Erica De Mane

Looks like fun. I want that hat.

Recipe: Spaghetti with Red Mullet and Haricots Verts, Da Fiore Style

One thing wrong with this country is our lack of respect for vacation time. Compared with Italy and France, we are pathetic, overworked Puritans. It’s tragic that we feel guilty and broke at the thought of taking two weeks in a row, a luxury here for most people. In Italy two weeks is a joke; you don’t even start to unwind before at least three. I haven’t taken two weeks in several years, and I’m so used to it that I forget how badly I need those two weeks. The occasional summer weekend getaway, much of it stuck in traffic, can be fun and will do in a pinch, but it’s no substitute for the real thing. I always seem to return from these weekends feeling tired, and nervous about facing Monday and all the stuff I tried not to think about over those two days. Less pay, more work, chintzy vacation: It’s the American way. This cannot be good for our waistlines. Stress and overeating, as we all know but somehow fail to take seriously, are a classic combination that can result in nervous fat build-up. You not only look bad but you feel bad too. Why do we let this happen? I think because we’re all so beaten down we don’t think we deserve a real vacation. Maybe I’m only speaking for myself, but I think it may be an American epidemic.

Make sure you take a vacation. I beg you, don’t let the vacation days pile up. Use them, even if only for sunbathing on your roof. Get the hell out of the office, and take your mind away from your obligations. For your head to work, you need to clear it out from time to time and start fresh.

A real vacation for me needs to involve water—not necessarily sand, but any kind of water that makes noise. Rippling, rushing, crashing, or trickling, it’s all good. In Venice, the noise of water slapping against the lagoon walls at night (before the cargo boats start unloading their fish and produce) is a sound both exciting and lulling.

Vacations bring to mind certain foods for everyone. For me it’s fish. Venice for me evokes the heart of vacation cooking—lightly cooked seafood, easy wines, eating outside amid water-drenched walkways. One of my fondest food memories from my first trip to Venice, about twenty years ago, is the pizza topped with various seafoods that we ate many evenings. We didn’t have much money for going to real restaurants, so we’d often pull up at a pizza place with outdoor tables and order a carafe of house white and a pizza covered with little clams or mussels, fresh anchovies or sardines, calamari, slivers of octopus, shreddings of salt cod (my favorite), or mini shrimp. These dinners were the most romantic and in a way the most lovely of the vacation.

Several years later, with a few more credit cards, we made our way to the incredible Da Fiore restaurant, where all manner of seafood is treated with love, care, and above all a subtle creativity that makes everything special and memorable. That is my idea of top-notch vacation food. I especially remember Da Fiore’s pastas with seafood, all of which seemed to have surprise flavors—a touch of cinnamon, a showering of fresh thyme, or a handful of pungent grapes mingling with Venice’s famous sea offerings. (In case you’re in the neighborhood, Da Fiore is at Calle de Scaleter 2002-2202A, Venice 30125.)

I don’t think I’ll be making it to Venice again very soon, but I can still enjoy the food. Here’s a recipe that I’ve adapted from the beautiful Da Fiore Cookbook published by Morrow, a book so full of great fish recipes it’s a wonderful library addition for anyone wanting to cook healthy, sophisticated Italian (and this I presume means all my readers). Its recipe for pasta with red mullet appealed to me right away. I love red mullet, but I had only prepared it whole and grilled, which is wonderful; here its unique sweetness can show off in a different way, as its juices mingle with the pasta and tomatoes and wine and herbs to create a delicate, sweet sea sauce. The original recipe calls for cornetti, a kind of skinny Venetian string bean, a summer specialty that I’ve unfortunately never had the pleasure of tasting. I’ve substituted haricots verts, mainly because they look similar to the cornetti in the book’s photo. The result is delicious. Whether or not it tastes like the pasta made at Da Fiore I can’t say for sure, but I love it.

At Da Fiore pasta is always a first course, but I’m offering my diet-conscious readers only one course, a main one (with a green salad to follow). This pasta is a complete meal, since it’s loaded with protein and greens. And because I think of it as a vacation dinner, I’ve broken down and made regular white spaghetti instead of my usual whole wheat (plus, this sauce seemed too delicate for the taste of whole wheat). But I have good news to share with you: Hard durum-wheat white pasta, such as spaghetti or penne, is much lower on the glycemic index than mashed potatoes or a French baguette (although still not as low as whole wheat pasta), so go for it, and have a great, long vacation wherever you wind up.

Spaghetti with Red Mullet and Haricots Verts, Da Fiore Style

(Serves 2 as a main course)

A handful of haricots verts, their ends trimmed
½ pound spaghetti
Extra-virgin olive oil
4 red mullet fillets (about 5 inches long), cut in half on an angle
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
4 anchovy fillets, chopped
2 garlic cloves. thinly sliced
3 medium round tomatoes, peeled, seeded, roughly chopped, and lightly drained
A generous splash of dry white wine
A handful of flat-leaf parsley leaves, lightly chopped
About a dozen basil leaves, lightly chopped

Bring a large pot of pasta cooking water to a boil. Drop in the haricots verts, and blanch for about 2 minutes. Scoop them from the water into a colander with a large strainer spoon, and run cold water over them to bring up their color. Drain well.

Bring the water back to a boil, and add a generous amount of salt. Add the spaghetti.

In a large skillet, heat 1 tablespoon of olive oil over medium-high flame. Salt and pepper the mullet fillets, and add them to the skillet skin side down. Sauté them, without moving them around, until their skin just starts to crisp, about 2 minutes. Take them from the skillet, and set aside for a moment (they’ll still be undercooked). Add another tablespoon of olive oil to the skillet, and then add the anchovies, the garlic, and the haricots verts, and sauté a minute to coat the beans with flavor. Add a splash of white wine, and let it bubble for a few seconds. Add the tomatoes, seasoning with salt and black pepper, and sauté for about 4 minutes longer. Return the mullet fillets to the skillet, and simmer until they start to flake and break up a bit, about a minute longer. Turn off the heat.

When the spaghetti is al dente, drain it, leaving a little water clinging to it, and add it to the skillet. Toss gently over low heat for a minute to blend all the flavors, adding an extra drizzle of fresh olive oil and a little warm water if necessary for moisture. The fish should break up into tiny pieces. Add the basil and parsley, and taste for seasoning, adding more salt and black pepper if needed. Divide the pasta onto two warmed pasta bowls. Serve right away.