Erica De Mane

“A Cook and Her Herbs” will be a new regular feature on my blog. Once a month I’ll post about my love of herbs. I’ll offer recipes, personal stories, historical notes on herbs’ uses in Mediterranean cooking, health facts and myths, all sorts of cooking wisdom, and, as always, beautiful artwork and food photos. I decided to write my first herb post in the dead of winter mainly because I find the season challenging for the herb-obsessed like me, and I figured you could use all the help you could get.

I hope you enjoy it. Please send along any thoughts you have about my postings and any ideas you’d like to see covered here.  Happy winter cooking to you. It’s been a long one. And don’t forget to look at my YouTube videos. I’m posting “A Cook and Her Herbs” videos monthly, too. And they’re often on different topics from my monthly text posts.

Recipe below: Pistachio Mint Pesto

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve grabbed a package of sage or oregano or rosemary at a supermarket and thrown it in my cart only to get home and find almost the entire contents browned and rotten. I’m talking about the herbs you find in the little hard plastic packages lined up in rows in the produce department. Winter is when I’m forced to buy that stuff, since there’s no other option, and the letdown for me can be profound. As you know, I love my herbs. When I see them mistreated, I take it personally. The supermarket stuff often looks fine from the front of the package, but had I bothered to flip it over, I would have seen how desiccated it was. Of course, sometimes it looks really bad from the front. And occasionally, and here’s the most annoying thing, it looks good from the front and the back, but the middle is screwed-up moldy. Now I always open the herb packs to see if there’s anything funky going on inside. Many herbs that aren’t big sellers, marjoram among them, sit on the shelf too long, and nobody pays attention.

When they’re not all moldy or dried out, or moldy and dried out, the herbs I buy at the supermarket usually taste okay, but being mass-produced they’re often on the mild side, compared with ones you grow yourself or buy at farm stands. That doesn’t make them bad. You just have to be sure to always taste a leaf to determine how much you’ll need. You might want to add a bit more to get the effect you want.

Oregano is pretty easy to find in supermarkets year-round now, easier than marjoram, but it’s hard to know if you’ll find Greek or Italian oregano in those little packages. My local West Side Market usually stocks Italian oregano, but when go to Citarella, it’s always the stronger, less flowery Greek. Greek oregano has bigger leaves and is slightly darker in color. I now open the packages and give them a good look and smell to make sure I’m getting what I want. I often prefer Italian oregano, but it depends on what I’m cooking. For instance, I want Greek oregano in a spinach and feta pie. It’s only right.

Parsley and mint are fairly dependable winter supermarket finds, and usually in pretty good shape. Basil, on the other hand, is almost never good in the winter. I’m not sure why that is. You’d think anything grown in a greenhouse would at least be serviceable. In Liguria they grow basil in huge greenhouses all year round, and it’s excellent, but the stuff I get is cat-pissy and mostly blackened at the tips, and also strangely sandy. So the hell with that.

I use both parsley and mint in this pistachio pesto, which to my way of thinking is a good winter substitute for the more summery Genoa pesto. I make that only when I can get the best basil. Regardless of the trials of winter, I try to keep working fresh herbs year-round, not only to brighten up my cooking but also for their strong antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties.  Every little bit helps.

I tossed this rich, mellow pesto with a pound of busiate, a long, twisted traditional Sicilian pasta. Seemed like a really good match, considering that it involves most of the ingredients for a classic Trapanese pesto, excepting the tomatoes. You can use it as a condiment for seafood or vegetables (it’s excellent on roasted eggplant). And if you’re tossing it with pasta, remember to save a cup of the pasta cooking water to loosen it up and make it creamy.

