Erica De Mane

Recipe below: Ditalini with Shell Peas, Prosciutto Cotto, Cinnamon, and Basil

Ditalini goes into pasta fazool (or pasta e fagiole in proper Italian), and in traditional Italian-American land it goes nowhere else. It’s a soup pasta. Small. Compact. Pasta e fagiole is sort of a soup, or it can be one. My family’s version was a cross between a soup and a pasta. A soupy pasta with ditalini, cannellini beans, lots of celery and onion, bay leaf, sometimes pancetta, sometimes sage, sometimes rosemary or basil, and occasionally just Italian parsley. Always hot chili flakes on the side. It was special any time of year, but especially in the winter, because it was thick and rich. And I loved ditalini, the little tubes, mixed in with the beans and the heavy broth.

It’s funny how certain pasta shapes become associated with specific dishes and then get etched in stone. When I was a kid there was linguine with clam sauce, rigatoni with meat sauce, penne with pink sauce, and ditalini with pasta fazool. That was all correct, and back then I wouldn’t have dared contradict any of it. But now I don’t think that way. I’m out of pasta prison. So here’s ditalini with fresh peas. Not so different from the bean versions, really, but the entire dish is much lighter. This one’s perfect for those lovely few weeks when spring blends into summer.

I don’t love shelling peas, but I do it because I want the peas. Also it’s nice when your fingers stain green and the kitchen smells like a mix of grass and potato (that’s how raw peas smell to me). And then you’ve got a nice pile of shells to make stock with. I like simmering a handful in a light chicken broth. I used chicken broth for this dish, but you can easily make it all-vegetable by adding the pea shells to a soffritto of onion, celery, carrot, a few leek tops, fennel trimmings, whatever you’ve got on hand.

I’ve included a little cinnamon, which I find gives the dish a bit of a Renaissance feel, or at least what I imagine would be that feel. It also deepens the sweetness of the peas. And cinnamon with basil is a beautiful combination. If you’ve ever grown the herb called cinnamon basil, which tastes and smells exactly how you’d imagine, you already know how alluring this pairing can be.

Recipe below: Gemelli with Nettle Lemon Pesto and Mussels

The thing about stinging nettles is that they really do sting. I was surprised to learn this. I thought it was just romantic folklore. They don’t sting bad, just a little, but if you keep grabbing them without gloves, your hands will likely blow up and get red and itchy. You just need gloves, and then there’s no problem. And once the nettles are blanched their little sting is completely gone, never to come back.

The first time I ever ate stinging nettles was in Rome many years ago. They were in a beautiful jade green risotto, a little on the loose side. The taste was an earthy mix of spinach and potting soil. I loved it. I came back from that trip wondering if I could ever find nettles in New York. And I did find them, at the Union Square market in Manhattan. I tried to duplicate my Roman risotto. It came out pretty well and I was very proud of myself. And then years later, when I got my little house in upstate New York, to my astonishment I discovered a big patch of stinging nettles growing in the backyard. That was some huge excitement. Now I cook with them every spring.

Stinging nettles are called ortiche in Italy. They’re most common in the middle and north of the country, where the soil is moister. Since my Roman experience, I’ve eaten ortiche several times in Liguria, usually as an ingredient in preboggion, the wild herb mix that’s used to fill pansoti, a bloated little ravioli, and other nice things, like savory torte, soup, and frittate.  I’ve recently discovered that it makes an excellent pesto.

I originally made my ortica pesto using the classic Ligurian basil pesto formula, simply replacing the basil with blanched nettles. Last night I cut back on the cheese, replaced the pine nuts with pistachios, and added a good amount of lemon zest. I tossed the resulting deep green pesto with steamed mussels and gemelli. I think another mild seafood such as scallops or trout would work just as well. You could certainly serve the nettles simply tossed with pasta, no fish, but the mussel combo was, in my opinion, a success.

I really love the color of blanched nettles. They’re a deep, almost bluish-tinged green. You’ll really notice that when you’re squeezing them dry, when lots of lovely emerald water will cascade into your sink.

