Pasta con i Peperoni Cruschi (Italian Pasta with Crispy Senise Peppers) There is no sauce in this plate of pasta. There is olive oil, a little garlic, a handful of fried breadcrumbs and a dried sweet pepper that has spent two seconds in hot fat and come out brittle enough to shatter between two fingers. That pepper is the whole dish. In Basilicata it is called crusco, which means crisp in dialect, and the name tells you that texture mattered more to the people who coined it t

Seupetta di Cogne (Italian Cogne Rice, Bread and Fontina Soup) Seupetta di Cogne is not a soup in any sense a Neapolitan would recognise. It is rice cooked in broth until it has drunk almost all of it, layered in a buttered dish with slices of bread fried in butter and cubes of Fontina, then baked until the cheese has run through the rice and the surface has gone gold. What arrives at the table is dense enough to hold the shape of a spoon. The name is a diminutive of seupa, t

Pane Cotto alla Lucana (Italian Basilicata Bread Soup) Pane cotto alla lucana is bread that has been cooked, not bread that has been dressed. The stale loaf goes into simmering water already carrying potato starch, sweet onion, tomato and the bitterness of field greens, and stays there until it surrenders. Some pieces melt and thicken the broth. The pieces cut from the crust hold their shape. The order is fixed. Onion and tomato cook slowly in olive oil until sweet and loose.