Fruit

From Lecce and its environs, quince paste—a deeply bronzed jelly molded into plump squares and tucked inside wooden fruit boxes—is our favorite Puglian treasure to take back to Tuscany. Here follows a lovely sort of pudding made from quince that, though it offers a less-dense dose of the fruit, yields one with all its beautiful, apple-wine sort of autumn savor.

In the autumn, as schools of swordfish swam south into the Bay of Policastro, the fishermen of the Cilento were often their conquerors, luring the great fish with oil-soaked bread and hauling them up from the sea—porting them like vanquished kings, high atop their heads up the steep paths from the water—to their camps to roast them or smoke them over smoldering fires of pine and olive and citrus woods. Sometimes, the Cilentini cured the fish under salt and foraged grasses and spiceberries, dousing the flesh with their own rough-made spirits. Served a dish such as this, one could think it the offering of some cultivated chef, yet, then and there, it was nothing more than the improvised handiwork of hungry men.

Alfonso cooks a dish much like this one, invented epochs ago by the Cilentini during the vendemmia—the harvest of the wine grapes. He tells the story of the fishermen who were also winemakers, who, after depositing the daily winemaking debris into the sea, set out their shore lines, much as they did every other evening. Serendipitously, they lured an abundance of fat, pewtery sea bass—branzino—the fish bewitched by the fermenting perfumes of the grape skins and seeds. The Cilentini then roasted the fish who’d fed on the grape must over cuttings from the vines. The flesh of the fish was scented, through and through, with essences of grape. Legend has it that the dish made voluptuaries of all who ate it. Stuffing the fish with cooked grapes likely gives it an even more luxurious savor than that taken on by his must-eating ancestors.

One must have a lemon tree or some harmonious acquaintance with someone who has a lemon tree, know a florist or a fruit seller who can procure untreated lemon leaves, or one can let go the idea of the lemon leaves and trump up alternate ones, such as those pulled from a grapevine or a chestnut tree. Lacking all of these, one must know how wonderful the dish will be with no leaves at all, just for grilling the fat prawns, beheaded but with their tails intact, over a good wood fire, then heaving them, all hot and sputtering, into an anise-perfumed bath. Though the lemon leaves, if they’re good and fresh, do add some flavor and keep the prawns moist during the roast, they are, in the end, only a pretty and clever sort of packaging.

A simple-to-make and delectable little paste with which to dress just-cooked pasta, to spoon into vegetable soups, to thin with milk or vegetable stock into, itself, a fine soup, to stuff into fat, ripe tomatoes, to present alongside roasted meat or fish, to spread on great chunks of olive-oil-toasted bread, to eat with a spoon while waiting for bread to bake.

A while ago, I’d heard from a friend about a tart made with oranges from the groves on the island of Capri, it, once an idyll and now mostly a tourist ruin just seventeen kilometers across the bay from Napoli. Specifically, it was the island’s village of Anacapri that was the scene of my friend’s tart story. She told me that the confection was barely sugared, so perfect were the oranges of its making. She said it was all of a cool cream in the mouth, each little bite of it a sensual, sweet/pungent explosion. She said that even the crust was scented with oranges, perhaps with some locally distilled liqueur of the fruit, and that, too, the crust gave up some soft breath of herb, like wild mint or rosemary. But where in Anacapri, I begged, never having seen the sweet in any pasticceria nor read of it on any menu nor found it perched on any dessert cart. Worse, everyone I asked about the tart shook their heads. “Non c’è una cosa del genere qui, signora.” “There is nothing of that sort here, madam.” This bantering betwixt my friend and I has endured several years. She insists that the tart, indeed, exists. I think it some citrusy half-dream of hers, a tart that should have been, perhaps, but one that never yet was, at least not in Anacapri. And so I baked it, hearing her gurglings and swoonings in my mind at every step. Though I’ve yet to make it for her—she living in Oregon while I’m here in Tuscany—I offer it here and tell you, humbly, of its goodness, of its simple sort of persuasiveness. I think it is the pastry I would make and share and eat on the last day of the world.

Traditionally, the gatekeep of an apartment building in Napoli is a widow or a widower of a certain age, one of whose missions, as spiritual guardian of the palazzo, is to slot the mail—after fastidious palpating of its contents, lifting it to the light of the sun, trawling it for heretical intelligence, and generally shadowing the recipient’s movements by it, to diligently rouse, invent, and unbosom internal gossip. The good gatekeep only breaks from these industries to stir at or baste some one of his legendary little potions, all of which signal to the tenants as they cross the threshold what will be the old watchdog’s supper.

