Erica De Mane

Recipe below: Penne with Clams and Red Pepper Rosemary Sauce.

I’m always cold in March. There’s never enough heat inside or out. Candles are good, though. Not that they give off heat, but they create an illusion.

I’ve never been a fan of scented candles. Patchouli, musk, sandalwood and me never got along, and patchouli in general has been known to give me the gags. It was in the air when I was a teenager. I’ve rejected men who wore it. Those oppressive scents are big in the scented candle business, so I’ve always disliked all scented candles as intrusive and even nauseating.

But as the New York cold drags on to the last mess of sloppy, gray sadness, I’ve turned to candles to create a contained space around my couch, along with my Mediterranean cookbooks, my wirebound notebook, cheap Pilot Varsity pens I buy in bulk, Italian food catalogs, biographies of dead gay artists, and, a new addition, a rosemary candle to bring the whole cocoon into focus. It smells not like perfume but more like food, like the polenta, rosemary, and olive oil cake I sometimes cook up for my husband’s breakfast. I’ve tried other scented candles I thought might work—bergamot, bitter orange, mint, sage (sage was disgusting)—but the rosemary one just fell naturally into place.

Rosemary the naked herb smells thick. It feels thick and even sticky. It’s like adding a piece of a tree to your food rather than adding a regular herb. It’s not truly savory either. It has sweetness underneath all its piney bitter. It’s not fresh like young pine sprigs. It’s richer. If I fry a sprig and eat it hot, it tastes sweet. If I eat a sprig raw, it’s bitter and can even make me want to spit it out.  But it’s good infused raw in olive oil or cream, or in vodka. A rosemary vodka martini is substantial, especially if you use a little more vermouth than you might normally think proper and garnish it with green olives and a fresh rosemary sprig. If you’re not crazy about martinis, you can simply flavor green brownish Taggiasca olives (my favorites) with fresh rosemary sprigs, strips of lemon or orange zest, and Ligurian olive oil. I’ve made rosemary pesto, cutting it only with a little parsley. Its sweet pine scent, when it’s ground down with pine nuts and grassy olive oil, creates exotic beauty to spoon over grilled swordfish or even grilled bread. 

Have you ever dripped rosemary-vanilla syrup over sliced blood orange?  That can be mind blowing. So can rosemary-vanilla ice cream. And if in summer you have your own bush and you’re lucky enough to gather some of its blue flowers, try scattering them over rosemary roasted potatoes. I grow an upright rosemary variety called Tuscan Blue. I’ve found that rosemary goes with almost anything. I know because I’ve tried it with almost everything.

Most cooks say rosemary should be used with a light touch; I say not necessarily. I used quite a bit in this clam pasta, but it didn’t compete in an obnoxious way since I balanced it with the clams, for one, but also with roasted red pepper and hits of both fennel seed and hot chili. I loved the way that made a red clam sauce but not a tomato sauce. I sort of knew what it would taste like when I dreamed it up, but it was even better.

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Recipe below: Duck Ragù with Black Olives and Orange

In the early 1980s when I met the man who was to become my husband, he was involved in a rented group house out in Riverhead, Long Island. About ten friends rented the house. I eventually became a member of the group, with both good and really bad outcomes. There was one woman who was nasty to me for no apparent reason, I came to think of her as pinch-faced and bitter and maybe even slightly unhinged. At one point a string of pearls my father had given me for Christmas disappeared from my room. I suspected her of taking it, but I never confronted her because I couldn’t truly imagine anyone doing such a creepy thing, even though she was pretty creepy. They were never found, and now, 35 years later, I’m still convinced it was her.

They called this fairly large, two-story, seen better days house and its property the duck farm, because it had once actually been one. You could still wander the acreage and enter a few of the dilapidated barns and imagine all the ducks crammed in there quacking like crazy. Long Island used to have a lot of duck farms, but by this time there were only a handful left. We’d occasionally purchase a few ducks for our group meals. Compared with now, they were cheap. I cooked many ducks back then, mostly roasting them whole, making sauces from oranges or cherries or green olives and rosemary, or once with kumquats, that one sort of a bitter mess but still good if you drank enough cheap red wine. The nasty person didn’t come to the table when I cooked dinner. At first that made me uncomfortable, but after a while I didn’t give a shit. I really liked cooking in the big square kitchen, its cupboard filled with authentic Fiestaware in haunting colors like mauve, olive, and teal.

