Lamb

Lamb shanks cooked in the cheater slow cooker without a lot of the usual braising liquid turn out with an amazing chestnut brown patina. We swear they look more like they came off an open fire of crackling grapevines than out of Min’s limited-edition NASCAR Bobby Labonte slow cooker. In a few hours and with very little liquid, the meat cooks to a perfectly tender state, but stays beautifully intact for country-chic presentation. Imagine the shanks piled on a deep platter with garlicky white beans and wilted escarole or on fashionable couscous. Talk about restaurant-stylish and dinner-party perfect. Unlike last-minute chops, shanks taste best made ahead and reheated. Depending on your final destination, reheat them in the slow cooker by themselves or foil wrapped in the oven with side dishes. Shanks are also an efficient way to achieve a pile of tender pulled lamb for pita pockets piled with Yo Mayo Slaw (page 152) or paired with the Detailed Salad (page 156). We like to use the Rub de la Maison, which combines barbecue basics with herbes de Provence and dried lemon peel.

We’ve always had a thing for the charred lamb kebabs on flat skewers that the kebab/gyro joints do so well. One place even gave R. B. a couple of swordlike skewers after he bombarded them with questions. We make lamb/beef combo meatballs flavored with cumin to roast in the oven, and sometimes even finish on the grill. The meatballs cook on a baking sheet just like a pan of cookies. We’ve come to appreciate the many lives of a good batch of meatballs. A bag of Q’Balls in the freezer is as prized as a bag of brisket. Toss them with pasta, stuff them into pita pockets and sub sandwiches, serve them as a heavy appetizer or a quick heat-up for kid suppers. Customize the Q’Balls by substituting a couple teaspoons of any of the cheater dry rubs for the salt and seasonings.

Raised up seven hundred years before Christ on the Mar Ionio, the resplendence of Sybaris eclipsed Athens. Tenanted by unredeemed voluptuaries who roasted songbirds, wove cloth from gold, slept upon rose petals, and indulged every hunger, even their appetite for peace, these Sybarites vanished, as if by some peevish smite from the gods. All that remains is a farming village of sweet, sleepy folk who roast lamb with lemons. Still, I think theirs is a dish upon which an old Sybarite could smile.

Deep in the Gothic tangles of the Aspromonte sits the fourteenth-century Santuario della Madonna di Polsi, a refuge culled by an ancient order of cloistered sisters dedicated to the honor of the Madonna, through a life of acetism. Once a year, though, in the early spring, when pilgrims from faraway parishes walk over Monte Montalto to the sanctuary to celebrate the festival of the Madonna, the nuns sacrifice a flock of newborn lambs to the glory of her, braising their flesh in old, shallow coppers and feeding the faithful at long, rough-hewn tables set out on a meadow floor.

During the sovereignty of Byzantium over southern Italy in the tenth century, it was in the workshops of Catanzaro that the silks that emblazoned the courts of Costantinopoli were loomed and crafted and tinged. Thus it was that from these handiworks, humble Catanzaro, its cheek brushing close upon the Ionian, lived its few lustrous moments after the glory days of Magna Graecia. But save the lacy Oriental architecture raised up by the Byzantines, nothing of the comforts of that epoch endured. And so Catanzaro, as did all of Calabria, pressed on in the severest of lives. And when, late in the 1700s, an earthquake felled the city, its fierceness left but dust. Reborn then, Catanzaro is now all of eighteenth-century alleyways, the parishes of the people insinuating upon the palaces of the nobles, the whole formed of a crooked, good-natured charm. And everywhere—round each curve and set into the arms of every angle wait the beloved putiche—the taverns—of the workingmen. Small, dark-wooded dens are they, wrapped in sharp, grapy vapors breathed up from the fat, brown barrels of gaglioppo (a local red wine) over these past hundreds of years. Traditionally le putiche were the dispensaries of only three balms—honest red wine, compassion, and a hellaciously spiced mash made from the viscera of pork, veal, lamb, or goat, sometimes from baccalà, the flesh braised in tomatoes and wine with peperoncini then cradled in a leaf of soft, flat, chewy bread, folded and devoured out of hand. And these morzeddu—dialectically, morsels—made the breakfast, the later morning’s merendina—snack—a consolingly juicy partner throughout the day and evening with stout doses of purply wine. Sadly, there seems of late a flurry of gentrification among the putiche, the work of those who would sophisticate them into whitewashed osterie with wine lists and menus translated into English and German. The cooks, too occupied with carpaccio and tiramisù, no longer make morzeddu. Even the compassion has perished. Enough of the old and crusty taverns endure, though, their comforts unfaded, at least for a bit longer. Here follows a version of morzeddu made with lamb—its shoulder rather than its spleen or its lungs—and a fine terra-cotta pot of the mash and a basket of warm breads are the rustic stuff with which to open an outdoor feast while some other meat or fish might be roasting on the fire.