It was not often,that one was plump enough in the purse to buy a kilo or so of meat from the butcher, carry it home, and cook it up into some luscious, soulful dish. When fortune placed in one’s purse a few centesimi more than were necessary for subsistence, one sought out the carnacottaro (an itinerant seller of cooked meat).

...in the style of Nereto. An old Longobard town in the north of Abruzzo’s province of Teramo, Nereto grows walnuts and breeds turkeys. And when the turkeys grow fat on the walnuts, their just-dressed flesh, roasted with aromatics, indeed tastes of the sweet, smoky nuts. A classic dish for Christmas there, I fix it for our Tuscan version of Thanksgiving. And because our local turkeys, as is likely the case with yours, do not feed on walnuts, I gift the bird with a luscious paste of them smoothed under the skin of its breast. I like the Neretese-inspired turkey infinitely better than the more famous tacchino alla Canzanese, turkey in the manner of Canzano, which typically asks that the bird be relieved of his bones and poached with a calf’s foot and knuckle, then cooled and presented in its jellied broth.

Caligola, Caligula—the diminutive in the dialect of the Empire for shoe—was the name given to Caio Cesare, despot of the Empire in A.D. 37. And it was under the murky waters of the small volcanic lake of Nemi, south of Rome, that were excavated, earlier in this century, two of the emperor’s small sailing ships—toy boats, really—from which his madness commanded droll, demonic games played in the shadows of the lake forest, the once-sacred woods of Diana’s mythical hunts. Now the pine and oak forests about the little lake of Nemi seem serene enough, whispering up nothing of the old horrors of the place. There, in May, begin to push up from the velvety black earth the most gorgeous and tiny wild strawberries. We like to go there then, for the festivals that celebrate them, to eat them, cool and fresh from their woodsy patches. And on a Sunday last June, as the season for them was ending, we lunched in the town of Nemi, hoping to find one last dose of the berries for dessert. Sitting out on a shaded terrace that looked to the main square, we watched the promenading of the few citizens not yet seated at table. A little ruckus came up behind us from two boys jousting with silvered plastic swords. One of them was a robust sort of chap, thickset, his patrician black-eyed face in profile to us. His adversary was a waif of a boy, a miniature of the other with the same legacy of splendid form and feature. The small one was losing the battle. I tried not to feel every blow I saw him take, the bigger one thrusting the blunted end of the toy sword into his spare middle over and over again. The little one was crying, then, but hardly in surrender. His pain was evident, his fear, too, I thought, yet he stayed to fight. Then, throwing his weapon to the side, the victor began to use his hands to pummel him. The diners around were unmindful. I begged Fernando to do something, to stop them. He told me sternly with his eyes that we must do nothing. I got up and walked, nonchalantly, over to them. “Buon giorno, ragazzi. Come stiamo? Come vanno le cose?” “Hi, boys. How are you? How are things going?” I asked inanely, as though they had been shooting marbles. Gentlemen to the core, the bigger one said, “Buon giorno, signora. Noi stiamo bene, e lei?” “Good day, my lady. We are well, and you?” “What is your name?” I asked, playing for time so the little one might catch his breath. “Io sono Alessio e lui si chiama Giovannino.” “I am Alessio and he is called Giovannino,” offered the big one. I ventured further. “Alessio, did you know that you were hurting Giovannino, that you were hurting him so terribly?” “Sì, signora. Lo so di avergli fatto un pò male.” “Yes, my lady, I know I hurt him a bit,” he answered willingly. I asked him why he would want to be so violent with his little friend. Alessio looked at me full face: “Signora, siamo romani. Combattere è nel nostro sangue.” “We are Romans, my lady. To fight is in our blood.” Educated by the eight-year-old gladiator, I could only shake his hand, then shake the hand of Giovannino and walk back to our table. Fernando told me quietly that a Roman boy could never be Huckleberry Finn. During the lunch, I noticed that Alessio, now sitting on a bench between two people who were likely his grandparents, kept looking at me, waving once in a while, smiling at me with sympathy for my unworldliness. He strolled by the table a little later and asked if we were going to taste the gelato di fragole. It’s made with basil and pepper and vinegar, he proclaimed, as though that composition might be as difficult for me to comprehend as was his penchant for rough sport. He went on to assure us it was the best gelato in Nemi. We asked him if he might like to join us. He said he couldn’t, but thanked us, bowed rathe...

