Anya Fernald - Home Cooked: Essential Recipes for a New Way to Cook

At work at a sheep milk dairy in central Italy.

Every time I visited a dairy and spent a few hours hanging around the aging room with one of these rural masters, they would invariably invite me to join them for the main meal of the day, lunch. We would eat for a few hours and talk further, and I would see a meal unfold in traditional fashion: bread set right on the table, salt pinched out of a bowl (and it was different than the salt I was used to), butter spread thickly, and eggs or a big piece of fresh cheese drenched in oil as a main course.

When I think back, a lot of the food I cook today came directly from what I learned from watching farmers eat simple food in their own homes. For example, I saw an animal being killed for the first timea pig, in a courtyard, with a knifeand learned to make blood sausage and chicharrns that very same day.

I started that year of cheese making as a wannabe gourmet and ended it as a nascent farmer. Id spent a year talking my way into dozens of dairies in languages I did not really speak and had developed a taste for travel and exploration. I was not ready to move back to the United States.

I had met a fairly well-organized research groupthe Consorzio Ricerca Filiera Lattiero-Casearia (CoRFiLaC)while I was visiting Sicily during my year of cheese making, and I was able to secure a work visa and a job offer from them. Shortly after, I moved to Ragusa, a town in southeastern Sicily, and began two years of work with a team that I affectionately nicknamed the Cheese Mob. At the time, the group was primarily responsible for managing denomination of origin labeling for cheese (these are the DOP or AOC labels you see on many quality European products), an authority that was taken from them in later years thanks to shady dealings.

When I worked there, the Cheese Mob was flush with EU cash, primarily earmarked for projects intended to stimulate the regional food economy in this underdeveloped region of Sicily. I led a business development program, and my work consisted of writing a few financial and marketing plans, attempting to implement them, organizing an export program, and eating a lot of epic dinners. In retrospect, the EU contracts must have stipulated that they hire someone who was not from Sicily, as I was definitely woefully underqualified for the job and can think of little reason that I would have landed it otherwise. But I remember feeling that I was in the right place when my first week of work landed me in a Sicilian village that was hosting a competition that involved rolling giant wheels of sheeps milk cheese down the mountainside in a sort of race (they boarded the windows and doors of the homes along the routethose cheeses moved fast).

As time went on, my work environment became increasingly operatic, with tears (regularly) and knives (occasionally) appearing during staff meetings, and my boss making the regular accusation that one or another of his core team were betrayers. It was colorful and frankly pretty stressful for twenty-three-year-old me, but the life I was living made it worth it. I spent the weekends in the countryside, evenings in the piazza, ate granita with brioche for breakfast, and became fluent in Italian. I joined the towns marching band and played my oboe at all of the processions that marched through our town and the neighboring villages. The bands favorite piece to play while marching behind the swaying statue of the Virgin was the theme from