Blog the Forty-second: My Pork Roast Barbary

Pork Tenderloins 
Rolled with Mushrooms Garlicky

This long awaited post is devoted to recrimination and disclaimers. Reader's discretion is advised, as there is little in the post.

First, let me disclaim this recipe for pork tenderloins rolled with mushrooms, because it’s mine. As you know, Gentle Reader, I eschew both individualism and innovation in my people’s cooking, as the slippery slope to gentrification. For this reason I attach the recriminatory label Barbary to recipes of my own invention, borrowing the traditional name of those trading ports where all manner of exotica hook up with things native and miscegenate.

And it is on this point of miscegenation that I want to recriminate. It seems to me that when one of my people marries a Gentile, you know you're in for ribbing, and it’s quite ridiculous of you to take any offense at any caricature I proffer of you or yours in this Blog about our people, because it’s a caricature. Caricatures are funny because they’re distortions, offered not as insults, but as alternative truth. A good joke always tells the truth, just not literally. Humor has its own way of telling the truth, and ridicule is its way of masking it. For you to take the ridicule personally quite misses the point, because you aren’t the point. Get it? You’re just the comic mask with which I’m masking some social critique, or just as often, some self-critique of my culinary chauvinism, itself an oblique critique of a prevailing relativism. It’s a hall of mirrors.  Have fun in it.

Blog the Fortieth: "The Glories of the Pea"

In Transcendental Array

It’s spring intermittently down here just south of the Mason Dixon line, which means tis the season for N.P.R.’s donor marathon. I never donate to N.P.R., even though for decades it has been my primary and often sole news source as I cook supper. I’m attached to it on uncle Niccolo’s advice to keep your enemies closer than your friends, as well as for the antidote it provides to my own bias in the daily exercise of having to decipher the news under its. In any case, I will to my dying day be grateful to N.P.R. for this quotation from the diary of a Lady-in-waiting to Catherine de Medici during her reign over the cuisine of the court of Henri II: “Nothing else has been spoken of at Court this week but the glories of the pea newly arrived from Italy.”

Ah! Can you imagine a world in which peas are glorious?

So, I am abashed to offer you this post on what my people do with peas, because I feel as though my people’s recipes are not glorious enough for that quotation. The recipes are really, really good, but only in the usual way that our food is really, really good, and glorious should be even better than that, I figure. Anyways, I have one pasta recipe for you, a soup, a vegetable side, a chicken-braise, and a most unexpected calamari braise, in case there be an apologetical glory of sorts to be got from crossing kinds in transcendental array.

Blog the Thirty-seventh: Chicken Cutlets Fancy

Three Ways 
(Plus bonus rollatini)

I once read on a NYC subway that it takes a village to raise a child.  Well, it takes an Italian family to come up with a good chicken cutlet recipe—not a nucleus of 2 parents, 2 kids, 3 cars, a dog & a nanny—but a sprawling Italian family of aunts, uncles, and cousins that crosses not only the five Boroughs, but an ocean and a century, with transatlantic runners and gentile grafts. 

That commercial you have running in your head now of three generations of well-manicured women looking lovingly at one another across a casserole is not what I mean either.  Rather, as the founding fathers of the American republic understood that the best means to manage contention was to let contending interests contend until mutually canceling extremes give way to a mean, likewise recipes in my family contend until a family consensus pronounces sentence by acclamation—vox populi, vox Dei—dialectical contention giving way to general emulation.

My mother never liked my Aunt Rose’s chicken cutlets with white mushrooms and onions, which I love, so she never makes it, but I learned it from my aunt long ago, and I love to make it for dinner parties for gentile friends, who love it. For holiday dinners my mother loves to make her cutlets topped with tangy onions, which I’ve never liked and never make, even though the rest of my family all like it.  Aunt Rose’s daughter, my cousin, told me she has recently taken to making her mother’s cutlets with my Baby Bella mushrooms garlicky instead of her mother’s button mushrooms with onions, which if you ask me is not really her mother’s recipe at all, but a new recipe all her own.  Liking her mother’s recipe, I didn’t like the idea of hers, until I tried it on myself one night, with a difference I’ll tell you about, and now I like it precisely for its difference.  I’ll give you all these recipes here and you can pronounce and acclaim for yourself, as if a people.

Blog the Thirty-fourth: A Reaction to RISOTTO

On doing it right, or not at all ~ 
which means you making your own broth!

When it comes to risotto, my zeal is not to be trusted, for it is the zeal of a convert.  Pauline, I am as zealous for it now as I was zealous against it before being knocked off my sheep.  What knocked me off is another specialty of North Italy, bollito misto, as little known as esteemed, and which you best always name in Italian, because there’s just no way to say “boiled meats” in English that will make it sound delicious.  But you’ll never master the art of making delicious risotto, unless you also give yourself to the art of making delicious broth; and you’ll never master the art of making delicious broth, unless a day’s exertion yields you something more than broth to eat.  That means learning to like boiled meat for dinner.  I hope to talk you into that.

I first encountered risotto back in the ‘80s, in the form of expletives gushing from Gentile converts to Northern Italian cuisine.  These self-appointed evangelists had been to the newly prospering North and came back witnessing to fellow Americans, whom they pronounced benighted by Italo-American red‑sauce fare, what real Italian food was like.  Well, my Italo-American family very rarely mentioned Northern Italian food, and when they did, it was with respect, so I didn’t like this dissing of our food by heretofore benighted Gentiles, who managed thus to provoke in me a hostile curiosity about this Northern contender to pasta.