Shanks slowly braised like these composed a winter Sunday lunch served to us in a linoleum-tiled card room snugged behind a bar on the edges of Potenza. The players were sent off precisely at one so that the cook might lay the oil-clothed tables with yellow linens and set them with blue and white china. The eight or ten tables were all reserved, as they were each Sunday, the only day when the improvised dining room was open. We had heard about the wonderful food and asked the signora if we might wait until the table of one of her fixed clients might become available. “Impossibile.” She laughed. “Questi tavoli non saranno liberi prima di mezzanotte.” “These tables will not be free before midnight.” She explained that after lunch, the pretty linens and china would be washed and tucked away to await next Sunday, leaving the gaming tables free for cardplaying throughout the afternoon and evening. When one booked a table, one booked it for lunch and endless rounds of briscola, the high-stakes action to which even the women were invited on Sundays. A lovely and entrepreneurial program, we thought, but what about our lunch? The sympathetic signora made room for us, tightening up the seating around a table for four, adding two more place settings and chairs. And so we dined with the priest and his mother and a retired fruitseller and his wife, all of whom spoke only in dialect while we bumped along in Italian. The encumbrance of language soon dissolved in the mists of the signora’s beautiful food. Plates of local, dried sausages and farmhouse cheeses, baskets of just-fried, bay-perfumed breads, a soup of bitter greens, great bowls of rough, handmade pasta sauced only with the rich liquors from braised lamb and dusted with pecorino and, finally, the whole, braised shanks of lamb themselves, sending up sublime perfumes of garlic and rosemary. And as sustaining as is the memory of the company and the food on that Sunday in Potenza, it is another scene that plays more sweetly in my mind. A sort of coming-of-age for me—it was there that I learned, fast and well, the secrets of briscola.

The hefts of lamb, perfumed with aromatics and roasted over a wood fire, speak of a primordial innocence. Make a feast of them. Bake some pettole (page 153) and offer a great wedge of young pecorino and a jug of honest red wine.

A perhaps four-thousand-year-old, pre-Mosaic formula, the name of the dish is derived from its cooking vessel, caldaro—cauldron. A characteristic preparation of Gravina in Puglia, this is the ancient dish thought to be denounced in the Old Testament: “Thou shall not seethe a kid in his mother’s milk,” forming the Orthodox Hebrew proscription against dishes that combine meat with milk. This version sautés suckling kid or lamb until golden in fennel, parsley, and garlic-perfumed oil before its milk braising.

Another dish often prepared for the panarda (page 50), the sausages are rubbed with olio santo, wrapped in Savoy cabbage leaves, and grilled over wood. Because lamb fat can give up an aggressive, even disagreeable, flavor, overpowering the savor of the lamb itself, pork fat is recommended to keep the sausages full of juices and to support their intricate spicing.

