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03/22/2007 Archived Entry: "Wild and Crazy Fennel"

One of the questions I am often asked by my Cook at Seliano groups here in Paestum is what food products are they allowed to take home, and which products are worth taking home. My answer to people who live in the New York City metro area is that there is very little we can’t buy at home, if not at the supermarket then at Italian specialty stores. Of course, if you live in Texas or Ohio, there may be many foods you can’t buy at home.

It is illegal to bring any meat product into the states, so as much as I would like to take a salami or dried sausage home, I can’t and don’t. Fresh fruit and vegetables are also forbidden by U.S. authorities. You can take home cheese, even raw milk cheese, as long as it is only for private consumption, not commercial. I used to carry home dried oregano from the Sorrento coast because it is more mild and sweetly fragrant than anything thing I could buy in NYC. But these days I can buy it, as well as wonderful Sicilian oregano, in my usual Italian haunts in Brooklyn and Manhattan, as well as on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx.

I used to buy salted capers here, but they are now available in my supermarket. Last spring, I did take home capers from Salina, an island off the northeast coast of Sicily, and politically part of Sicily. It is famous for its capers, as is the island of Pantelleria, just south of Sicily. The Salina capers were, indeed, very special. Truly, however, even more special than the capers themselves was the experience of buying them from a private person, a woman about my age who had a sign up on the fence of her house announcing that she had her own production. We slammed on the breaks of the car and knocked on her door. We spent a good hour or so at her dining table talking to her and her adult daughter, not just about capers and how they are grown, harvested (one by one by hand with great difficulty), and cured (salted, sun-dried, then salted again), but about life and the world in general. It was one of those travel experiences I will never forget. I think it made the capers taste better when I got home. Then again, my niece-in-law, not having had that experience, not even knowing where the capers came from, commented that these were the best capers she’d ever eaten. I had put them in a salad, if I remember correctly. Incidentally, if ever you see a dish called Aeolian, or from Lipari or Salina, both Aeolian islands, it is bound to contain capers. It is a defining ingredient in their food.

Anyway – allora – I did realize on this trip that there is one thing I can’t get at home – wild fennel. It is a very important ingredient in Sicilian cooking, and I haven’t yet figured out how I am going to deal with that when I develop recipes for the “Big Book.” In some recipes, just for the flavor, I think I can substitute a few fennel seeds. Wild fennel seeds are available in NYC, but even not-wild fennel seeds that you can buy in the supermarket have good flavor. There are some dishes, however, where the wild fennel fronds and stems constitute the actual substance of the dish. They are not merely a flavoring, and there is no substitute.

You may know about the famous pasta con le sarde of Palermo, a dish where the fennel is almost as important as the sardines (actually fresh anchovies). But there is also a false – finto, in Italian – pasta con le sarde in which the fennel is the main ingredient and there are no sardines or anchovies, except for a few preserved anchovies or a little anchovy paste. I love how the Sicilians call this: they say pasta con le sarde A MARE, which means the sardines are A MARE, still in the sea, meaning the dish has no sardines. In the same delightful nomenclature vein, there is also a dish called patate con agnello scappatto, which means roasted potatoes with escaped lamb, meaning the dish is merely roasted potatoes, but with the seasoning -- rosemary and garlic -- with which you would season the lamb if you had any lamb.

I hear that wild fennel, finocchietto in Italian, grows prolifically in California, and I wonder why some enterprising person hasn’t started shipping it east, where, in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, there are large Italian-American communities that would welcome it in their markets. I mentioned this in a previous newsletter and I got a response from Mimi in California. She said she went to her local farmer’s market to ask about it and was told by several vendors that they sell only the cultivated variety. They did tell her, however, that wild fennel grows year round on the bluffs of the Pacific Palisades, near Los Angeles, which is only five minutes from where she lives. They told her that picking wild fennel there is a popular neighborhood activity, although she’d never heard about it.

There is a big difference between wild and cultivated fennel. It is the big white bulb of the cultivated variety that is eaten. The fronds have very little if any flavor. On the other hand, it is the fronds of the wild variety, and the seeds, that are eaten. The bulb or root is tiny and of no consequence.

If you know what the fronds of the domestic vegetable look like then it is easy to identify the wild plant. The fronds, or leaves, are feathery. In New York City, practically every supermarket carries fennel, which is sometimes called Florence fennel, and sometimes mislabeled as anise.

Fennel is in the same botanical family as anise, but it is not the same as anise. Anise seeds, which have more sense of sweetness, are used in pastry and sweets. Fennel seed is used in savory foods. Most Italian bakeries make some kind of biscotti with anise. The Stella Doro bakery in the Bronx makes famous “anise toasts,” which are really a type of biscotti. And anisette, for instance, is a liqueur made from anise seeds. I like to use fennel seeds with pork (in “Naples at Table” I have a wonderful pork chop recipe that I continue to make) and sometimes with fish. There is also a liqueur made from wild fennel seeds, although I don’t see it in the stores back home. It is called liquore al finocchietto and it has a more pungent flavor than anisette. I am bringing a bottle of finochietto back home. I tried making it last year with wild fennel seeds that I gathered myself here. It was terrible. It ends up you need to use the seeds while they are still green, and it would be illegal to bring those into the U.S.

Both anisette, which is often served with or in coffee in Italian-American restaurants and finochietto are considered digestive drinks. They help digestion after a big meal. And so does raw cultivated fennel bulb, which is why it is often served at the end of a meal along with fruit or even in the fruit bowl.