Il Mondo di Salvatore
A Cook Who Makes a World of His Own
Salvatore Denaro is a chef who lives, works, cooks, cultivates his garden, raises pigs and chickens, eats like a prince, and drinks like a pope in the central Italian region of Umbria. Some people, discerning critics among them, think he is one of the best chefs in the region if not in the entire country. To my mind, however, he is not so much a chef as a curator, in the contemporary sense of a person with keen discrimination who selects and collates fine things, whether works of art or hip-hop tracks.By Nancy Harmon Jenkins
Photographs by Nancy Harmon Jenkins
Salvatore is a curator of really good food. It might be ribbed, pear-shaped Costoluto tomatoes from his garden, picked at the apex of ripeness just before they start to fall off, sliced and strewn across a serving platter, adorned with nothing but a glug of Umbrian Moraiolo olive oil and a sprinkle of Sicilian sea salt; or dark golden-yolked eggs from his rusty-red hens, tossed in a shallow pan with slivers of onion and potato to make a nut-brown frittata; but it might equally be an unusual spicy-sweet prosciutto discovered while traveling through the mountainous back country of Campania.
When it comes to food, he is nothing if not insistent. If it’s good, if it’s truly good, it must be cooked and consumed right away, as if we all have a moral obligation to perfection. “Eat, eat,” he commands, as he slices that prosciutto and passes the fragments around to the assembly: “Just taste how sweet it is!”
Roaming the old terraces below my house, he comes back to the kitchen with his arms embracing a great mass of wild greens, insisting they must be cooked immediately. They are an extravagant mix of pungent chicories, wild poppy greens, valerian, arugula, borage, and an enormous quantity of what he calls piattelle (cat’s ears in English, Hypochaeris radicata), a kind of hairy chicory that grows flat to the ground like a big plate. It takes time and patience to rinse the dusty greens, picking them over to get rid of intruders, but the reward, after steaming, then sautéing in plenty of olive oil with crushed garlic cloves and a couple of broken dried red chiles, is a dish of greens as tasty as anything you could imagine and so packed with goodness that you feel comfortable knowing it will cure you of anything that ails you. In company with an enormous pot of puréed dried fava beans, doused with more of that good Umbrian oil, and with crusty bread from a favored bakery (cooked in a wood-burning oven, of course), this meal has a kind of purity that it would be difficult to duplicate anywhere else on the globe. Its tastes and flavors come from right here, a farmhouse kitchen high in the mountains on the cusp between Tuscany and Umbria.
And that’s part of the point about Salvatore as a chef and teacher. He’s not in search of new techniques or novel ingredients. Instead, he proudly calls himself un cuoco contadino errante, a wandering peasant cook. His understanding of food begins on the ground, sometimes literally, starting with roots, but also seeds, vines, and olive trees — the whole complex ecosystem of forests and meadows that surround and help nourish the cultivated fields, in Umbria or wherever they exist together. Before he even begins to cook, he almost instinctively grasps how all the elements, from cultivar to soil structure to climate and weather and time of harvest have a direct impact on flavor, whether in the kitchen or at the table. He plunges deeply into cultures and traditional ideas as a way to better understand flavors and textures, and if this makes him sound like a culinary historian buried in a library, that he most definitely is not. One night at a friend’s house in Sicily, he built up coals on the hearth and cooked whole small mackerel, stuffed with black olives, seasoned with oregano and wrapped in fig leaves, then buried in the embers. The recipe, he said, came from Archestratus, a Greco-Sicilian who wrote in the fourth century BCE. Salvatore’s point? The method, unchanging over the millennia, is as valid and as tasty today as it was back then.
