Through the Maze

Passport & Plate - Octopus & Potatoes

scriptamanent — Wed, 12 Mar 2014 04:57:42 GMT

Ingredients
A fresh Octopus (800 g.)
Potatoes (4 or 5)
1 Onion
1 Carrot
1 Stick of celery
3 Laurel leaves
2 Cloves of garlic
1 Lemon
Salt
Vinegar
Pepper
Parsley
Basil

How to prepare this recipe
OCTOPUS & POTATOES
The recipe

The twentieth century was late in Camogli. Tonio had a stove, a couple of oars and a light blue boat, Baxeicou . He has painted it every single summer since he was thirteen. You need perseverance when it comes to salt.

Near the stove and scattered all around, the needles for the nets, some fishing rods and a fillet knife with a bone handle. On the windowpane of the little house on the port, the shining green leaves of the basil waited in the hazy morning.
When he drags the net back, he already knows what will be: octopuses, anchovies and squid make for a good day. With red shrimp and swordfish it’s even better. That is how he makes ends meet: selling his poor catch to the restaurants downtown, but not today. Today is Sunday and he toasts to the coming season: the last summer of the century.

He brings the octopus to the table; with his pocket knife he takes the eyes away, then the beak and the entrails. Eventually he washes it carefully and leaves it on the cutting board.
In the meantime he fills the pot with water and puts it on the stove to boil. He adds salt, a spoonful of vinegar, two big laurel leaves, half an onion, one carrot and a stick of celery.

While the water boils, he hits the octopus on the worn out wood to make the meat tender; then, taking it by the head, he plunges it into the water: as in a ceremony he dips it in and out three times until the tentacles curl up and look like burned flowers.
He leaves it gently sliding into the hot water while inside another pot the peeled potatoes patiently boil too.

With wise and slow movements he chops up the parsley and slices two cloves of garlic.
Half an hour later the potatoes are ready to be sliced. Tonio cuts the red and tender octopus into pieces and puts them into the terrine with the potatoes.
A seagull sings, he opens the window and the crisp air from the coast washes his weariness away. His widowerhood and a son across the ocean are painful thoughts, but the patch of sun on his wrinkled face makes him feel less miserable, and while he picks some basil leaves a shy and yet warm smile appears on his lips.

He tears them with his fingers and lets them fall into the terrine, savoring the enticing smell.
As the sun is high in the sky he climbs the steps that lead to the tiny terrace above his room; here, sitting in the shadow he waits for the octopus to cool down, taking little sips from the glass.

He spends the whole afternoon on that terrace, trying to make out the distant waves until night falls and his land looks like a handful of glittering precious stones laid down onto the coast.
With the flavour still on his tongue he closes his eyes. The sea cradles his fishes and his dreams. The straw yellow wine helps him picture his corner of happiness, nestled tight between the land and the sea, yet roomy enough to keep on dreaming.

The story behind this recipe
POLPO & PATATE
Behind the scenes

I love to melt imagination and reality, I’ve always done it. I just can’t do without them. That happens when I write as well as when I travel. It is powerful, overwhelming and I always try to make the best out of it, leaving the other side of the coin to my psychotherapist.

I have a big, quite strange family and I never met three of my four grandparents: they died decades before I was born. So I thought I could write one of them down in order to depict a glimpse of his life.
It all comes from what I lived, heard and then tied with my imagination. Because sometimes to cook a recipe from a century ago, is better than leafing through the pages of a yellowed photo album. My uncle had a van and I spent my infancy travelling with it throughout Europe, keeping the travel diary my mom gave me always with me. Then I grew up, the van became a plane and the travel diary turned into a constant restlessness.

When I first left home my mother gave me another sort of diary. She began to write hers and her mother’s old recipes in it and I am continuing the job. Some time has passed since an insecure fat kid used to hide away in food. Now food is one of the best ways I have to keep track of my past as well as to understand who I meet. It measures and shows people’s stories. It doesn’t change you only physically, because it doesn’t feed your body alone.

And then there is Camogli. It is a little breathtaking town near to my city. I felt free there, I felt lonesome and almighty. The way it carves thoughts out of your mind is one of its best secrets. I chose Camogli as the background for my story because that place is partly mine, just as the flavours that come from it. Even though I now live far from there, I can’t help smiling when I smell that dish, it is like a familiar dialect to me, like someone you maybe never met, but you know you belong to.

Photos: A crowded silence

scriptamanent — Thu, 27 Jun 2013 01:30:00 GMT

I was born in Genoa, Italy, in 1982. I graduated in Politics in Milan and then in creative writing in Turin, at the Scuola Holden. I speak English, French and some German. I love motorbikes and Swiss army knives. I shoot with a Slr, a rangefinder (Olympus Om2, Zorky 2-C) and a Dslr (Olympus E510). In the spring of 2010, after 20 hours of flight, I landed for the first time in Africa. Addis Ababa swallowed me in a minute. I spend one month there and I travelled quite a bit and. Right from the start, I was fascinated by two places: markets and temples. Markets in Addis Ababa, are some of the best places to understand a culture and a country. Meat, salt, spices, animals and people, all packed together in places that even though are bigger than any market elsewhere, always look tiny and on the verge of exploding. Temples, on the other hand, are majestic and almost unreal: both the temples of Gonder, carved out in the pink pale rock and the churches in the capital, are places of extreme beauty and silence. In the end, markets and temples, tell a similar story: they show rhythm, spirituality and dignity; they inspire the same crowded silence that asks for respect and admiration.

Sharing Stories - A Glimpse into Another's Life - The Lemons of Lalibela

scriptamanent — Sat, 23 Mar 2013 23:55:53 GMT

You meet girls at the market of Lalibela. You want to go there on Saturdays; they wait all week, they dress well and walk around that irregular space amongst spices, logs, cereals and fabrics. All the boys know it and go there to buy lemons as an excuse. First they walk and take time, then you want to say something to surprise them and catch their attention. It’s not like being ferengi (1), but it’s the only chance they have to meet them.

You hang in the balance at the market, just like when you travel. You sift memories out, you separate them from the present. One thing lost, one kept. You walk through it in the only way you can, without rhyme or reason. Following this rule, you will only have exceptions. Used watches, rusty glasses, chicken tied by their paws. Pyramids of polished tomatoes on a rag in the middle of the mud.

The light teff (2) is for the rich, the dark one for all the others. The price of salt is not bad but you want to haggle, then you buy it in blocks or minced, measured with glasses. Wood comes in bundles, carried for tens of miles from the mountains: twenty birr (3) to get a burning fire for coffee and incense, a custom that happens three times a day.

You feel clumsy in that ordered chaos they only know the secret of, but somehow you never feel like a stranger: whoever you happen to meet, it will always be someone.
At noon the market is a horizon of plastic sandals and dark umbrellas against the sun. In the heart of a dry and rocky valley, lemons are an excuse for girls and girls are a gift from every Saturday. A beauty that only belongs where it happens. You can’t take it back home, you can’t reproduce it. It wouldn’t have the same taste, nor the same dignity.

Api tells it to me from behind a cold Sprite, under a poster of Britney Spears, even though he prefers Beyoncé. The mud on the walls keeps the room cool and the fridge is noisy. He’s my age, he crosses his legs showing his flip-flops full of dust and points at the voting posters: a bee for the government and a flower for the opposition. He wants to keep on studying politics and he needs money for that. But he likes to be a guide and today he still has work to do. However next Saturday he’ll go alone to the market to buy lemons.

(1) ferengi: Ahmaric word used for every white individual
(2) teff: typical Ethiopian cereal
(3) birr: Ethiopian national currency