Dear friends,
when I think of food and Italy, it is often not the fancy piatti with elaborate sauces and layers and preparation that I think of but rather the wild things I collected and ate as a child.
Some came right off the bush into my mouth without any preparation at all or even washing like the black berries in their season, the tiny wild strawberries, the loquat's (nespole), the almost sickly sweet fruit of the little strawberry trees, fennel growing along the roadside, pencil thin wild asparagus, mint, rose mary, sage, oregano, thyme, prickly pears...there was a universe to be found in the woods and fields which was free for the taking...
King of the wild food of course were the Tartufi bianchi, the Porcini mushrooms, the Ordinali and the Generali...my God, when I tasted these wild mushrooms and truffles I knew that I had never tasted anything that good before and I never wanted to eat a cultivated champignon mushroom ever again...they were quite tasteless by comparison...I had no idea that a mushroom could taste so good...no wonder people literally sometimes die for them in cases of mistaken identity...
Another category all to itself were the pignoli...I would literally spend hours climbing up the umbrella pines of Tuscany as a boy to knock down the big ripe open pine cones and then once back down on the ground to knock all the pine nuts out of them and then on to cracking the shells off between two flat rocks...it sounds labor intensive I know but they tasted oh so good and fresher than the expensive ones bought in a store...I just remembered that years later when I lived in Tehran,every afternoon like clock work, a flock of Indian ring neck parrots would descend on the pine tree next to my patio on the third floor and with a mighty rucus of squawking, pull the pine nuts out of the cones and shell and eat them with great gusto. So their wonderful flavor was also appreciated by parrots,the most anthropomorphic of all the bird family in my opinion.
Moving up the food chain to protein free for the taking, I used to sift the wet sand in the shallow sand bars of the Tirrenian Sea for little tiny butterfly clams which came in many shades of pastel from yellow to green to blue and every shade between and as my friend Luciano use to say: "If God intended us to be vegetarian, then why do butterfly clams taste so very good?"
And if you went to le scoglie like around Antignano, you could collect cozze or mussels which I don't have to tell you how good they taste steamed with a little lemon butter. Another past time we had as youths was to take a nail and pound it backwards into the end of a broom handle and then go down to the rocks of the break waters at Marina Di Pisa and literally spear and impale crabs which we would take home and grill in the back yard.
Of course we spent many a Saturday there fishing with cane poles and bobbers for rock fish which were always exciting to catch what with all their fins and spines splayed for a fight when you hauled them up out of the water and their bulging bug eyes and gasping mouths like little black dragons and they fried up really well too along with the common eels we caught as well, with barbless hooks or you could never get the hooks out again without major surgery because they swallowed them whole along with the bait. On rare occasion we would catch shiny silver fish which looked like small white fish and that was always the high point of the day...
Now that I think of it we used to find female sea urchins full of roe during certain times of the year and break them open and suck out the eggs which tasted so good fresh from the sea like that that you would never want to eat that semi dried up kind you find in sushi restaurants again...
We would fish for calamari at night by trolling from piers with no hook but rather a little plastic glow in the dark moplike lure from the sporting goods store which the squid would grab onto and refuse to let go til we reeled them in.
I also did a lot of snorkeling and became quite adept at finding octopuses. Where the bottom was sand, there was always an accute shortage of housing for octopi and so any time there was a bucket lying on the bottom, it was almost a sure bet that it had a tenant. Often they would build a little front fence of white clam shells around the outside of the mouth of the bucket. One time when I dove down and looked in, the octopus was holding a clam shell in one of its arms and waving it back and forth like a flag of surrender...I should have let it go but they taste so darn good that I could never resist even though it took a lot of pounding on the rocks to tenderize them. On rare occasions we would catch spiny lobsters in little underwater grottos...and for them also I showed no mercy...they would make me feel hungry just looking at them...like when I see a salmon in an aquarium...and dog fish make me hungry too
The best thing about eating sharks is that they have no bones...I wonder where people got the idea that sharks eat people when it is by far and away, the other way around...
I know that there were wild hares, wild boar, pheasants and wild ducks and other game in the fields, marshes and forests but I never got into hunting, I was a little too young for it before I left in 1966 and had lost interest in it by the time I returned in the 1970's...
Anyway speaking of hunting, I think Italy has more hunters per square foot than any other place on earth...it literally wasn't safe to be in the woods during hunting season...one time I was up in a tree bird watching and making bird calls when I heard a shot gun go off and a few moments later it was literally raining bird shot on the leaves all around me...that was the last time I made any bird calls up in trees...
Anyway, the Italy of my childhood was rich in wild food if you knew when and where to look for it and nothing tastes better.
cheers,
Brian H. Appleton
www.zirzameen.com 
Where The Wild Things Are 
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