Orecchiette on a Pugliese Tuesday

Cisternino is a white town of about eleven thousand people on a limestone ridge at the edge of the Valle d’Itria, looking down over olive groves and trulli toward the Adriatic. It is best known for its fornelli pronti, butcher’s shops that will grill whatever you choose on the spot and serve it at a table in the lane, and for an old centre of whitewashed alleys and outside staircases that seems, from the belvedere at the edge of town, to have been poured down the hill. What goes on quietly in its kitchens, though, is pasta. In a great many Pugliese houses there is a pasta-making day in the week, often midweek, when the kitchen is cool and the greens are fresh from the market. Call it Tuesday.

The flour is semola di grano duro rimacinata, twice-milled durum wheat semolina, and the rimacinata is the whole point. A single milling leaves semolina coarse. A second pass reduces it to a fine, warm yellow powder that takes up water evenly and holds a thumbprint sharply, which coarser semola will not. Durum wheat is the grain of this part of the south: the Murgia plateau grows it, and Altamura, on the far side of the Murgia, makes its famous DOP bread from the same remilled semolina. The dough is nothing more than semola, tepid water and, for some cooks, a pinch of salt, roughly two parts flour to one of water. Nobody weighs. The dough is ready when a ball pressed on the board springs back.

It is kneaded for ten minutes or more, rested under an upturned bowl, then cut into pieces, and each piece is rolled under the palms into a rope about the thickness of a little finger. A short, round-tipped knife lies to the right. With a pulling cut, the cook slices a small piece from the end of the rope and drags it toward her with the flat of the blade so that it curls into a rough little shell, then catches it on the tip of her thumb and turns it inside out, so the rough, dragged surface ends up where it will hold the sauce. Watch an older cook in the Valle d’Itria do this and each one takes a second, perhaps a second and a half, and she is rarely looking at her hands. A few hundred is an afternoon’s work. In Bari, the women who make orecchiette on their doorsteps along Strada Arco Basso, in the old town, have turned the same motion into one of the city’s most photographed sights.

The thumb has already learned. The cook is only watching it work.

The partner, from autumn into early spring, is cima di rapa, the tight flowering tops of a turnip relative that grows all over the Pugliese countryside, in the red earth of the Valle d’Itria as much as on the plain. By late spring it turns tough and bitter, and cooks move on to other greens. The method is simple and exact. Pick over the greens, keeping the tender crowns and the first leaves. Boil them in plenty of salted water, add the orecchiette to the same pot, then drain everything together and toss it in a wide pan where garlic and a broken dried chilli have been warming in a generous amount of olive oil. An anchovy fillet melted into the oil is optional and very common. Some cooks finish the dish with breadcrumbs toasted in oil, the poor man’s cheese; many add no cheese at all. The starch catches the oil and the bitter green water, and it is done.

On the sideboard, very often, stands a bottle of Primitivo, perhaps from Gioia del Colle, up on the Murgia, where the grape has its own DOC. Half a glass when the second tray is finished, a few minutes at the open window before starting on the greens: there are worse ways to spend a weekday afternoon in the Valle d’Itria. The orecchiette on the tray, rough side up, have the pale yellow of an autumn afternoon and the small, even shadow of a thumb that has made the same shape for decades. The thumb has already learned. The cook is only watching it work.