Should there be, one day in your life, both a handful of still-warm-from-the-tree ripe figs and the juice-dripping flesh of a melon, go quickly to find leaves of mint, some good green olive oil, and the juice of a lemon to make this little salad. Use only flawless components and arrange them for someone wonderful with whom to rhapsodize over it. You might, then, need heady, appropriate conversation. You could choose to speak of Platina—one Bartolomeo Sacchi—the Vatican librarian and author, in 1475, of Platine de Honestate Voluptate. The work’s argument concerns the history of Roman cuisine and was the first officially published cookbook since those written during the Republic. Or you might want to chatter a bit about Cantalupo in Sabina—the Singing Wolf of the Sabines—once a papal garden property outside the Roman walls where a strain of tiny, orange-fleshed melons were cultivated, they, no doubt, being the precursors to those we call cantaloupe. Perhaps you might choose not to speak at all, thus distracting nothing from the sweet little figs.

First, know that you are about to bake the earth’s most delectable prune tart. If you wish to make it with fresh plums, you must sugar them, according to their own sweetness and your own need to taste sugar rather than fresh fruit. The same adjustment is necessary should you use fresh apricots or nectarines or peaches. Then simply proceed with the recipe.

Il Pane della Ninna Nanna (Lullaby Bread). Neither very sweet nor pizzalike in the flat, savory pie sort of way, this is a gold-fleshed, orange-perfumed cakelike bread that, if baked with care, will be tall and elegant, its crumb coarse yet light and full of the consoling scents of yeast and butter. Fabriziana is one of the several “middle” names of the Roman countess with whom I learned to bake the confection in the cavernous old kitchen of her villa that looks to the gardens of the Borghese. Ours were clandestine appointments, with our yeast and our candied orange peels and the tattered recipe book of her mother’s cook. You see, Fabriziana had never cooked or baked in her life, had never made anything from a pile of flour and a few crumbles of yeast. Forbidden in the kitchen as a girl, her adulthood has been always too fraught with obligations to permit interludes in front of the flames. But in the years we have been friends, she has always demonstrated more than a kind interest in my cooking, sitting once in a while, rapt as a fox, on an old wrought-iron chair in my kitchen as I dance about. And one day when I told her I was searching for a formula for an ancient, orange-perfumed Roman bread, she knew precisely where to find the recipe. Trailing off in some Proustian dream, she said she hadn’t thought of the bread in too many years, it having been her favorite sweet at Christmas and Easter. Once she even requested that it—rather than some grand, creamy torta—be her birthday cake. She told of poaching slices of it from a silver tray during parties and receptions, stuffing them deep into the pockets of her silk dresses to eat later in bed, after her sister was safely asleep, so she might share them only with her puppy. So it was that we decided to make the bread together. Wishing to avoid the chiding of her family and, most of all, her cook, we chose to do the deed on mornings when the house would be safe from them. It was wonderful to see Fabriziana at play. Flour and butter were forced under her long, mother-of-pearled nails, and her blond-streaked coif, mounted to resist tempests, soon fell into girlish ringlets over her noble brow. With a few mornings’ worth of trial, we baked Fabriziana’s lullaby bread, the bread of her memories. And once, on a birthday of mine, the countess came fairly racing through my doorway proffering a curiously wrapped parcel that gave up the telltale perfumes of our bread. The countess had learned to bake indeed.