Agnello Piccino, Piccino, Picciò (Delicate, more Delicate, The most Delicate Lamb of all). Just outside the village of Campo di Giove—Field of Jove—southeast of Sulmona, there lives and works a butcher who is also a chef of sorts, roasting and braising, as he does, some of his wares in a great, old stone bread oven that sits behind his pristinely stuccoed shop. His clients come sometimes to buy their lunch or their supper still warm and fragrant, readied for the table. Though it was achingly cold on that February morning when first we came upon the butcher at work in his outdoor kitchen, we joined the long, decorously kept line that wound its way from his ovens down the country road. We offered our good-days to the mostly women in whose midst we now stood, women typically Abruzzese, with serene, high-boned faces. They carried their pots and casseroles in sacks or against a hip and, when they felt our interest, they talked to us a bit about the dishes for which the old butcher was celebrated. Mutton braised overnight with tomatoes and onions and red wine; pork braised with bay leaf and garlic and peperoncino in Trebbiano d’Abruzzo; tripe and pancetta with tomatoes and yet more peperoncino; kid roasted with centerbe (an artisanly distilled liqueur made with mountain herbs). Long and reverent was their litany, but when one of them spoke of his agnello da latte—of suckling lamb that he braised only with butter in a sealed copper pot—there came a swift agreement that it was his piatto prelibato—his dish of greatest refinement and delicacy. As the gods would have it that day, the butcher had not prepared agnello da latte but intinglio di agnello allo zafferano (page 47), which, when it came our turn, he packaged for us in a little plastic tub and on which we later lunched in the car with the motor running. It was luscious. We returned in the afternoon, forsaking the day’s program, to beg its formula and to know when the mythical angello da latte might be forthcoming. Il macellaio, the butcher, shook his head on both counts. The suckling lamb in the sealed casserole he prepared only when he found lambs of just the right plumpness and age whose mothers fed only on certain grasses. He turned to the next question. “Una ricetta è una questione di cuore, signora mia; è molto personale,” he said. “A recipe is a thing of the heart, my lady; it is most personal.” I simply looked at him, neither beseechingly nor with delusion, and proceeded to tell him how I thought it had been accomplished. I spoke for a long time, I suppose, he never interrupting even as clients accumulated around his cold white cases. I sealed my discourse by asking why he’d used imported saffron rather than the milder one harvested locally up near Navelli. By now, he was laughing, mostly at my accent, I thought, which is distinctly Northern and often unpleasant to southern ears. At a point much later, after we knew each other longer, he confessed it was only my determinazione—determination—that had made him laugh. The butcher, at least with words, never told me if my understanding of his beautiful lamb stew was correct, but each time I make the dish, I know that the pungent, melting result is a fine tribute to him. And so, when Campo di Giove sits even remotely on our route, we visit, happy to see our friend and hoping to find agnello da latte. We are always a day too late, a week too early. Someday our timing will be divine. Curiously enough, though, the butcher, without my asking for it, one day told me its formula.

La Coscia della Sposa (The Bride’s Thigh). Once upon a time, the panarda was a rustic sort of feast hosted by a farmer for his neighbors and friends, for his tribe. A feast whose substance was bread and lard—pane e lardo—the words meshed, dialectically, as panarda. Lard was a precious comestible, a potent winter fuel that could keep a body whole up there in the mountains. Thus, if a family had a pig to slaughter, it was a family blessed. And if this family was wont to share its sainted beast, even if only the herb-scented renderings of his fat spread on a trencher of honest bread, it was a festival cheered. Time and greater plenty swelled the proportions of the panarda, it growing into a flushed reveling, a Pantagruelian episode staged by one who desired to give thanks for some plague disarmed, some spiritual wound soothed. The panarda became a gastronomic pageant, a devout rite of Christendom quickened with mystical invocations—a duality, then and now, with which the Abruzzesi are at their ease. A wake, a wedding, a generous harvest, an homage—all these became motives to unfurl the festival, to illuminate, throughout its thirty courses, the inextinguishable Abruzzese ebullience. So fraught is the feast with the host’s honor and the honor of his forebears that guests at his panarda must take to heart the intricacies of the culture into which they have entered. He who does not is imperiled. Stories are recounted of one or another unwitting stranger, who, by the twenty-fifth or twenty-eighth plate, begged his leave from the table. It was then that the barrels of primitive muskets were leaned against the temple of the blunderer, these inspiring, pell-mell, the rediscovery of his appetite. Still, today, when one sits at a panarda table, one is bound to partake of any and all that is set before him. To this, I make personal testimony. Our induction into the rites of the panarda was at a country wedding near the city of L’Aquila, its thirty-two courses presented to nearly two hundred celebrants. Here follow the two dishes I loved best, the first for its straightforward symbolism and display of the ticklish Abruzzese humor, the second for its pure, seminal goodness.