Marche: Nobody Goes There, Which Is Just Wrong

by Joseph Harris

Italy has a spine. The Apennines run down the middle of the peninsula from the Alps nearly to Sicily, and every region along the way is having its own relationship with those mountains. In the north the relationship is about snow and dumplings. In the south it is about stone and scarcity and peppers drying on strings. The climate changes, the dialect changes, the story changes, but it is always the mountains doing the talking. If you want to understand Italian regional cooking, forget the boot. Look at the spine.

Mountain people are the same people everywhere along that spine, and I mean that as the highest compliment. The mountains made a culture of shepherds and smallholders who moved their flocks up in summer and down in winter along droving roads older than Rome, who cured meat because winter was long, who foraged because the hills gave mushrooms and truffles and greens to anyone who knew where to look, and who wasted nothing because there was nothing to waste. It is a culture of self-reliance with a long memory. In Marche the country people were called contadini, and the region’s whole cooking is farmhouse cooking: chickpeas and lentils from the high fields, pecorino from the flocks, pork cured in the cellar, pasta rolled on the board by hand. The Marche countryside still runs on the old sharecropping geography of scattered farmhouses, each one its own small republic with a vegetable garden and a pig. When people ask me what Italian food is, that is the honest answer. It is not a cuisine. It is several hundred years of families on hillsides.

And then, down at the bottom of those same hills, the other Italy: the coast. The Adriatic is a strange and wonderful sea. It is shallow, almost an enclosed lagoon between Italy and the Balkans, and that shallowness makes it one of the richest fishing grounds in the Mediterranean. The towns along the Marche coast—Ancona, Fano, San Benedetto del Tronto, Porto Recanati—have lived by the net for as long as anyone can remember. San Benedetto was one of the great fishing ports of Italy, sending its boats past Gibraltar. The fishing culture had its own laws, its own saints, its own widows. The boats went out for days, and the men cooked aboard, on deck, in one pot, and what they cooked was the fish they could not sell: the bony ones, the ugly ones, the scorpionfish with its spines and its enormous head, the odd sole, the cuttlefish, whatever the market would sneer at. Vinegar kept aboard the boats because wine would not last went into the pot to brighten it. Stale bread went under it. That is the brodetto. It was never a recipe. It was the end of a working day at sea.

This is what makes brodetto different from the other fish stews of Italy, and Italy has plenty. The Tuscan cacciucco in Livorno is a port city’s stew, dark with red wine and hot pepper, a dish with a swagger to it. The Ligurian buridda leans on the pantry, dried cod and walnuts. The Sicilian versions ride on saffron and couscous, souvenirs of Arab traders. Those are stews of ports and trade routes, cosmopolitan by nature. Brodetto is the opposite. It is a stew of working boats, and its rules are working rules. Vinegar, not wine, because vinegar is what the boats carried. Every fish in its order, the tough ones first and the delicate ones laid on top at the end, because a man cooking on a moving deck does not get a second chance. And the deepest rule of all: you cook what the sea handed you that day. The famous thirteen fish of Ancona were never a shopping list. Thirteen is just what a good day looked like.

Naturally, being Italy, every town on that coast will tell you the next town does it wrong. Ancona makes it with tomato. Porto Recanati, twenty miles away, considers tomato a scandal and makes theirs golden with wild saffron. San Benedetto uses green tomatoes and peppers and a firm hand with the vinegar. Fano is so serious about its version that it holds an international brodetto festival every year, which is a wonderful thing to be internationally serious about. These towns can see each other down the beach. The arguments are older than the recipes. But the oldest brodetto of all takes no side. Before the tomato ever reached Italy, the deck stew was in bianco—fish, oil, garlic, onion, vinegar, and broth as clear as the day’s water, with nothing to hide behind. That is the one we cook Tuesday night.

Now, the region itself. First, the pronunciation. It is MAR-kay. There is no “ch” sound in it anywhere, thank you very much, and the Marchigiani will let you know. They carry a particular attitude, and once you look at their ledger you understand it. This is a region almost nobody outside Italy has heard of, and it produced Raphael. Let that settle for a moment. One of the three pillars of the High Renaissance was born in Urbino, a hill town without a train station, in a region travelers skip on their way to somewhere famous. Rossini came from Pesaro, and he matters twice in this book, because Rossini was as devoted a gourmand as he was a composer. He claimed he had cried only three times in his life, and one of those was watching a truffled turkey fall overboard into the water. A man from truffle country, weeping over lost truffles. I understand him completely.

The list keeps going in a way that should embarrass the rest of us. Giacomo Leopardi, the greatest Italian poet after Dante, from Recanati. Maria Montessori, whose name is on schools in every country on earth, from Chiaravalle. Bramante, who drew the first plans for St. Peter’s. Father Matteo Ricci, who walked into the Ming court and became Europe’s bridge to China. Enrico Mattei, who built ENI and rearranged the world’s oil politics, born in Acqualagna, a town whose other claim is that it calls itself the truffle capital of Italy and has the harvest to back it up. Even the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, the one they called the wonder of the world, was born in a tent in the market square of Jesi. If Jesi sounds familiar, look at the label on tonight’s wine. The Verdicchio dei Castelli di Jesi in your glass grows in the hills around that same square.

And still nobody goes. Urbino sits there, a perfect Renaissance city, nearly empty. Ascoli Piceno has a piazza built entirely of travertine that may be the most beautiful square in Italy, and you can cross it without dodging a single tour group. The Frasassi caves, the castle at Gradara where Paolo and Francesca earned their place in Dante’s Inferno, the wild Sibillini mountains named for a sibyl who was said to live in a cave up there. Monte Conero, the one place on the whole upper Adriatic where a mountain runs straight down and puts its feet in the sea, with beaches beneath it you can only reach by boat. That is Marche’s whole story in one piece of geography: the shepherd’s country and the fisherman’s country in the same view, intermingling like partners in a dance. The neglect of all this is just wrong, and the Marchigiani know it, and their pride has a little vinegar in it because of that. I respect the vinegar. I run a restaurant in a small town on a foggy coast a long way from anywhere famous. I know something about being the place people haven’t heard of yet.

Tuesday night’s menu is that dance set on four plates. A midsummer salad of shaved fennel and nectarine with the great green olives of Ascoli. A chickpea soup from the farmhouse hills, gold with saffron. Tagliatelle with porcini and summer truffle, because in July the scorzone is coming out of the ground around Acqualagna, and because a mushroom-and-truffle coast like ours recognizes a kindred one. And then the brodetto in bianco, made by the dish’s one true rule: with what the boats bring in. Ours come from colder water than the Adriatic—rockfish standing in for the scorpionfish it is cousin to, squid in first, shrimp and scallops at the end, the day’s catch in between, all of it in a broth as clear as the day’s water. The tradition doesn’t mind. It was never about the thirteen fish. It was about cooking what the sea hands you, at the foot of a mountain, and calling everyone to the table.

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