A note on pistachios: Although wildly expensive, the Sicilian pistachios from the town of Bronte are exceptional. Turkish pistachios are also excellent, and I often buy them. I saw both at Kalustyan’s the other day, but considering that I was also purchasing a not so mini tin of Spanish saffron, the potential bill scared me, so I went for California-grown. They were better than I expected, rich and sweet and flecked with green, which is nice when  making pesto. There’s nothing more depressing than gray pesto. Oh, and one other thing: I’ve tried toasting boring nuts such as almonds, pistachios, pine nuts, and walnuts to make them more flavorful for pesto, but it doesn’t work. I think pesto needs the taste of virgin nuts. I find that a strong toasted-nut taste overpowers the fresh herbs and throws the delicate medley off balance. That’s just me. I know people who do it, but I don’t think my people should.

Recipe below: A Quick Winter Ragù with Sausage, Rosemary, Fennel, and a Splash of Cream

I find winter supermarket shopping bleak. No Greenmarket cantaloupes, no backyard beefsteaks. As a picky, bordering on really picky, food shopper, I try to keep my supermarket visits down to maintenance only—onions, carrots, celery, broccoli, milk, plastic packs of somewhat fresh herbs, decent grana Padano, but definitely not a terrible thing called American fontina, which I bought once out of desperation and never again. Most of the lettuce is okay, but the other day I sniffed a pile of really good looking escarole and it smelled oddly like the mildewy inside of a bathing cap. I can’t imagine how that could be. Am I just a super snotty shopper who brings on her own depression? I know this sounds exaggerated, but a package of rotten, I mean really smelly, chicken I bought a few days ago literally had me in tears. Angry tears.

I’ve stopped buying fresh Italian sausage at supermarkets because I’ve been burned too many times, not only because of the sour, industrial quality of much of it, and problems with the pork industry in general, but also because half the time it’s rotten. I mean it stinks. If you’re going to sell mass-produced, processed ground meat, it might as well be fresh. Don’t you think? Evidently my 14th Street grocery store doesn’t think so. Sell-by dates have little meaning over there. And don’t get me started on their chicken rotation, or nonrotation. If you’re going to bother to stock phony free-range chicken, you may as well keep it fresh.  And when the cashier asks if I want my receipt? Damn right, I want it. You’ll be seeing me back here with that high-stinking chicken in no time. The whole thing is so frustrating.

I really should make my own Italian sausage. It’s easy, and it feels really good. I think I’ll start again soon. I wish I had kept my grandmother’s meat grinder. It was an old hand-cranked thing that clamped on to a table and looked ancient and beautiful to my eyes. I had it in my college dorm room for a while. I’m not sure why I brought it there. Maybe back then I thought of it as found art. Not sure.

So this winter I walk miles through New York sleet, wind, and deep freeze to get myself a decent sausage. Actually I don’t have to go all that far, usually just over to Faicco’s, on Bleecker Street, about 15 blocks away, a fun slide on ice-slicked sidewalks (I also trudge over there for my tripe, the only place I can find it anymore). And the surprise is that Faicco’s good, fresh sausage doesn’t cost any more than the supermarket’s rotten one.

I’ve spent much of this winter in Italian food shops, the few that are left in downtown Manhattan. I can find excellent house-made mozzarella at a place called Sergimmo on Sixth Avenue. They also carry a Sicilian primo sale I can’t find anywhere else. I love Buon’Italia  in the Chelsea Market. They’ve also make good fresh sausage, and it’s where I buy my cotechino for New Year’s Day. And they carry a huge selection of Setaro dried pasta. There’s a new caffè on Perry Street, right behind the Village Vanguard, that’s run by a Tuscan food exporter called Sogno Toscano, and it carries porchetta, bresaola, speck, guanciale, lardo, culatello, pecorino aged in grape must, pickled artichokes and eggplant, and good canned tomatoes. It is a wonderful addition to the neighborhood, and boldly opened right in the middle of Covid. I haven’t made it down to Di Palo’s in Little Italy yet this winter, but I will. I’m also planning a trip to Arthur Avenue in the Bronx to stock up on pantry staples like capers and anchovies and olives and dried sausage, all at really good prices. I can mostly keep my bad self out the supermarket, if I try.