I tried different duck roasting methods, since back then I was just learning, from hot and fast to low and slow and to low and really slow, and what I discovered, which was frustrating and also a bit of a mystery, was that often the duck would taste like liver. I was perplexed. It never tasted like that in Chinatown. I don’t detect that taste now when I cook duck. It might be that by now I’m just better at cooking it, but I also wonder if maybe there was too much blood left in those Long Island ducks, too much iron in the muscle. Lazy duck farmers? I’m not sure, but duck is high in not only iron but also magnesium, selenium, phosphorus, and B vitamins, so it has good healthy gaminess going on. You can’t expect it to be bland, but that liver taste was a stretch for my palate. I now find it easier to cook the breast and legs separately. I buy D’Artagnan mulard duck breasts and legs at Citarella. Mulard is a cross between Muscovy and Peking breeds. As far as I can remember, all the Long Island ducks were Peking, which had more fat and less meat. Mulard ducks are dark and meaty.

For this recipe you’ll need three whole duck legs. They get cooked low and slow until you can pull the meat off with your fingers and throw it all back into the sauce to create a rich ragù. I’ve chosen flavors—orange, and black olives—that I initially thought of as Provençal, but I’ve also added cinnamon, which in the final tasting gives it a Sicilian aroma, or possibly a Venetian Renaissance one. In any case it is really good, and I hope you’ll give it a try.

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Recipe below: Penne Rigate with Spinach, Prosciutto, and Cream

Before I started cooking professionally I worked at Amnesty International for several years, first in membership, then as a caseworker, and finally as an ill-equipped writer for their newsletter. What I really wanted to do was get into a big sweaty kitchen with sharp knives, flames, and good Italian food, and that would come soon enough.

My volunteer assistant at AI was a middle-aged woman named Nancy Wilford, a proper blonde whose husband John wrote for The New York Times. I’m not sure what drove her to show up every day to stuff envelopes, lady the switchboard, and help me sort through all the  political prisoner mail that piled up like you wouldn’t believe, at least 50 percent of which was from crazy people. All the wacko stuff got jammed into what we called the microwave file. Mark David Chapman, the horrible man who shot John Lennon, wrote me a bunch of letters in a scratchy little script, insisting he was a political prisoner. There were also letters from supposed relatives of escapees from the imperial Russian Romanov family massacre. Those people were tedious. Occasionally one would even show up at the office, dressed in red and gold, cross-body sash, pointy mustache, and epaulets, and covered in medals. They really got on my nerves.

Nancy was interested in Italian food, and once she found out it was my passion we talked about it almost daily. She mentioned several times a dish that she and John were “mad for,” and maybe the only somewhat Italian thing they made at home. It was penne with spinach and cream, that’s it, frozen spinach, cream, and no salt (a high blood pressure issue, I think). She said they couldn’t get enough of it. It sounded so plain and boring it made me sad as hell to hear her going on about it. She was so in love with the simple pasta that I didn’t want to one-up her by mentioning that my Italian-American mother made something similar but included prosciutto, Parmigiano, nutmeg, garlic, white wine, and sometimes peas. I remember my mother washing the spinach for the dish in three changes of water. Remember how dirty spinach was back then?  

That was a “Northern Italian” pasta, different from the tomatoey things my mother usually served, and probably borrowed from the Pappagallo restaurant in Glen Head, Long Island, my parents’ favorite fancy place in the sixties and seventies. I think she called it pasta Florentine. Just about anything containing spinach that appeared on an Italian restaurant menu back then was called Florentine. It was a simpler time.

I hadn’t thought about this pasta for ages, and I hadn’t thought about Nancy Wilford much either, except that I’d heard she had died a few years ago, which made me gloomy and nostalgic for my unruly youth. She was nervous and giggly, but I was always happy to see her sitting in my office with her blonde flip hairdo, looking determined to do a thorough, if unpaid, job. She wouldn’t except a salary—didn’t want it, didn’t need it, she said.

