Apulia

Puglia is Italy's flattest region and the one with the most coast: some 800 kilometres between the Adriatic and the Ionian. The Tavoliere is the country's second largest plain and has grown durum wheat since antiquity. The Gargano promontory, once an island, keeps beech forest within sight of the sea. The Murge is a waterless karst plateau; the Valle d'Itria is trulli country; and the Salento peninsula, between two seas, is covered in olive trees, some of them a thousand years old.

Wheat explains the table. Pane di Altamura DOP is made from remilled durum semolina, sourdough and a wood oven, in loaves of at least half a kilo with a crust thick enough to keep it edible for a week: it was the bread farm workers carried out on Monday and finished on Saturday. Orecchiette, the little ear-shaped pasta, are dragged with a round-tipped knife and flipped over a thumb; in the old town of Bari, women still make them in the street. Around that sit taralli, frise (twice-baked rings you wet with water before dressing), Salento puccia, Bari focaccia with cherry tomatoes and olives, and tria, pasta half fried and half boiled, eaten with chickpeas.

Dairy is the second pillar. Burrata was created in Andria in the early twentieth century as a way of using offcuts of mozzarella curd with cream: mozzarella on the outside, a soft, buttery filling inside. Nearby are ricotta forte, fermented until it burns, aged canestrato, and podolico caciocavallo from the Gargano. Meat belongs to the Valle d'Itria, where Martina Franca cures capocollo and Cisternino butchers grill bombette (small rolls of pork neck and cheese) over coals while you wait, in shops that double as restaurants.

The vegetables are the real identity, and they are winter vegetables, not summer ones. Cime di rapa (turnip tops) are cut from November to March, which makes the region's signature pasta a cold-weather dish. Then dried broad beans mashed with wild chicory, wild hyacinth bulbs, cardoncelli mushrooms, and tomatoes strung up and kept on the vine until spring. Seafood tends to be eaten raw (sea urchins, mussels from Taranto's inner lagoon, curled octopus) or baked in a tiella of rice, potato and mussels. The wines are Primitivo di Manduria, Negroamaro and Salice Salentino, Nero di Troia and Castel del Monte.