If you can make or otherwise get your hands on some high-quality Italian pork sausage, I advise you to cook this dish. Most ragù sauces take at least two hours of long simmering. This sausage version will be ready in about 40 minutes. I know you’ve seen me use a blend of rosemary and fennel before. I return to it again and again. It’s worth it for its intrinsic beauty, especially when it comes to winter cooking.

Recipe below: Bucatini with Octopus, Vermouth, and Basil

Lately I’ve been loitering around Eataly on 23rd Street. It tricks me into feeling I’ve travelled somewhere, maybe Florence, somewhere with big food shops filled with great Italian stuff. Eataly can be difficult, with its crowds and complicated floor plan, but there’s no denying it’s got some great Italian products. I don’t buy there all the time, but occasionally I do. Sometimes its pricing is just too bizarre, though. I recently intended to purchase a small head of puntarella, a type of chicory, but found, to my amazement when I brought it to the counter, that the tiny head of lettuce would have cost me $28.  Living in New York, I’m usually not shocked by food prices, but this was crazy, don’t you think?  However, some things there are reasonable. Cheeses, for instance. I was surprised to find a caciocavallo from Irpinia in Campania, a place not far from my ancestral village of Castelfranco in Miscano. Both localities are famous for this cow’s milk (or occasionally sheep’s milk) cheese, but Irpinia finally found a way to export it, and I’m grateful that Eataly stocks it.

Eataly also has an interesting seafood department, reliably carrying hard to find things such as fresh anchovies and head-on scampi, the kind I like to stuff, and a good selection of whole fish (not just farmed branzino). On my last visit I saw octopus tentacles as thick as I’d ever seen in my life and of such gelatinous repulsiveness that I had to buy a few. Two of the monsters were enough for dinner for four. (They were sold detached from the head. I wonder how big that head would have been.)

There are several ways to cook big octopus. First off, most people buy whole ones that have been previously frozen, since that tenderizes them, which means you don’t have to spend time slamming them against a rock. They’re also cleaned, meaning the head has been emptied out, which cuts down on kitchen trauma. Most recipes ask you to first blanch your octopus in boiling water for as long as it takes to make it tender. That can be an hour or longer, depending on what you’re dealing with. And then there’s another way, more of an Italian granny way, which is to just stick it in a pot with no liquid at all, cover it, and sort of steam heat it into submission. Also I had a friend whose mother used to just sit an octopus up on a sheet pan and heat it in the oven until it softened up. Very strange to witness, but it did work. Sort of like baking a potato.

My method is a hybrid way. I put the octopus in a pot, pour on a little vermouth or wine, add aromatics (garlic, hot chile, onion, celery, bay leaf, herbs, depending), cover it, and then let it steam braise. This tenderizes it nicely and has the added benefit of gently seasoning it throughout.

I know a lot of people are kind of grossed out by the thought of cooking an octopus, but this recipe is a lot easier than you might think, and the resulting sauce is sensational. I hope you’ll give it a try.

Bucatini with Octopus, Vermouth, and Basil

(Serves 4)

Extra-virgin olive oil
1 sweet onion, like Vidalia, cut into medium dice
1 carrot, cut into medium dice
1 celery stalk, plus the leaves from about 3 stalks, cut into medium dice, the leaves lightly chopped
2 fresh bay leaves
5 or 6 large sprigs fresh thyme
2 garlic cloves, peeled but left whole
1 small fresh red chili pepper, cut in half lengthwise (seeded, if you like less heat)
1 medium-large octopus, previously cleaned and frozen
1 cup dry vermouth
1 35-ounce can Italian plum tomatoes, lightly drained and well chopped
Salt
A handful of fresh basil leaves, lightly chopped
1 pound bucatini

Get out a large stove-top casserole with a cover (I used a Le Creuset oval pot). Add a big drizzle of olive oil over medium heat. Add the onion, carrot, celery plus its leaves, bay leaves, thyme, garlic cloves, and chili. Let it all sauté for 2 or 3 minutes so it can become fragrant. Add the octopus, turning it over a few times to coat it in the oil and aromatics. I don’t add salt here since often the broth the octopus lets off is somewhat salty, and also extra salt can toughen it.

