LIFESTYLE
Travel&Dine
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Quark G XPress Demo “Sardinia, which is like nowhere. Sardinia, which has no history, no date, no race, no offering… It lies outside; outside the circuit of civilization.” — D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia, 1921
By SHERRY HOFFMAN
iovanni Nenneddu Cabras has lived in Valle Lanaittu in Oliena for nearly 70 years in a one-room pinnetta, a shepherd’s hut. His face is squared, strong and beautifully creased and weathered like his Italian mountainside. We’re there as tourists, to see how a handful of the planet’s people live, to marvel at the world and our power to enhance or destroy it. Twenty-five of us sit at a long wooden picnic table under a bamboo awning. At each place, there’s a hand-carved wooden plate and anachronistic plastic cups and utensils. At 6,000 feet in the verdant forest in the Gennargentu National Park, it’s beautifully serene and silent. Not even the sound of a bird’s wings. Giovanni moves from his hut to a smaller one where there is some serious cooking underway. Giovanni turns the spit making sure the suckling pig is evenly roasted. A train of sausages lay on an iron grate and the smoke emanating from the hut smells like a fine perfume. Giovanni is a second-generation goat herder. He’s not happy about a bunch of tourists joining him for lunch, but our guide says, “he’s gotten used to it.” Like a lot of us, the
68-year-old shepherd needs to supplement his income. He has to pay the Italian government a fee for each of his 80 goats. Each goat has a name and comes when called. Each also has a place in the goat hierarchy and each knows his or her place. Because of laws governing the preparation of food, Giovanni can no longer sell what we’re eating: cheese, honey, sausages, tender and salty proscutti or the spectacular open fired suckling pig with skin that crackles so loudly it wakes up the mountainside. So he hosts tourists. The lunch was a gastronomical adventure, one where the food was warmed from the sun and fit for a gourmet without a swirl of decorative sauce or a scattering of parsley. Bright red and kiwi green tomatoes drizzled with single vineyard olive oil and cracked Sardinian salt is so simple and outrageously delicious, it’s a wonder it’s not on everyone’s menu. Freshly made ricotta under a stream of rosemary honey and perched on music bread was three courses in one: appetizer, entrée and dessert. Music bread, a Sardinian staple, is named for its resemblance to sheet music. Centuries old, it would be made to last a month and feed the entire village. ——
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The pleasure on our faces as we feast on fresh olives, pecorino, salami, and drink his home made and indigenous Cannonau, a red wine, gives Giovanni a reason to smile. By the last lick of a finger, he’s holding onto our shoulders, kissing our cheeks, and through a translator, welcoming us back anytime. At every curve in the road on this island, where the scenery is either breathtaking or looking like it’s close to an airport, there are opportunities for eating adventures. As we leave the shepherd’s empty wooden plates and travel on the winding road, we find a food truck, just like one on Market Street in front of Philadelphia’s Drexel University. Printed on its side is a bill of fare, and hanging from its ceiling are sausages, huge rounds of cheese and hunks of salami. A man and woman with white aprons stand waiting for passers by. We stop and shop, leaving with bundles, wrapped in brown paper. Step into Sardinia and you instantly become a locavore. It’s not a sustainability issue or the cause du jour; it’s just the way it is. Everything needed to exist on the second largest island in the Mediterranean is already there, as it’s been from the beginning. There’s just more. The most obvious “more” is on the enchanted ground of Costa Smeralda, especially since Prince Karim—also known as the Aga Kahn, one of the world’s wealthiest Muslims—turned the quiet seaside town into the place for the rich, the tan and the beautiful. It’s now the home-away-fromhome to the oil minister of Saudi Arabia, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and many of the world’s most influential power brokers. Still, there are more sheep on the island than people. This tiny stretch of secluded crescents of sand was created for a photo-op, and with 300 days of sunshine a year, the light is always right. Yachts the size of small ocean liners float in the background and jutting rocks sit within swimming distance. The rocks behind the beach are fertile enough to give birth to poppies, and at night, which comes around ten, the moon strings diamonds of light beams
out onto the water. Discovering the foods of Sardinia was our objective, but in the process we also discovered the people. We sat in the stands to watch the daylong celebration of Saint Efisio, a festival of faith and colors. It’s taken place every May 1st in Cagliari for the past three and a half centuries, even during World War II bombings in 1943. One of the largest and most colorful processions in the world, the festival involves several thousand Sardinians wearing 16th and 17th century costumes, and accompanying the statue of the saint on foot and with horses and carts. By end of the parade, the streets are covered with red rose petals, each participant having scattered them along the route. It was magnificent. We also visited the Nuraghe, the stone remains of ancient dwellings. Rocks have never impressed me. All rocks are old. Some are just shaped differently than others. And you can’t eat them. Leaving the stones on our way to another eating adventure, we stopped to let a herd of sheep cross the road. No one went for the cheap joke. During our time on this engaging island, we traveled from top to bottom, side-to-side, and had unforgettable meals designed by some of the most talented and unpretentious chefs and some ordinary, yet extraordinary, home cooks. We ate with four generations of women who live in Orroli, about 50 km north of Cagliari. The tiny town of 2,500 has 40 of the world’s oldest people living there. The secret to their longevity? “It’s in the air,” the family tells us. The matriarch offered us a quick hands-on lesson in making fregola, often referred to as Sardinian couscous. We were dealing with it in its raw state, before the tedious drying process, and forming it not into a traditional couscous but pulling it so thin it looked like tree bark. In this incarnation, it’s used in soups along with traditional pasta dishes. The women served us boar with red
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IMPORTED FOOD, TEA, SWEETS AND BEVERAGES FROM THE BRITISH ISLES
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wine; fennel grilled with saffron, vinegar, then topped with pecorino. Semolina with pork and tomatoes were a perfect fit with glasses of homemade deep red wine. After we lingered over mirto, a popular Sardinian liqueur, we climbed a wooden staircase to a museum of sorts, with antique clothing, dresser sets and baby carriages ringing the room. We left as a part of the family and strolled through their garden, past the lemon and orange trees and fragrant flowers. Our driver then threaded his way through a quintessentially narrow cobblestone street. The Argiolas Winery, owned by the Argiolas family since the early 1900s, has three vineyards in Sardinia. At the one in Serdiana, we sampled several of their products: Turriga, an intense ruby red wine with a rich complex bouquet, and S’elegas, a single vineyard white made with 100% nuragus grapes. This straw yellow wine has a fruity, fragrant and harmonious bouquet, and a full, mellow and slightly bitter finish that is typical of nuragus. They served the wines with Sardinian pecorino, which doesn’t have a bite, but rather a nip that melts oh-so-gently on the palate, prosciutto, and music bread. The end of the tasting brought a wonderfully elegant, mellow and velvety grappa and a lemoncello that paired wonderfully with the pecorino. This was all we needed to get Italy not simply into our mouths but also into our souls. Any trip for me, even one a mere twenty miles from home, is not complete without a visit to at least one supermarket. On the final day of the trip, all of us were desperate for one. The LD Market in Olbia, is a conglomeration of a dollar store, Balducci’s and Sam’s Club. You can buy a wrench, the finest Sardinian olive oil, and baby clothes in the first two aisles. Too rushed for a shopping cart, we bought only what we could carry. For me, that meant three different cheeses, two pounds of malloreddus pasta, two bags of Sardinian salt, three kinds of honey and three kinds of olive oil, one with pepperocino. I can carry a lot. If you find yourself in Italy someday, hop a plane or take a leisurely ferry to Sardinia and feast with some of the warmest people on the planet. ■
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