Chile

Chipotle peppers add deep, smoked heat to this cheater brisket, which is otherwise cooked with all the regular barbecue elements. The leftovers are outstanding, so cook the big one and stock up for your upcoming Mexican fiesta featuring brisket chili, nachos, tacos, or burritos.

Min’s uncle Mike and aunt Mary of Belen, New Mexico, spend their free time on the banks of the Rio Grande in the little resort town of Truth or Consequences. The town’s name change from Hot Springs occurred back in 1950 when Ralph Edwards, host of the popular radio show, announced that, to celebrate the show’s tenth anniversary, Truth or Consequences would broadcast from the first town to rename itself after the show. Forward-thinking civic leaders jumped at the opportunity for free publicity and to instantly differentiate their town from the hundreds of other Hot Springs across the country. The name change vote passed and Ralph Edwards became a town hero. Now, everybody just calls it T or C for short. After a day relaxing with high-speed toys on the nearby Elephant Butte Reservoir, Mike and Mary regularly welcome a brood of sunburnt kids and friends with a patio barbecue. Elaborate cooking is the last thing on anyone’s mind. This throw-it-all-in-the-slow-cooker chili pork barbecue (or try it with beef chuck roast) lets Mary have as much fun as the rest of the gang. Serve the meat with warm tortillas, guacamole, shredded lettuce, onions, and plenty of Pecos Pintos (page 147).

Our friend Mary Ellen Chavez of Belen, New Mexico, owns the wildly popular Burritos Alinstante, a small chain with a cultish following in the Albuquerque area. When he met her, R. B. (a swamp Yankee from Rhode Island) asked what kind of Mexican food she served. “We don’t serve Mexican food, R. B., it’s New Mexican,” she gently corrected. “New Mexico is the only place for red and green chiles like ours.” Serving her mother’s famous burritos with New Mexico red and green chiles has earned the small chain Best of Show among more than 230 vendors at the New Mexico State Fair. Number one on the menu is Carne Adovada, pork that’s first browned or grilled, then slow-cooked in New Mexico red chile sauce. We’ve swapped Mary Ellen’s restaurant steam pan for a slow cooker. Fortunately, dried New Mexico red chiles are available pretty much everywhere now. To make the sauce, rehydrate the dried chiles in hot water and blend them with garlic and a little water. After a warm night in the slow cooker, you’ve got breakfast burritos Alinstante. Mary Ellen has yet to tire of them, but she limits herself to one a day.

In between cruises when you’re pining for the late-night lido deck scene, there’s no better way to escape the quotidian than an island-themed luau. Lining the slow cooker with banana leaves and filling it with seasoned pork can really generate a breezy mood. The cheater way is to put a whole banana, skin and all, on top of our Luau Pork during cooking. It gets the party point across just as well. To carry the theme, think side dishes with tropical fruits, macadamia nuts, coconut, and rice.

Heating up in the desert sun, chipotles bring the smoke; lemon takes over for the vinegar.

In spite of his Irish tendencies to worry and brood, R. B. pretends to think of himself as an upbeat guy who genuinely wants to like things. Even so, he’s given up on grilled shrimp-stuffed jalapeño peppers. It’s hard to cook a raw shrimp tucked inside a pepper unless the pepper is roasted to bitter death. Cheesy alligator snouts—broiled and blistered jalapeños with melted cheese—never disappoint. Broil or toaster-oven these treats and all they need as garnish is plenty of cold beer. Serve the broiled snouts as a conversation-starting appetizer, whole and hot from the oven, or sliced and set in little tortilla scoops. Serve them as a side to a Mexican feast paired with Cheater Carne Adovada Alinstante (page 56). Jalapeños are usually tolerably hot, although it’s impossible to know until you take a bite. Satisfy all your guests with a combination of hot green jalapeños and the mild mini red and yellow sweet bell peppers.

Hummus may come and go, but warm spinach cheese dip, with its highly satiating qualities and homey familiarity, is still and always will be an excellent choice for casual parties involving cocktails. Broiler-charred jalapeños are our spin to bump this old classic into flavor advanced placement. As with any creamy cheese spread, R. B. will find any leftovers, no matter how buried in Min’s fridge, to plop on open-faced burgers.

For more than fifty years, Min’s two family branches, the Merrells and the Almys, have been eating at the Cortez Cafe in Carlsbad, New Mexico. The food is straightforward Tex-Mex and always finishes with a round of sopapillas and honey. Back in the ’70s, the family thought nothing odd about beginning meals with bowls of fiery green salsa scooped up with saltine crackers. The Cortez has since switched to tortilla chips and you may prefer them as well, but the Merrell-Almy clan retains its hot spot for salsa and crackers. Pining away in Nashville for that distinct Cortez flavor, Min thinks she’s figured it out—it’s mostly fresh jalapeños. Min’s cousin Eric, knighted Sir Cortez by the clan, now brings his version of Min’s Cortez Salsa recipe to every family dinner—with sleeves of only the freshest saltines, of course.