One important thing to know about Salvatore right away is that he is not in fact Umbrian, although he has lived and worked in that central Italian region for almost four decades. This kind of dislocation isn’t unusual in North America, but it’s notable in Italy where, apart from international hotel restaurants in major cities, most chefs cook in the place they come from and they cook the food of where they come from. Fabio Picchi, for example: He is from and lives in Florence and he serves Florentine food at his acclaimed restaurant Cibreo. The dishes might be prepared with rare finesse, his might be the best food in the city — many would argue that it is — but it is rigorously Florentine. Just so, Cesare Benelli at Al Covo in Venice, or Rita Russotto at Satra in the southern Sicilian town of Scicli — like countless lesser-known chefs all over Italy, they cook the food of the place because that’s the food they understand, that’s the food they’re most comfortable with, that’s the food of where they come from. And it’s the food their customers want.
Salvatore’s case is a little different. When the subject of Italy comes up, he can be heard to murmur, “Non sono italiano, sono siciliano” — “I’m not Italian, I’m Sicilian.” This is a distinction Sicilians often make even if they’ve been away from their home island for a very long time. Just the other day, when an irritated American woman, complaining that he was late for lunch, said: “All you Italian men are alike,” Salvatore stopped her. “Non sono italiano, signora,” he said gently, “sono siciliano.” Don’t charge me with Italian bad habits, he meant, Sicilian habits are bad enough.
Piazza Armerina, the hill town that he comes from, in the heart of Sicily, is renowned for an extensive Roman villa on its outskirts where a spectacular set of floor mosaics attests to the luxury of upper-class life in the fourth century CE. His father was the fattore, or bailiff, of a large property adjacent to the Villa Romana, but he died when Salvatore was still quite young, leaving the family in diminished circumstances. After finishing liceo, he went north to study at the University of Perugia’s Istituto di Agronomia Generale, one of Italy’s prestigious agricultural colleges. Going to ag school in Italy doesn’t have the same lack of intellectual cachet that it sometimes has in the United States. The agricultural institutes are sources of cutting-edge research into human nutrition, dietetics, sustainable farming, sensory evaluation, and the combination of high technology with traditional practices, as well as the pursuit of excellence in everything from wine and olive oil to eggplants, beans, and tomatoes. Arguably Italy’s greatest cultural heritage, right up there with art, music, and literature, is the country’s incredibly rich and varied tradition of food and wine. Arguably, too, the country’s greatest economic strength, despite years of industrialization, is still its agriculture and the constant production over millennia of breathtakingly high-quality fruits and vegetables.
Still, Umbria and Sicily could not be further apart, whether we’re speaking of landscape, history, culture, cuisine, or dialect. Umbria is acclaimed, and not just in travel brochures, as il cuore verde, the green heart, of Italy. The countryside is gently seductive, sensuous, mystical even, a landscape of rolling hills and steep valleys, ancient oak and chestnut forests, and medieval hill towns perched above expansive slopes of vineyards and olives. Turned by the plow, the Umbrian earth is the color of chocolate, or of dark, rich espresso. Sicily is harsher, more dramatic, a land of excess, of blinding sunlight and dark dense shadows, given to extremes of landscape and weather — a brilliant Mediterranean setting for the remains of ancient civilizations piled up, one upon the other, their bleached bones enduring in the dry air. The soil is resistant, burnt by the sun.
Sicily is Africa, impervious, internal, suspicious of the stranger. Umbria is Europe, soft, communal, yielding to the plow. Great saints come from Umbria (Francis, Clare, Benedict); the Mafia comes from Sicily (Gambino, Badalamenti, Provenzano). Enough said?
Umbria’s most typical food, served in both fancy restaurants and farmhouse kitchens, is torta al testo, a yeasted flatbread. Cooked on a griddle, then split and filled with greens or a thick slice of locally cured sausage, it is proudly celebrated as cucina povera, the cuisine of poor country folk. Sicily’s most typical food, on the other hand, is caponata, a complex and richly flavored mélange of summer vegetables in a sticky, oily, sweet-and-sour sauce that seems to sum up the island’s complicated history, incorporating elements of Greek, Arab, Byzantine, Spanish, French, and even possibly Mexican cuisine in its sumptuous blend. (The Mexican element comes from the addition of chocolate, typical of caponata from Catania, and said to derive from Mexican moles, brought to Sicily by the Spanish.)