It was nearly eleven on Saturday and Fernando was standing under the open roof in the rain, tender, silvered glissades of it plashing quietly, as it has for two thousand years, onto the black and white marble of the temple floor. He, not minding, stood directly in the puddle, its depths caressing the tops of his shoes, looking up at the sky like a child in wonder, the water settling in fine mists on his cheeks and eyelids. He turned fifty that morning in the Pantheon. His spiritual birthday thus celebrated, he pronounced that his carnal festival was to be solemnized in not less than six of his preferred ostarie/trattorie/ristoranti. Fernando wanted to eat artichokes. More, he wanted an artichoke crawl—a critical journey up and down the vicoli (narrow streets), an earnest search for great, golden-green, crisped Roman roses—as many of them as he might vanquish in a day and its evening in a half dozen genuine houses—we were in search of the one perfect carciofo alla giudia. Ten years ago, I might have propelled him into the arms of the trattoria da Giggetto, when I was still convinced of the authenticity of its cooking. Sidled up as it is to the edge of the Portico d’Ottavia, perhaps it was only the taberna’s majestic old neighbor that wooed me. Fernando had his own ideas. At midday, we made quick aperitivi e antipasti visits to Arancio d’Oro in Via Monte d’Oro and La Campana in Vicolo della Campana, taking only one or two artichokes and a glass of white wine. We would settle in at Agata e Romeo in Via Carlo Alberto for a proper lunch that would start with another of the little beauties. The evening’s gallop would open at Tram Tram in Via dei Reti before a stint at Il Dito e la Luna in Via dei Sabelli, where we would crunch on more fried thistles. Our palates veneered in stainless steel, our bellies convulsing, plumped, we brushed sea salt and crisp freckles from our lips and our chests and stepped at last inside the dimmed sanctum of Piperno in Via Monte dei Cenci. Murmuring something to our waiter about not having much appetite, he assured us that he would carry to us only those plates that could titillate a dead man. He started us with a salad of puntarelle—a thick-bladed wild grass collected in the Alban hills— glossed in sauce of anchovies. Then came the misty comfort of stracciatella, chicken broth scribbled with a paste of egg and pecorino. Expert by now, able to whiff their very presence from twenty meters, we knew then the artichokes were only moments away. He set them down, clucking over their beauty, assuring us their salty vaporousness would coax our hunger. He was right. We continued with la coda alla vaccinara—oxtail stew—abbacchio—roast suckling lamb—a few crumbles of a hard, piquant pecorino pepato—peppered pecorino—a soft brown pear, and sealed it all with a great fluff of roasted chestnut mousse that we ate with small silver spoons.

Baccalà is of ancient Roman favor. The methodology of its preservation was one cultivated during their campaigns in the north, where they learned to embalm a catch of the great, fat cod under unpounded crystals of sea salt, reviving it for meals both festive and humble. Stoccafisso differs from baccalà in its fundamental cure, as it, having no encounter with salt, is simply hung out to dry in the winds moaning up from the North Sea. In either case, once plumped in its renaissance bath of cold water, the cod flesh is tender and, when cooked gently, its flesh takes on an almost creamy texture. The yield of a correctly reconstituted and properly cooked fish, well conserved in either way, is quite the same. This is an unexpectedly delicate dish, the raisins foiling any saltiness that might linger in the fish, while the Cognac softens the acidity of the tomatoes.

If you’ve never had grilled duck breasts, you’re in for a revelatory surprise. The contrasts are striking: the smoke of the grill against the richness of the duck fat, the juicy meat capped by crispy skin. At the restaurant, we buy Liberty Farms breasts (see Sources), which I have found superior to others in taste and texture. They raise a variety of duck called Pekin, a smaller, more compact bird (a single breast is perfect for one person) with a brighter, more delicate flavor and feel. You may have more luck finding Muscovy duck breasts, which are heftier, more steaklike. If you use Muscovy, you’ll only need four breasts to feed six people. Grilling duck breasts requires some attention. The fat from under the skin will inevitably drip into the fire, causing flare-ups, which can blacken the breasts if you’re not careful. If a flare-up occurs, use tongs to snatch the breasts off the grill for a few seconds, then return them once the flames have subsided. You may need to move them around the grill almost continuously as the fat renders out. The reward for this vigilance, however, is perfection—crisp golden brown skin and plump, succulent meat. An easier option is to sauté them in a cast-iron pan over medium-low heat, still skin side down, taking your time to render the fat from under the skin. Once the skin is crisp, which can take longer than you might expect, turn the breast over and cook a few more minutes, until medium-rare.

In so many American childhoods, cherry pie is a gloppy, cloying, Day-Glo affair. As a chef, I’m expected to disdain such things now, and, officially, I do. But I’ve always loved cherries. This Italian cherry and almond tart is everything a bad cherry pie is not: flaky, buttery, and sophisticated, with a filling the color of darkest rubies. But if someday, when cherries are long out of season, you happen to see in a corner booth at DuPar’s Coffee Shop someone who looks like me, wolfing down a slice of all-American diner pie, wearing dark sunglasses and a stain that looks suspiciously like Red Dye #40, well, keep it to yourself. Even chefs have fond memories of their misguided youth.