Wine

Traditionally, the gatekeep of an apartment building in Napoli is a widow or a widower of a certain age, one of whose missions, as spiritual guardian of the palazzo, is to slot the mail—after fastidious palpating of its contents, lifting it to the light of the sun, trawling it for heretical intelligence, and generally shadowing the recipient’s movements by it, to diligently rouse, invent, and unbosom internal gossip. The good gatekeep only breaks from these industries to stir at or baste some one of his legendary little potions, all of which signal to the tenants as they cross the threshold what will be the old watchdog’s supper.

It was not often,that one was plump enough in the purse to buy a kilo or so of meat from the butcher, carry it home, and cook it up into some luscious, soulful dish. When fortune placed in one’s purse a few centesimi more than were necessary for subsistence, one sought out the carnacottaro (an itinerant seller of cooked meat).

It seems unclear why a dish characteristic of Napoli should be called after a Ligurian port. Some say it’s because a Genovese sailor cooked it for some locals and the goodness of it was hailed throughout the hungry city. Others will tell you that Genovese is nothing more than a torturing of Ginevrina—of Geneva—hence giving a Swiss chef, one from the tribe of the Bourbons’ monzù, no doubt, credit for the sauce (page 84). The truth of its origins, adrift forever, holds less fascination, I think, than the patently simple recipe and the lovely, lush sort of texture the meat takes on from its long, slow dance in the pot.

...in the style of Nereto. An old Longobard town in the north of Abruzzo’s province of Teramo, Nereto grows walnuts and breeds turkeys. And when the turkeys grow fat on the walnuts, their just-dressed flesh, roasted with aromatics, indeed tastes of the sweet, smoky nuts. A classic dish for Christmas there, I fix it for our Tuscan version of Thanksgiving. And because our local turkeys, as is likely the case with yours, do not feed on walnuts, I gift the bird with a luscious paste of them smoothed under the skin of its breast. I like the Neretese-inspired turkey infinitely better than the more famous tacchino alla Canzanese, turkey in the manner of Canzano, which typically asks that the bird be relieved of his bones and poached with a calf’s foot and knuckle, then cooled and presented in its jellied broth.

The raffinatezza—refinement—of the food of Teramo is legendary. And the Teramani propose that it was, indeed, among them that crepes—called crespelle or scrippelle in dialect—were first fashioned. It was much later, they say, that their delicate, eggy secrets traveled to France via the gastronomic exchange during the epoch of the Bourbons. Often one finds the scrippelle plumped with a stuffing of mushrooms or a truffled paste of some sort, then gratinéed. Sometimes, they are composed into a timballo—a lovely molded cake, its layers spread with savory filling. Though they are luscious and a genuine part of the culinary heritage of the region, these fall too far, for me, from the ingenuousness of la cucina Abruzzese. The following, though, is a version of scrippelle that is more homespun, the one we eat always at a lovely Teramana osteria called Sotto le Stelle, Under the Stars. Our ritual is this. At about eight o’clock, we stop by at the Bar Centrale (the place most intelligently furnished with the splendid labels and vintages of Italian and French wines in all of Italy south of Rome, all of it accomplished with Abruzzese grace and humility by a man called Marcello Perpentuini). There we chat with Marcello and take an aperitivo. A bit before nine, Marcello telephones Antonio, the restaurant’s owner, orders a bottle of wine for us and tells him we’re on our way. We walk the few blocks through the quiet streets of Teramo to the little restaurant. Our wine has been opened, some lush plate of local salame and fresh, sweet pecorino laid on our table with warm breads, and, perhaps best of all, someone back in the kitchen is making our scrippelle.

