Blog the Forty-fourth

Me on Clams

I begin this post, in Scholastic fashion, with objections to my writing it, and then answers to my objections.

First Objection

I'm not partial to clams. I've always been glad to eat them when others make them, but I haven't been much inclined to make them for others. When I have, it has been from the duty of the moment, in obedience to the culinary imperative, If it can be eaten, it must be cooked.  However, is knowledge to be trusted where there is not love?  For does not the Apostle write, If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or clanging cymbal. And again, If I can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, but have not love? Now, love goes out to delight in its object, whereas knowledge takes it in. Accordingly, whether it be the love that loves to cook clams or the love that loves to eat them, where its love is lacking, can the tongue be trusted to speak true?

Second Objection

Contrary to the injunction of the same Apostle, I cannot be trusted not to mention things that ought not to be mentioned among us. Again, contrary to the dictum of the Philosopher that all knowledge is desirable, I have acquired knowledge I find undesirable but must in conscience mention to you anyway. You cannot trust shame to keep me from confessing it to you: I tell you, my shame is not to be trusted. I bid you turn around, gentle Reader, and go back to shore. Do not dive with me into turgid waters to discover of clams what, once known, can never be unknown. If you prove to be of weak conscience, my undesirable knowledge may not only wound your conscience but destroy your appetite.

On the contrary

However, granted I am not to be trusted, I say that others may, to wit, my people and God.

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-eighth: OCTOPUS

Behold!  
Octopus in a Seafood Salad
(plus a Bonus Baby Octopus Braise)

Women of a certain age develop very definite opinions about color, and the last thing you want is to get lassoed onto a paint committee with them. I'm an idiot savant when it comes to colors. I'm great at mixing and matching them, but I never get their names right, as women of a certain age love to tell me.

I got into it once with such a one when I said that octopus is purple. "No it's not; it's white." I stared at her dumbly, as though she had eight heads. I would concede if she were to insist that I mix up blue and green, but there's no way she'll convince me I mistake white for purple. So I reply, "Well, it's kind of greyish white before you cook it; and the inside is quite white after you cook it; but on the outside it's purple as purple can be." And she, "Well, we've served it to you before, and it was white." Oh, is that what those cyclinders were? I thought they were digits of palm or tofu. Turns out they were cored octopus, which I subsequently spotted in the freezer of the fish market next time I went. You Gentiles had me this time. I was speechless. Dumb with incredulity.

When I was in Brooklyn at Christmastime, I spotted a new fish shop across from the pastry shop, and reconnoitering came upon three crates of octopus of as many sizes. To mine eyes they were beautiful to behold. When I asked the fishmongress where they came from, she said "Portugal". That clinched it, as my father always said the best octopus is fresh from Portugal, so I decided to buy some to make for my mother and me that night. I was tempted by the baby ones, which we cook in spicy tomato sauce, but t'was the season for octopus salad, so I decided to decide between the middle and mega size. The reddish color of the big boy before me seized my sensorium, so I asked for him. When he weighed in at $24, I think I manged to keep custody of my facial features as I gulped out, "That's fine."

I ended up sending a pic of the big boy boiled to my friend of definite opinions, with the text, "Documentary proof that octopus is purple:" 

Blog the Thirtieth: Fish Steaks, Plus

Marinades for Swordfish and Tuna,
plus a bonus recipe for Filet Mignon

In the eyes of the foolish, fish steaks are good food.  Well, they’re not.  Sure, they cost a lot.  Sure, they’re fancy.  Sure, they make a good impression.  But so what?  That’s food for the vain, not the hungry soul.  When you cook fish steaks, what you mostly need to worry about is their drying out. They want to be tough, and you have to stop them. Now, tell me, does that sound like good food?

I live in an old colonial town on a great Bay, once the livelihood of watermen, but now the playtown of perpetual recreants.  Would you believe the place has more good sushi bars than Italian restaurants?  Talk about a transvaluation of values (transpacific, to be precise).  Anyways, the price of good tuna has been driven up beyond the tolerable by this Asian invasion [are only Asians allowed to say that, or do those crazy-high SATS preempt protected class status?].  No way I'm paying twice as much for tuna as for a rib-eye—vanity of vanities!  It’s cheaper in the end just to get the sashimi lunch special at Joss, with a miso soup and salad thrown in for good measure.  Anyway,  even though my parents never bought but fresh fish steaks back in Brooklyn, I make do with frozen tuna, wild from Vietnam, when it goes on sale for $10 a pound, but averring the palpable difference in taste and texture.  (I bet you can still get it fresh for under $15 a pound in Bensonhurst.)

