Today I bought a kilo of peas from the local farm ladies in Camucia and brought them home. I thought about risotto, I thought about pea soup, I thought about the osso buco I’d also bought and how good that would be with fresh peas on the side. I thought about all of that and then I remembered Nika Hazelton.

Nika died many years ago but she was a good friend despite her rigorously conservative politics. She was also a fine food writer with many books to her credit, including The Regional Italian Kitchen, published back in 1978 and now almost lost to cookbook history. Unlikely as it sounds she also wrote a food column for William F. Buckley’s right-wing rag National Review. Nika and I quarreled over politics but agreed about food and especially the wonderful food of Italy where Nika was born and spent many years of her adult life in a house near Cortona.

But why do peas remind me of Nika? One story of hers that I remember with particular glee was one she wrote about a dinner party at which she served nothing but asparagus. “One can never have too much asparagus,” she said with the same dogmatic conviction that she had brought to Buckley’s 1965 run for mayor of New York. And so, she served asparagus soup, followed by asparagus risotto, followed by a massive pile of asparagus—there must have been six or eight pounds of the green stalks piled on a big tray on the sideboard of her Riverside Drive apartment.

And so I came to peas. Why not just have peas, plain peas, for dinner? I thought as I looked at the mound of green pods. And I did. I cooked them in a manner I’ve always called piselli alla romana, since I first had them like this when I lived in Rome many years ago—and when the peas we bought in the Piazza della Pace market had been harvested, like the peas I bought in Cortona yesterday, that very morning before the dew had quite dried, and brought to market by the gardener herself. Those are the very best kind of peas and there really isn’t much point in eating any other kind. You must grow them yourself or buy directly from the person who grew them. Peas in a supermarket produce bin are likely to have been harvested many days, if not weeks, ago, and their sweetness will have converted to unappetizing starch.

Here’s how I cooked them, and you can call it alla romana if you wish though I should note that peas are prepared like this all over Italy. For 2 pounds of peas in their pods, you will need 3 tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil, a smallish yellow onion chopped fine, a slice of prosciutto (or pancetta or guanciale—but not too much fat on the slice) chopped fine to make a couple of tablespoons, and the usual salt, pepper, and if you wish, a tablespoon of finely minced mint leaves to add at the very end.

First of course you have to shuck the peas, give them a quick rinse, and set them aside.

Put the oil, the chopped onion and the prosciutto in a medium saucepan and set over medium-low heat. Cook until the onion bits are starting to soften and the prosciutto is giving off its fat. Then stir in all the peas and give them a good turn or two to make sure they are well coated with the fat, and the onion and pork bits are distributed throughout. Now add a quarter-cup or so of hot water, a good pinch of salt, and several turns of black pepper. Bring to a simmer over low heat, cover tightly and cook for about 15 or 20 minutes, until the peas are tender. You might have to add a bit more water from time to time but the peas should never be swimming, just sort of lounging in their fatty, salty, delicious liquid.

When the peas are done, turn them out in a bowl and garnish with the minced mint if you wish. Serve immediately while they’re still hot.

Reader, I ate every one!

Fave, aka fava beans, aka broad beans, are what’s most prominent on Tuscan tables at the moment, whether eaten raw–piled on a plate, shucked at the moment, and served with soft, young, fresh pecorino cheese (cacio e bacelli); or braised with prosciutto and olive oil; or steamed till tender and tossed with oil and pepper; or even the whole pods sauteed, a terrific way to handle these historic beans. Our beans are small and tender, no peeling required. In fact, my neighbors look upon the very idea with horror. With vegetables this good, simplest is best.

Artichokes: We get four, sometimes even five, varieties, most without the pesky central thorny bits that make American artichokes such a chore to prepare. In the market recently: romaneschi (globe artichokes), violetti (the name says it all), and dark purple moretti. At Villa Campestri, Chef Luigi broke away the tough outer brackets of the violetti, cut off the tip ends, then rapidly slivered the whole compact thing lengthwise and used the shards as the basis for an opulent risotto. Young artichokes are also good fried—especially with rabbit. Just dipped in flour and dropped in boiling oil—extra-virgin of course—for crispy outsides and tender within.

Asparagus: My father loved the first asparagus that came up in his garden and often cut a few fresh spears for breakfast. Served on crisp toast with a dribble of olive oil, it makes a great start to the day. In Tuscany right now, lucky people are finding wild asparagus in the woods and fields. It’s cooked just like the garden vegetable but has a deeper, darker flavor with pleasantly bitter overtones. It too makes a great risotto but also adds mystery to a simple frittata.

Agretti: The most mysterious vegetable, also known as barba del frate, the friar’s beard, it’s a definition of spring when this appears in markets in Tuscany and all over Central Italy, looking from a distance like a fat bunch of chives. You can eat agretti raw, in salads, but most people hereabouts steam it till tender (not more than 6 or 8 minutes), then dress very simply with oil, salt, pepper, and a spritz of aceto balsamico or lemon juice. The muddy roots are a bitch to clean but no more so than cleaning muddy spinach. Ad for the taste? A little salty (it grows best in somewhat salty soil and is botanically known as Salsola soda), a little astringent (like spinach, it seems to be loaded with iron), fresh and green and delicious.

It’s almost unknown in America but Bill Tidball grows it in Virginia and Megan Chase has had it in her Maine garden—both with great success. What’s available in New York City Greenmarkets, Chef Sara tells me, is often overgrown and tough and not worth bothering with, probably because farmers are reluctant to cut it when it’s appropriately small and tender. But it’s worth encouraging good farmers to pay more attention to this delicious addition to our vegetable  array.