The food that Salvatore grows, prepares, and serves up to friends and clients in Umbria is not exactly Sicilian food, nor is it exactly Umbrian. His caponata, for example, incorporates barely cooked tomatoes, where Sicilian orthodoxy insists on cooking tomatoes down to a jam. In his garden he grows the curious Sicilian long squash called cucuzza, but he also has okra and heritage tomato varieties from the US, and both bell and chile peppers grown from seeds acquired on a recent trip to Turkey. And he uses all of these liberally in his cooking. On the other hand, it would certainly not do to call his food an amalgam or fusion cuisine. For many years, I’ve happily eaten what he prepares — at the restaurant he had for a time in Foligno, at a picnic table in his big vegetable garden in the countryside near Bevagna, in friends’ kitchens back in Sicily, or at the Caprai winery in Montefalco where he gives cooking classes and works as culinary consultant. I would be hard pressed to label this anything but la cucina di Salvatore.
To foreign palates, it is unmistakably Italian, full of herbal flavors, marked by the prodigious use of extra-virgin olive oil (and hardly ever a trace of butter), characterized above all else by the excellence of the materia prima, the Italian phrase for basic ingredients, everything from meat or fish to garlic, tomatoes, carrots, and parsley; even the salt that goes into the making of a dish is carefully selected from Trapani, on Sicily’s west coast. As an advocate of Slow Food, Salvatore has been quick to adopt and appreciate many of the hidden products that the organization ferrets out, no matter where from: artichokes from Liguria, pistachios from eastern Sicily, lambs from high up in Tuscany’s mountainous Lunigiana. In a sense, Salvatore’s cooking is distinctively pan-Italian. And yet it is rooted in regional traditions.
Take, for instance, his panzanella, a traditional bread salad from Tuscany and Umbria. Made in summertime with tomatoes and torn-up pieces of bread, it’s the pride of country kitchens in this part of Italy, which is vaunted for its waste-not mentality at the table. Stale bread, moistened — refreshed, you could say — with vinegar and water, torn to bits and mixed with chopped ripe tomatoes and slivered red onions plus fresh basil from the garden and plenty of good oil. So far, so good. But then Salvatore does something unfamiliar, something that lifts panzanella right out of Umbria and into the teeming Italian Mezzogiorno with its more assertive flavors. Instead of the stale bread of tradition, he uses friselle, twice-baked barley buns from southern Italy, hard as ship’s biscuit, until soaked, but a good deal tastier. Then he adds three heaping tablespoons of fragrant sun-dried Sicilian oregano, whose pungency is almost unknown in Central Italy, along with two big handfuls of coarsely chopped green olives, the kind called schiacciate or ammaccate, meaning smacked olives — smacked with a clean stone to crack them open before curing so they release some of their bitterness and absorb the flavors of the cure. It’s the way everyone makes green table olives back in Piazza Armerina. In Umbria, on the other hand, olives are seldom cured, since every precious one must go into the region’s deservedly acclaimed olive oil.
Salvatore is short and round — not fat but rotund in the way of a certain southern Italian physiognomy — with comfortably sloping shoulders, a round face defined by a thin moustache and a well-trimmed beard, and arms that stretch wide in a warm embrace. And he embraces often — a hug, a kiss on both cheeks, a kiss three times, for everyone in the room, male and female alike, even for the occasional dog or cat. When I was first introduced to him, he embraced me, touching cheeks in the Italian manner once, twice, thrice, and again.
At that time he was chef-owner of a hole-in-the-wall trattoria in the heart of Foligno, a small Umbrian city that, like many towns in Umbria, had recently been ravaged by an earthquake. When I say hole-in-the-wall, I mean there were probably not more than 25 or 30 seats in the place, including a couple in the adjacent wine bar, and the kitchen was uncomfortably crowded if more than two people tried to handle the orders coming in. But it was packed day and night, lunch and dinner, with eager diners, many of whom were regulars or knew each other well. Il Bacco Felice, the happy Bacchus, was its name, and it fit because one of its attractions was an array of fairly obscure but superb locally made wines, especially Sagrantino di Montefalco, about which enthusiasts. . . well, they enthuse. (One description of a Sagrantino di Montefalco says this: “Compelling aromas of truffle, tobacco, black-skinned fruit, menthol and a whiff of blue flower.” If you don’t know what blue flower smells like, neither do I — violets maybe.)
