Erica De Mane

Mo, my mother, around 1952. She sure could cook.

Cinnamon, Nutmeg, and Orange Flower Water

Here’s another excerpt from ‘The Making of an Italian Cook’, a memoir I’ve been working on.

“We’re completely out of pepper flakes?,” Dick, my father, would say, to no one in particular, while shaking an empty little plastic jar. Shit, no more anchovies, I’d notice, knowing quite well I ate the last of them the night before. Well, this calls for yet another trip to Razzano’s. I was starting to live at that store. I was becoming just like Dick, focused on Italian condiments. Anchovies and hot red pepper flakes were the two big flavors I took to heart when I first became interested in cooking. Their importance on our family table couldn’t be overestimated. My father shook pepper flakes on almost everything, even on fettuccine Alfredo. I think being a Southerner, he didn’t quite grasp the nuance of that dish. And I could down a tin of anchovies, straight, in one sitting (I’d also done the same with jars of cocktail onions, but that’s possibly an issue separate from my world of Italian food). However, when I began digging deeper, three other flavors, less strident ones, came forth as foundations of our Italian kitchen: cinnamon, nutmeg, and orange flower water.

Nutmeg was, back then, and still is an aroma that drives me wild. From the time I was a little kid to right this minute I associate it with ricotta, a big Easter and Christmas ingredient for Southern Italian families. Ricotta-scented nutmeg is a voluptuous combination and one of the Italian tastes that, although subtle seeming,  can just flood your mouth with flavor. Two ingredients that are sweet without being sugary. There’s something mysterious about that, almost in the line of trickery. And there is just about nothing more enticing, food-wise, for me, than shoving a big spoon of  lasagna filling into my mouth, right from the bowl. (The way my mother, and just about every Southern Italian mother I knew, made this was by combining ricotta, parmigiano, parsley, and a whiff of nutmeg. Truly sublime.)

When I first began exploring Italian ingredients on my own, I felt  smart and haughty buying nutmegs whole at Razzano’s, the big Italian grocery in Glen Cove, Long Island, a place I now knew intimately thanks to my escalating involvement with the Italian kitchen.  Our neighbor Gloria told me whole nutmeg was best, and I was quite surprised to discover it actually began life as a round brown lump and not just a jar of beige powder. Scraping at a whole nutmeg with a clumsy box grater was an intimate experience (we never had an actual nutmeg grater, I suppose because my parents always bought the pre-ground stuff). The dark hard thing, which kind of resembled wood, didn’t release its charm until you got it irritated with a quick little exfoliation. Once I starting paying attention to this beautiful spice, I realized that Mo was using nutmeg in other preparations as well, in béchamel sauce, for instance (usually along with a bay leaf and a pinch of paprika), to layer into her “Northern” lasagna (the Southern ones, of course, always got ricotta, usually flavored with nutmeg). She also added a discernible amount to her Bolognese sauce, another “Northern” dish that intrigued me as a kid (milk in a meat sauce? What the hell?). These dishes were added to her repertoire by way of the many restaurant dinners my parents consumed during the ’60s and ’70s, when generic-style Northern cooking was  huge.

Cinnamon is a spice I associate with Mo’s Sicilian side, her father’s family. She not only used it in eggplant parmigiano, but her family occasionally flavored ricotta with cinnamon, not nutmeg, to use as a filling for giant ravioli, something evidently very radical and gossiped about in her mostly Neapolitan neighborhood when she was growing up in Rye, New York. Being a glamorous working mom, she didn’t have time for elaborate pasta making and never cooked this dish for us, but she told me about it during one of the many arguments I’ve started over how she never told me about her family’s Sicilian dishes (it turns out she told me about quite a few of them, but I always, neurotically perhaps, felt she was holding out). I worked up a version of these ravioli from her description and she said they were more or less right on, except that they didn’t have the tomato paste–laden sauce that her grandmother napped them with. I dismissed that as too thick and sour and settled on a lighter, looser tomato sauce that I flavored only with basil. I included this excellent ravioli recipe in my book The Flavors of Southern Italy, if you’d like to give it a whirl. It’s got an unexpected sweetness, since the filling also contains more than a pinch of sugar, an addition I later discovered was common to many savory Sicilian dishes.

I now know that there are two popular varieties of cinnamon, each distinct. The kind most American’s know, the powder that comes in jars and gets sprinkled on rice pudding, is Cassia cinnamon, an Indian variety. It’s sweet and strong, its bark hard and dark brown. This is the only cinnamon I was familiar with until maybe the late ’70s, when I moved into the city and began shopping at Kalustyan’s Middle Eastern market in “Curry Hill” in the East 20s and discovered the lighter and more fragile-barked Ceylon variety (native to Sir Lanka), which is what cooks use in Mexico (if you’ve ever had Mexican hot chocolate, you know its taste). A more complex spice, still sweet but with a touch of bitter that hits right on the tip of your tongue, Ceylon is considered the true cinnamon. Evidently the Cassia type began as just another bark that tasted somewhat like Ceylon cinnamon and so eventually got added to the spice rack. Ceylon is what I now prefer for savory cooking, although it makes some of the dishes I grew up with, such as lamb ragu and baked eggplant, taste quite different from what I remember. I’ve gotten used to this new taste, but still, with almost anything I make that includes ricotta, savory or sweet, I continue to go for the Cassia. For instance in ricotta cheese cake. I just can’t get myself to tamper with my flavor memories there.

