Sardegna: The Island That Keeps Feeding This Kitchen

by: Joseph Harris

There is a concept in the world of longevity research called a Blue Zone. The term came from a simple act — two scientists in 1999, mapping the villages in the mountainous Ogliastra province of Sardinia where men routinely lived past a hundred, drawing circles on the map in blue marker wherever the centenarians clustered. The blue circles gave the phenomenon its name. Dan Buettner later expanded the research globally and identified five places on earth where people consistently lived the longest, healthiest lives: Okinawa, Japan; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Ikaria, Greece; Loma Linda, California; and Sardinia, Italy. Five places. One of them is an island in the Mediterranean that the rest of Italy has never quite known what to do with. One of them is a small city on the California coast that grows its own

wine grapes twelve miles from the restaurant.

Cucina Verona was one of the first Blue Zone restaurants in Fort Bragg. That designation is not a marketing invention. It is a recognition of something this restaurant has always believed — that the table is the center of community life, that food made with correct ingredients and shared with people you care about is not a luxury but a necessity, that the pleasure of a good meal and the health of the person eating it are not in competition. The Blue Zone project formalized what we had been doing by instinct. It gave the philosophy a name.

The five Blue Zones share a common architecture that has nothing to do with supplements or fitness regimens or the wellness industry. They move naturally. They eat mostly plants, beans, whole grains, and good olive oil, with meat reserved for special occasions and wine taken moderately with friends. They have purpose. They belong to communities that hold them accountable and keep them connected. They laugh. The Sardinian men of the Blue Zone are specifically noted for gathering in the street each afternoon to share what can only be described as a sardonic sense of humor — which is, it turns out, its own form of medicine. They live a long time because of how they live, not because of what they avoid.

Sardinia itself is one of the stranger and more beautiful places on the Mediterranean map. It is the second largest island in the sea, sitting between the Italian mainland, Corsica, North Africa, and Spain, belonging fully to none of them and drawing quietly from all of them. The Nuragic people built stone towers there in the Bronze Age that still stand. The Phoenicians came. The Carthaginians. The Romans. The Byzantines. The Arabs. The Spanish, who left a Catalan accent in the northern dialects that you can still hear today. And through all of it, the Sardinians remained stubbornly, magnificently themselves — isolated enough by geography and temperament to preserve a culture that is unlike anywhere else in Italy, unlike

anywhere else in Europe, unlike anywhere else at all.

The food is the proof. The fregola — small toasted semolina balls, nutty and complex in a way that no other pasta achieves — looks like something that could have come from a North African souk, and in a sense it did. The saffron from the fields around San Gavino Monreale is among the finest in the world. The pecorino sardo, made from the milk of sheep that graze the mountain pastures, is aged to a sharpness that has nothing polite about it. The pane carasau — paper-thin twice- baked flatbread, so dry it keeps for months — was the bread of the shepherds, made to last through a season in the mountains without a kitchen. The Cannonau wine, made from the Grenache grape grown in the island's volcanic soil, contains two to three times the flavonoid content of most other red wines. The shepherd Antonio Todde, officially recognized by the Guinness World Records as the oldest man in the world in 2001, lived to 112 years and 346 days. His explanation for his longevity: a quiet life, love your neighbor, and a glass of red wine every day. He was not being poetic. He was reporting the facts.

I have not been to Sardinia yet. It is on my list — near the top, getting closer. But here is what I can tell you about the island from this kitchen in Fort Bragg: whenever the menu gets hard, whenever I find myself without an answer for what to cook, I find myself in Sardinia. The fregola appears in my thinking. The lamb braised low and slow with saffron and spices that have no Italian name but feel completely at home in a Sardinian pot. The artichokes in spring, braised with white wine and wild herbs. The pane carasau with pecorino and honey and bottarga, the cured mullet roe of Cabras that tastes like the sea concentrated into something you can hold between your fingers. The seadas, the fried pastry filled with fresh cheese and drizzled with dark honey, which is the Sardinian idea of dessert and which is correct.

A place that feeds your imagination before you have ever set foot in it is telling you something. It is telling you that its logic is sound, that its ingredients are in alignment with each other and with the season and with the body eating them, that someone worked out long ago how to feed a community well and kept doing it for a thousand years until it became instinct. That is what a Blue Zone is. Not a health program. A civilization that got the fundamentals right.

This restaurant has been trying to get the same fundamentals right since we opened. The table as community. The ingredient as the argument. The meal as the reason to gather. Cucina Verona and Sardinia are making the same case from opposite ends of the world, and on Tuesday we are cooking from the island's larder to make that connection as clear as it has always been.

The lamb shoulder has been braising since this afternoon. The fregola is waiting to go into the braising liquid in the last thirty minutes, absorbing everything the lamb has given the pot — the saffron, the cumin, the trace of something warm and North African that has no precise name in Italian but belongs here completely. The artichokes came from the garden this morning. The pane carasau arrived from Italy, thin as paper, already ancient. The seadas will be fried to order and the honey — dark and complex, the way Sardinian honey tends to be — will go on at the last moment.

The wine is Cannonau di Sardegna from Sella & Mosca, the red that carries more health in a glass than almost anything else you could pour. The white is Vermentino di Sardegna — coastal, saline, bright, the taste of the island looking out to sea. And at the end of the evening, if you can find it, Mirto — the liqueur made from myrtle berries that grow wild all over the island, dark and slightly bitter and completely Sardinian.

I owe myself a visit. The island has been feeding this kitchen for years without ever asking for anything in return. It is time to go and say thank you in person.

Chi mangia bene vive bene. In Sardinia they have been proving it for a hundred years. Literally.

Reservations: (707) 964-6844 or click here

124 East Laurel Street, Fort Bragg, California