Erica De Mane

Recipe below: Apricot Tart with Almonds and Thyme

Growing up in New York I’ve almost never had a decent apricot. Seems we don’t know how to grow them here. Even in season at farmers’ markets they’re usually sour or, even worse, mealy and tasteless. I asked the people at Migliorelli Farm in Tivoli about this and was told that apricots are “temperamental” and have a “short period of perfect ripeness.” My brother, who lives north of L.A., says the local apricots out there are much better than we get. I was upset to hear that.

Cooking helps immensely. The ones I found recently were pretty sour but also juicy and  just so pretty I had to buy them. The ones Migliorelli grows are a deep orange with splotches of pinky red. They smelled good, sort of like apricots should, so I thought heat and sugar would wake them up. And they did.

This tart was inspired by a Patricia Wells recipe I learned about many years ago. The technique is so easy compared with pâte brisée–based tarts. What you do is basically make a cookie dough and press it into a tart pan. You don’t even have to roll it out. And forget about the annoying blind-baking bean-and-aluminum-foil procedure. You just stick it in the oven to firm it up a bit before filling it. Cut the apricots in half (small plums also work well), stick them cut side up in the pan, and pour a cream and egg mix over the top. I flavored my custard with almonds and a drizzle of orzata syrup, which I love and which is less obnoxious than that crappy, ultra strong almond extract, the ruin of so many Italian American pastry shops.

The mix of apricots and almonds can’t be beat, and, as I’ve just discovered, adding fresh thyme brings the whole thing together with a weird hit of savoriness.

You’ll want a 9-inch tart pan with a removable bottom.

Recipe below: Grilled Pork Chops with Caper Sage Salsa

I love a grilled pork chop. When it’s properly done the fat gets all crispy and there’s a slight pink at the bone. My nostalgia for grilled pork grows partly from childhood memories of my father’s boozy summer grill nights, when everything and everybody was amply toasted and things were not often properly done. It’s a mixed bag of recall, but it gives me mostly a good feeling.

Dick would start his grill nights with a “mart,” meaning a good-size glass of vodka on the rocks with a twist. He’d have a few of those and then move on to the big bottle of mouth-puckering Chianti. The pork went on a fire that never was given a chance to die down to suitable-for-cooking orange coal. Flames shot up, and the meat almost always emerged burnt on the outside and still cold in the middle. My mother would scream that everything was “completely blackened. Disgusting. And raw.” There was a lingering fear of trichinosis back in the late sixties and early seventies, so the “raw” question stirred panic in Italian American moms (maybe in all moms, but it seems the Italian ones were always especially prone to medical scares). We ate all the blackened raw pork anyway and sort of loved it. The few pork chops that were actually overcooked in addition to being blackened (no trichinosis there), were coveted. I actually preferred the rare ones. They were more like steak. I also thought I knew that trichinosis was a thing of the past. All the pork chops, in whatever stage, got topped with fire-roasted onions and peppers, and that was a good touch. I suppose our grill nights might possibly have been just as unruly without the booze, but I guess we’ll never know.

I still love grilled pork chops, especially soaked in a simple marinade. Here I prepare a marinade with a hint of the sea. When I “man” the grill now, I try to not get too bombed and actually pay attention to what I’m doing, which in a way seems like less fun than when my father was at the grill, but I guess it’s a tradeoff. I like my pork cooked juicy, with that little touch of pink. I try for that and usually more or less succeed.

Sage is a strange-smelling herb. I like it, but sometimes it stumps me. I search for new ways to use it, especially since I’ve got so much of it in a patch that comes back bigger every year. This sage and caper salsa was a surprise. I was expecting it to be kind of harsh, but the good olive oil, the capers, and the pine nuts seemed to bring out the sweetness in the herb. Sage is lovely on pork, classic, but also, I have discovered, on whole grilled trout. And try it on thick slices of roasted pumpkin or butternut squash, as the summer moves toward its end.

Happy summer grilling to you.

These peaceful fish and lady are happy to be underwater, where they hear a lot of rumbling. This painting is by Sergio Fiorentino. This is a portrait of me.

Recipe below: Crostata with Summer Peaches and Rosemary

Fruit and herbs. I’m always looking for good new combinations of fruit with fresh herbs. And in my culinary travels this summer I’ve discovered I love rosemary with stone fruit. Not too much rosemary; just a small amount will perfume the fruit with a gentle evergreen aroma. Too much and you might wind up with harsh medicine. So follow me here, and I’ll show you how nice it can be.

I first tried this flavor combo last week with small yellow plums, called lemon plums, that I found at the Union Square market, making a rosemary-scented syrup that I poured hot over the stoned fruit, letting it soak in. It was piney and sweet. Then I moved on to peaches, which had just become available at Migliorelli, my farm stand in Rhinebeck. They had both yellow and white peaches. I chose the white ones for this, but I left their mottled red skins on for color and richness of taste. Before I went about putting this crostata together, I sliced a peach, placed a few rosemary needles on it, and ate it. The taste was a mix of sweet, pine, lemon, and, I thought, also a hint of black pepper. That was what I was hoping for.

Heat both mellows and deepens flavor, depending on what you’re working with. For instance here the peaches became less acidic, more just melting sweet with a hit of citrus. The rosemary lost its harsh edge, but also spread its flavor throughout the crostata in a softened way. All good.

