Chicory

Italians love the chicory family of vegetables, of which escarole is a member. Escarole was one of the abundant leafy green vegetables that they could readily find in the States. Today it has fallen out of favor, but when I opened Buonavia, my first restaurant, in 1971, we were cooking escarole by the bushel. We served it in soups, braised with garlic and oil as a side dish, in salads, and for an appetizer; or we would stuff it, as in the recipe below. In Italy, stuffed greens served with beans would often have been the whole meal, not just a side.

The harmony of this salad is that both the radicchio and the endive are from the chicory family, sweet and slightly bitter at the same time.

This quick salad delivers a lot of flavor. The radicchio has a touch of bitterness, but the raisins bring in the sweet element, and the goat cheese the creamy complexity. It is a great appetizer, or can be a main course.

Radicchio belongs to the chicory family. Sweet and bitter at the same time, it is delicious in salads, braised alone, in risotto, and for making pasta sauces. On my recent trip to the Salinas Valley in California, I was astounded to see how radicchio prospered, and how much of it was being produced.

This soup has weathered well among the generations of the Italian immigrant families that have cooked it. As I travel through America and look for the flavors and recipes the Italian immigrants brought with them, this recipe is almost always remembered fondly. It is still cooked with nostalgia and reverence, and at holidays, particularly in the homes of immigrants from southern Italy. It is a dish usually served when the whole family is at the table. Even if the “marriage” mostly likely refers to the marriage of the ingredients, the soup is also thought to give strength to a newly married couple for their wedding night.

Escarole is in the chicory family, the bitter dark-green vegetables that Italians love. Escarole played such a big role in the cooking of Italian Americans because it seemed to be one of the few chicory vegetables available here in the States. It is a very versatile and inexpensive vegetable as well: easy to grow, resilient to cooler weather, and giving a large yield per head. The outer leaves can be used in soups, braised with garlic and oil, or stuffed; the tender center white leaves are great for salads. This is an Italian recipe, but the ingredients are adapted to include the local ingredient kale, much loved and eaten in the States.

Make soup with any of the greens (and reds) in the chicory-endive family, including the various kinds of radicchio now in the markets, escarole, curly endive (or frisée), or Belgian endive, as well as unrelated leafy vegetables such as Swiss chard, spinach, or arugula. The procedure is the same, though cooking times will vary.

Escarole is a great vegetable that is used much in Neapolitan cuisine, in soups and salads or just braised with garlic and oil. In this recipe, blanched escarole leaves are wrapped around a savory stuffing (as cabbage often is) and baked. Serve these rolls as an elegant antipasto, or as a vegetarian main course.

You must be familiar with timballo from the film Big Night—maccheroni dressed with a wonderful sweet tomato sauce set in a big round form of pâte brisée to bake. A sweet crust with savory pasta might seem an unlikely combination, but the timballo is delicious and represents much of what is left of the Neapolitan kitchen from its aristocratic days under French-Spanish rule. These delightful pizzelle—small half-moon turnovers of raised sweet dough, stuffed with braised escarole, garlic, and sausage—are a wonderful and much simpler rendition of the timballo. The bitterness of the escarole and savory flavor of the meat, enveloped in the sweet crust, reach a perfect balance. These pizzelle make a great hors d’oeuvre, passed around still warm from the oven. They will win you much praise, and you do not need to labor over them at the last minute. You can make the dough and filling a day before. Moreover, the assembled pizzelle can be frozen and then baked when needed.

Radicchio trevisano will yield the best risotto with the most authentic Italian flavor, but this recipe will be very good with radicchio grown in the United States, either the small round heads, or heads with long wide leaves. Endive, a distant cousin of the radicchio, will also make a good risotto.

Although it is great in a salad—sweet and bitter at the same time—in the cold winter months radicchio trevisano is better cooked, and has a more resilient texture. Traditionally paired with speck—boneless, smoked prosciutto—radicchio makes a great risotto (see page 115) and a great sauce for pasta. In those dishes, the radicchio serves a secondary role as a distinctive flavoring, but when baked this way, it is the main protagonist. I enjoy baked radicchio by the mouthful, savoring its taste and texture, sweet, bitter, and crunchy. The best variety for baking is the long thin radicchio trevisano or spadone (as shown in the photos), but the small round heads most often found in the supermarket or the kind with long but wide leaves (resembling purple romaine lettuce) are also delicious baked this way. Serve as an antipasto or a vegetable course, over soft or baked polenta.

Puntarelle is also called Catalonian chicory, though I think of it as a truly Italian vegetable. It is in the chicory family, with thicker stalks tapering to serrated leaves that look a bit like those of a dandelion. The leaves have a little bite to them, with more of a fennel-endive thing going on in the stalks. It might take some searching to find it in the market—you could always try asking your market if they would order it—but it’s worth seeking out. In Rome, puntarelle is traditionally paired with strong flavors such as anchovy and garlic that can match the strong flavor of the vegetable, as I do here, along with an ice-water soak that takes off some of the edge. If you can’t find puntarelle, I suppose you could substitute frisée, but then you’re kind of missing the magic.

This is a very grown-up salad and my idea of a fantastic lunch. It also happens to be a great way to use loins left over when you’ve braised or stewed the richer, darker pieces of your rabbit. Like pork tenderloin or filet mignon, rabbit loin can’t take that sort of cooking. Give it a quick sear instead, and toss it with crisp pancetta and frisée in a Chianti vinaigrette. You’ll find yourself making rabbit more often just to end up with spare loins.

This lovely salad can slide from late winter into early spring when bouquets of radishes proliferate in the market. Some people find endive too harsh, but here the flavor is mellowed a bit and the leaves are given extra snap by a saltwater soak. This is a study in textures, with the silky endive accented by the crunch of the nuts, all lightly bound with a tart but delicate Meyer lemon dressing. Because of the egg yolk, the vinaigrette won’t last for more than two days in the fridge, but you’ll find lots of uses for any leftover dressing. Try tossing it with boiled Piccolo potatoes or use it on your favorite greens.

Uni, or sea urchin roe, is at once delicate and incredibly rich. I like this preparation because the chive and radish offer a bit of bite and cut some of that richness, while the lemon and cucumber contribute a breezy freshness. Because the portions are small, make sure you cut the vegetables into a very fine, uniform dice. This would make a very elegant passed appetizer at a cocktail party. You can find fresh uni packaged in trays at Asian markets.

Using canned beets keeps the prep time to a minimum, but you can substitute roasted beets if you wish (see note below).