In the thirteenth century, when the Angevins reanchored their royal seat from Palermo to Napoli, the latter was illuminated, transformed, by the influx of a luxe new citizenry. Royals, nobles, and government bigwigs were followed by a cadre of the epoch’s great artists. Giotto and Petrarch and Boccaccio ensconced themselves in Napoli. And as they are wont to do, the masses, too, followed, hoping to stay warm, a little warmer even, inside the echoes of the city’s great, new noise. And as much as she did flourish then, also did the misery of her increase. In great part, Napoli starved under the reign of the French kings. While obscenely cinematic festivals were being staged inside the lustrous salons, the Napoletani waited outside each evening for the cooks to wallop out over the castle walls to them the viscera of the lords’ sheep and cows and pigs and goats. And from these mean stuffs did the women and men of Napoli invent their suppers. Among the dishes that became tradition during this time was zuppa di soffritto, a high-spiced potion made from the heart, spleen, and lungs of the pig and still prized by the Napoletani. Here follows a version of the good soup that asks for less exotic parts of the pig.

This is the poorest of dishes for the days when the seas are as empty as one’s belly, when even the clams have forsaken one. Fashioned from seawater—sometimes bits of seaweed—a tomato or two, some fat, firm garlic, a dried red chile, and a thread of good oil or a spoonful of sweet, rendered pork fat, hoarded from an easier day.

Though the ancient origins of pasta are likely Egyptian, it was inside the eternal Saturnalia of fifteenth-century Napoli where the simple stuff began its story as an everyday comfort against the hungers of the southern Italian poor. Crafted and cooked and dispatched from painted wagons spirited through the city’s boisterous alleyways— they were exuberant vehicles of rescue enrobed in garlicky vapors, for nearly everyone could sport the price of a portion of il carrettiere’s belly-warming wares, hence thwarting the troll for yet a few more hours. Typically, il carrettiere prepared his long, thick cords of dried pasta by dragging them through a warmed coalescence of olive oil, ravishingly perfumed with garlic, oregano, and peperoncino. Should one have been so flush as to call for cacio, his dose would have been handsomely dusted with the piquant pecorino of Crotone in Calabria. The formula stayed safe through time, its solace radiating north and south, where still some one or another version of pasta all’ aglio, olio, e peperoncino prevails as cure for surfeit now as much as for want, but always, one hopes, with homage to il carrettiere. As rudimentary as this dish is, don’t mistake it for one whose elements might be collected without care. One needs crisp, sharp, juicy garlic and a fine extra-virgin oil. That little bottle in the cupboard with the blue or red top that is older than the Flood and smells only of dust is no longer oregano. And the pure, clean fire that comes from a small, whole dried chile pepper crushed between your thumb and fingers can rarely be had from flakes of them long-ago collected in jars.

The transumanza is all but a faded pastoral ritual in the Abruzzo. Once three million sheep and lambs were guided each year from summer mountain pastures to the winter lowlands and back again, but now—with the flocks reduced to several hundreds of thousands—they are transported in huge, canvas-roofed vans. And thus the pastoral life is in suspension, lulled into a smaller, less dramatic sort of existence that permits the shepherd to stay fixed, to have some dwelling or other as a home. Before, he lived with only the sky as refuge. His nobilities and his indignities, his dreaming and sleeping and, often, his dying, were fulfilled in the open air. But to hear stories from old men who, as boys, were raised to be shepherds, whose youth, nomadic and primitive, was spent in the waning epoch of the transumanza, one thinks it might hardly have been a life of desperation. Its very solitude was often its gift, say the old men. In his aloneness, the shepherd honed a curiously grand capacity to listen and discern. He became a piper of sorts, free to move about from village to village, and thus to transport to the hungry ears of each place his accumulation of stories. He was a folkloric hero, an exotic who lived by the graces. The old men smile deep in their eyes when they speak of they who live and die hanging tight to the fancy that security is palpable as a jewel. And, so, having heard the dusty memoirs and the swollen legends recounted by the old shepherd romancers, of the austere dishes they recall being cooked out in the open over their fires or under the shelter of some ruin, we wondered if someone, somewhere, might be cooking them still. Having just billeted ourselves at a modest hotel, La Bilancia, in the environs of Loreto Aprutino, spurred by the repute of its kitchen and cellars, we approached our host. Sergio is a gallant man with a burly sort of gentility. He said how strange it was that the circle had closed so quickly, that in his own lifetime, foods representing poverty had come to be of historical, gastronomic, interest to a stranger. We followed him into the kitchens, the parish of his wife, Antonietta. It was she—one who had every comestible at her disposal, kitchens with the square footage of a small village, four chefs at work under her soft-spoken guidance—who offered to cook the old dishes. They were, after all, her childhood food, the consoling plates of her grandmothers. She explained that the Abruzzesi, even when their means invite them to eat more extravagantly, still cook the old dishes at home. “They still comfort,” she said. “They are cherished, they are our nostalgia.” Too, she mused, this was not so true in some other regions where the foods a people ate when they were poor were fast set aside in better times. And so, because her clients partake of these dishes at home, it is other foods they long for when they sit in her dining room. Hence, it was a somewhat singular occasion for Antonietta to prepare the old foods. She set to making her lists, dispatching us on a mission to the nearby town of Penne to find a certain flour, a certain dried bean. Antonietta cooked two of her own preferred dishes from the traditions of the transumanza, from la cucina povera. And that evening, the immense room filled with guests vanquishing great hefts of roast lamb and fricasseed veal and saddle of hare and generous plates of maccheroni alla chitarra with a sauce of wild boar. She sat with us, her impeccable white cook’s bonnet always in place, eating the simple food with an unembarrassed appetite. We, too, loved the dishes, as much for their own goodness as for the images they lit. The rough pasta dough is made from three flours and hand-rolled. Cut into rustic strings, this is not the ethereal pasta of the refined cucina whose destiny it is to linger about with shavings of white truffle or the belly of some poached lobster. It is the coarse stuff that is homey sop fo...

