The caper is a small shrub of the Capparaceae family. The buds of the plant called capers and the fruits called cucunci, in the Salento dialect chiapparine, are consumed.
Read also: History of the Salento dialect
The caper is an integral part of the Salento flora as it thrives in extreme environments, such as aridity, salinity and calcareous soils. We often see them majestically sprouting from old walls, rocks or quarries.
Capers are diuretic, anti-inflammatory and anti-tumor. They help digestion and circulation. They fight tiredness during seasonal changes. And you can also use them for anti-aging masks.
In southern Salento, precisely in Racale, there is an important cultivation with many varieties of capers.
In the kitchen we can use them everywhere to enrich dishes: from salads (especially tomatoes) to pasta (the most famous is olives and capers), up to fish and meat. By flavoring a dish with their strong flavor, capers also allow us to avoid a waste that is important for our health: the excessive use of salt.
The flowers are hermaphroditic, very large, and bloom from May until early autumn. The caper is not a tree, but a simple shrub, and its fruits are not fruits but flowers, that is, still open buds.
The plant, always green in colour, rather small, grows in the form of a bush, between the cracks in walls, between the splits in rocks and in barren earth.
It does not need water, and loves dry, calcareous soils. The original name of the shrub is Capperis spinosa, a plant native to Greece and Asia Minor, typical of the Mediterranean basin.
Claudia Miggian0
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