This recipe has something special. Reading the ingredients, I almost imagined the Civita farmer returning home after a hard day's work in the fields, bringing with him the good things the countryside had generously provided: onions, chili peppers, and cherry tomatoes. In the chicken coop, the hens had laid precious eggs, enough to feed and nourish an entire family. So the skilled cooks of the time would go and cook all these ingredients together, serving aromas, flavors, and nutrients at the table.
These are the ingredients for the ancient Civitan recipe:
2 liters of water
1 kg of onions with the whole tail
Eggs (1 or 2 per person)
Extra virgin olive oil
Sale
Chilli
Fresh cherry tomatoes
Stale bread
Pecorino
At the time, it was common to cook dishes in terracotta pots, which seemed to enhance the aromas and flavors with a different intensity and richness. They would add oil, sliced onions, and chili pepper to the pot and sauté for a few minutes. Then, they would add the fresh cherry tomatoes and water, season with salt, and continue cooking over medium heat. Before adding the water to the terracotta pot, it was heated separately to a boil to avoid temperature changes when added to the sauce. Terracotta pots were indeed a precious commodity at the time and were treated with care to avoid damage.
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- The onion or the scattered eggs
Going back in time, when gas stoves hadn't yet arrived in Civitani homes, it's possible to imagine women busy mixing ingredients over a fireplace or brazier, careful to ensure nothing burned. The aroma of the culinary preparation would then have mingled with the smell of crackling wood in the fireplace, creating an alchemy that today is probably technically impossible for digital natives to explain. The onion and cherry tomato sauce was cooked for at least half an hour, allowing much of the added water to evaporate. In the last five minutes of cooking, the eggs were cracked and added to the mixture, allowing them to sink into the sauce. Once the eggs were hard-boiled, the crock was removed from the heat and left to cool. The embers from the fireplace were also used to toast a few slices of homemade bread. The egg and sauce was thus served with bread and a generous sprinkling of pecorino cheese. At the table, people were satisfied with very little, and at the time, they were completely unaware of the fact that that little, in reality, was incredibly a lot!!