Now, there are two ways to deal with fish steak’s determination to dry out, the Way of the East or the Way of the West.  The Eastern Way is to get the very best and very freshest fish steak and not cook it at all, making quite a fuss about how you slice it up and lay it out.  That’s the Way of the East at its extreme, namely Japan.  I advise you not to try this at home; go out instead for sashimi.  You might think it uncharacteristically ecumenical of me to recommend Asian food to you, but allow me to explain to you how my culinary respect for the East only corroborates my Western chauvinism.

Blog the Twenty-ninth: On How to Broil and Eat your Fish Whole

The problem may not be the Gentiles after all.  The problem may well be modernity itself.  Commodious living has infantilized us. We eat like babies, whose food is cut up for them.

This thought dawned upon me while serving whole fish to a couple of Turkish brothers.  I’m talking native born Turks, mind you, from the seashore, no less, the one a naturalized immigrant, and the other a visitor to my table from the Black Sea.  They assured me that fish is cooked and served whole in their town, as in South Italy and South Brooklyn, but when I broiled us each a perch and presented each whole on a dinner plate, they required instruction on how best to eat it.  They were unintimidated by the fish and unembarrassed by their ignorance—which is perhaps more than I could hope for from Gentiles—but their ignorance was all the more appalling for coming from a people presumed to know food.   

It was the same shock I felt when I learned that my new computer doesn’t come with instructions in words, either on paper or on screen, just little moving-frame pictorial instructions, like stain glass windows set in motion.  Has illiteracy benighted the West overnight anew?  Similarly, I feel that if Turks no longer know how to fillet their own fish at table, Judgment  must have come and gone, and I missed it.  I feel as if I can remember a verse form a minor prophet, “When the Turk of the sea must be fed his fish, that he not choke on a bone like a babe, then the end is come.”  Apocryphal prophecies never make sense, you know, until they come true.

It’s one thing for a New World Gentile not to know how to eat a fish, but a Turk, worse yet, a Greek, the ur-Westener?  Yes, I have a Greek friend too, a Greek national, mind you, abiding among us as a resident alien, and he too grew up among a people who cook and eat their fish whole, as is right and just, he avers, but he too did not know how to fillet his own at table for himself.  As you know, my use of the word Gentile has a meaning as flexible as it is broad.  I might well use it to refer to anyone outside my family; but most often I use the word as an ancient Roman would have, to refer to the peoples north of the Alps, the peoples of the milk‑pail.  But the peoples of the olive and the fig, across the sea, can’t be called Gentiles!  They are kindred, even if at one or two removes, like cousins, if not from as near as Queens or the Bronx, then Long Island. 

Blog the Twenty-fifth: Squid, squid, or squid?

“Calamari” Three Ways:
Braised, Broiled, or Fried.

Why is it you can get a Gentile to eat squid if you call it “calamari”?  I live in a hard-drinking sailor town where peoples of northern European stock hold sway, and their frequent devotions to nectars of the grain are as likely to be accompanied these days by fried calamari rings as by fried onion rings.  It’s not as if the foreign name renders unrecognizable those tentacles winging the plate, and it’s a small step for imagination to reassemble the “rings” into a squid torso. 

Plenty of people who will eat “calamari” won’t touch a fish cooked whole with its head on, as is done throughout the Mediterranean.  I used to think this childish, but lately I’ve been feeling moralistic about it, perhaps under the pressure of the bourgeoning vegetarian populations upsetting my culinary ecosystem.  That blank bovine stare they adopt at table as I chew my flesh and they their cud strikes me as judgmental.  I have a college buddy who worked in a slaughterhouse one summer, and he likes to say that he feels he has the right for life to put his hand to meat with a clear conscience, having wielded the stun gun with that same hand.  A fortiori the bar of moral vindication seems set pretty low if you’re expected to look your dinner in the eye when it’s already dead by someone else’s hand, and especially if there’s a jury of vegetarians watching for any wincing of conscience.

This is my first fish blog.  I ate a lot of fish growing up, and a lot of it before I liked it, on Fridays, and often also on Wednesdays.  When it comes to fish, you have to take “the food of my people” in the extended sense that extends to my father’s people back in Sicily, because as my father likes to say of my mother, “She’s from the mountains—what does she know about fish?”  We have friends of the family likewise from Sicilian shores, or else Naples, who “know” fish.  True, my mother’s father did use to take bus rides to Salerno and bring back fresh fish, but that was only an occasional treat, and the most beloved recipe of my mother’s people is baccalภsalted cod from Northern Europe (which they either fry, or else braise with potatoes, tomatoes, and olives (at Christmas), but salted fish doesn’t count, especially from Northern Europe.