Transumanza

Here's the transumanza, the word I want to be, the one that means migration for the old transport of sheep. We didn't see this in action - and it doesn't really exist anymore since the sheep take the train - but here's a video of something like what it might have been. Twice a year, from Abruzzo to Puglia, pecore infinite!

Otherwise, Italian cooking lessons are all beef, lamb, sheep, pasta, olive oil, olive oil, olive oil. Wild boar! Aubergine (eggplant), courgettes (zucchini). They don't eat chicken in Abruzzo. Chickens cross the road, they're for eggs and Americans, but not for plates. Our guide had to search very deep to find a chef who would do vegetarian recipes with us, but he found one in an old watermill down an appropriately windy dirt road. She had the largest knife in Abruzzo, a machete as long as your forearm, a weapon for onions, and taught us how to cook with foraged greens. Among these, we cooked with nettles, dandelion, and borage. Nettles hurt like hell, even through the vinyl gloves, which had me thinking of Medea. I think it was Medea (Greek witch/villain/misunderstood-foreigner) who killed her rival princess with a poison dress that melted the woman's flesh from the outside in. That's what nettles feel like. After you boil them good and proper, they're edible and won't hurt, so we had them in a soup, which was quite tasty, in fact. It was the brightest deep appealing shade of green. The secret to the color is to keep the water very salted. My fingers were still tingling from stripping the leaves the day after we cooked them. I suppose that adds to the allure, like the puffer fish they eat in Japan, which actually is lethal if prepared incorrectly. Japanese puffer fish sidebar: Fugu is a rare and valuable delicacy, and the preparation method is meant to leave just enough poison left in it to numb your tongue and prove how lethal it might have been if not for the chef. But that's for someone else's travel grant.

I learned that puffer fish thing in the "taste" chapter in Diane Ackerman's extraordinary book A Natural History of the Senses. Go read it. Other tantalizing food reading: Jim Crace's The Devil's Larder, which my Aunt Susan (epicurean maestro, grows her own peppers in the window, makes a mean deep-fried turkey) gave me years ago, and I still re-read from time to time. That one's fiction. I haven't yet read Like Water for Chocolate, but now think I must. It was recommended at dinner after we had a particularly charming cooking session with a restaurant-owner-chef who taught us a couple actual skills, but mostly insisted, all Italian-like, that we must always cook with love. (Then dinner conversation turned to Fifty Shades of Grey, which I just can't bear to pick up, it looks like a harlequin - which I guess means of all sins, I would always pick gluttony first.) Chef's rules: always use a wooden spoon, never use a Cuisinart.The old device for making pasta by hand on Sunday is called a citara. Families hand them down from one generation to the next. The citara looks and sounds like a guitar. An apt similarity. The chef's a musician, there's harmony in the meal. That pasta on the right? I made that.