After the octopus has warmed through in the oil for a few minutes, add the vermouth, and let it bubble. Cover the dish, turn the heat down to really low, and let it simmer until the octopus is tender. This can take a while, in my experience at least an hour. My octopus, this time, was thick so it took even longer. Just test it every so often by poking it with a thin knife. If you get any rubbery resistance, it’s not done yet. You’ll also want to turn the octopus over a few times during cooking, to make sure it simmers evenly.

After a bit, it should start smelling pretty good. That is a sign you’re getting there. Test again. When a skinny knife goes through easily, it’s ready. Turn off the flame, and lift the octopus from the pot onto a cutting board, preferably one with a juice-catching moat, like you’d use for a steak.

Check to see how much broth you have in the pot. If you’ve got too much, the resulting sauce will be too liquidy. If you have more than 2 cups, take some out and save it for some other use. (I froze some of mine. It makes a great addition to a fish stew, for instance. I could have boiled it down, but it was very intense already and I didn’t want it to become too salty. This is a judgement call.)

After you get your broth level right, let the octopus cool enough so you can handle it.

While it’s cooling, add the tomatoes to the pot and simmer them, uncovered, on medium heat for about 15 minutes.

What I do now is cut the tentacles (legs actually) at the base of the head (I didn’t have the head this time around; if you have it you can slice it up and add it to the sauce, but I find its texture often dry, so I usually discard it). I then pull some of the soft skin off the tentacles. It slips right off. I don’t remove all of it, just some of it, and leave the suckers on. The soft skin does add some flavor, but the texture is a little weird, so I just remove part of it. But that’s up to you. Next cut the tentacles into approximately ½-inch pieces.

Return the octopus pieces and any juice they have given off back to the pot. Simmer about 10 minutes longer, just to let all the flavors come together. Taste the sauce to see if it needs salt. Mine usually needs a little, but that depends on how much exudes from the octopus. Add the basil. You can also add a drizzle of fresh olive her if you like. Can’t hurt.

Now you’re ready to cook your bucatini perfectly al dente and toss it with the octopus sauce. I’m not always particularly strict about the no-cheese-with-seafood “rule,” but in this dish I feel that cheese will conflict with the delicate taste of the sauce, so I leave it out. 

You can also present the sauce, without pasta, just in bowls, possibly with a cup or so of cooked ceci thrown in, alongside garlic-rubbed bruschetta slices to dunk in it. Either way, it’s a good thing.

Red wine, rosemary, vanilla, a beautiful combination of flavors that cook down to a thick, glossy syrup that clings to the pears and makes for an elegant winter dessert, a study in pink and deep crimson. Not too sweet, but full of intensity. I hope you’ll try it. And if you’d like the recipe, it’s here.

I’m nude. I’m languishing. The fish my uncle Nunzio brought this morning is sitting here waiting for me to fix it before it rots. If I cook something good, I’ll be a happy nude. If I just sit here holding my boobs like an dope, the fish will spoil and I’ll have made a sin. What should I cook? Maybe I’ll fillet it. Then I can coat it in olive oil and throw the fillets on the grill. That’s a good idea. In that case I should make a sauce. I have fresh marjoram. I have garlic. I have lemon. I’ll make a salsa verde with those things plus good olive oil. I have salt. I even have a fresh jalapeno. Maybe I’ll add that. That’s a good idea. If I grill the fish fillets and then spoon a bit of the salsa verde on top, not only will I have saved the fish from rotting, but I’ll have a really good dinner. I think I’ll do that. It’s better to cook the fish than to let it rot. That would not only be sad but also a sin, I think. Okay, great. I’m nude, but I’m not languishing. Now I’ve not only got a plan, but also a wonderful dinner. Thank you, uncle Nunzio for bringing me this really fresh fish, that at first I viewed as a burden, but now see as an opportunity.