In short. Puglia is one of the vegetable gardens of Europe, and its cooking is built on what the fields give rather than on what the sea gives. Some of it will be familiar; a good deal of it — lampascioni, cardoncelli, mugnuli — has no English name at all.
The flat land, the mild winters and a great deal of sun mean that something is being harvested here in every month of the year. It is the reason the everyday cooking of the region leans on vegetables, and the reason a Puglia menu in February is not a hardship.
The ones with no English name
These are the ones worth learning, because you will meet them on menus and they will not be translated.
- Lampascioni — a wild bulb, bitter, usually preserved in oil or fried. Not a fruit, not a grape, whatever the name may suggest to an English ear.
- Cardoncelli — the king oyster mushroom of the Murgia, firm enough to grill like meat.
- Mugnuli — a Salento brassica, somewhere between broccoli and turnip tops.
- Cime di rapa — turnip tops, the other half of the region’s most famous plate of pasta.
Lampascioni are not raspberries. The dialect names — pampasciuni, lampagioni — travel badly, and translation engines make the same mistake with some regularity. It is a wild bulb of the Muscari family, dug out of the ground.
The ones you already know, done differently
Artichokes, aubergines, peppers, tomatoes, broad beans, chicory. What changes is not the vegetable but what happens to it: most of the year’s crop is not eaten fresh but preserved — under oil, dried in the sun, or turned into passata in a single day at the end of August.
One curiosity worth its own page: the carrot of Polignano, which grows in sand a few metres from the sea and comes up purple, yellow and white.
And the fruit
Figs above all — fresh in August, then dried, then turned into a syrup that stands in for sugar in half the traditional sweets. Then grapes, almonds, prickly pears, and the citrus of the Gargano.
For what to do with all of it, the vegetable recipes are the place to go. This page sits under Apulian food and produce.
The vegetables described here, preserved the way they have always been preserved: sundried vegetables and vegetables in oil from our shop.
