Focaccia ‘mbrigliata with anchovies and raisins. Collections of focaccias, one of my passions in the kitchen; as I have written before I dream of having a place of my own to continuously bake bread and focaccias, accompanied by rustic, traditional cooking.

This is how I have fun preparing at home what I love, then sharing the result with the family.

A thin sheet, spring onions (cipollotti or sponsali as they are called between Puglia and Basilicata); I am Calabrian, for me they are cipollotti or cipuji, sautéed with their green tops, the raisins dried in the sun becoming a nice brown color, the capers that on every wall show their presence with sumptuous blossoms.

Anchovies could certainly not be missing, a popular product all along the Italian coast.

While the bread was baking in the wood oven, the focaccia in its corner did not take up space and kept company with the first tastings.

The table laid out awaiting good things.

“Let’s start from the day I learned to make this focaccia. The dough, rolled with the rolling pin, had become a thin veil, so thin that the sun almost shone through it. Grandma had gathered the first spring onions in the garden and chopped them into pieces with their whole green tops, because wasting was a sin and that way everything was used.
Then capers packed in salt and anchovies preserved in tins were added, the kind our aunt would occasionally bring us from the sea; she had moved away to continue her studies, while we had remained up in the Serre, among chestnut and olive trees. We used exactly those tins to collect the olives and then count them, as a sort of measure.”

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