La Minestra

La Cucina Povera- The Food of the Poor. It was about to be a huge fad, and then people realized they didn’t want to pay ten bucks for bread soup. Surprise.

I’m making soup. I’m making Minestra di Pasta e Fagioli. This is a soup often known in the US as “Pasta Fazool,” because of the Neapolitan word for bean: fazzulo. Whatever you call it, soup, pasta and beans are cooked together and separately throughout Italy in many preparations. There are many renditions of this soup in American restaurants and they largely suck, frankly, because they take a french or franco-american approach to an intrinsically Italian soup. They take beans and boil them with chicken stock, add a can of tomatoes and a bag of frozen vegetables. It’s a simmer-and-stir. Many delicate french soups are made this way (minus the frozen vegetables) and it’s a perfectly fine technique- but not for Italian soups.

Italian soups have 2 components  that will set them apart: pestata and pandade. Like everything in Italian, there are many different words that mean the same thing, but here’s what they mean: Pestata (or trito or mirpazza) is a paste of aromatic vegetables and fat- usually pork fat like back fat or salt pork, but could also be lard or olive oil. Garlic, onions, carrots, celery, parsely, rosemary- whatever is appropriate to the recipe (or your mood) are chopped together until very fine, and then the fat is added and chopped in as well (or you can do what I do- use a food processor). This is one of the traditional uses of the mezzaluna you got for christmas five years ago and lost in the back of the pantry. The paste is then fried separately and added to the soup once it’s lightly toasted.

Then there is the panade (or rinforzo) or thickener. In many recipes with beans, which have a natural affinity for them, potatoes are cooked along with the legumes until they’re cooked enough to be mashed, either in the soup pot, or taken out and mashed to a finer consistency and added back in. Bread can act in this role as well, and grains like semolina. Rice is generally not used in this way, since its consistency, like pasta’s, is considered sacred and is added only at the last moment to cook to its optimum point. The point is, unlike a roux or cornstarch, these add body and flavor, not merely viscosity.

And in the spirit of soup’s economy, after dinner which included a potato and radicchio salad, there was a little left, and into the soup that went as well.

I could hear my grandmother calling me a greaseball.

Rite of Spring

Well, crap, I lived. Thanks to everybody who came for Easter, from as far away as Simi Valley… sheesh!

Having its roots in a pagan festival, Easter brings to mind the cycle of life for me. There’s still a nip in the air, but here we are, eating peas. There are some dead leaves still visible in the mulch, but there’s enough sun to get artichokes. It’s a time of transition and renewal, much more than New Year’s, which- especially in the Northeast- is a time where gray and cold transitions into grayer and colder. Some lentils and pork don’t quite signify the revolution that a change in weather and new life do.

It’s easy to be philosophical when you spend a lot of time in the garden. To take dirt and some alien seeds and eggshells and mere effort, then to yield- with the forbearance of time- something alive that will perfume the sights and smells and energy of your home, and eventually nourish your body; this is a miracle. It’s especially dramatic, of course to live in California, which is rife with biology in a way that I can’t imagine any other state being. The shifts in temperature, not only from time of year, but from elevation, landform and ocean, along with an abundance of conserved areas not far from- and often within- populated areas make for a surrounding of life unlike any I’ve seen in this country.

artichoke in flower

So, all that said, I still have a mountain of peas to deal with, and- out of nowhere- the strangest craving for meatballs. I haven’t historically loved meatballs, but I figure there has to be a way for me to like something that is made of ingredients that I like. My mother’s recipe reads not unlike a meatloaf recipe, with beef, breadcrumbs, eggs, parsley (always dried, which smells of grass clippings to me and may well be), romano cheese… and that’s about all I can think of. So I said to myself, what could be different?

This brings me to one of the cookbooks in the Reference Section. These are seminal volumes that we go back to for answers, not necessarily for new inspiration (unless we’re feeling retro/classical). Among these are, of course, The Iliad and The Odyssey, that is to say *Mastering the Art of French Cooking*, volumes 1 and 2; [*Larousse Gastronomique*]( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larousse_Gastronomique); its Italian sister [*Il Cucchiaio d’Argento*](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_cucchiaio_d%27argento); *The Joy of Cooking*; and baking treatises, like *The Cake Bible* and *The King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion*. These are all stately final-authority type tomes, but there are some more modest books in the category, too. One of them is Marcella Hazan’s *Classic Italian Cooking*, a book truly ahead of its time, and while it makes no claim to be an exhaustive study of the cuisine, it is a collection of historically sound, well-tested recipes designed to capture the interest of an American audience. *The Lutece Cookbook* is a similar study of the evolution of haute cuisine in America’s restaurants. These books have something over the encyclopedias that precede them: they give us a solid answer without exhausting us with information. Case in point, Marcella’s *Classic Italian Cooking* > index > meatballs > answer. The answer? Milk soaked in bread in place of the breadcrumbs. I should have known this, having made many forcemeats exactly the same way, but hey.