A few days ago I realized my refrigerator held all the ingredients to produce a version of my mother’s penne with spinach, prosciutto, and cream. I think it must have been something like thirty years since I had last cooked this one up. So here it is, pretty much as I remembered it, and I’m happy to report it’s not just nostalgically good, but truly, truly good. I hope you’ll give it a try.

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Recipe below: Fettuccine with Chicken Liver, Prosciutto, and Thyme

I’ve been thinking about foods people love, things they even crave. Chocolate is a big crave for a lot of people. It’s not my thing. I seem to crave red wine often, maybe a little too often. I’m also drawn to food that tastes a bit metallic, like canned seafood (especially Spanish mussels) and all types of liver. It’s made me wonder if I had an iron deficiency, but I don’t think so, since I take a multivitamin. I think the craving is not in my body but in my soul. Metallic and bitter tastes are just part of what I am.

I especially love chicken livers for their creaminess. Cooking them fast over high heat so they caramelize on the outside but stay pink and tender on the inside is the only way. And a good flame of cognac at the end and you really set their lusciousness.

If you love chicken livers as I do, or even if you sort of think you like them, or for that matter if you think you don’t like them, give this recipe a try. I’d love to convert you.

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Recipe below: Tagliatelle with Shrimp, Rosemary, and Ginger

I love my Southern Italian Mediterranean food. Those are the flavors of my life that I was exposed to at an early age and have been cooking with for decades. There is, however, a frustration spot. Spices. Modern Italian cooking uses very few of them. There’s not much left from the old Spice Route days. Black pepper is still used, a lot (maybe too much), and nutmeg and cinnamon are both still found in Southern Italy in sweet and savory dishes such as my grandfather’s Christmas Eve ricotta-and-cinnamon-filled ravioli. There’s also saffron, one of my favorite spices. But that’s about it, even if I travel north into Tuscany or Emilia Romania. Herbs have replaced a lot of spiciness over the years. I couldn’t cook without herbs, but I need spices too. And I sneak them in here and there, trying to do so without pushing my flavors beyond recognizable contemporary Italian style.

One of my Italian culinary projects is to poke around to find dishes where spices are still used. I have found good spice in some Sicilian dishes, such as couscous, where the Moorish influence is obvious in the presence of cinnamon, saffron, and bay leaf. I’ve also hunted around in Venetian cooking, as Venice was the hub of the Italian spice trade, I figured they’d have some spice lurking around, ginger, maybe, or clove or star anise.

I often start my research in my ridiculously large cookbook collection that I’ve accumulated over 40 years. I’ve got good books, some quite dusty, others really new. I keep adding, and I almost never get rid of anything. Recently I pulled out The da Fiore Cookbook, with recipes from that famous Venetian restaurant. I’ve often drawn inspiration from many of its fish dishes, and I still find them fresh and unusual even after many years (the book came out in 2003). Mara Martin, the chef there, got the idea for one of her sweet and sour (“saor”) fish dishes from a fourteenth-century Venetian cookbook that included ginger in its old preparation for preserving fish. She even called this dish saor alla Marco Polo, because its distinguishing ingredient, ginger, was brought to Venice after the explorer’s travels to China. Ginger isn’t used much in any region of Italy these days, but it’s such a compelling addition to seafood, I knew I’d have to try it in my own Italian way. I thought immediately of rosemary and how its flavor and ginger’s have always seemed similar to me. Both are sharp, ginger being more biting and rosemary having that distinct strong pine burn on the tongue. Both seasonings, in fact, give you a nice little tongue burn.

So here you have my shrimp pasta with rosemary and ginger, to my culinary mind a truly legitimate Italian dish, with flavors from long ago but made contemporary. I hope you’ll try it.

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Recipe below: Onion Torta with Pancetta and Thyme

I almost never use garlic in the winter. What I usually find I’m not crazy about—the softneck type, mass-produced in California and piled high in supermarkets. It almost always tastes acrid to me. I used to try to work with it, but I finally asked myself why. Now I say resist. A winter tomato sauce with just onion or shallot or leek is wonderful.

