Erica De Mane

Recipe below: Calamarata with Swordfish, Eggplant, Mint, and Marcona Almonds

Yesterday we had a big rain that started out warm but finished cool. In the middle of the rain I drove to Montgomery Place Orchards, a farm stand in Red Hook (the upstate Red Hook). I was scared I’d see mainly piles of warty gourds, but no, not yet. Eggplants and tomatoes are still here. The light is changing, but we’re not finished yet. So I immediately got to work and cooked up a couple of Sicilian-style pastas.

Tomato with eggplant is a Southern Mediterranean coupling that’s one of my earliest food memories, with a sweet but slightly astringent vegetable aroma. It makes a brilliant pasta sauce, one that is surprisingly rich considering that it’s all vegetables. And you can add fish. I choose swordfish here. I’ve made essentially the same dish using fresh tuna, and also once with monkfish; both were good, but I keep coming back to swordfish, which I think of as the official fish of Sicily, especially the Messina area. If you leave out the swordfish and top the dish with shaved ricotta salata, you’ll have a version of pasta alla Norma, the classic dish from Catania. I included olives in my take, though they’re not traditional, and I also subbed basil for the mint, but you can use either, or both. I served the swordfish pasta one night and then made the Norma version the next with the leftover vegetables I still had. I just had to run out for ricotta salata, which is essential if you want to call it Norma.

This is a great little condiment. It mixes newborn fish called neonata with Calabrian chili. You’d think it would be obnoxiously intense, but it’s not. Its taste is more subtle and gentle than when I mix straight Calabrian chili with anchovies, for instance. I’ve fallen in love with this flavor and add little blobs of it to a number of my dishes. Here I used it in both the calamarata preparation and the Norma. It’s hardly a traditional addition to pasta alla Norma, but I used so little that the fish was undetectable. It just deepened the taste in a suave way.  I bought my jar at Buon’Italia at Chelsea Market; you can also find it at Amazon and elsewhere.

Recipes below: Calzone di Cipolle; Peach and Tomato Salad with Tropea Onion, Ricotta Salata, and Thai Basil

Most people don’t think of onions as part of the summer harvest, but they’re out now at my farmers’ markets, lots of different kinds, juicy and shiny, which is not how I would ever describe winter supermarket onions. I find them enticing. I’m especially happy to see local farmers growing the Tropea variety.

Cipolla rossa di Tropea is originally from Calabria, where they say it has been grown for two thousand years. The onion is sweet and red, with a bulbous shape that I find extremely cute. It’s juicy, but not eye stinging, and firm enough for good slicing.  The ones I just found were from the Montgomery Place Orchards farm stand, in Red Hook, New York.  

I’ve sampled Tropea onions in Calabria and even bought some from a roadside truck. I can’t decide if the ones grown on Calabrian soil taste different from the ones pulled from the ground in Dutchess County, but regardless, these local Tropeas are delicious. I’ve used them in both of the recipes below, and I’m thinking about pickling the ones I’ve got left. If you can’t find the Tropea type, regular round red onions will be an okay substitute but not anywhere near as glamourous.

When I found the onions at the market, I immediately thought about making an onion torta from Puglia, which I hadn’t cooked in many years. It’s a classic there, with many interpretations. I’ve sampled one made with ricotta forte, a  fermented ricotta that tastes a little like blue cheese but with more bitterness. I’ll eat and like just about anything, but I’m not sure I actually liked that, and in any case ricotta forte is hard to find here, so I substituted caciocavallo, which is also used for this.

If you’ve got Tropea onions you might also like to try this truly good salad with peaches and tomatoes, both at their peak right now.

About fifteen years ago there was a restaurant down the block from me in the Village called Piadina. The food was good, but for me the main attraction was the piadina sandwiches, a specialty of Emilia-Romagna. They served them as an appetizer, which was odd because the sandwiches are sold as street food in Italy, but I thought it worked if you shared one. My favorite was with stracchino and arugula, simple but delicious, with its thin, crispy, slightly oily pastry folded over like a taco. Sometimes I’d get it with prosciutto crudo added. Actually I’m not sure if it was stracchino cheese. Traditionally the things are made with squacquerone, which is similar, but I think stracchino would have been easier to find in New York. The piadinas came cut in quarters, oozing cheese, bitter with the arugula. I couldn’t get enough of them. This was on 13th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. It closed and was replaced by another restaurant a few blocks down, but that one recently went out of business, too. So I was excited when I saw Casa Piada opening on Greenwich Avenue. It’s not a true restaurant, just a counter with a few tables in front and a little room in the back. They sell only piadine, or piade, as they call them.