So, peas and meatballs. But not together- not for me, anyway, although my old buddy Marianna puts peas in damn near everything. I used to think this was *a palermitana* (Palermo-style) but I later learned this was *a Marianna*, in an effort to get her kids to eat something green. I know I talk about Sicilian food a lot, and I love food from all over the country, but I have a special fondness for Northeastern Italy. Friuli, Alto Adige and Veneto- not to mention Istria and the Slovenian provinces that are no longer part of Italy politically- are regions that straddle cultures, truly. Sicily’s food culture is a fascinating sum of its parts, but the Germanic and Italianate influences in the Northeast- although coherent- are distinct.

And the Venetians love their rice. They love rice so much that it would be impossible to say that any way of cooking rice is the “Venetian style” since there are about 30 ways they cook rice that are all more or less “standard.” They even have different styles of *risotto*. In springtime, when the peas first arrive, people go nuts with the classic *risi e bisi*, rice and peas. Not exactly a minestra, but decidedly not a risotto, it’s a thick soup of rice, peas, onions, stock and just a taste of pancetta (the salt of cured pork always makes peas taste sweeter). How thick? I describe it like this: you want it to be like a cooking risotto that you’ve just added liquid to, but it has yet to be absorbed.

This is one of those dishes that every *Mamma* in Veneto will tell you *definitively* that *this* is how much pancetta is right and *this* amount of liquid. However you make it, you can hardly go wrong. It’s a light but flavorful *primo* that follows the grows-together-goes-together truism: try serving it with grated piave and a young Soave (not Rico).

And really, why not follow this with a rich meatball in a slightly acid tomato sauce? With a little frisee salad, it’s dinner.

Listening: “The Preacher” Jimmy Smith

Here Comes Peter Cottontail, Again

Well, [last year, I fantasized about Easter dinner](http://omnivorousfish.com/node/133). This year, **I’m doing it**. I made 120 ravioli and did mise* for 3 easter pies plus bread tomorrow. 15 ladies and gentlemen are coming to eat all this stuff sunday, and I am **psyched**. If only I had had time for landscaping. Living in an apartment, you forget that there even is an outside to your home. It’s an amorphous concept, like Detroit.

Well, here’s the menu, if you can’t wait to find out. It’s a mixture of Neapolitan, Sicilian and Southern Californian influences, with nods to tradition, availability and pragmatism. And no, unfortunately, I did not find a goat.

*Pizza Chena* Easter “Stuffed” Pie in the style of Acqua Bella, Campania: A rich yeast dough with butter and eggs, filled with basket cheese, ham, pecorino romano and herbs.

*Torta di Zucchini* Another Easter Pie, this time Filo filled with a custard holding together Salame Napoletano, zucchini and spring onions.

*Pane Pasquali* A festive yellow bread dough braided with whole eggs, covered with poppy seeds and baked.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Ravioli of Fava Beans with tuma cheese, sauced with butter, olive oil and marjoram, with caciocavallo cheese

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Lamb Leg *Cacio e Uova*: Braised Lamb with onions and white wine with an enriched sauce of eggs, lemon and cheese

Braised artichokes
Roasted potatoes with rosemary

Arugula Salad with Lemon

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

*Pastiera Napoletana* Easter grain pie

*Risu Niuro* Sicilian Black Easter Risotto (with cocoa, not squid ink, you knucklehead)

So, as you can see, I have to get back to work. I hope you all have a *great* holiday.

Listening: NPR, [Fresh Air](http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=13)

Pascha (Pasqua) [Easter]

Well, Easter is almost here, and for the first time in about ten years, I have off. And we’re getting into it.

I’m only partly Sicilian by extraction, although most of my cultural exposure was with Sicilians, but a lot of my family traditions are *cilentano*, that is to say from Campania, which is to say Naples, the capital of Campania. That means *pastiera*, or grain pie, a sweet pie made of hulled wheat berries. It also means *pizza chena*, or *pizza piena*, which means stuffed pie (the former the Neapolitan word, the latter Italian), a yeast-raisd dough stuffed with any combination of salumi, cheeses, herbs and boiled eggs. The “ham pie” of my childhod is a simple animal made of ham, hardboiled eggs, fresh ricotta (basket cheese) and parsley.

Strangely, we never had lamb on Easter, but then again we never had lamb ever because my mother doesn’t like it. In fact, the first time I had it, it was in a restaurant when I was 12 or 13, and I ordered it mainly because I knew my mother didn’t like it. And even though it wasn’t phenomenal and it came with irridescent green mint jelly, I knew that there was something to this whole lamb thing.

What we did have was ravioli. In fact, I made my first-ever ravioli for easter, when I was 9 or 10. My mom thought I was nuts (she still does).

So I’m working on the menu, but I’m trying to hit all the traditional bases: favas, cheese, eggs, peas and artichokes. We’ll see how the markets treat me.

I’ll tell you, it’s not easy to find a lot of specialty Italian products in Southern California. In New York- or even Philadelphia- imported and artisanally made products are everywhere, **especially** around Easter. But here, not so much. I did find tuma, a somewhat obscure sicilian cheese, in this little deli near my house. If you’re in long beach, I recommend [Angelo's](http://www.yelp.com/biz/angelos-italian-deli-long-beach) highly. But it seems like I have to go back to mail order, well, internet order, which I haven’t really done since the Food Network Revolution. That and, of course, I need to start adapting recipes to available products, just like the immigrants did. But for this year, I’m sticking to the originals as much as I can.

Listening: “I Palindrome I” Apollo 18 They Might Be Giants