Pete Moody grew up in Delph and also lived in Diggle and Uppermill before going up to Lancaster to study English in 1996.
He taught himself to cook from the backs of cereal boxes, Chinese whispers and Youtube, deciding the long hours, crippling financial difficulty and a snooker-player complexion were preferable to a teaching career. He is currently starting up a business in Shrewsbury.
I AM a qualified shepherd. No lie. Several years ago a heavily bearded Italian, with the approximate title of Head of the Shepherd’s Association of Italy, and a cheese maker to boot, bestowed on me and my lass the Lady Sedgwick this honour.
In return we merely had to hike fifty-odd miles over two days into the Abruzzo mountains with a bunch of sheep, a handful of other tourists, shepherds, Labradors and hangovers.
It is this very time of year that the Tranzumanza – the moving of sheep up to high pasture for summer – takes place. This ancient practice has all but died out in the last century or so as folk have chosen to move into the cities to find work indoors, primarily.
Nunzio Marcelli is stubbornly keeping it alive with this biannual, nearly-festival. It’s a tough walk but by the final hut there’s a powerful camaraderie, a sense of vicarious nostalgia and plenty of red wine.
As we first walked down from his farm at half four in the morning, through banks of wild mint, dill, rosemary and oregano, which the sheep chomp on (‘they marinade themselves,’ someone translated for me, with a wink), we cast our minds back to the previous evening’s meal, a kind of last supper of garlicky, peppery tomatoes and onions, loose-kneaded loaves and blackened lamb chops washed down with the locally extolled and internationally ubiquitous Montepulciano. Hence the hangovers.
The highlight was a sauce somewhere between salsa verde and pesto that was clearly the (unchomped) valley herbs, finely chopped into lots of dark olive oil with capers and then elevated to something incredible with lots of hard pecorino cheese roughly grated into it. Try it.
Try it on lamb, on risotto, on toast or off a spoon. It’s impossible to get the balance wrong. This isn’t fancy food.
The smell of the beast, of the beast’s home and of its history is wrapped up in what amounts to an eventual punch of flavour round the chops.
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