Highway of the sea
Paola Bacchia’s new cookbook, Adriatico, takes inspiration from the cuisine of Italy’s Adriatic Coast.
From Venice to Portofino, Italian ports comprise the lion’s share of Captain’s Choice’s 19-day “The good life on the Mediterranean” journey aboard the 500-passenger Europa
2. The trip departs Australia in June 2019. captainschoice.com.au For Paola Bacchia, the Adriatic Coast is more than a simple entry in an atlas. It’s the groves of ancient olive trees on the Salento peninsula, the spindly wooden fishing machines along the shoreline between Ortona and Vasto, and the horses on the coast of the Gargano taught to trample on sunhardened broad beans to release their edible seeds. The author’s love of the region was inspired by her father, Nello. “He grew up on the shores of the Adriatic Sea, on the Istrian peninsula, which was part of Italy at the time,” says Bacchia.
“It is the sound of my father’s words and the taste of my mother’s cooking that drove me to write Adriatico.”
As Bacchia researched dishes from the northern part of the Adriatic, she realised they were connected to the cuisine of the south “not by the land but by the highway of the sea”. The mountainous parts of the Adriatic coastline are a geographic lucky break, producing “a happy marriage of ingredients that are not commonly associated with each other, such as mushrooms and clams, silverbeet and squid, mussels and potatoes”.
Tiella is a regional favourite of hers, cooked in the terracotta pot it’s named after. Rice, mussels, potatoes, cherry tomatoes and pecorino are banked on top of each other, and baked over a hearth. “The mussels are layered so that they open upwards and collect the flavours from the other ingredients as the dish cooks,” she says. Back in Melbourne, where Bacchia lives, Italy informs the cooking classes she runs at her house – even if the connection isn’t always immediately obvious. “Apple strudel doesn’t sound very Italian, but in the north-east, where Maria Theresa of Austria once ruled, it’s very popular,” she says. Bacchia demonstrates her mother’s recipe, in which the dough is stretched “so thinly that you can read through it”. Bacchia will also lead culinary tours in Trieste in September and Puglia in April, which will broadly retrace the path she took to research Adriatico. The highlight? “Olive Oil Day” in Salento, a place filled with “silvery olive trees that are well over a thousand years old”. The visit will include a trip to a cave that houses stone olive presses dating to pre-Roman times. To encounter these relics, which are connected to a private masseria (fortified farmhouse), is “nothing short of astounding”, Bacchia says. Adriatico by Paola Bacchia (Smith Street Books, hbk, $55) is available for pre-order and will be published on 1 September.