The Omnivorous Fish

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; its Italian sister Il Cucchiaio d’Argento; 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

Well, last year, I fantasized about Easter dinner. 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

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

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

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 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

There’s something about the block of 18th Street in San Francisco between Guerrero and Oakwood. Maybe it’s the ancient spirit of the Mission, maybe it’s something in the water, maybe Jimmy Hoffa’s body is under Bi Rite, I’m not quite sure what it is, but some of the best things to eat in the city are right there.

On the corner of 18th is Tartine, which is a bakery and café in a big space, yet the tables and chairs are jammed inexplicably into a New York corner. Thanks to California’s progressive ideas about the sale of booze, it’s a proper café, where you can get anything from OJ to a bottle of wine to enjoy with your goodies, savory or sweet. In fact, the kids at the next table over came for a bottle of wine and three glasses to while away the afternoon discussing Marxism. It was so undergrad.

Huge, unsubtle but delicious croissants come in plain; (Niman Ranch) ham and gruyere; chocolate and other permutations (though be warned; they cook them dark). Tarts, cakes, cookies, quiches, quick and yeast breads all make appearances, and I have to say they range from pretty good to underwear-changing good. Lemon lovers look out for the lemon meringue cake; a baked Alaska filled with lemon curd. Cute hipster kids swarm both in front of and behind the counters from which they make excellent coffee (though SF has some of the oldest hipsters I’ve ever seen).

The Bay Area, I must say, has the most consistently good coffee from the greatest number of independents than any city I have ever been (calm down, Seattle, I haven’t been there- yet).

Speaking of places I hadn’t been, I took a suggestion and went to dinner at Delfina, almost next door. It looks like your typical urban hip place, easily transported to New York, LA, Philly, Chicago or Boston, with distressed metal this and marble that. I didn’t take note of too much of the décor since I was flying solo and ate at the bar, but I did have a nice view of the open kitchen and the very young, mostly cute crew behind the line.

It was an absolute madhouse when I got there at 9, but being a party of one, I snagged the end seat at the bar, next to two completely odious 20-something women that were there to see, be seen and eat expensive food they don’t deserve before going home to vomit it up. The advantage to eating so late (and planning to eat everything in the place) is that you get to watch the place slow down and see how the machine contracts to its slower pace. I have always been fascinated by the operation of restaurants, and this process is perhaps the most interesting bit of theater.

At any rate, I sat down and was brought some dense-crumbed, crusty, but noticeably cold bread, and remarkably good butter, anointed with one of the new salts that all the cool kids have. This was soon followed by mint tagliatelle with porcini. Sounds simple doesn’t it? Well, so does string theory, but it’s not. This pasta was the kind of pasta that grandmothers make, but flecked with fresh mint, in a butter sauce light enough to keep you hungry, inundated with paper thin shavings of boletus edulis that kicked you in the teeth when you bit into them. The whole thing was earth, sex and light-colored sin in my mouth, and I regretted getting the half portion one bite in. Since, however, details haunt me, I have to note that I scratched down ‘tagliatelle’ in my notebook, and the website confirms that’s what the menu had written on it, and it is a free country, but in reality what I was served is tagliarini. No harm no foul.

With this, I drank a Gavi from Villa Sparini, one of a few half bottles available on the short but functional wine list. I was struggling between it and a colline they had by the glass, and the bartender’s rec was right-on. It had just the right amount of citrus to lighten it up.

Next I had quail stuffed with sausage and fennel, a little polenta and a brown, nectarous sauce made of stock and vin santo. It was one of those dishes which is merely excellent, that is to say, I wasn’t annoyed by the lengthy list of ingredients or put off by dubious combinations. I had a red wine with this that was being served by the glass after much discussion with the bartender, but I was having much too good a time by then to write anything down.

Delfina is one of those places where everybody loves food. Everyone who works there wants to talk about the wine list and the ingredients and they genuinely want you to have a good time. Unlike the clientele, I observed no posturing. I started talking to the bartender, a mysteriously beautiful young woman who lit up to chat about the minutiae of Gavi. And I got to hear her story since, like New York, nobody is from San Francisco, so everybody has a story.

Then I had cheese, which I will quote right from their website:

Wrinkled pagliarina with marcona almonds
Piemonte- cow, sheep, and goat milks
Moliterno tartufato with housemade quince paste
Sardegna- sheep’s milk
Parmigiano Reggiano with saba
Blu del Moncensio with brachetto gelatina
Piemonte - cow’s milk
Tumin rutulin with wildflower honey
Piemonte- goat’s milk

They were mostly fantastic, and the braccheto gelatina kind of haunts me still. By this point I had fallen completely in love with the bartender, and was overwhelmed emotionally and gastronomically by a big pedestal-dish of strawberry ice cream she put in front of me. It was rich and cold and ambrosial and frankly almost surreal. It was like sitting at the bar chatting with a giant strawberry breathing strawberry breath on you, inundating you with his strawberry presence. It was smooth and subtle, yet frosty and poignant. It was perhaps the best ice cream I’ve ever had in my life.

Delfina. Go there. Fall in love.

Delfina Restaurant
3621 18th Street
San Francisco, CA
415.552.4055

This Easter, I’m working. All the time. What’s more, I still don’t have a kitchen (though I’m getting closer every day).

I drove down to my Mom’s house yesterday, I’m going to my sister’s for dinner, and then back on my head tomorrow at 8AM.

My sister is making ham, which will be fine. She bought it at Sam’s Club, but it will be fine, since ham, even at its humblest, is a excellent vehicle for salt. I don’t know what else there will be, except for the bottles of barbera I’m bringing, but it will all be fine.

But I can’t help but fantasize about what I would cook. Want to fantasize with me?

