January 31, 2010

Cooking as ancestor worship

My wife comes from a long line of exemplary cooks. She works the kitchen by instinct, mixing, matching, improvising. She's economical, mindful of but not enslaved to kids' eating schedules, and treats recipes as inspiration rather than prescription. When life gives her lemons she makes lemon meringue tart.

This is no way describes my approach to cooking.

For one, I have no sense of proportion or timing. When I get it in my head that I am going to cook I can rarely tolerate not cooking -- from scratch -- every last damn thing. Call it a sense of cheating. If it can be made rather than poured from a can, I want to make it. It's such a problem that there's even a mild irritation that I can't actually provision the milk or beef or rare vegetables from my backyard.

Which of course means that dinner is rarely served before 10 PM on the nights I cook.

Normally this little mania takes the form of Italian cooking, specifically Southern Italian, usually from the region of Basilicata. Lots of reasons for this, mostly having to do with family heritage (copiously covered previously).

Last week, we made ravioli, with a twist. The particular recipe comes from my great-grandparents' hometown of Barile, a village long-steeped in Albanian tradition. Ravioli alla albanese has been described as "dessert and dinner all in one" because the ricotta filling, called gyuz, is sweetened with sugar and cinnamon. Full ingredients and recipe.

The ricotta was fun and surprisingly easy. One gallon of whole milk plus one quart of buttermilk, heated to 175° until the curds start to separate. You then ladle the curds into cheesecloth and drain. Add your chosen seasoning and the fluffy warm filling is ready to go.

Hand-making ravioli, on the other hand, was an extraordinarily laborious undertaking. We'd made pasta from scratch before -- with an electric machine -- but that won't do for the sheets that form the ravioli pillows.

So we borrowed a friend's hand-crank pasta machine. Problem was, it had no clamp to secure it to the counter which, if you've ever tried forcing dough through a tiny metal slit, was no fun at all.

Well, that's not entirely true. Getting it right was immensely satisfying.

Once you have the sheets you use this fabulous little slicing/pinching wheel specifically for ravioli. This gives you the pillow "casing" into which you put the ricotta. You have to make sure the edge seals firmly as you will shortly be plopping the ravioli in boiling water and don't want filling exploding everywhere.

The recipe calls for meatballs and tomato sauce as accompaniment and here is where the from-scratch obsession shows its ugly underside. These sides ended up being two separate meals entirely. For one, the fist-sized meatballs came from a Neapolitan recipe that includes grated Parmesan, garlic, basil, oregano, and nutmeg (vetoed by wife).

The sauce, however, wasn't really a sauce but a ragù, basically an entire meal in a pot.

You pound pork shoulder flat, line it with pancetta, then fill it with a yummy payload of garlic, parsley, chili powder (hallmark of this region), nutmeg (vetoed), and pecorino or parmesan. Add white wine and canned whole tomatoes and simmer forever.

In a nutshell what you get after simmering this pork bomb is a sauce for pasta and a second meal, which we didn't not even attempt to eat on the night in question.

All in all, a fantastic experience, though perhaps not one best-suited for a weeknight. Let me know if you'd like detail on the ingredients or process. Full photo set here.

See also Spaghetti All'assassino and Lucanian risotto.

Posted at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

August 17, 2007

Do you kill people for hire?

If so, you might like this dish.

Spaghetti All'assassino (Spaghetti of the Assassins) is possibly the best pasta dish I have ever eaten. On our last night in Matera, we had dinner with friends and they introduced me to this devilish concoction.

Like many traditional Lucanian dishes it is simple with a twist. In this case the twist is heat -- of all kinds. Basically you undercook a bunch of spaghetti then throw it into scalding hot oil olive. (Stand back, it pops.) This chars the outer “nest” of pasta and cooks the inner pasta to completion. As this is happening you dump in cooked tomatoes and peperoncino in powder. That's it. A fiery combo of crunchy on the outside and al dente in the middle.

I cooked the dish last night and screwed up approximately half of it. The tomatoes burned and I got the outer shell a bit too hard. But this is how we learn.

Here's the recipe. It serves four.