So Easter was a wet one. I slogged along the muddy path to the Antolinis to share the Easter feast. Theirs was unusual compared to years past. We had the farm-made salumi and prosciutto and the crostini neri (crostini with a chicken liver paté on top) that are part of every feast in this valley, but then, instead of the typical pasta al forno or lasagna, Maura served crespelle, an Italian version of crepes, piled like sheets of pasta over a spinach-ricotta filling and dressed with a cheesy besciamella.

You can’t have Easter without lamb, of course, and it was delicious, roasted in the wood-burning oven, but the surprise factor was the bistecca alla griglia, cooked right in the fireplace and perfectly done, rare in the middle, crisp and brown on the outsides.

Torta della nonna might have been the dessert in days of yore but Maura served a sumptuous tiramisu instead–she makes it in the classic Venetian manner, with mascarpone and coffee and lots of bitter cocoa powder, but it always seems odd to me to find this delectable sweet in a Tuscan farmhouse. I first had tiramisu back in the early 1980s at a restaurant in the Venetian lagoon where it was billed as “il famoso tiramisu del’isola di Burano.” I’d never heard of it but it enchanted me and I wrote about it in Cuisine, a great food magazine edited brilliantly by Pat Brown and Anne Mendelson. The magazine bit the dust shortly after, in a power play with Conde Nast, but the recipe went on to greater and greater heights. Now you find it all over America and even in a Tuscan farmhouse where, we agreed, Maura and I, it bears a relationship to the Tuscan stalwart zuppa inglese–due cugini, we said, two cousins.

I didn’t take a picture because you don’t take pictures at your neighbor’s table, but believe me it was a rich meal.

Lampascioni are always cooked, sometimes pickled, but never raw. They are considered a garnish par excellence of the favorite Pugliese dish, fave e cicoria, a mixture of pureed dried fava beans and steamed wild chicory greens. Along with the sweetness of the fave and the sharpness of the chicory, there’s a wonderfully bitter, pungent flavor from the lampascioni.

Bitterness is one of those tastes that it’s sometimes hard to get our palates around but it’s a prized flavor throughout traditional regions of the Mediterranean–I like to think it reflects the Mediterranean appreciation for the sweet bitterness, the bitter sweetness, of life itself. You can’t have one without the other.

Greeks too like these bulbs and call them voulvi. It’s just one of the many correspondences I’ve found between Greek and Southern Italian (especially Pugliese) cooking, doubtless a relic of the long centuries when Greece was dominant in southern Italy. I’ve also been told of lampascioni sold in Provençal markets although I’ve never actually seen it myself.

I bought about 3/4 kilo (1 1/2 pounds roughly) of these in the market in Andria recently and brought them home to Tuscany to cook them. I imagine if you can find tassel or grape hyacinths in an uncontaminated field you could harvest them and cook them too. The directions are dead simple: Cut off the tops and bottoms and peel the tough, often muddy outside skin, just as you would with an onion. Bring a mixture of 2:1 water and vinegar to a simmer and add the cleaned lampascioni. Let them simmer away, covered, for 30 to 40 minutes or until the bulbs are tender. Then drain them in a colander and return them to the saucepan, adding about half a cup of olive oil, a chopped red onion, a minced clove of garlic, and a handful of chopped parsley. Cook all this together, stirring it up, until the bulbs are very tender. Serve the lampascioni immediately.

They’re great with lamb or roast pork, not so interesting with chicken or beef. Or squash them with a fork and serve on top of crostini of toasted bread as an appetizer.

Actually, markets are getting slimmer on the ground in northern Italy with ever greater spaces devoted to cheap plastic housewares, mostly made in China, and cheap clothing, ditto. Food stalls take up less and less space. I’ve watched the Cortona market over the years dwindle to a mere handful of fruit and vegetable dealers, among whom I count my beloved Signora Benigni, source of many delights from her own gardens. Big cities–Florence, Venice, Milano, and of course Rome–still count some fabulous daily markets but for the small weekly markets that once were such a feature of each little town, you have to head south and count on your luck.

Andria, in northern Puglia, still boasts a daily covered market along with all the little stalls that pop up around it, some of them permanent fixtures. This is where you find what the locals like to eat.
Like these cardoncelli mushrooms, supposedly collected from the fields of the Murgia, the rolling upland west of Bari, though I suspect these may have been cultivated. Still, they’re grubby enough with soil to be foraged in the wild.

Artichokes: Puglia is famous for artichokes and now is the season for them. They’re shipped all over Italy, probably all over Europe.

And cima di rape, a close relative of what we call broccoli rabe or rapini,very spicy greens, full of goodness and perfect for making that classic Pugliese dish, orecchiette alla barese, the “little ears” of pasta cooked right along with the greens so they absorb lots of the delicious flavors.

And finally, unmistakably, lampascione, the bulbs of tassel hyacinth, and these are most definitely foraged from the green hills of the Murgia. This basket was perched at the entrance to the market and the man who sold me a kilo swore he had harvested them himself. (Sceptics often claim lampascione all come from Morocco these days but I have faith in my source.) These are, like their Greek cousins voulvi, very bitter; steamed until tender, then squashed in plenty of hot olive oil, they’re usually eaten just with bread to sop up the juices–an excellent example of that old Mediterranean lust for bitter flavors, as if all of life’s sweet bitterness (bitter sweetness) were captured in a single bulb.