Blog the Forty-first: Pickling Cherry Peppers

... or Italian Eggplant "Sott'olio"

It’s pickling time, the perfect time to offer you my meterological theory of Western civilization. Western thought began in the Mediterranean where more often than not the blue sky smiles on you with a golden sun and the rich earth vouchsafes its bounty. If you’re an Aristotle or an Aquinas, you naturally begin reasoning about nature on the premise that she is a loving mother, beautiful, good, and benevolent in her purposes, and you resolve accordingly to seek your wisdom from her. But when human inquiry into nature migrates north, it meets cloud, wind, and hail, ground yielding tubers only if watered by much sweat, and life short, nasty, and brutish; so if you’re a Bacon or a Hobbes, you premise that nature is a cruel stepmother, as stinting of her secrets as of her treasures, and you resolve for your survival to put your mother to the rack until she tells you what you want to know.

That’s why they pickle cucumbers and cabbage up there. It’s a question of surviving the winter. But down in the sunkist land of my people, you pickle because it makes things delicious. It’s a matter of art. Taste their pickled cucumber and our pickled eggplant, or their pickled beets next to our pickled cherry peppers, and you will taste the difference between preservation of life and appetite for it.

Blog the Twenty-eighth: Two Cauliflower Sides

Cauliflower fried crispy
or Spicy cauliflower salad.

I thought I'd follow up on my two recipes for cauliflower pasta with two for cauliflower sides, if only for the opportunity to talk food shopping. I've told you before that I go shopping without a list, watching rather for the grace of the present moment, which generally comes in the form of a sale. Somewhere in the world something is in season in such abundance that the superfluity has made its way across the globe to my local grocery, where it is piled high on the cheap. If a trifectal probe of eye, nose, and poke turns up a fine specimen of the species, into the shopping cart it goes, and we'll figure out what to do with it when we get home.

Now this kairotic approach to food shopping makes as much financial as culinary sense, and is far more sensible than the new foody fatuity of cooking "local", unless of course you live where sive Deus sive Natura manifestly intended Man to live, on the Mediterranean. But once you migrate north to places where for a third of the year only such subsistence fare as root vegetables is available, then you've already flouted nature, and high tech techniques for growing vegetables in the snow are no more natural than turning to commerce to bring you things in season from those post‑lapsarian Edens to the south that are warm enough to perennially bring forth things not only nutritious but delicious, by the sweat of Man's brow, as God prescribes, without thermals.

Blog the Twenty-second: On What Antipasto is.

The name antipasto originates from ante pastum, Latin for before the meal (and not before the pasta, so it’s still antipasto even if you’re not having pasta for a first dish).  When I was a kid, it never occurred to me that the stuff I noshed on to take the edge off my hunger while waiting for the pasta to boil was antipasto.   The Italian fridge and cupboard offer a delightful variety of noshers, and half the pleasure is to see what a little digging will turn up.  This pleasure of the tasty tidbit in advance of the meal proper gives the true origin and spirit of antipasto.  It’s more a foreword than an introduction, a little something to tease appetite, flirting with it rather than wooing it, and like a flirt, inventive, improvisational, opportunistic. 

The sort of antipasto served as a first course at a sit down meal seems to me a machination of the restauranteur and caterer, and when I was a kid that caterer’s first course was what the word antipasto was reserved for.  Knowing the half dozen courses our holiday meals at home ran through, I couldn’t imagine what of Nature’s species of pleasure was left to add on.  When I was told that you might be served prosciutto on melon, for example, such a miscegenous coupling of luncheon cold-cut and postprandial fruit struck me less as an invention of fancy than a creature of decadence.  To this day I think this combination of a wet summery-sweet fruit with a dry winter-cured meat incongruous, more likely to interest a jaded palate than satisfy a seasoned one.  For that matter, I think moist mortadella a better match with fresh mozzarella, and at a quarter of the price of prosciutto.

These days, the antipasto we have at home on holidays is usually eaten hanging out in the kitchen or lounging in the living room.  It is laid out for new arrivals to dig into as soon as they like, without ceremony.  I remember thinking it the height of discourtesy when one Thanksgiving a Gentile in-law who had been delayed two hours by Thanksgiving traffic, upon arriving and finding that we had gotten started on antipasto and champagne, threw a tantrum, thinking it the height of discourtesy in us not to wait for them to start.  Apparently she thought her pleasure in an inaugural toast was well worth our being tantalized by the sight of food and bottles untouchable until she should arrive.  It reminded me of yet another Thanksgiving when my Gentile host had us keep watch for a half hour over the platter of antipasti I brought, sitting in our midst on the coffee table as we sipped cocktails round about it, before he ventured to sample something and give the rest of us the signal to begin.  I felt like I had been hired by a choreographer for a pièce du scene.  Such restraints of formality are alien to the Italian way.  Italian customs aim to stimulate and gratify your appetites, not restrain them.   The idea is to enhance the joy of eating.

Blog the Ninth: Artichokes ‘n Potatoes

Stuffed with Love or Braised with Ease:  You Choose.

Today I will present you with dueling recipes, as in that cookbook that Jacques Pepin and Julia Child did together with contrasting recipes on facing pages of the book, except that it will be me facing off with my mother.  Let me concede from the start that her artichokes are more delicious than mine.  So what’s the contest?  Well, hers require the indefatigable patience of maternal self-oblation, while mine are easy enough for you to do even on a worknight.  If you’re not a self-oblating Italian mother, gourmet mania might perhaps substitute for maternal kenosis to carry you through my mother’s recipe, but I doubt it (however tendentiously).

My mother lovingly stuffs each leaf of each artichoke, one by one, with a delicious little breading, so that each time you pull off one of the leaves of your artichoke and scrape it with your front teeth, you get a little savory breading together with your little bit of artichoke flesh—yes, every single leaf.  These stuffed artichokes are such a favorite in my family, especially with kids, that it is beyond numbering how many my mother has made over the years.  She’ll complacently make as many as a dozen at a time, so they’ll be extra for the kids to take home.  (This amazes me in a woman who tells me that stripping broccoli di rape stalks one by one is playing house!)  In any case, I personally don’t know of any modern kids deserving of such a labor of love, and I maintain that it rises to the level of the spiritual virtue of charity if done for unworthy ones, so this can count for your Lenten mitvah of the day.