…in the manner of Ellisabetta. Abruzzesi women seem congenitally beatific. They endure, they temper, they are faithful to their own notion of life and betray none of the gnashing dramatics of those Italian women who seem to burlesque passion, who remain in pain eternal, fanned if only by the postino’s tardiness. The Abruzzesi are intrinsically more dignified than those. As wives and mothers, the Abruzzesi seem more revered than leaned upon. Not the archetypal massaia, farmwife, a woman of the Abruzzo historically worked the fields, made bricks, and piled them up into rude buildings with the same good sentiments with which she told fables to her children and suckled her baby. There are many stories, in fact, of women of the Abruzzo that I might tell you. I could tell you about Francesca Cipriani. Well into her seventies, slender, of fine bearing, her long, silver hair pinned up under a kerchief, she speaks eloquently of what it is to live in an isolated mountain village at the end of this millennium. She knows very well that hers is the last generation with the will to stay there inside the small rhythms of its solitude. She is of the village of Campotosto, long and still famed for its plump, rough-textured sausages. She is one of the last artigiani—artisans—who build, by hand, the mortadelline di Campotosto. We were hard put, though, to talk her into selling a few of them to us. She said that this last batch had not yet had time to age properly and that she simply would not sell them in their unfinished condition. We told her that we had a woodshed much like hers and that we lived, not so high up as she, but nevertheless, in the mountains and that we would promise to hang the little sausages there in our own crisp, cold, oak-scented air. She consented. As we were driving away, she raced after the car, counting on her fingers and calling to us, “Lasciatele appese fino al giorno di Pasqua e a quel punto saranno perfette”—“Leave them to hang until the day of Easter, at which point they will be perfect.” We did exactly as she said, taking Francesca’s mortadelline from the woodshed on Easter morning, slicing them thickly, and eating them with a soft, buttery pecorino bread for our Easter breakfast. And then I could tell you about Elisabetta. We found her in the countryside between Anversa and Cocullo. We saw a sign fixed to a tree, penned in a child’s hand, we thought, that read, LA VERA CUCINA ABRUZZESE. COME ERA UNA VOLTA. THE TRUE COOKING OF ABRUZZO. AS IT ONCE WAS. It was, after all, nearly noon, and the invitation was, indeed, irresistible. We pointed the car, as the sign’s arrow indicated, down the narrow, scraggly lane. We stopped in front of the only house. There was a puppy sitting among the weeds and wildflowers, a starched, white napkin laid before him like a tablecloth and beset with various little dishes. After wishing him a buon appetito, we turned to the door. Another sign, in the same child’s hand, invited us to ring the bell if we were hungry. We rang the bell. And there came Elisabetta. A rosy wool skier’s cap pulled low over her brow, her thin, tiny body swathed in long skirts—one piled over another for warmth—and scuffed black boots composed her costume, all of it ornament to her caffè-latte-colored skin and the great, gray sparklers she had for eyes. Elisabetta, now seventy, began her career as a restaurateur at sixty-one. She was just coming into her stride, she told us. Since we had arrived much too early for lunch, she sat us down in the kitchen in front of an old whisky bottle filled with cerise-colored wine and two tumblers. She puttered about, chopping and stirring and such, talking about her life, her adventures, how, when her then twenty-year-old son was sent to Sicilia for his military service, she went along. Because she feared the boy would miss her too much and because she feared, too, she migh...

Twenty kilometers from our home sits the bustling Latian village of Acquapendente. There we find our trustworthy pork butcher, our panificio di famiglia (family bakery), and the only shop between Rome and Florence where Erich can find the music of Astor Piazzola. Hence, Acquapendente is a sort of vortex for us. It is on early Friday mornings when it beckons us most plaintively, the day the market—the mercato—comes to town. It is a good-enough market at any time of the year, but steeled in late January fogs is how we like it best. From our home in San Casciano dei Bagni, higher up by four hundred feet and, in winter, sitting nearly always in crystal air, we descend the narrow, sloping road past the sheepfolds, past the ostrich farm, away from the new, gold sun, fresh from its rise, and into the thick, purply mists of the rough little place. Wrapped in our woolens we stroll the abundant tables of green-black Savoy cabbages and violet broccoli, baskets of potatoes and turnips unwashed of their Latian earth. Here and there are lit small, consoling charcoal fires in funny little tripod burners over which the farmers thaw their ungloved hands. Just outside the fray are the humbler posts, those that beg no rent, that are had for their predawn staking. The farmers, sober in the unpacified cold, unwrap their often meager stuffs—a basket of chestnuts, one of cauliflower, and once, a man, standing beside his little pile of pumpkins, held a brace of pheasant, still dripping their blood on the frozen ground, his booty from a predawn hunt—offering them at far lower prices than those asked by their more prosperous colleagues inside the village. It was there, too, at the Friday mercato in Acquapendente that a woman from Bolsena, who was selling just-ground chestnut flour, sat on the edge of her table and wrote out this most wonderful recipe. The smokiness of the chestnut flour enlarges upon the forest scents of the mushrooms, the whole combining into a sensual sort of rusticity. If chestnut flour is not to be found at your specialty store, substitute whole wheat or buckwheat flour and mix 3 ounces of canned, unsweetened chestnut puree with the mascarpone.

Abbacchio, a long-ago Roman term for a newborn lamb, is the prescripted dish of Easter. And older than history is the innocent, rousing scent of it roasting with branches of wild rosemary, curling out from the kitchen doors of the trattorie in the Trastevere on Sundays in the spring, beckoning one to table together.

These are Rome’s other artichokes. Softened rather than crisped in their oil bath, they are of an extravagant goodness.