From the somber mountain village of Amatrice in the Abruzzo—one of the areas from which have emigrated, to other regions of Italy and throughout the world, many cooks and chefs—was born the famous pasta all’ Amatriciana, prepared faithfully by the pilgrim cooks wherever they go. One evening in Rome, an Abruzzese cook asked if he might offer a different pasta to us, the one most nostalgic for him. What he presented was, indeed, pasta all’ Amatriciana, simply made without tomatoes. In dialect, its name contracts into gricia.

For nearly a century, the mattatoio, the slaughterhouse, of Rome was fixed, south of the city’s center and flanked by Porta San Paolo and the Piramide di Caio Cestio, in the quarter of Testaccio—a hillock formed by the dross of terra-cotta amphorae that held olive oil and other comestibles imported into the city. Of an eloquent, uncompromised Roman character, the quarter grew up simple little houses in whose kitchens were cooked the humble remains of the butchers’ art, transforming the offal into i piatti fortissimi—the strongest plates—to serve to the workingmen for lunch. Il mattatoio has long since been relocated, but the Testaccio still practices the most orthodox Roman gastronomic traditions, building dishes such as nervetti in insalata, a salad of poached calves’ feet, coda alla vaccinara, (see page 4), pajata, the grilled or braised intestines of a calf or an ox, and trippa. As prosaic as are the formulas for these dishes, the manner in which they are presented is also prescripted. First, if the proprietor in any one of the neighborhood’s tabernae—Romans swing easily in and out of Latin, as in this usage for taverns—doesn’t approve one’s general look or demeanor, he will point, steely, to a little sign marked COMPLETO, reserved, that is fastened, permanently, handily for such occasions, to a rope of salame suspended from the rafters. If he does deem to seat one, neither he nor his colleagues will be charmed if one speaks Italian. It is only the dialect of Rome that is shouted in the Testaccio. It seems best to communicate, through eye-rolling and hand-flailing, that one wishes all decisions to be made by the house, that one is armed with magnificent appetite, and that one shall remain serene and unrepining at whatever part of whatever animal may be set before one. Our place of choice to be fed like a Roman is called Da Felice, an unsigned post in Via Mastro Giorgio. We go always of a Saturday so we can always eat tripe. Soaked in water and vinegar, urging the nastiness from its pores, the tripe is poached before it is sautéed in a battuto (the fundamental vegetable, herb, and fat flavoring for a sauce) of pancetta, olive oil, and garlic, then braised overnight on the quietest flame in tomato, white wine, and wild mint. A Saturday ritual in the Testaccio, as well as in every genuine osteria and trattoria in Rome, la trippa is served in deep bowls, under a dusting of pecorino, with chunks of rough bread and a jug of Frascati. Food of the poor is this tripe, flotsam conjured into a flavorful, cockle-warming stew, one that a sage Roman wouldn’t trade for a big, bloody beefsteak, not even one flounced in truffles.

Braised meats are ideal for any large gathering because much of the work can be done the day before. In my opinion, braises actually taste better when the flavors have had time to meld and develop. And in the braising process, not only have you cooked the meat, you’ve also created a sauce. Osso buco is a classic braised dish of northern Italy, usually garnished with gremolata, a popular condiment made of minced lemon zest, parsley, and garlic. That’s fine in the winter, but in spring, I like to add two of my favorite spring ingredients: peas and pea shoots. It’s a brighter rendition of the traditional preparation. The risotto, perfumed with saffron, is the perfect starch for spooning up with the braising juices. I’m usually pro-cheese, but in the case of this risotto I find myself torn. Though the Parmesan gives the risotto richness, without it the dish is a little lighter and “more of the season.” You decide.

Brian Wolff is the chef de cuisine and resident pickler at Lucques. Every time I turn around, he’s got something in the vinegar, like shell beans, cherries, or tiny onions. His pickled raisins are delicious and make a great last-minute condiment. Keep a jar in the refrigerator; if you have a terrine or leftover roast chicken or pork, these raisins make a wonderful sweet-and-sour topping.