400 grams of spaghetti
300g fresh baby tomatoes
virgin olive oil for frying (at least a cup)
peperoncino in powder to taste

1. Cut the baby tomatoes in half and fry in very hot oil for about 6/7 minutes, they should get a bit mushy but not brown, add salt. You need to do this in a large deep frying pan.
2. Cook the spaghetti until really 'al dente' - if it says 8 minutes on the pack, take them out at 5.
3. Drain the pasta really well and pour into the tomatoes and boiling oil (if the oil is hot enough it will make a big noise). Add peperoncino and stir a little to get oil around all the spaghetti.
4. Leave for about 2/3 minutes before stirring/moving around/turning the burned parts around and then leave again for another 2/3 minutes. If you stir continuously the crusty brown bits don't get formed.
5. DON'T add parmesan.

Thanks for Mikaela Bandini for introducing me to the dish and for the recipe.

Tags: basilicata, pasta, italy, recipe

Posted at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

May 5, 2006

Invaders of Basilicata

You kinda knew this was coming. Tourists are finally discovering Basilicata, the last untrammelled region of Italy. I've written a few times about why I think this part of Italy is so wonderful and it is true that a part of what makes it wonderful is that you just don't encounter many tourists. Yet, the world needs to discover Basilicata and, apparently, it is.

A few signs that Basilicata is breaking out:

The May 2006 "Europe" issue of Travel and Leisure Magazine has a long piece on "Italy's Secret City," Matera, one of the provincial centers of gravity of Basilicata and one of the oldest continuously-inhabited cities in Europe. The online version of Travel and Leisure proclaims it more bluntly: Italy's last, secret corner: Basilicata.

The April 2006 edition of Gourmet Magazine asks on the cover "Have You Been To Basilicata?" and delivers a full food-centric tour of the region. (The article is not online, but two of its recipes are.)

In the last few years at least two book-length travelogues have been written about Italy's instep: Seasons in Basilicata and Under the Southern Sun.

My posts on Basilicata seem to have caught the attention of at least one of the members of Basilicata's regional government. Recently he sent me a boxload of material relating to external promotion. Guides to wines and olive oils of the region, a CD of music to eat by (not kidding) by a classical composer from Basilicata, multimedia, maps, storybooks, cookbooks, catalogues of arts and crafts. These materials are all new. The regional government seems to be making a big tourism push. They have an advantage too in that a large percentage of foreigners with Italian heritage had ancestors from Basilicata. (The story of why -- the destitution of the area in the 19th and 20th centuries -- is a subject for another post.) Called the Lucani nel mondo, or Basilicatans of the world, these "expatriates" are a prime target for the new tourist marketing.

So, Basilicata is starting to shake the stereotype of bumpkin backwardness and desolation. This may mean that it will no longer serve as the backdrop of choice for religious moviemakers, but such is life. Basilicata and the south of Italy have for centuries been the Mediterranean waystation for marauding hordes and conquerors (a fact which gives it a greater diversity of cultural influences that regions to the north), so it is only fitting that they are now welcoming a different set of hordes -- this time on their own terms.

Posted at 12:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

January 23, 2006

Matera

The most interesting city in Italy, in my opinion, is not even on 5% of tourist itineraries. Matera is a gem protected by being nowhere near the sea or a navigable waterway in a region, Basilicata, which is still struggling to shed the image of bumpkin backwardness held by its northern Italian compatriots. Matera was centuries-old before Rome was founded and is known primarily for i sassi, troglodytic caves carved from the soft rock of the hillside. It is impossible to tell where the hill leaves off and man-made structures begin. Carlo Levi famously exposed the plight of the impoverished populace of Matera and Basilicata in Christ Stopped at Eboli and since then things have improved. The Italian government moved residents out of the caves a few decades ago and set about to rehabilitate and modernize them. Though most of the caves are abandoned, some Materans are now moving back in, some own them as storage, and at least one hotel exists built into the rock.