In April, field garlic will start popping up in my yard and around sidewalks and parking lots across much of the Northeast. On Long Island when I was a kid, we used to call this stuff onion grass, and I’d eat lots of it. I’d take a tin of anchovies, maybe a jar of pimento-stuffed cocktail olives, and a box of Triscuits and sit in my backyard, yanking up the little bulbs and fashioning a type of demented dollhouse antipasto. I felt so grown up. Nobody I knew thought to actually cook with field garlic back then. I do now, though. Both the chive-like tops and the little bulbs are gentle and delicious. Sort of a low-rent version of ramps.

But what I really wait for is the cultivated hardneck garlic that starts appearing at my Greenmarket, and in my own little garden, around June, when its immature shoots pop up looking like scallions, the bulbs not even formed into separate cloves yet. I pull up some of these adolescent garlics myself, but most of my homegrown I let rest underground until early August, when they’ll be fully developed, intense and sweet. The hardneck varieties, which have better flavor than softneck, don’t dry well. They need to be used either freshly dug or within two months. That’s why industrial garlic growers don’t grow them. Softnecks dry, and they keep through long, cold winters, although they do eventually grow those bitter green sprouts, and by that time they really start tasting crappy.

It’s still only mid-January, cold, gray, and brown in New York. It’ll be a while before I can experience garlic beautitude. So in the meantime I’ve decided to go full-on onion. I’ve always liked a slow braise of onion. French onion soup and pasta alla Genovese, both with lots of soft onion, are two of my favorite winter dishes. For this rustico onion torta I’ve used the Vidalia variety, because I thought its sweetness would work well with the chunk of pancetta I had on hand. A little lemon zest and a splash of dry white wine in the filling prevents the sweet onion from overpowering. I also included some of the thyme I rescued in December from my on-the-verge-of-freezing garden. Thyme and sweet onion are a gorgeous match.

Happy Winter cooking to you.

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Recipe below: Five-Ingredient Winter Tomato Sauce

When I was about seven or eight I started seeing colors with numbers. A color would jump out at me when I thought of or saw a certain number. Five was red. Eight was forest green. Three was yellow. Seventeen was violet. Eleven was always light green, a pea green. Every number below twenty had a color. Then when I was around 16, all the colors mysteriously went away.

Forty plus years went by with no colors, and then about two months ago they came back. Not all of them, though. So far there are only three.  Five is still red, and it’s the strongest by far. That was true long ago as well. It’s a clear, bright red, a tomato red. Three is yellow. Eight is still forest green. But that’s it.

When the colors started flashing again, my first thought was, what’s going on, am I having a stroke? I was a bit scared, but I quickly eased back into it and started to enjoy my colors, hoping they would stay and more would follow.

I tried to think back to when I was young and it all started, wanting to remember if I liked the visions then. It’s hard to describe what they’re like, then and even now. I think back then they were a mixed blessing. I loved the colors sparking in my head, but they also could be intrusive, like when I was supposed to be learning arithmetic and the numbers and colors just created chaos. That is most likely why I never really learned any math in a solid fashion. It didn’t hold me back too much, but I think it might account for why I never measure anything when I’m cooking, unless I need to set a recipe for others to follow.

My colors have returned in time for the new year. I take this as a good sign, maybe for a lively year to come.  So here’s a simple five-ingredient winter tomato sauce that starts out with bright red canned tomatoes, a solid number five. They turn a little darker when you cook them, taking them out of that category. I don’t have a number for maroon. I can’t remember if I ever did. But, in any case, the taste is good, smoothed over by butter, sweet onion, and rosemary.

This will make enough for a pound of pasta. I especially like it on ricotta gnocchi or as a sauce for merguez-stuffed peppers. My mom often added peas to this kind of simple sauce. I love that too, as you can see in my photo, and pea green always went with eleven. It would be nice if that came back.

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A story with a beginning but no end.

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Recipe below: Fusilli Lunghi with Clams, Pancetta, and Sweet Pimentón

I recently got back from a trip to Andalusian Spain, where I went partly to look into the life of Federico Garcia Lorca but also to eat a lot of ham and seafood.

