Gabriele D'Annunzio, who had bought a fishermen's cottage near San Vito Chietino and transformed it into his love nest, called them "colossal crabs". He was fascinated by them and made them protagonists of some memorable pages from his novel The Triumph of Death. Let's talk about Trabocchi, fascinating constructions on wooden stilts, real fishing machines that make the landscape unique Abruzzo coast to which they give the name of Costa dei Trabocchi: “The long and stubborn struggle against the fury and danger of the wave seemed written on the great carcass by means of those knots, those nails, those devices. The machine seemed to have a life of its own, to have the air and effigy of an animated body. The wood exposed for years and years to the sun, to the rain, to the gusts, showed all the fibres, put out all its roughness and all its knuckles, revealed all the resistant peculiarities of its structure, it flaked, it was consumed, it became white as a tibia or shiny as silver or grayish as flint, it acquired a special character and significance, a distinct imprint like that of a person on whom old age and suffering had done their cruel work.
Although very ancient, for some they would even be of Phoenician origin, in reality these unusual fishing constructions receive the their first historical testimony in a manuscript dating back to 1400, found in the abbey of San Giovanni in venere, in Fossacesia, where Father Stefano Tiraboschi, speaking of Pietro Da Morrone (lived in 1.200), upon leaving the abbey, could admire the coast "dotted" by the overflows. But the legends and folk tales, trace them back to the 1600s, when Sephardic families (Spanish Jews), settled in those places, and following a strong tidal waveor, they engineered this system to be able fish without being forced to go out to sea.
The suggestive terraces of the Villa overlook this extraordinary panorama of the stretch of coast that goes from Fossacesia to Ortona Caldora Punta Vallevò restaurant managed by two twin brothers Marco in the kitchen and Luca in charge of the dining room and large cellar. Their adventure is simple and passionate at the same time. In 1995 the two renovated a ruin in Vallevo', a small town in the municipality of Rocca San Giovanni (CH) overlooking the sea flanked, at the time, by the now disused Adriatic railway, and in a few years they made it a point of reference appreciated by gastronomes for a cuisine that, like the trabocchi, has its roots in the consolidated gastronomic tradition of Abruzzo and reaches out towards the flavors of an authentic and genuine sea and that he has his own strength in a simplicity that knows how to enhance the flavors with a happy hand grasping its essence. And whose secret is uniquely in the freshness of the catch: you eat and enjoy what the sea offers by relying on your imaginationto. And simplicity and seasonality also guide the choice of strictly zero km local products. Finally, there is a third secret that has marked the success of this restaurant and it is its family management, the twins assisted by their wife and children manage to make even those who are not strictly part of the family feel at home by involving the patrons in the most authentic for the land of Abruzzo.
To the readers of Mondo Food, chef Marco Caldora offers a Legume and seafood soup, the most tasty and healthy one can wish for at this moment with its load of B vitamins, folic acid, minerals, such as iron, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, magnesium and zinc the former and iron, iodine, zinc, magnesium, potassium and selenium and omega3 the latter.
The chef always has it firmly in mind and hands three ingredients: tradition, seasonality and simplicity (which always says: it is a gift from the Lord).
“The dish – he explains – comes precisely from legumes that are used a lot in winter, from a hot soup that is very welcome in cold temperatures, and from the use of fish that express their maximum flavors in this period. And then a soup without pasta should always be on the menu of a restaurant”.
The recipe for legume and seafood soup
ingredients for 6 people:
500 g Tondino del Tavo dried beans
500 g dried chickpeas
500 g Santo Stefano di Sessanio lentils
500 gr peas
1 white onion. Platter of Fara Figliorum Petri
300 g extra virgin olive oil of the leccino and/or gentile di Chieti variety
100 g of air-dried cherry tomatoes
For the dressing:
600 gr squid
500 gr clams
600 g scampi
600 gr shrimp
1 clove of red garlic from Sulmona
A bunch of chopped parsley
4 slices of diced and toasted bread.
Procedure:
First, soak the dried legumes in cold water overnight.
In a saucepan, make a stock/broth with the heads and shells of the crustaceans.
In a tall saucepan, sauté the chopped onion in the oil and start adding the hardest legumes, i.e. chickpeas and beans, brown for a few minutes and add the fumet and a few ladles of water, bring to the boil and add peas and lentils being careful not to overcook them.
In a pan put the squid cut into julienne strips, after a few minutes the clams. As soon as the clams are open, immediately remove from the heat, shell and filter the sauce.
Add the split tomatoes to the legumes, the filtered sauce and after a few minutes the rest of the fish (including the scampi and shelled prawns which I put raw because they will cook in the soup).
Serve in a deep dish with a drizzle of raw oil, croutons and freshly chopped parsley.
Caldora restaurant in Vallevò
SS16 Adriatica, North, 66020 Vallevò CH
https://goo.gl/maps/aqnPfuSEpZbtcVJ48