Now comes word that Matera has a new use for the rock-hewn dwellings: data-haven. A company called Datacontact is using the caves to house their servers and a call center. It makes some sense. Physically the servers could not be better protected inside the mountain. Though in a tectonically active area, the sassi have survived in their current form for over a millennia. Geographically too the placement is sensible. Labor is plentiful in Basilicata marginale, as regional natives mockingly call themselves. One hopes that this geographic marginalization (and associated prejudices that accompany it) will matter less in a the virtual world of telecommunications. After all, in a network there is no such thing as a margin.

And lastly a cookbook recommendation: A Mediterranean Feast. Got this as a Christmas present and it is a wonderful introduction to the food of the whole region. Southern Italy, being a cross-roads of the Mediterranean, is a hodgepodge of cultures and influences not known in the more European northern regions of Italy. Greek, Roman, Norman, Albanian (more on that later!), Spanish, Muslim -- all mixed together. So this cookbook, as a much a regional history as a culinary guide, is particularly illuminating about the myriad influences that define Basilicatan cuisine. This weekend I made Lucanian roast chicken with homemade wheat pasta. But really that was just an excuse to try Mark's reconstituted apricot tart recipe. Apricots, of course, being a favorite fruit in Egypt and so wonderfully in keeping with my OCD-like focus on the Mediterranean basin. Tip #1: add some orange juice and even a splash of sweet liqueur to the water that will rejuvenate the dried apricots overnight. Tip #2: Don't try to force wheat pasta through a capellini-sized extruder die. The wheat is too dense and the angel hair holes too small. Your machine will blow up. Trust me.

You may notice that this entry belongs to a new blog category, sub-category really, called Basilicata. I'll be posting more on this region throughout the year. Though there's been one travelogue written on the region recently, the instep of the boot is fascinating and unknown to most. Just like Ascent Stage.

Posted at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

January 9, 2006

Pasta as pastime

I am able to screw up cooking a meal even when I follow the recipe precisely so it was particularly foolhardy of me to get a jump on my new year resolution to cook more by trying to put together dinner Saturday night based on a short narrative passage in a travelogue. But since I had the kids without wifely backup I decided to at least fill the time with enough potential for mess and chaos as to keep them interested.

Tip: if you have kids and a pasta machine, use it. My boys loved it. Making pasta is hard to screw up in a machine*. Just pour in flour, some eggs, optional dry ingredients and then watch it ooze out of the template you screw on. It looks somewhat excretory or vermiculate or both, which of course is nothing but fun for little kids. Pulling the strands and cutting them off with scissors also scores high marks. How often do you get to use arts and crafts supplies in the kitchen? Next up: Elmer's Glue.

We made the pasta, called lagane, a type of wide strand noodle from the Basilicata region, out of wheat flour for inclusion in a simple sauce also from the region. Actually everything from Basilicata is simple. It is the most poverty-stricken part of the country (which is why so many of its people emigrated, thanks great-grandpa!) and so recipes are always simple, if sometimes unfamiliar. Great for a guy trying to learn to cook. The sauce was comprised of olive oil, garlic, chili peppers (always in dishes from Basilicata), tomatoes, walnuts, and basil. Turned out wonderful.

The other, riskier dish culled from the travelogue mentioned above is called ciambutella, a kind of omelette of Italian sausage (and pancetta, but we had none), peppers, zucchini, potatoes, onion, tomatoes, olive oil, herbs, and of course eggs. You eat it on cross-sections of crusty bread, like bruschetta or crostini. My guess is that I should have doubled the egg quantity as it seemed to be little more than cooked veggies with sausage. Not bad, of course, especially with the pasta dish, but still.

Lastly, a real crowd-pleaser (remember my crowd): R2D2 Treats. Half of a banana covered in melted white chocolate and chopped peanuts and flanked by two pieces of Kit Kat. This is the droid you are looking for.

Please note: my new year resolution did not include cleaning up the kitchen after cooking.

[*] Unless the machine fails to turn on. At which point I considered panic as the children were all geared up for pasta and the only way to do it was manually. Hand-cutting pasta is only slightly more fun than peeling a carrot with a fork. A Fonzie-like thwack on the side started the unit, thank god.

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