“Since I was a baby,” says Luigi Basile, chef/owner of La Locanda in Voorhees, “I was always fascinated by how they make the food.” Growing up in Montella, near Naples, in the Campania region of southern Italy, Basile used to hang out in his grandmother Maria Vincenza’s kitchen whenever he could and try to make himself useful.
In his family, says Basile, Vincenza, as she was known, and the other women, “don’t show you. You looked. They took a little of this and a little of that and you watched and then you would learn.”
An attentive boy who hung around could suddenly find himself deputized to go down to the cellar, where it was cool, and bring up some olive oil, a jug of wine vinegar, a jar of peppers, some potatoes, a chunk of prosciutto or pancetta. “It was, ‘Do this, get that,’” says Basile, who was only too happy to comply.
There was very little shopping as such in Montella, says Basile, now 45. “In a small town, everybody knows each other. The lady next door gives you eggs because she has chickens, so when you make the dessert, you bring some of it to her for respect. Everything, you get it from the backyard or from somebody, it’s very rare you get it from a store. Somebody gives you, then you give back. It wasn’t like a negotiation. It was a beautiful thing.”
With few work opportunities in southern Italy at the time, Basile apprenticed for nine years at a resort restaurant on Lake Garda, in the north between Venice and Milan. When he was 21 he came to America. One thing he had in his head was his grandmother’s secret recipe for fagiolata, a hearty bean stew. He had pieced it together over the years just by watching.
“Only I know it,” he says. “I keep it a secret.”
At La Locanda, many of his regular customers know the dish, if not the recipe—he sometimes makes it and serves it to them as a side dish on the house. It’s never been on the menu.
Basile bakes the fagiolata in a clay pot in a wood-burning oven, just as his grandmother used to. The baking takes only an hour. What’s time-consuming is cooking the individual ingredients—including sweet red peppers, onions, eggplant and long hot peppers—before they go in the pot. The main ingredient is white cannellini beans, which go in the pot with their cooking water. Then there’s garlic, basil, olive oil, white-wine vinegar, salt and pepper, though in what proportions he isn’t saying. After an hour in the clay pot, the whole thing changes from watery to thick and creamy as the starch flows out of the beans.
The transformation is magical, but Basile says the fagiolata was not his grandmother’s greatest hit—not even close. She was an even better baker than a cook. “Her ricotta cheesecake was wonderful, almost as fluffy as profiterole filling, she beat so much air into it,” he says. “Her rum cake was the best in the world, unbelievable.”
Vincenza did actually try to teach her grandson how to bake, but at this she failed. “Baking is my weakness,” he says. “I’m just not good at it.”