Pietro Demaio is a master preserver of both food and tradition. The retired GP of 40-plus years was born in Melbourne as the youngest of six children, but the story of his family begins in Varapodio, a small village in Calabria in Italy’s south.
It was 1938 and Demaio’s father left Varapodio for Victoria, where he completed his internment period in Warbuton before farming in Swan Hill. The plan was to work in Australia for a few years before returning to his wife and four children, as was customary of many Italian families of the era. However, the war broke out and Demaio’s father became separated from his family for a decade with little communication between them.
Pietro Demaio.
(Photo: Chris Middleton)In 1948, the family was reunited in Swan Hill. By this time, Demaio’s father had bought a farm and the family quickly got to work. A year later, the sixth family member was born: Pietro Demaio fondly describes his father as someone who “always looked beyond the obvious and was always thinking ahead”. This curiosity led his father to take a punt on
a business idea. He moved the family to Melbourne, Malvern to be exact, and opened a fruit shop.
“Most Italians stayed in Carlton, Kensington and Moonee Ponds as a community and at that stage we were probably the only Italians in Malvern,” remembers Demaio. Despite this, the family made their mark on Glenferrie Road and ran a successful greengrocer.
Growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, Demaio recalls “it was very difficult to get anything we now call traditional Italian food”. Pretty much if you were Italian and wanted the taste of the motherland, you had to make it yourself. This was a time where olive oil wasn’t found in aisle nine at your local supermarket but the pharmacist. This need to be self-sufficient transformed backyards into veggie patches and garages into cellars, as newly arrived Italians would preserve anything from eggplant, olives and salami and make passata and wine.
“As time went on, I had a circle of Italian friends and we were always bemoaning the fact that mum makes the best pasta fagioli or someone makes the best salami or someone makes the best capocollo, but when you ask how they do it, no one had any idea,’ he says. Demaio wanted to crack this mystery and started shadowing his parents’ generation of Italians who arrived in Australia in the 1940s and 1950s.
He watched relatives, friends, and friends of friends preserve vegetables, fish, meat and more. Sometimes the results were magnificent, other times less so.
“I thought there has to be a science behind this, then it became obvious to me that what we’re trying to do here is reproduce what happened in Italy but we don’t understand it, the conditions are different.”
Tomatoes for passata.
(Photo: Chris Middleton)In 1986, Demaio, his wife and three young sons packed their bags and moved to a little town just south of Florence for six months. “My dilemma was I knew what it was to be
a Calabrese because that’s what I was brought up as but I had no concept of how to be an Italian because I had never lived in Italy. Obviously Italy had moved on significantly since 1938 the year my father left,” explains Demaio.
On the trip, he also visited his parents’ village Varapodio and experienced pure serendipity when he went to pay for a coffee. “I’d only been in the village for two hours and the owner tells me it’s been paid for,” he says.
“Then this older gentleman asks if I’m the son of Pepe Maio and tells me he remembers my father used to give him bread as a child before he went to Australia and he wants to buy me a cup of coffee. I felt this instant belonging.”
While in Italy, Demaio was determined to find a cookbook that finally unpacked the art of Italian preserving. “I looked everywhere and no one had one, everyone always had a recipe but not a book with them all together.”
Demaio solved his own problem. He started collecting the recipes himself from Italians he met or was introduced to along the way. What he learned was not only traditional preserving techniques but the processes and conditions needed to perfect olives, salami, wine, passata, tuna and more.
Preserving artichokes.
(Photo: Chris Middleton)Demaio continued collecting recipes both in Melbourne and in Italy over a few decades. By 2008, he had a book’s worth of recipes and preserving knowledge. The original plan was to print 200 copies and give the book to friends and family.
“The whole concept of food and wine is something that you share, particularly for Calabrese, if you go back to the 1930s sharing food is sharing life.”
A bookshop owner then suggested Demaio print some more and start selling them. “I took five to the bookshop, two hours later I got a call that they had sold.” In the end, he sold more than 48,000 copies of his passion project-turned-book Preserving the Italian Way, before Plum republished it in 2021 with new photography by Chris Middleton.
“I always liked the double entendre of the book, where you preserve tradition while making preserves.”
Downsizing from his family home to an apartment with his wife, you’ll find Demaio preserving whatever’s in season from tomatoes, tuna, sardines, eggplant and more.
Demaio preserves whatever’s in season.
(Photo: Chris Middleton)“It’s almost as if nature knows what goes with what and provides you with it, she’s beautiful.” In summer it’s passata season with tomatoes and basil, whereas in winter it’s salami time with the cooler temperature and dried herbs, fennel seeds and chilli.
Demaio is a firm believer that anyone can preserve, no matter the size of your kitchen, and one of the best places to start is with olives.
“It’s really simple, make a brine with 100gm salt and 1 litre of water and bring it to an almost boil. Fill a jar with black or green olives, a clove of garlic, some oregano and fennel seeds, then pour the brine over, seal the jar and leave for two months in the pantry.”
The other trick to preserving? “When it comes down to it, you can preserve basically anything with just four things: sun, salt, olive oil and vinegar.”
If you look in your pantry and poke your head out the window, you probably have all four waiting for you right now.
Buy Preserving the Italian Way here.
This story appears in the April 2022 issue of Gourmet Traveller, which is on sale now. Subscribe to GT here.