At first glance, Il Bacco Felice looked just like any other alimentari, a grocery-and-wine shop, its narrow entrance lined with towering stacks of wooden wine cases; dusty bottles of grappa and olive oil; jars of honey, preserves, and pickles; braided strings of onions, garlic, and chile peppers; and sacks filled with locally grown Castelluccio lentils, chickpeas, and farro from the high Colfiorito plateau, and tiny risine, rice-shaped white beans grown around Umbria’s Lake Trasimeno. The diners who crowded the tables, passing bottles and plates of food back and forth along with a certain high level of gossip, were not your ordinary locals grabbing lunch in a neighborhood trattoria. The location was famous; many customers had happily traveled great distances to be there, as indicated by the graffiti that covered the walls, a new scrawl added seemingly by everyone who came in. It was both the epitome of an utterly unassuming trattoria and a place where you could count on terrific food, often very simply prepared but with superb ingredients, wines of unassailable quality, and a convivial atmosphere presided over by Salvatore, who hustled among the tables, ducking into the kitchen, emerging with platters of food or another bottle of wine.
In season he might offer his own take not just on caponata, but on pasta alla Norma, Sicilian pasta traditionally served with a sauce of fried eggplant, tomato, and shaved ricotta salata. At times he made porchetta, the classic roast pig from this part of Italy, flavoring it with copious handfuls of dried fennel pollen that he had harvested himself from the fields around his garden plots. He made a complex rub for chickens, using his own red-wine vinegar in which he had steeped bunches of dried oregano, then roasted it, the chickens small enough that a single one made a healthy serving. Or he rubbed chicken with what he calls his condimento, a mix of aromatics that includes Turkish bay leaves and Sardinian myrtle, along with the usual black and red chile pepper, salt, and more oregano. That dry-rubbed chicken becomes pollo alla diavola, a spatchcocked bird cooked on the grill. At Il Bacco Felice, when the bird came off the grill, he would hover over the tables of those who’d ordered it. “Use your fingers,” he commanded. “We’re in the country here.”
It was indeed like eating in a big, old-fashioned, family kitchen in a very well-supplied country house. There was never a menu. Instead, the chef told you what was available — and very often told you what you would eat too. Later he might sit down with you, help himself to a glass of your wine and discourse passionately on what you were eating and drinking, as well as what you were not.
It was a remarkable place, exciting, generous, surprising, challenging, all because of the personality in charge. And now it’s gone, although much lamented. A great chef, a fine cook, a perfectly terrible manager, a host who kept giving away food and drink, Salvatore seemed incapable of understanding that this was not in fact his own home, his own family kitchen. Generosity in a restaurateur is an admirable quality, but it requires someone holding to the bottom line. And there was no one doing that at Il Bacco Felice.
Now that he no longer has a restaurant to supervise, Salvatore has more freedom to travel and he takes advantage of that, scurrying off to Istanbul or New York or San Francisco — wherever a client calls him for consultation. Often he travels in company with Marco Caprai, promoting the family vineyards. But his heart is clearly back in Sicily. One recent year, toward the end of September, he said to me: “We have to go to Sicily.”
I’m always happy for any excuse to go to Sicily, but why now?
“Because next week is October 4th, San Francesco, time to harvest table olives.”
Why the feast of St. Francis, the world’s most popular saint? What’s the connection to table olives?
Salvatore gave me that universal Italian shrug that means: “Who knows?” “Boh!” he said, “If you wait any longer, the olives are too full — they’re only good for oil.”
