Every Friday morning when I am home I go to Locorotondo market. Usually I go on my old motorbike with a plastic crate bungeed to the pillion behind my big topbox. This means I can park close to the action while having lots of space to carry my shopping. At the core of the market are the fruit and vegetable stalls, which are fringed with refrigerated vans selling fresh meat, fish, cheese and charcuterie. There are also a few specialists offering rice, pulses, flour, olives and spices. On a couple of streets which run from the market to the town centre there are vendors of clothes, shoes and general tat. One area is devoted to second hand clothes where you have to jostle with big-boned local women to find a bargain.
About half the female population of our area go to market, plus a few blokes and a few tourists. I guess that, like me, most of the tourists were brought up in a supermarket culture and that many find the market a frustrating experience – few of the stallholders speak any English and they are reluctant to sell fruit and vegetables in units of less than a kilo. Also, while a few things will be displayed in abundance, it will be almost impossible to find everything you want if you have a shopping list and a fixed idea of what to buy.
It took me two or three years of living here to learn how to use the market. This is because in order to shop successfully there you need to be able to buy what is good, then go home and work out how to cook it, rather than start with a set of recipes and then go out and buy the ingredients. This in turn requires some knowledge of the local seasons for fruit and vegetables, because it’s the stuff in season locally which will be fresh, cheap and abundant. It also requires a reasonable vocabulary of cooking techniques, so that you can serve up the same vegetable week after week in different ways.
This week early local clementines made their first appearance, bright green with flecks of orange at this stage of the year, piled in great heaps with their leaves on, all shiny and dew-covered. They taste bitter-sweet and fresh and carry with them the promise of still sweeter fruit to come. I bought a kilo and proved to myself that dogs do have a long memory. As I began to peel one at home I found our dog Milly sitting expectantly at my feet, waiting for a segment, although it is several months since the last season ended. I hand her a slice which she wolfed down, before resuming her alert posture, quietly salivating.
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