An Invitation to Dinner

For Kirsten Powers, somewhere in Puglia

Kirsten, I hear you found a trullo.

Good. You always struck me as someone who understood that the best decisions

look slightly irrational from the outside. Moving to the heel of Italy’s boot — that

narrow, sun-hammered peninsula that juts into the Adriatic like an afterthought

— is exactly the kind of move that makes complete sense once you’ve walked

your own land, stood among your own olive trees, and tasted the bread.

And that is where we need to begin. The bread.

Puglia grows roughly eighty percent of Italy’s durum wheat. Let that settle for a

moment. The rest of Italy — the north with its risotto pretensions, Tuscany with

its bistecca self-regard, Naples with its entirely justified pizza pride — feeds itself

largely because of this flat, dry, relentlessly sun-drenched region that the rest of

the country spent centuries ignoring. The irony is not subtle. The heel feeds the

body. The body rarely thanks the heel.

From that wheat comes the pasta. Not the egg-rich tajarin of Piedmont or the

silken pappardelle of Emilia. Puglia’s pasta is made with semolina and water and

nothing else — orecchiette, cavatelli, troccoli — shapes that cup and catch and

hold whatever they’re given. Honest architecture. The pasta doesn’t perform. It

works.

This is a region that has never had the luxury of performance. Puglia was Greek

before it was Roman, Norman before it was Spanish, perpetually peripheral to

whoever was running the peninsula at any given moment. What it developed

instead of prestige was depth. The fava bean slow-simmered until it becomes

something close to philosophy. The lamb braised until the argument is settled.

The shrimp and rice and potato layered in a clay pot and slid into an oven and

left alone, which is, it turns out, usually the right answer.

Tuesday night at Cucina Verona we are cooking Puglia. All of it — the fava soup

with bitter radicchio, the Tiella alla Barese with its coastal layers of Carnaroli rice

and shrimp and Pecorino, the pork rolls braised in passata with broccoli rabe

standing in as the honest green vegetable that refuses to be charming. We close

with Pasticciotto — warm shortcrust pastry filled with lemon-vanilla custard —

and a glass of cold Limoncello, which is the Pugliese way of saying the

conversation should continue but the argument is over.

The wines are Pugliese. The Primitivo — the grape the rest of the world knows as

Zinfandel — comes home to the table where it always made the most sense.

You can’t be here, Kirsten. You’re in your trullo, among your olive trees, which is

the right place for you to be. But the rest of you — Fort Bragg, the coast, anyone

paying attention to what’s actually on the table in this country — can be here

Tuesday. Twenty-nine dollars. Family style. The way Puglia intended.

Come hungry.

Reservations: (707) 964-6844 or click here

124 East Laurel Street, Fort Bragg, California