Risotto is in fact North Italy’s answer to pasta, and like pasta, is a first dish, not dinner (if you try to make dinner out of it, you’ll only bloat yourself with eating too much starch and milkfat in one sitting).  Like pasta, risotto is a remarkably versatile staple, readily marrying with many another food to yield spectral variations. However, unlike pasta, it is labor‑intensive to make, if made right, and it is very often not made right, both here and in Italy, because it is, well, labor‑intensive to make right. 

For one thing, it demands homemade broth, which takes all afternoon to make.  For another, it requires continuous stirring for nearly 20 minutes over a steamy pot, because the signature creaminess of risotto comes not from cream, but from the soft epidermis of Italy’s short‑grained Arborio rice breaking down from the friction of continuous stirring, to melt into a starchy cream that absorbs the flavor of whatever ingredient you’re featuring—which is why your featured ingredient must be cooked tastily before adding the Arborio rice to it, so that it too can break down in the stirring and its flavors blend with the rice cream.  Risotto is not fried rice and not rice pilaf, it is creamed rice, and it gets that way from continuous stirring and thorough blending.  Restauranteurs have tricks for stirring less, but I tell you, they are feeding you risotto stillborn.

Blog the Thirty-second: Chicken braised with Sausage & Mushrooms

A chicken braise worthy a gentile.

Okay, okay, so maybe there was some Italic hyperbole in my saying that my Gentile friends are not worthy of my most delicious chicken braises.  As a matter of fact, I often make them the most delicious one of all, chicken braised with sausage and mushrooms.  I make it for select Gentiles as often as I get Italian sausage from Brooklyn—Bensonhurst being the only place I know to get fatty Italian sausage without fennel—and  when I make a big fuss over the honor I do them by sharing my Brooklyn sausage with them, they get that.  Then when they taste how delicious those mushrooms are soused with all the savors of the braise, they get that too.  And they even know without instruction to sop up that pan sauce with crusty bread.  Yes, they get all that, on their own, and are enjoying themselves too well to think up any condescending compliments.  Their joy is pure and so my joy complete.

I don’t have a charming name or story for this dish because my mother sort of made it up.  She ate something like it at a wedding once, liked it, improvised her own version at home, tweaked it over time, taught it to me, who tweaked it some more, and the story of all this offers insight into the spirit of our cooking.  We like our food tasty rather than fancy; friendly rather than sophisticated; light rather than complex; effusive rather than concentrated; pure rather than distilled.  This braise  is a paradigmatic example, in that it goes against many rules of the gourmet for enhancing and concentrating flavor, in favor of lightness, cleanness, and harmony.

For one thing, it uses white rather than dark mushrooms.  I’d go so far as to say its genius is in its use of plain white mushrooms.  You might well figure that a braise would be all the more delicious with dark Baby Bella, or fancier yet, Crimini mushrooms—no doubt the choice of a Tuscan or Frenchman, who will wryly remark with a confidential tone and bemused frown on the ingenuousness of our using white button mushrooms.  Ah, proud mushrooms for proud men, overweening, overbearing, prepossessing, bent on infiltrating and dominating.  Might as well just call it a mushroom braise, because that’s all it will taste like with those dark ones.

But we know that it is the meek that shall inherit the earth.  It is precisely the self-abnegation of the white mushroom that gives it another sort of power, an unprepossessing power of assimilation.  It gets its glory from another, as does the moon from the sun, reflecting and refracting the other’s light with a beauty all its own.  All that its spongy flesh absorbs this mushroom mingles in its womb—the savoriness of chicken and sausage gilded in olive oil and butter, the redolence of much garlic, tangy sprites of tomato, the fresh perfumes of green parsley and white wine—each savor shining more glorious in spectral array than ever in proud isolation.  It is its very translucency that gives the white mushroom this its power of transfiguration, and it arises arrayed glorious by its service.

Blog the Sixth: Mushrooms Garlicy

A Supererogatory Side,

or else a Pasta Garlicy or Risotto, 

or even a Frittata

Because I could not resist the Baby Bella mushrooms on sale the night I broiled my pork chop some blogs ago, I decided to have a third vegetable side that night.  This inability to resist a sale testifies to the very wellspring of my cookery, namely poverty.  I learned to cook as a graduate student when, in the face of indefinitely protracted doctoral dissertation composition, I tired of cafeteria food and decided that, whatever the case might be with the dissertation, adulthood could not be put off indefinitely, and it was time to cook real food for myself on a daily basis.  There were however limitations, to wit, a graduate student budget.  So, I would go to the supermarket, buy what was on sale, go home, call my mother, and say, “So how do I cook veal breast—it looks like it’s all bones.”  Thus did I learn how to cook veal breast, and whatever else was on sale that week.

To this day, I go to the supermarket, not with a shopping list, but with a budget, even if not as constricted as in yesteryear.  I look for what looks good and is at a good price, which usually means what’s in season and hence in abundance, if not locally, then somewhere on the globe.  I shop global, not local, because that’s what I can afford.  My senses are the final arbiter:  what looks good, what smells good, what feels good—of what’s on sale—that’s what I buy, whatever its provenance, and I figure out what to do with it when I get it home.

The Baby Bella's looked good and were cheap, so I grabbed them.  I love mushrooms.  I do not understand people who do not.  They perplex me.  If the truth may be spoken, they seem to me to be missing a part of soul.  I know that a soul, being immaterial, cannot have separable parts, as does a brain.  It can, nevertheless, have parts of a sort, namely powers.  But what power can be lacking in these poor souls?  They do not lack the power of taste, for the mushrooms taste bad to them, however unaccountably.  Are we to think there is a power of soul more specific than taste that is necessary for the appreciation of mushrooms?   It seems pretty well established for some time now that the formal objects of sensation are five, corresponding to our five senses.  And so these poor souls perplex me.