First, you need to know that Easter is the holiest day in the Roman Catholic Calendar, and is a Feast day (as opposed to Good Friday, which is a Fast day [as is Christmas Eve, where you eat more than almost any other day, which makes no sense, but there you go looking for sense in religion]). Italians, however, especially Sicilians, have retained a great deal of their indigenous rituals, mostly regarding curses and charms, but also unabashedly use Easter as a ritual of Spring, and the traditional foods reflect that.

What are the traditional foods, you ask? Ace #1 Italian Easter food, hands-down no question: eggs. In times before modern animal husbandry, Spring is when eggs began to appear in abundance, and have been associated with fertility and rebirth since man first broke a shell. Goat and lamb rank high, as do peas, artichokes and cheese. In Naples, they stew kid with wine, peas, hardboiled eggs and hard cheese. In Lazio the Roman influence is strong, and many brodetti make an appearance, that is to say soups thickened with egg, often including lemon and rice. Salami, ham, etc. also pop up, as people cleaned out the last of the winter preserves. Thus, the Easter “Ham Pie” of Italian-American fame: Pizza Chena (or Pizza Rustica).

This Ham Pie, of course, begins a long list of things that get eaten after Mass on Saturday night, and Easter morning (and about an hour after Easter dinner). To me, it is the ne plus ultra for Easter foods, but the first runner up is Easter Bread, which is not unlike a brioche, rolled into long ropes and braided together with dyed, hardboiled eggs.

All that aside, what would I cook for dinner?

Pea Soup. No doubt about it, if fresh peas are available. Leeks, peas, mint, stock, cream, period. Falanghina or Greco di Tufo would be welcome additions.

Fava Ravioli. Traditional, but contemporary, favas blanched and mixed with basket cheese and fresh mint, stuffed into pasta and tossed with butter, marjoram and fava greens. A light red wine would be the order of the day for me, or a ballsier white, but I would rather see a nice Barbera d’Asti or maybe the varietal gamay from Edmunds St John. Mmm.

Kid Leg Roasted with Rosemary, Potatoes and Lemon. Yes, kid, as in goat. I guess you could have lamb, but it wouldn’t be the same. I would garnish this with hardboiled eggs and an herb salad. Call me a crazy American, but I would want Ridge zinfandel with this. A heavier Barbera or Dolcetto could do the job here, too. Don’t be afraid of the lemon; it loses its teeth in the oven.

For dessert, a cheese cake of some order would be traditional, but I might be inclined to go with Riso Nero di Pasqua, or Easter Black Rice. This is a black risotto, not from squid ink, but from cocoa and chocolate, thickened with cheese, and garnished with rum-soaked fried figs. Labor intensive, yes, but it’s a labor of love. Very much a traditional animal from Sicily, it should be served with a nice passito, but be sure to leave room for agneddu pasquali, the marzipan lambs.

Whatever you’re eating, having a good holiday.

When my family comes to visit¹, I like to cook Italian, especially in the Italian style of service, since when we entertain, we generally do things in the French way (which, of course, is really the Russian way). How do they differ? If you don’t know much about food, not much. If you do, they are enormously different. First of all, Italians are AOK with a little cheese before dinner. Yes, Francophiles, get your jaws off the floor, I said cheese before. Charcuterie (or salumi, really) are often served with cheeses, olives and vegetables, although sometimes there is a separate vegetable course. For tomorrow I have salumi and giardiniera, though I will probably pick up some cheese, also, most likely some obnoxiously strong provolone, Pop’s favorite. This is the antipasto, “before the pasta.”

When you read about restaurants and food enough, you get to the point where you can name a restaurant in just about every city you’ve heard of. There’s Bern’s in Tampa, Christopher’s in Phoenix and Al Forno in Providence. These are places you may never go, so who knows whether they’re really good, or whether they’re just better than what’s around.

In case you had any doubt, Al Forno is great. And I don’t mean great like “wow that was really good” great but I mean great like “holy shit, I’m afraid to have sex because Al Forno might be better and I don’t live in Providence” great. Al Forno is the kind of restaurant that you want to take people to when they say something decidedly idiotic like “it’s Italian food, how great can it be.” Al Forno is the kind of restaurant you go to to cheer yourself up. Al Forno is the kind of restaurant to go after several meals in places like Sabatino’s.

It’s along a cute little block in Providence on the East side of the river, just south of the Rhode Island School of Design. The address (577 South Main) takes you down a beautiful brick-lined walk to the kitchen door, so, if on foot, you walk around the building to find a very pretty facade with a very pretty view (of the restored foundries across the river) fronted by an onerously ugly parking lot. (Caveat: if you go before the restaurant is open, the doors are all shuttered, and since the edifice is covered with vines, it looks foreboding at best, abandoned at worst.) Once your fifty foot trek through the parking lot is done, you find yourself in a beautiful %arbor, speckled here and there by light filtered by overhead vines, walled by brick and facing a glass wall looking into one of the dining rooms. It seems as though a singing clock and candelabra are about to walk up and seat you. No one, however, comes out, and it’s still another several paces inside. If you’re early, you could easily stand there waiting to be seated until a regular walks past you- and around the corner to the door invisible to you if you’re not looking for it- wondering what you’re doing, standing there like an idiot.

I don’t really have the time right now to go into the food, but let’s just say I ate both meals basically in complete silence, chewing at the same rate a slug runs the mile. The food was so good it was almost scary. If you happen to find yourself there, and you’re wondering whether the melon, feta, mint and olive oil salad is a good idea, let me say this: if you eat nothing else (that doesn’t contain pork fat) in your life, you need to eat this.

Back home, finally, and loving it. Bought a 50 bottle vinotemp today, and down to Bowery tomorrow to get a new worktable for the kitchen. Life is good.