccheroni alla chitarra with wild greens. I’ve known this dish from when I was a little girl, have cooked and eaten it in both Italy and Australia and it has ties to my Abruzzo ancestry going back more than 600 years. It’s also a lovely connection to Bisnonna Maddalena and Nonno Anni recalling her foraging for wild greens on hillsides around Fossa and carrying them in her apron back to the kitchen. (‘Maccheroni’ is the original Abruzzese name used for this dish, while in Italy’s north where maccheroni is a short pasta, it’s called ‘spaghetti alla chitarra’.)
Pictured for the cookbook is my chitarra – made of beechwood and strung with steel wires, which are ‘tuned’ like a guitar. A sheet of fresh pasta is laid across the wires and pressed through with a rolling pin. One side creates thin strands with a square profile, the other side, wider strands, like fettucine, as I’ve made here. In the little vases (old inkpots!) are some edible greens I picked – yes, I went foraging in the backyard, not quite the Abruzzo hillsides but I was amazed how much it yielded (and I double-checked they were safe to eat – dandelion leaves, cobbler’s pegs, purslane among them).
The napkin I chose is one Nanna Francesca brought me back from Italy many years ago and the fork is from a cutlery set bought in L’Aquila in 1970 by a Fossa relative, Pierina who gave it my parents who passed it down to me. Once you start delving into it, it’s incredible how much history can end up in sitting down to a bowl of pasta! 💚🍝 xxx
* An Abruzzo invention, the ‘chitarra’ dates back to at least the 1800s, its ancestor being a rolling pin with notches in it that cut the pasta into the wider strands. (Chitarra may be found in many shops, markets and online.) Will keep you posted when the cookbook is available. 😊
On the kitchen table… fennel flowers, their little blossoms like star bursts with a slight scent of liquorice, honey and lemon. I came across some fresh fennel bulbs at the market about a month ago but life has taken over for a bit since then! These fennel were irresistible in their curviness. (Male fennel are slimmer, the female fennel more rounded and sweeter – said to be ‘like the many beautiful, curvy women of the Mediterranean shores these plants are indigenous to’!) 😘
When we cook the same dishes that our ancestors cooked it connects us to them, to our history and it also brings us back to something within ourselves that we mightn’t have thought of for some time or something we hadn’t yet discovered. Just the aroma of a dish cooking can release a trigger of deep memories that lets things rise up and take shape in us.
The maccheroni Calabrese (pasta rolled on a knitting needle for its shape) has a richer red sauce with melanzane and chillies that Francesca’s town of Palmi is known for. And the chitarra pasta has bitter, wild greens added to the passata, inspired by Maddalena walking hillsides near Fossa picking wild greens into her upturned apron and taking them back to cook with. It also has pecorino cheese on top because that part of Abruzzo is known for its sheep.
Zoë Boccabella 