The jamón was excellent. It’s on every menu. You find those big legs hanging in almost all the food stores, along with ropes of dark red morcilla, the blood sausage I’m also crazy about. After a few days of eating lots of cured pork products, I went into ham fat overload. The stuff is rich. But I didn’t get sick of seafood, especially shellfish. Southern Spanish cooks have a way with clams, usually involving garlic, olive oil, and sherry.  The clams are simply opened over a high flame, their juices mixing with the sherry and everything else, and then quickly brought to the table, often sprinkled with pimentón, either sweet or hot. I love the dish.

I have a long history with clams, mainly because my father was in love with them. He dug for them with his buddies on the Glen Cove beach in all sorts of weather. He steamed them in a big black pot that had a spigot at the bottom for the delicious hot juice to pour out of, to drink straight or mixed with vodka. Clams raw, on the half shell, served with cocktail sauce, were a big Italian American thing in the sixties and seventies, a mandatory appetizer before a ribeye at Manero’s Steakhouse in Roslyn, where we’d go for birthdays and such. Back then clams were a man’s game, like cigars, but I was into the sport, all of it—digging, cooking, and eating them, and even cleaning up. I loved hearing the clink of many empty clam shells as I dropped them into the garbage can.

Clams still mean Christmas Eve to me. My mother almost always cooked some form of them with pasta every year. I now do the same, alternating red and white versions, sometimes adding a splash of Pernod or cognac, and mixing up the herbs. I like rosemary with clams, but basil often wins out. I often also throw a plate of baked clams into the seafood mix, lately with a Sicilian or pistachio pesto on top.

Since I’m still in a post-travel Spanish food head, this Christmas Eve I may go with this fusilli lunghi with clams, dry sherry, and sweet pimenton. It’s a really fragrant dish. I added pancetta to it. If you’re a stickler for Catholic tradition, you can leave out the meat, or make it for New Year’s.

I love fusilli lunghi. It’s a little slippery to get into your mouth, but that’s half the fun. The one I buy is made by Setaro, an excellent Neapolitan company. For a neater eating experience, you can certainly go with spaghetti instead. In any case, Buonitalia offers a huge assortment of Setaro pasta shapes. Anything you can imagine, and some really big ones like their giant lumaconi, paccheri, and candele lunghe. Their bucatini is also excellent.

For this pasta I used a mild pimentón del la Vera. You can use a hot one if you prefer. I like the La Dalia brand. This dried chili is used often in Southern Spanish dishes, on poached octopus, on potatoes, and sprinkled over many fish-type tapas. I kind of got addicted to it, but it can overpower you with smoke if you let it. And the Spanish sometimes let it. I try to use it sparingly.

Happy Christmas cooking to you all.

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Still Life with Soup Tureen, by Oskar Moll.

Recipe below: Minestrone with Pumpkin, Parsnip, Borlotti Beans, and Rosemary

Minestrone, the big chunky vegetable soup of Italy, is traditionally cooked long and slow for a uniform flavor that many people find comforting. Not me. There’s something about that sour long-boiled vegetable taste that turns me off. The minestrone of my childhood, both Progresso and homemade, was so disappointing, bland, boring. And I wasn’t crazy about the soup’s look and texture either. I cook my minestrone hard and fast. My grandmother would definitely not approve. Her summer minestrone was soft and greenish brown from its zucchini, yellow squash, and string beans, with a suggestion of maroon from its long-cooked backyard tomato. I know long-cooked vegetables are a Southern Italian thing, the idea being to try to coax nuances out of the vegetables. But you reach a point of diminishing returns, and my people have crossed it many times. My family used to cook broccoli rabe down to practically a purée. I haven’t made it that way for decades. Why grow or buy beautiful vegetables and then go boil the crap out of them?

I’m not saying a minestrone should be al dente. That would be completely un-Italian. You do need to release flavor with cooking. I’m looking for the perfect sweet spot of tender but not falling apart. This is especially important with pumpkin, butternut squash, and sweet potato, all of which disintegrate into a mush with almost no encouragement. I like having the beautifully colored little bits of vegetable collapse in my mouth, not in my bowl. The cooking time for this is only about half an hour. I think my grandmother let hers go through a whole afternoon of soap operas.

I served this fall soup topped with a spoonful of parsley sage pesto. I thought that was a nice match with the rosemary. If you’d like to give it a try, you can find my recipe for the pesto here.

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