Thyme Travels: Puglia
Patience Gray’s revered and inspiring autobiographical cookbook, Honey from a Weed, tells many stories of her life and travels while in constant upheaval with her husband’s search for marble fit for sculpting. It ends in the 1970s with them settling in Apuglia, in a farmhouse, devoid of modern comforts like a refrigerator (and electricity). She declared her kitchen ruined when her son put a fridge in.
It’s easy to see why they stayed. Road sides are littered with fruit trees; crab pears, apples, persimmon and figs. Carob and bastardoni (aka prickly pears) are new and entertaining. Oregano, purslane and wild mints like nepeta are weeds here and grow everywhere alongside the olive trees. Caper bushes hang from centuries old city walls and almonds are in every garden.
We began our trip near Lecce, in a converted masseria, a fortified farm house. Often converted now, but once where olive oil was made. You can eat at and visit many, and we came across abandoned ones too. Original grind stones still in place, along with the presses. This one is hidden away in a dark cave, the ground worn where donkeys walked in circles, pulling the wheels round, crushing the olives to a pulp, that is then transferred into baskets made from the small lower branches of the olive trees. Then it’s pressed. Liquid ran into holes leading to a large reservoir under our feet. Left for a few days in the pitch dark, the oil is allowed to separate where it can be skimmed off the top. Any masseria is certainly worth visiting, if only for dinner.
We spent our last few days just outside Ostuni, an ancient walled city. We drove from our base out into the countryside, where, hidden between Locorotondo and Cisternino was I giardini di Pomona. Five hundred and sixty varieties of fig make up the majority of the fruit trees here, but it’s not just figs. Vines which grew both red and white grapes. Ornamental apples and quince. Giant medlars just like ours here at Thyme. But mostly figs. So many figs. Paolo Belloni is the botanical conservatory’s owner. English, French and Italian spills forth, while handing us figs. “This one is for the chef,” he says handing me a tiny purple fig. “They call this one the idiot. Bello. It splits open in the rain”. Back at the house, Paolo dries his fruit and sells it out of a small shop on site with various other fig related produce and ancient horticultural books on a table in the corner.
Paolo is passionate about cooperation, amongst plants as much as humans. Next to the dry stone walls condensing water in between the stones, and the thick matted bushes protecting the fields, is a lavender labyrinth leading to a lone persimmon tree. The tree is grown from a lone sapling found after “fat boy” destroyed Nagasaki in 1945. The seeds are now being collected and sent back home.
After an amazing and nourishing trip, I left feeling suitably inspired.