It’s a lovely, open little space set up by people from Pesaro, Italy, which is also where their piadina breads are made, to be flown across the ocean. The place is decorated with all sorts of Italian paraphernalia  including Mina album covers and a poster for an old Ferragosto party that I would love to have attended.

I ordered the Fico, a piada filled with prosciutto, burrata, fig jam, and arugula. They use burrata, which is oozy and good but maybe not as flavorful as stracchino, but the sandwich was really well put together, and the bread was as nice as I remembered from the Piadina restaurant of many years ago, hot, crisp, flat, and a little charred. My husband got the Carpaccio, a special that day. It was filled with bresaola, burrata, sun dried tomatoes, arugula, and pesto. It was excellent. I was a little confused about the meat, though. I figured carpaccio meant raw, but bresaola is cured. The meat was soft, so I asked and the server seemed confused by the question. I’ll have to explore that further on my next visit. I’d like to try their porchetta piadina, and the mortadella versions too. You can also get a piadina with Italian tuna, or a caprese. And there’s wine, beer, and good Italian coffee. Casa Piada is a great addition to my neighborhood and worth seeking out if you’re in the Village. It is open until 8 p.m. Sunday through Wednesday and to 10 Thursday through Saturday, so you can make a dinner out of your visit if you like.

Recipes below: Ceci with Shrimp, Summer Tomatoes, Saffron, Fennel, and Orange; Spaghetti with Summer Tomatoes, Saffron, Fennel, and Orange

Living in New York, where most of the year it’s cold, I can barely believe we’re even capable of growing decent tomatoes, but here they are again, luscious and dripping. I’ve even managed to grow some myself, not gorgeous big ones but cherries, grapes, and this year a mini variety called Galapagos, about the size of a hazelnut. Lots of them coming in. Maybe they’ll even ripen before the first frost.

Every August I make lots of pomodoro crudo, an uncooked tomato sauce that I use for pasta, on top of fish, in panzanella, for bruschetta, tossed into a chicken salad. It’s just chopped tomatoes, my best olive oil, salt, and summer garlic, and sometimes I add olives or capers, occasionally anchovies or scrapings of bottarga. I always include lots of herbs, basil obviously but sometimes marjoram and parsley instead, or tarragon or mint. I make it so often I sometimes forget I can actually cook with the beautiful things. So here are two recipes for cooked summer tomatoes. When I say cooked, I don’t mean stewed. I’m talking about a quick flash in a hot pan just to warm them through and release their sweet juices.

I chose bouillabaisse-inspired flavors for both of these recipes: saffron, fennel, orange. They felt summery, plus I had wild fennel in my garden that was going to seed, so I wanted to use it anyway.

There are a number of trendy Italian restaurants in my West Village neighborhood of the kind that take months to get a reservation at, or you can never get one, or you need to stand on line starting at 3 p.m. Don Angie and its down-the-block sister place San Sabino come to mind. They are in the updated Italian-American style, with mezcal-braised chicken cacciatore and pinwheel lasagna, which I find slightly annoying but what do I know, the places are a huge hit. And then there’s a more in-your-face version of this type of place called Arthur & Sons, with red-checked table clothes, more of a Little Italy look. It’s always crowded with people eating big plates of chicken parm or humongous meatballs. Arthur & Sons used to have a place next door called Italian American Social Club, paying some type of tribute to the old mob clubs on Sullivan Street and in other parts of the Village, like a minstrel show of Italiano-Americano. Thankfully that stupid place recently closed.

When I want Italian in my neighborhood I go to places that are non-Tiktok and have really good food. There are several fine ones to choose from, and one I find myself returning to often is Fiaschetteria Pistoia, at 114 Christoper Street. Its glassed-in sliver of kitchen is generally speaking Tuscan. They make all their pasta fresh there. The menu is mainly pasta and antipasti, with usually one secondo an evening.

Fiaschetteria is Tuscan dialect for a place to taste and buy wine. The wine bottles come in an open wooden box with a handle, so the waiters can carry them all to your table, usually six choices each evening. I’ve tasted quite a few over many visits, recently a Sardinian Vermentino and a fine Chianti. They’ve all gone well with the mostly pasta menu. And I’ve sampled almost all of the pasta dishes, too.

