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01/11/2005 Archived Entry: "Back from Italy"

I’m back. From Italy. And although I am always excited about going, I am always very happy to be home – and smell my own coffee, as my friend Rozanne Gold says.

It was a very productive and delightful trip. I arrived two days before Christmas and so I had a little time to crash from the intensive book promotion schedule for Arthur Schwartz’s New York City Food that kept me busy from early November. I hung out in the kitchen of Baronessa Cecilia’s farm-inn, watching her, and her cooks, Anna, Eugenia, and dessert queen, Maria, cook up a storm for Christmas Eve and Christmas day. Of course, I could not stand by idly. I helped. Puttering in the kitchen is relaxing for me.

We were about 30 people for Christmas Eve dinner – La Virgilia – which is, as you may know, an all-fish meal. Cecilia is hardly stuck in tradition, however. Yes, we had the obligatory linguine with clam sauce, the baccala (salt cod) fried and served in tomato sauce, and even capitone (eel). Actually, hardly anyone in Cecila’s family likes the eel, so just a small amount was prepared and brought by Cecilia’s sister, Enrica. She dusts it with flour, fries it, then marinates it, which I would call a kind of scapece, the Neapolitan word derived from escabeche. It’s a popular method of cooking zucchini (check out my recipe in Naples at Table), as well as small fish, such as sardines. But Enrica insisted it wasn’t scapece, but marinato, simply “marinated” fish. Our loving but heated “discussion” of this was typical of Italian family table talk. Arguing over the correct name of a dish, or its correct preparation is a favorite indoor sport.

Cecilia started dinner, however, with two less traditional antipasti. She made a Russian salad – insalata russa – which is peas, cubed carrots, and cubed potatoes in mayonnaise, but instead of the usual ham or chicken, she did it with shrimp. And she added gelatin and molded the salad decoratively into timbales. Alongside the pretty Russian salad, she placed a timbale of smoked Scottish salmon filled with minced apples in crème fraiche – which is crema acida in Italian. I doubted that the timbales of smoked-salmon encased minced apples were going to hold their shape, but I was wrong. The plates looked beautiful.

Although Cecilia’s family, the Barattas, live in Salerno and nearby Battipaglia, Christmas dinner is not a typical meal of the region. Her father was from Parma, and because the family lived in Parma during World War II, when it was safer than being in the south, Cecilia’s mother, Elvira, took to cooking Parmense food for Christmas, the food her husband grew up eating. Christmas dinner is centered on stuffed and boiled capons, which make a sensational broth in which are floated cappelletti – you might call them tiny ravioli. I shouldn’t actually use the word “float” because every bowl is so chock-a-block with stuffed pasta that you can’t see the bottom of the bowl. Cappelletti are filled with the gravy resulting from braising beef (you eat the meat at another meal), thickened with breadcrumbs, and flavored with grated Parmigiano. I had two bowlfuls. I couldn’t help myself. When I first started going to Cecilia’s for Christmas nine years ago, we all went to her mother’s house. I remember Cecilia moaning on the drive back to the farm. She claimed to have eaten “at least 90” of the 900 cappelletti her mother had made that year. This year, as her mother is 92, 2,400 cappelletti were made under her supervision by Concetta, her cook of many years. After telling you how many cappelletti a person can eat (well, Cecilia and I), I think I need to add that we had enough for a big party on New Year’s Eve, too. They freeze well.

After Christmas, my Cook at Seliano group arrived. I want to say the highlights of this season’s trip were our elegant, private lunch at the Victoria Excelsior Hotel in Sorrento, and our visit to the amazing Feudi di San Gregorio winery in Avellino (and our fabulous lunch at their contemporary restaurant, Marenná), but it was, as it always is, the camaraderie of the kitchen and the table that makes this such enjoyable work for me, and such a memorable vacation for everyone.

New Year’s Eve we had a grand party for about 60 people, featuring some of the food my group had made – our timballi di tagliolini, a pastry drum filled with meat, pasta, peas, béchamel and Parmigiano, carried around for everyone to admire, is always a source of pride. (The recipe is in Naples at Table), so you don’t have to go to Italy to learn it. Cecilia hired a Neapolitan singer, who I thought was going to be a bit too low-key with only his acoustic guitar, but he turned out to be a real tummler (that’s Yiddish, not Italian, for someone who can rouse an audience) and he had some of the young local guests dancing wildly, and all of us singing along to the more familiar Neapoltian songs.

January 2 was departure day for my group, and being a woman who cannot sit still, Cecilia decided we should take a ride to Buccino, a nearby town where there are some minor Roman ruins, and to Padula, where there is an astonishingly beautiful monastery. The Certosa di San Lorenzo is as close to a grand palace as a monastery can get. It is the Versailles of monasteries, and even more amazingly it housed only 24 monks. All were apparently from very rich families and made sure their kinsmen lived in monastic luxury, with huge, multi-room “cells” and lavish gardens. You should see the kitchen, with gorgeous blue and yellow tiles, colors that supposedly distract the flies. (I’m told the color scheme doesn’t work, at least not on contemporary flies.)

The next day, we went on a four-day orientation trip to Calabria. I say orientation because Cecilia doesn’t know Calabria well, and I have only driven through it on my way to get the ferry in Reggio to Sicily. We didn’t go to any particular area and explore it thoroughly. We let word of good food and interesting archeological sites be our compass.

The one thing that everyone will tell you about Calabria is that they eat an inordinate amount of hot peppers – peperoncini. The two things that no one tells you is that the landscape is stunning, with mountains practically meeting the sea in some places, with plains planted with the largest, tallest, and oldest olive trees you are likely ever to see, alternating with orange groves, which, at this time of the year, are laden with fruit and have shiny dark leaves in contrast to the grey-green of the olive trees. And they have tons of mushrooms in Calabria, as they do, by the way, in neighboring Basilicata. Both these deep-south regions still have huge forests, which most of Italy does not. Mushrooms thrive in forests. We ate fresh porcini every day – I think at every meal but breakfast.

Our friend Camilla, who is married to Giuseppe Januzzi-Savelli, a prince of Calabria (no joke), which I suppose makes her a princess of Calabria, told us on New Year’s Eve that we would not eat well in Calabria –“except for fish at the shore.” Now I can’t wait to tell her where to go. I can’t say every meal was fabulous, but several were, and I just know there are more wonderful things to discover. Over time, I’ll share more about my Calabrese experience.

Right now, I must go. I have a cauliflower to cook. I don’t know why I never thought to do this, but Eugenia cooked a cauliflower the way I often do cabbage – with just a sautéed onion and no water in a covered pot, letting the cauliflower cook in its own moisture. Cauliflower in Italy has much more flavor than I can usually get from ours, but maybe with this method, it will be better. We ate the cauliflower with pasta mista, which are mixed shapes in the same bag (you can buy pasta mista here at a good Italian market). After the cauliflower was cooked, and the pasta half cooked separately, Eugenia drained the pasta, leaving it in its pot with just enough of its cooking water to barely cover it. Then she added the cauliflower to the pasta and let the pasta finish cooking another couple of minutes. With grated cheese, it’s a great, simple minestra, which is to say a course that can be eaten as a first course before a main course, or as a whole simple evening meal. We ate it as the later, after having had a big lunch, following it with fresh fruit. I’ll work out an exact recipe and share it with you soon, but you good cooks out there can, I am sure, prepare it from my above description.