Not so many springtimes ago, I knew it was a Roman birthday for which I yearned, convinced that the salve of the place would soften the edges of a long sadness. Arriving crumpled and unslept on that morning, I slid my two dusty bags under the purple flounce of the bed in my genteelly shabby room at the Adriano and bolted off to the Campo de’ Fiori. I needed lilacs. I explained to the flower merchant in the market my desire to bring più allegria—more cheerfulness—to my little hotel room, that I was preparing for a sort of birthday party. He amplified the girth of the sweet-smelling sheaves I’d chosen and dispatched his helper to carry the towering bouquets through the twisting streets back to the Adriano. His field of vision completely contained inside thickets of blossoms, the porter left me to play front guard, to scream commands and admonitions back at him, staging a droll farce that could happen only in Rome. Safe inside the hotel with the lilacs, I purloined a large metal wastebasket from the reception hall, tied up its middle in a length of green silk, and installed the great, weeping blooms at the foot of my bed. I raced back to the market to fill two baskets with tiny, blushed velvet peaches still on their branches and hung them from wall sconces and draped them over mirrors and bedposts and on the roof of the dour, mustard-colored armoire. I collected breads from the forno (bakery) in Via della Scrofa, not so much to eat but for the comfort of their forms and their scents. I unwrapped the Georgian candlesticks I always carry with me from their cradle in my old taffeta skirt, threw open the shutters to beams of a rosy moon, and the birthday room was ready. I’d collected a beautiful supper at Volpetti: a brace of quail, each reposing on a cushion of roasted bread—depository for their rosemary juices—olives crushed into a paste with capers and Cognac, a stew of baby artichokes, new peas, and fava beans scented with wild mint and called, mysteriously, la vignarola—the winemaker’s wife—and a small, white, quivering cylinder of sweet robiola (fresh handmade cow’s milk cheese). I laid the feast on the dressing table, serving myself only bits of it at first. But little explosions of goodness insinuated themselves, and the quiet supper urged me into the goodness of the moment. Hungers found, strategies resewn. Happy birthday. During the time I lived at the Adriano, I went each morning to the market in Campo de’ Fiori, stopping to chat with my flower man, he introducing me to the lady with the slenderest, most delicate asparagus, which I devoured raw, like some earth-scented bonbon, and the one with the baby blood-red strawberries collected in the forests of Lake Nemi up in the Alban Hills. A ration of these beauties I vanquished each afternoon between sips of icy Frascati from my changing caffè posts along the campo. With those weeks as initiation, I might have stayed the rest of my life in the lap of that neighborhood, that village within Rome so contained and complete unto itself, and surely would never have known a single lonely day. More than she is a city, Rome is a string of small provinces, fastened one to the other by old fates.

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.

Roman ox butchers, known as i vaccinari, have been attributed authorship for this most characteristic dish of la cucina povera romana. Honored as savvy, inventive cooks, the butchers were and are wont to pot up the most particularly toothsome nuggets plundered from the great beasts. The tail of an ox, though it surrenders inconsiderable flesh, is of the tenderest texture and most delicate savor to be gleaned from the whole hulk of him.

A patently rustic treatment of the prawns that presses us to a dramatic sort of dance in front of the flame as we toss the fat, handsome things about in the hot oil, their briny perfumes dissolving up in great vapors around our heads. A bottle of fine Cognac perched on the kitchen shelf seems an occurrence as common in Rome as is the one filled with the simple white wine from the hills just outside its gates. Here, the bottle is used to a fine end, scenting the seething, sputtering flesh of the prawns inside their bronzed, vermilion shells.

People think risotto is a super-rich dish, made with tons of butter. But when it is made properly, the richness comes from the starchy rice and the stock. To make perfect risotto, really pay attention to what’s happening in the pan. As the risotto cooks, stir it with a wooden spoon in rhythmic movements that go across the bottom and around the sides of the pan. The rice should be constantly bubbling, drinking up the liquid as it cooks.

These leeks are also delicious cold, dressed with a mustard vinaigrette and served with sliced prosciutto and chopped egg.

These tiny black lentils are named for their resemblance to caviar.

Every chef has a love-hate dish, the dish that made it into the first review, the one that customers call ahead for, the dish, therefore, the chef will never be able to take off the menu. Short ribs are mine. I used to be tortured by them, but I’ve come to accept them as a permanent member of the Lucques family. The short-rib saga began one cool and rainy weekend when, inspired by the weather, I made them for a Sunday supper. The response was so overwhelming that I added them to our daily menu. When spring arrived and the city began to warm up, I replaced the short ribs with something lighter. That week, I went out to the dining room to say hello to a friend and was assaulted by diners at three different tables, who waved me over to find out (you guessed it) where the short ribs had gone. At first I was stubborn and refused to serve them in 90-degree weather. But I had a change of heart when I realized how much people loved them and how easily I could satisfy their craving. The short ribs went back on the menu and will probably remain there for all eternity.