Recipe below: Asparagus with Anchovy Parmigiano Breadcrumbs

For many people asparagus tastes like grass. Like grass but sweet. I guess I’d somewhat agree, but what does this even mean exactly? Fresh mown grass, or cooked grass? Lawn grass or wild grass? Grassy is something people say when trying to describe the tastes of many green vegetables. It’s sort of like when people say that cheeses or mushrooms or dairy products taste nutty. I’ve even heard people say that particular nuts, almonds for instance, taste nutty. Which means I guess, that they taste likes other nuts, and that all nuts taste similar—which they don’t. Describing the taste of food is hard. Food writers struggle with it all the time. The frustrating thing is that you can’t convey a taste without comparing it to something else. How do you get around that? This spring I’ve been trying to concentrate on the taste and smell of asparagus. It’s hard. I mean green asparagus, not white or purple, which are variations I don’t find at spring farm stands. Raw asparagus has no smell, and its taste registers only a faint sweet bitterness for me. But cooking it brings out all kinds of tastes. Grassy? Maybe. But for me, I now realize, asparagus tastes like a cross between artichoke and broccoli. I’ve settled in on that description for now.

And what about asparagus pee? That aroma is really something special. I look forward to it every spring. It never fails me. It’s asparagusic acid that causes it, a chemical unique to asparagus and commented on since the dawn of the vegetable. The acid gets broken down in your gut into sulfur. Sulfur itself can smell disgusting, as in heavily cabbage-laced fart, but to me asparagus sulfur isn’t nasty. It’s a kind of sweet sulfur. It’s a marker of spring for me. And did you know that about 30 percent of people can’t smell their asparagus pee? The medical explanation for this is that some people break sulfur down better than others, leaving little left to smell. I have another theory: Some people just smell things better than others. I think I’m a super smeller.

Morelscapes by Don Huber

Recipe below: Braised Chicken with Morels, Tarragon, and Thyme

Last night we had a thunderstorm that lasted for more than an hour. It was the low rumbling kind but with hardly any lightning, so the night sky remained dark. The rain wasn’t heavy, which was a good thing, as in a heavy rain we often lose power and I wasn’t in the mood for that (sometimes I am). I sat in bed with the cats, listening to the entire show. The cats weren’t scared, but they were upright and alert, with big eyes. A storm like this one, without lightning, is odd to sit through, but it let my head wander to thoughts of spring food, of everything I was eager to cook again. I focused on morels, with their honeycomb weenie caps, dry texture, and hollow insides.

Yesterday I had gone out looking for morels, searching in the correct places, around the moist, decaying crud that builds up under elms, ash, and old apple trees. I’ve had this house in the Hudson Valley for seven years. Every April when morel season starts, I go a little apeshit looking for them, but I’ve never found any. A neighbor, Larry, brought me about a dozen huge ones several years ago, all about six inches long, that he found somewhere around here. He wouldn’t say where. I wasn’t furious with him, but I was definitely irritated, and he knew it. I sliced them all in half, lengthwise, checking for bugs, which are common in these mushrooms, but I didn’t find any, so I just quickly sautéed his mega morels in butter and splashed them with grappa. That is one of the best ways to bring out their earth flavor. And just so you know, you don’t want to eat them raw; their toxins need to be heated out and away.

Today, after last night’s rain, I figured I’d go out again, looking. But it’s still raining, so I guess I’ll wait until later, when things dry out a bit.

In the meantime I want to share with you a very good recipe for chicken with dish that I made the other night with morels I had bought at Eataly for $55 a pound. I swear that was the price. I bought exactly ten of them, and the bill came to $12. I justified the expense by telling myself that at least I didn’t get the golden morels, the lighter ones piled up next to the run-of-the-mill ones I did buy. Those were going for $85 a pound. I have a love-hate relationship with that store.

This recipe is a pretty straightforward braise. Morels, chicken, and tarragon are a classic French trio, but I decided to strengthen it by adding thyme at the beginning of cooking, as an underpinning, and then introducing the tarragon right at the end, so it wouldn’t lose any of its potency. I was really happy with the result, and it produced lots of rich, earthy sauce to flavor rice I served with it.

Morel season is just beginning up here, and I’ll continue to scout around, like I always do. I don’t have high hopes for success, but you never know. I might get lucky. I’ll keep you posted.

I think it’s important to look well groomed and neat. I like to feel clean even if I’m not clean.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.