Honey from a weed

July 17, 2020

Ironically (or maybe fittingly), minutes before spotting the email calling for food memories for this online blog, I had been flicking through one of my favourite books. For me, Patience Gray’s Honey from a Weed carries a sense of pride and affection,since I met her daughter a decade ago as I settled into a recently opened--what I was calling at the time--ethical deli and coffee shop. It was a failed attempt--catastrophically so from a near bankruptcy point-of-view--but I had hoped it would affect positive change by promoting more ethical eating and shopping. I haven’t dispensed with this idea, but it has taken many different twists and turns as I realize the matter is far more complex, ingrained in much deeper issues.

Honey from a Weed is not a straightforward recipe book: although it has many very good recipes. It aims to evoke a sense of being: a way of appreciating, communing, loving, and nurturing, often with very little effort other than the hard but beautiful graft of the farmer and the cook.

Documenting her experiences in Spain, Italy and Greece, where Patience found herself due to her sculptor husband’s search for the best materials, provided them with an opportunity to immerse themselves in these countries’ local culture. Apulia, Italy, was one of the places where they made their life and where she learned many of the book’s recipes. It is also not far from my own ancestral roots. A striking factor highlighted in Patience’s book is how Italy’s disparate regions only unified in the last one hundred and sixty years, yet its citizens were always unified, in a way, through the sharing of recipes and ingredients. As an example, she offers the torta di patate recipe, which also has significance for me because of how it highlights our sharing nature while originally hailing from my parent’s home region of Campania.

Mum and dad grew up in villages that were only forty miles apart in Campania. I have been very fortunate that both have shared food stories with me from which I could pick out a multitude of recipes -- many of which I featured in the aforementioned deli. Indeed, I intended to create a recipe book, but the more painful challenges of balancing financial survival with ethics took precedence. My food memories stretch back to the places they spent most of their childhood summers, where they developed their love, passion, and simple take on food and ingredients. And as with Patiences’ book, their knowledge was seldom just confined to their region. I remember them often discussing so and so’s take on a sauce or many other dishes and how they should try this or that. Funnily and bizarrely to me, the fellow immigrants with whom they shared ideas were often referred to by the name of their home region.

Food is such a big part of this current crisis, and I find myself returning to the ideas and the reasons I set up my deli: the years spent researching the horrors of mass market food production and factory farming, the time I spent working with good chefs who cared about what they did and the ingredients they bought, and visiting new farms run by people who had decided to do something different or maintain traditional practices. These times were enlightening for good and bad reasons. I realized what a mess we had created in how we ate and farmed, and how poorly we treated people and animals. But, these were also beautiful times, in which I discovered small communities of people who were waking up to the mess and trying, like me, to make things better in our own little ways. Even if it felt at times all too inconsequential, something I suffered from a lot and still do, somehow we retained a sense of belief that if this was the way we all acted, life could be much improved for everyone around the world.

As I sit here now typing away, months into the lockdown, I am reminded of all of this, triggered in some part by this call out for stories. I am doing something that for most of my 46-year life I have been promising myself I would do: write stories, of which this is the first, in the hopes that a change in stories could affect attitudes. My attachment to food has remained strong, strengthened maybe over the last few months, as I discover a new yearning to tell stories, create recipes, and imagine a different way of living. Food stories bind us to our earth, nature, shared living and the environment around us and to the memories of times that feel bygone, but actually never went away. I am reminded that food is not just a set of ingredients, but stories about people, animals, plants, earth, and elements. These stories hold together. I do however remain sad still by the trading, profiteering, commodification and homogenization of life-giving and sustaining sources that smell and taste of hard work, passion, love, nurturing, through such abnormalities as food exchanges and commodity markets.

Recipes, new and old, are not just for glossy books with pretty pictures that adorn newly designed kitchens with pots and pans we may never use. They are the very fabric of life, love, nurturing and togetherness that shows how much we can care, share, love, and do for others for the simple return of a smile on a face. So we can choose to take this opportunity to remember, recreate, and re-write the stories of what we now realize is what really matters and together come up with a recipe for a future that tastes and smells of sustainability, togetherness, sharing, and loving, and that is not bought from a supermarket or soulless chain cafe. Together, we can create a new recipe for all and abandon the recipe for disaster that we have all been cooking for as long as we can remember.

In the spirit of this blog and all the beautiful stories and recipes it contains, I will repeat Patience’s recipe for the torta di patate. This dish shows how a few simple and accessible ingredients can become so much bigger than its parts. And by the way, it is very tasty.

“...Don’t start making this delicious torta until you have dried a stale white loaf in the oven to the point when it can be crushed to a powder by rolling a bottle over it on a hard surface. This is called pangrattato or pane grattugiato. In Italy there is a shortcut to preparing it, in the south, in the form of taralli which are dry baked biscuit rings (often flavoured with fennel seeds); in the north, various forms of grissini, biscuit-like sticks instantly crushable.

INGREDIENTS
1 kg (2¼ lbs) potatoes
a little salt
50 g (2 oz) butter
¼ litre (9 fl oz) milk
3 fresh eggs
grated nutmeg
1 tablespoon sugar
2 tablespoons grated parmesan or pecorino
100 g (3½ oz) lardo, salt pork, diced and lightly browned
olive oil
Pangrattato

Peel and boil or steam the potatoes. Drain and mash immediately. Put them in a pan on a low heat, beating in the butter, then adding the hot milk. Beat to a cream, take the pan off the fire and whisk in the eggs. Add nutmeg, sugar, parmesan, and finally the lardo.

Oil a baking tin and sprinkle the bottom and sides with fine crumbs, which will adhere. Transfer the purée to the tin, smoothing it very lightly with a spatula, oil the top and sprinkle densely with more crumbs. Bake in a moderate oven for 45 minutes. Heat a large flat dish and place it face down on the tin, then reverse it.

This Neapolitan dish which I came across years ago at Vico Equense in Campania was served nicely browned (after a grey mullet cooked al forno) and cut in large slices like a cake….”

Andrea is a writer, food lover, art and literature lover, love lover.