Orange flower water has to have been the most exotic of my teenage flavor discoveries. It happened one Easter, when I was on our yearly trip to Rocco’s Bakery in Glen Cove with Dick to pick up the ricotta cheesecake, a Pastiera, the type that includes whole wheat berries and is made only for Easter (or at least was when I was a kid). I had always found the pastiera’s flavor exotic but never really thought about it. Now, entrenched in my new found love of Italian cooking and with my jacked-up taste buds, I asked Mo what made the thing taste so wild, so unlike anything else except possibly a gently scented soap from a Miami hotel. She didn’t know. She’d never made one. I was incensed. How could she not know? I got the feeling my constant cooking- related questions were starting to seriously annoy her. Her parents had both died very young, so stirring up memories must have been painful. I suppose I was insensitive to this at the time, but I really needed an answer. Could it be she really didn’t know what went into ricotta cheesecake?  So, brilliantly, I got the idea to go over to Rocco’s and ask. Orange flower water was the answer. Orange what? So then I marched myself over to Razzano’s, and there it was sitting on the shelf, gorgeous little cobalt blue bottles, imported from France, of all places. (Now I know that this lovely liquid is produced all around the Mediterranean and used in Middle Eastern, Sicilian, and Provençal cooking. At the time I thought is was exclusive to Easter cheese cake.)

So there were many secrets lurking behind the red sauce world of Southern Italian cooking. I could only guess what magic I would go on to discover (and of course there turned out to be much more than I imagined). I went right ahead and made a few ricotta cheese cakes, finding an interesting recipe in The Talisman Italian Cookbook, by Ada Boni, an excellent little volume my mother had hanging around the house that I unfortunately didn’t get to know better until I moved it into the city with me several years later. Ida Boni’s recipe didn’t contain wheat berries, but that was fine with me. At the time they scared me, reminding me of my earlier forays into that dreadful health food cooking. It didn’t contain orange flower water either, just orange zest and cinnamon, and that was not fine with me at all, so I just dumped some in. As it turned out, I dumped quite a lot in, and the cakes did taste like soap, inedible actually. I knew as they were cooking that something was terribly wrong. There was a dry perfume slick in the air that triggered a slight gag response in me. But since I’m not easily deterred, I tried it again. This time I added just a few drops. and what do you know, that was all it took to achieve that delicate taste that had been so damned intriguing. Not until some years later did I learn that this glorious liquid was one of the culinary legacies of the Arab influence on Naples and Sicily, but I certainly knew right then, on the North Shore of Long Island, that it was something I’d be needing in my life for a long time to come. I drizzled it over fruit, which was a beautiful experience, especially, as you’d imagine, with actual oranges (which I later found out made a pretty standard North African and Sicilian dessert). And, off the culinary track for a moment, if you add a small capfull to a cup of safflower or olive oil, you’ll have an amazing body oil. I use it all the time, and my elbows are quite smooth and fragrant.

And then I made a huge olfactory connection. That I didn’t think of it right away made me feel extremely stupid, but orange blossom perfume, in little orange shaped bottles, was an aroma I had known intimately my entire life, as part of my winters in Hollywood Florida. The bottles were sold at Anthony’s Grove, in their gift shop, where we’d drive  several times a week to purchase grapefruits, tangerines, and various hybrid citrus and watch a drunken sad old Seminole Indian guy stick his head in an alligator’s mouth. That was always a side attraction, and it made my sister Liti and me uncomfortable. Not that the worn-out alligator posed any threat, but this man’s miserable predicament made us feel guilty.

The shop reeked of orange blossom perfume, a truly unique aroma. Could it be that, inexplicably, I didn’t understand blossom and flower to mean the same thing (is that possible?), or was it the French or Tunisian packaging and New York setting, as against the southern Florida, that threw me off? I suppose it is just that one of them you wore and the other you cooked with. I guess, but really, in retrospect, that was pretty lame.

These three flavors came to form a group in my mind, for I was learning that one, two, or sometimes all three would show up in various Southern Italian dishes. Before my father poured red or white wine over summer peach slices, I’d grate on a good amount of nutmeg. I’m not sure where I picked up that habit, but it seemed to impress him. “You made this up?,” he’d  ask.  Nutmeg, I later discovered, when, a few years later, I started cooking my own La Vigilia, the Christmas Eve fish feast, is a great mellower of baccala, rounding out the residual saltiness and adding warmth. I like rubbing nutmeg-scented butter over a chicken before roasting it. The aroma while it’s cooking is beautiful, and the taste is subtle but opulent, especially if you make a little pan sauce out of the drippings (a splash of dry Marsala for deglazing is the neat little trick there). A half a cinnamon stick simmered in a simple tomato sauce is lovely, even better when the sauce contains squid. Cinnamon and lamb are a great match, a Sicilian flavor combination my mother made good use of and one I encountered years later when I began visiting that gorgeous island on my own. The next time you’re braising lamb shanks (and I know you will be), throw a cinnamon stick into the liquid, and see what an exotic result you get.

My mother told me about a baked rice pudding her Sicilian father used to make that contained orange flower water, nutmeg, and cinnamon and I certainly got on that case quickly. Its flavor is very much like a ricotta cheese cake, except that it contains no ricotta.The rice and spicing provide depth and sweetness (and also the sugar, of course.) This, and a bunch more new recipes, will be published in my book.

Italian cooking doesn’t layer on spices like, say, Indian or Moroccan. Generally speaking, Italians, both north and south, dispensed with most spices a few hundred years ago and ever since have preferred the freshness of herbs. But these three ingredients (I still think of them as exotic gifts) continue to make an appearance, and I’m happy to create with them, knowing that I’m in no way compromising the spirit of the Southern Italian palate.