Bread and the Summer Sea
There is a moment, on a beach in Puglia, when you realise that the woman at the next umbrella is dipping her lunch in the Adriatic. She has walked down to the waterline holding what appears to be a fossilised bagel, crouched, submerged it briefly in the sea, shaken it off, and carried it back up the sand, where she is now piling chopped tomatoes onto it with the unhurried authority of someone doing exactly what her grandmother did. The fossilised bagel is a frisella , and what she is doing is not eccentricity. It is the correct procedure. The frisella is a ring of durum-wheat bread that has been baked, sliced through its equator, and baked again until it is completely dry — hard enough to survive weeks in a cloth bag, hard enough that biting into one unprepared would be an expensive mistake. To eat it, you wet it. The traditional method, for fishermen and farm labourers along the Puglian coast, was seawater: a few seconds' dip, which softened the bread and salted it in one gest...
