Erica De Mane

Recipe below: Gemelli with Escarole, Anchovies, and Sweet-and-Spicy Bread Crumbs

The farther along in life’s journey I get, the more I’m drawn to specific foods: sautéed bitter greens, canned fish, good bread, and more and more red wine. It’s not health that drives this, or at least not consciously, but more a desire for solid flavor. I liked all these things when I was a kid, too, but back then I also wanted Ring Dings. I don’t want Ring Dings anymore. I’d rather have a tin of oily sardines than a cupcake any day, even a really good cupcake. And I want a lot of olive oil. It sometimes alarms me how much olive oil and how much wine I can consume, but I try not to think about that too much.

What I do like to think about is a dinner that comprises these elements. It’s my favorite kind of meal. Many combinations of pasta, preserved fish, and green vegetable make me happy. Variations on escarole, anchovy, and pasta have been in my life for a long time, and lately they’ve been around more than they used to, crowding out nice things like a good roast chicken or a meat-rich lasagna.

I spend a fair amount of time running around New York City searching out good bitter greens, especially Italian chicories. This search frequently takes me to Campo Rosso Farm’s stand. If you’ve ever stopped into the Union Square Greenmarket on a Friday you may have noticed a farmer selling beautiful, flowerlike Italian chicories, pink, white, burgundy, lime green. That’s Camp Rosso, from Gilbertsville, Pennsylvania.  They specialize in these bitter greens. At various times I’ve seen tardivo, Treviso, radicchio bianco, Castelfranco radicchio that looks like giant pale pink roses, frilly-edged Italian endive, escarole, frisée, and puntarelle, which is hard to find even in Italian specialty shops like Eataly. If you love these bitter lettuces as much as I do, you should get yourself over to Campo Rosso’s stand and see for yourself. Fall is a great time to go. This time I purchased a wide-open escarole and the palest pink Castelfranco radicchio. The escarole went into this pasta.

If you’d like to make this dish, here’s how:

The first thing you’ll want to do is to gather about a cup or so of homemade breadcrumbs, ground, not too finely, from good bread. Take out a small sauté pan, and set it over medium heat. Add a tablespoon of olive oil, and let the oil warm through. Add the breadcrumbs, a teaspoon or so of sugar, some salt, and a big pinch of crumbled hot dried chili. I used piment d’Espelette, but peperoncino or Aleppo would work. Stir everything around until it starts to smell like sweet toasted bread. That will take only a few minutes. The crumbs should turn just lightly tan. Pull the pan from the heat to stop the cooking.

Next you’ll want to take a large head of escarole, or several smaller ones, chop it all up, wash it, and then blanch it for about 2 minutes in a big pot of boiling salted water. Drain it into a colander, and run cold water over it until it’s completely cool. I do this not to lessen its bitterness, which doesn’t happen anyway, but to preserve its bright green color. I want to see the clear green mingling with the white pasta. Squeeze most of the water from the escarole.

Put up a pot of pasta cooking water, and bring it to a boil. Add salt, and drop in about ¾ pound of gemelli, giving it a brief stir so it doesn’t stick.

Get out a large sauté pan, and set it over medium heat. Drizzle in about 2 tablespoons of good olive oil, maybe not your best olive oil but the best you use for cooking. Add two thinly sliced garlic cloves, the fresher the better, about 6 very high quality oil-packed anchovies, roughly chopped (I used Ortiz brand, but Donostia’s Cantabrian anchovies are even better), and half a fresh green jalapeño, seeded if you like. Sauté all this for about a minute, just to release all its flavors. You don’t want the garlic to color very much, so keep an eye on it. Add the escarole, stirring everything around to blend the flavors. Add the grated zest from a small lemon, and sauté a minute longer. Add a splash of dry vermouth, and let it bubble away. Turn off the heat.

When the gemelli is al dente, drain it lightly, leaving some water clinging to it, and add it to the escarole pan. Turn the heat back on, and toss everything around for about a minute. Taste for salt. You may or may not need it, depending on your anchovies. Add a drizzle of fresh olive oil, stirring it in.

Plate up three servings. Top each one with a generous scattering of the breadcrumbs. Serve right away.