And so we set off for his hometown in Sicily, to harvest big fat green olives and cure them the old-fashioned way, making those delicious olive ammaccate, smashing them with a clean stone and immersing them in a brine flavored with bunches of wild fennel and garlic, pushed down into the liquid along with the olives themselves. He worked with an old friend, Maria Cascino, who runs an agriturismo on the riverside below Piazza Armerina, with her son Giuseppe and Giuseppe’s son Alessandro, who has confessed he wants to be a chef when he grows up. Alessandro hung on Salvatore’s every word while Salvatore himself hung on Maria’s every word, as she maneuvered the olives into big glass jars where they would rest for several weeks. Later we turned last year’s olives into what they called olive cunzate, a kind of olive salad, to have with a crust of bread and a glass of wine before dinner. Here’s a recipe you might try with plain green olives from a supermarket bin. It will bring them to life in a whole new way. Do it ahead of time, too, and let the olives marinate in the mixture for a day or two, even up to a week, before serving.
Makes 1½ to 2 cups olive cunzate.
about 8 ounces of brine-packed green olives, with their pits
2 to 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, preferably Sicilian
1 small fresh green or red chile pepper, thinly sliced
1 medium stalk celery, coarsely chopped
2 or 3 whole cloves of garlic, peeled and thinly sliced
2 tablespoons coarsely chopped flat-leaf parsley
1 teaspoon of good white-wine vinegar plus sea salt to taste, optional
1 tablespoon finely minced flat-leaf parsley
pinch of dried Sicilian or Greek oregano
Rinse the olives in a colander, tossing under running water. If you wish, remove the pits, but the olives themselves should remain as whole as possible. Transfer the olives to a bowl.
Some brine-cured olives have vinegar added to the brine to give a tart flavor. Taste an olive to see how salty and/or tart it is, then decide whether or not to add vinegar and/or salt to the marinade you will soon make. Meanwhile, add 2 tablespoons of olive oil and toss gently.
Add the chile, celery, garlic, and the coarsely chopped parsley and toss again. If the original brine for the olives was not perceptibly tart, add a teaspoon of vinegar, along with, if necessary, a sprinkling of sea salt. Let the olives sit, covered, at room temperature for 30 minutes or so, then taste. Adjust the mixture again at this point, if needed, adding more vinegar and/or salt. And if the mixture seems too dry, add the remaining olive oil. At this point, you can serve the olives immediately, but they will be better if covered and kept in a cool place for two or three days.
When ready to serve, let the olives in their marinade rise back up to room temperature. Transfer to a serving platter and sprinkle with the minced parsley and dried oregano, crumbling the latter with your fingers. Taste an olive and adjust the seasoning once more, adding, if necessary, a little vinegar and/or salt.
“Sono stato fortunato,” says Salvatore. “I’ve had a fortunate life. Ho cresciuto con olio buono e pane buono” — “I grew up on good oil and good bread.” The only other things you need, he says, are good olives and good cheese. And of course a glass of good wine. It’s a Sicilian prescription that’s as old as Piazza Armerina, quite possibly even older, and as true in Sicily as it is in Umbria or just about anywhere else in rural Italy where the old ways still rule the kitchen and the table.
If Salvatore is a bridge between Sicily and Umbria, or between Sicily and the mainland, he is also, in his person and his practice, a link between the modern world of internationally touted chefs who scurry from place to place, with an eye and an ear cocked for the latest trend, and the old-fashioned world of the contadini, the peasant farmers among whom he spent his early years, with whom he still feels most comfortable — and from whom he still feels he has much to learn.
“La cucina,” he says, “è la grande passe-partout” — cuisine is the master key that unlocks all cultures. Working even in a tiny kitchen like Maria’s brings great satisfaction. “I don’t want to cook where you have to call the fornitore every morning: send me a saddle of veal, a couple of fresh rabbits, a dozen steaks. No, I want to cook with what I find, with what’s at hand. It’s a way of learning about things, people, places, cultures.” He smiles at the taste of one of those green olives, and then he says something that almost every great chef I’ve found in Italy has said: “I miei maestri non sono cuocchi, sono le nonne”— “My masters, my mentors, are not chefs, they’re grandmothers.” ●
From issue 103