The ones with long-braised meat sauces have always been excellent, using tagliatelle or pappardelle. I’ve had duck ragù, beef ragù, and a wild boar sauce that’s a special from time to time. Those things are where the place excels. You can also get cacio e pepe with pici or homemade spaghetti with bottarga. The only dish I wasn’t crazy about was a tagliatelle with baby octopus, a special one night. There wasn’t anything wrong with it; its style just wasn’t for me. It tasted too much of tomato paste, with a very concentrated, cooked-down flavor and consistency. I prefer a brighter, looser sauce with seafood.

The antipasti are good too. I particularly like the zucchini sformata, a flan that includes Parmigiano. The chicken liver paté is done in traditional Tuscan style, smooth with not much intrusion of other flavors such as anchovies or capers.

They offer one secondo a night, or at least that’s the way it’s always been when I’ve gone. I haven’t tried many of them, since I always want pasta, but I did recently order the veal scallopini in white wine lemon sauce, and it was tender and good.

I love the place, but here’s a heads-up about what could be a problem for you: The restaurant is really small, with really small tables, and has only one bathroom, which often has a line. I’m okay with that, but just so you know.

I recently saw the new Odyssey movie by Christopher Nolan and didn’t care for it, finding it an overblown action cartoon, all in shades of brown and gray. It got me thinking I wanted to see Pasolini’s Medea again, so I watched it. It was made in 1969 and stars Maria Callas. I’ve seen many films of her opera performances and often found her face strained in a comical way, even for opera, but her worried eyes and tight mouth are heartbreaking and true here. She lets you get into the head of Medea, the outsider, the witchy barbarian occupying an uncomfortable, to say the least, place in her civilization. When you watch her get her revenge, you feel how devastating it is for everyone, including herself.

Unlike the new Odyssey,  Pasolini gives you violence in a beautiful and, more important, purposeful way, which must have been hard to pull off, especially with human sacrifice involved.  And the colors in this film are gorgeous, orange, sea blue, deep red, vibrant green, especially the clothing and the coppery clanking bling Maria wears, as in the photo above. There’s not much dialogue, but there’s lots of music, which seems to be a mix of non-Western folk sounds and tribal chants from not sure where. I just learned that Elsa Morante, the Italian novelist and poet, helped put that music together.

Pasolini’s Medea is the way to do Greek mythology. Check it out.

Recipes below: Bucatini with Swordfish, Saffron, and Wild Fennel; Fennel and Celery Salad with Bottarga

Wild fennel is the most liberated herb in my garden, and generous too. It grows fast, by mid-June. I’ll notice its feathering fronds swaying freely in a little breeze. And that’s only part of its appeal. By early August, umbrella-like clusters form, bringing me flowers to gather pollen from, and later green seeds. Fronds, stalks, pollen, and seeds all provide me with subtle variations on the plant’s theme.

I grow wild fennel every year. It’s technically an annual in New York, but it drops seeds easily, and if we’ve had a mild winter I often find it shooting up in the spring in odd places. This year it shot up so aggressively I actually had to pull some out or it would have taken over.

There is one special use for wild fennel in Southern Italian cooking, and it is in something I truly love, pasta con le sarde, the classic pasta dish from Palermo. There are impediments to recreating this pasta in New York. Wild fennel grows on the side of the road in Sicily and in parts of California, so for many people the herb is free. In New York, you’ve got to grow your own, as I do, or find a farmer’s market that’s carrying it, which I am glad to see is happening more and more. Also I can almost never find sardines fresh enough to do the dish justice. Oily fish goes off fast, and sardines that come from Portugal simply have been dead too long. People always ask me, can you make this pasta with canned sardines? I’ve tried it several times, but the taste is different, stronger, oilier. In short, I don’t like it. But what I can do is make the dish with all the Arab-Sicilian components of con le sarde—raisins, pine nuts, saffron, wild fennel, white wine, toasted breadcrumbs—but substituting another popular Sicilian fish for the sardines. Here I went with swordfish. The taste is obviously not the same, not as wild in feel, a bit more suave. But I love this version almost as much as the original. I hope you’ll give it a try.

And speaking of suave, I’m also offering you another good thing to do with fennel, using domestic bulb fennel mixed with celery to make a gentle salad. Since I didn’t want it to be too gentle, I topped it off with shavings of bottarga, giving it a fishy, salty kick. You can use Sicilian tuna roe bottarga or, my preference, the Sardinian grey mullet variety, which is less fishy and has a nice bitter edge.