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-ninth: At the Heart of Minestrone

Savoy Cabbage Braise,
or Pasta ‘n potatoes?

If you’re a Gentile in the least acquainted with Italian food, you no doubt think you know what “minestrone” is, but I doubt you do, because I doubt there’s something to know, speaking precisely. There is of course a single name, but that’s not conclusive, since we name and contemplate not only things but also their absence—as darkness names the absence of light and blindness the absence of sight. We moreover name what can be based on what is; and what could be based on what can be conceived; and what should have been be even against what already is unfortunately. Language and thought extend much farther than the reality before it, and venture so far as to name even the ineffable that cannot be named and the inconceivable that cannot be conceived (which is especially useful when you need to name God or mathematical fictions).

But what has any of that to do with “minestrone”? Well, the Italian suffix “-one” indicates that we’re dealing with something not only big but clumsy, something oafish or overdone—you call your fat uncle a “mangione”, not your voracious teen. A “minestrone” is an overdone “minestra”, which only raises the question of what a “minestra” is, itself vexed. One might translate it “soup”. But does the English word “soup” imply a medley of elements in liquid, whether thin as broth or thick as sauce?  A “minestra” can be less than that. 

In Sicily, the day after a feast day my aunt made us a light supper out of a mild green served in the salted water it simmered in, drizzled with olive oil and squirted with some lemon. That’s a simple “minestra”. You eat the greens with a fork in your right hand and bread in your left, spooning and/or sopping up the broth at the end.  Is that soup? Granted that you finish with a spoon, is it soup if you begin with a fork?

That’s the English horn of the dilemma. Then there’s the Italian. When you add pasta to a “minestra”, it is no longer a “minestra”, but rather a pasta. It changes its genus, as adding wings to a warm dinosaur makes it a bird. In the case of a minestra, the bread is but accompaniment. Add pasta to that same minestra, and the pasta becomes the essential matter of the dish, which then takes its specific form from its minestra. When I make pasta ‘n lentils, I sometimes save some of the lentils to eat on their own the next day as a minestra, accompanied no doubt by bread. In contrast, my people never have bread with pasta, for doubling the starches ruins the proportion. Only at the end after the pasta is all eaten, if there remain remnants of sauce in the bowl, might we reach for a piece of bread to sop it up.

Notwithstanding the antiquity of these distinctions, when we add not only pasta but different sorts of pasta to the multifarious minestra of a minestrone, we don’t call it a pasta, but rather a “minestrone”, or an “oaf” of a “minestra”. This nomeclature does not make quidditative sense, but there it is anyway, existing. Exist though it may, if there’s no accounting for it, there’s no knowing it, speaking precisely, is there?

Blog the Sixteenth:Greens ‘n Potato Mash

With a Side of Dry-Roasted Meat.

Like most addictive substances, greens are an acquired taste.  Remember the first time you tasted alcohol?  Didn’t it seem inconceivable to you at the time that anyone could like that taste?  And if you had known how much trouble it is to produce wine, beer, or spirits, wouldn’t a passion for it seem not only gross, but down right unnatural?  Such is the case with greens.  What tastes like dirt to others, to its lovers is earthy; where others taste metal, its lovers taste minerals.  Greens require lots of soaking because, well,  they’re dirty.  They sometimes need par-boiling because, well, they taste like iron.   After these preparatory purges of huge unwieldy heads of greens, you end up with a small pile of green mush.  What but addiction could explain anyone’s going to such lengths?

Well, poverty might could explain some of it.  No doubt my people’s knack for making greens delicious goes back to that mating of poverty with resourcefulness that gave birth to their cooking.  They were poor.  Greens are both easy to find in the byways and easy to grow in abundance.  The tender stuff, especially the hearts, can be eaten raw in salads.  But what to do with the tough, the bitter, the metallic?  That’s when ingenuity enters in, and cooking gets started.

Such culinary ingenuity should not be taken for granted.  It is yet another witness to human omnivorousness.  One might expect animal appetite to tend naturally toward the pleasant and away from the painful.  But human beings like the sour as well as the sweet; the fiery as well as the mellow; the bitter as well as the salty.  The human palate enjoys being pinched, bitten, burned, desiccated, and generally roughed up, now and again.  We can get interested in the full gamut of tastes and feels.  Why?  Because our senses are the mediums of our minds, and we like to perceive and contemplate all that there is.  We are omnivorous.

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.