When apricots show up at my markets, in the next week or so, I’m going to try using rosemary on them, maybe in a sorbetto. I’m not sure, but stay tuned.

And happy summer herb cooking at all my friends.

Recipe below: Cherry Clafoutis with Bay and Lemon Thyme

Cherry clafoutis as traditionally made in the Limousin region of France uses whole, unpitted cherries.  I never wanted to serve it that way, for fear of choking someone, especially when my swallowing-compromised mother was still alive. So every summer I’d consider making a cherry clafoutis and ultimately decide to forget it, even though the thought drove me crazy with culinary romance. Also I wanted to pit the cherries, but I stupidly couldn’t figure out how. Why it took me so long to break down and buy a cherry pitter I’m not sure, but I think I had it in my head that there was no way a simple little gadget that cost nine dollars could get the pit out while leaving the cherry more or less whole. I was dead wrong. The things work. Buy one. I only use it in June and July, when cherries are in season, but it has contributed to my life in a big way.

After I got through with the pitting, which took all of five minutes, I needed to think about herbs, as I wanted to add some sort of herb flavoring to the batter. The usual additions are kirsch and vanilla, which I love and did add, but since dairy, especially cream, accepts flavors so readily, I decided to also add fresh bay leaves and sprigs of lemon thyme to the standard milk-and-cream mix and give that a quick heat-and-steep. You’ll want only fresh bay leaves here. Dried would impart a musty flavor, which would really not be good at all. If you don’t have lemon thyme, regular thyme and a piece of lemon peel will work beautifully. Lemon verbena is also a nice way to go.

I love the bay leaf and lemon thyme combination so much, I’m already thinking about other ways to use it, both sweet and savory. Stay tuned.

I used a shallow 11-by-8-inch oval baking dish for the clafoutis, but any more-or-less equivalent-size round or rectangular dish will work fine.

When I first moved to Manhattan from my Long Island childhood home, in the late 1970s, Downtown was an enticingly raw place. My studio apartment near Union Square got broken into a lot, once two days in a row. I started growing pots of basil on the roof, because I missed my father’s backyard garden. Soon one of the old women on my floor, who we referred to as Miss Alabama, a big butch in men’s boxers with a Southern drawl, told me if I continued to go up there to garden, someone would come along and slit my privates from end to end. Men were waiting, she repeatedly warned me. I was more worried about being assaulted by Miss Alabama than by a stranger on the roof—and those pots of basil brought me great joy. They opened a world of fresh sweet aroma and flavor and green wonder for me. Not only did I ignore Miss Alabama’s warnings, I went bigger, adding parsley, thyme, fennel, oregano, rosemary, and wild arugula.

I’ve since grown herbs in city stoop pots, on windowsills, under grow lamps in winter, in a garden in upstate New York, and on the roof of God’s Love We Deliver—they have a big, gorgeous herb garden up there which for a while I helped tend.

I have found herb gardening in Manhattan extremely rewarding, an endless hit of aroma and freshness, Not that it doesn’t have its drawbacks. People steal my plants. All the time. Who thinks it’s the height of accomplishment and city fun to get shitfaced and rip out marjoram at three in the morning? That’s upsetting, but it has never deterred me. I just keep planting. The joy of going out to my stoop while cooking dinner and scissoring a few sprigs of rosemary or basil is just too great.

When I was a child my father kept a tidy Italian man’s garden, growing tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants, the triumvirate of Southern Italian soul cooking, and he always had basil, flat-leaf parsley, oregano, sage, rosemary, and spikey arugula (from cuttings our next door neighbor had smuggled back from Sorrento). Fresh herbs feel like home to me. At my wedding I carried a bouquet of them, heavy on the rosemary and thyme. I wish it had been bigger, much bigger. If I had my wedding to do over now, I’d wear a headdress of herbs as well, and give each guest a small bouquet to take home. And I should have had an herb-themed wedding dinner and a cake decorated with basil and mint. But that’s okay. I’m making up for it now.

I’m extremely lucky to now have, in addition to my city stoop pots, my own herb garden upstate. I stare at it and fuss with it dozens of times a day. Herbs are my friends. Truly. They are great company. I talk to them. I plant kinds that complement each other next to each other, like basil and marjoram, or fennel and parsley, so they’ll have something is common when they chat among themselves. Maybe it’s my imagination, but I’m pretty sure this year my bronze fennel, parsley, and lemon verbena are leaning in together, not just toward the sun. I must have made the correct arrangement.

My ancestors in Southern Italy, going back hundreds of years, cooked with the same herbs I grow and use today, and knowing that connects me to them, though otherwise they are somewhat of a mystery to me. The wild fennel liqueur I make in August, a Neapolitan specialty, is probably close in flavor to the liqueur my great grandfather made. I bake rosemary-flavored taralli, little, round crackers, that taste like the ones my family would have eaten in their poor little town in Campania. I’m sure of this because I have gone there and tasted them at the source, eating ones made by my grandmother’s cousin Tony, who grew all his herbs in his dusty little backyard garden, the same way his grandfather had.

So it’s early summer again and my upstate garden is just starting to fill in. This year I planted some companion flowers, nasturtium and marigolds mostly, to deter bugs and disease. So far it all looks pretty good. At this stage when some of my plants such as basil are still small, I’ll wait to start using them lavishly so they have a chance to grow bushy. July and August are when I really let loose and go wild with herbs. Stay tuned.

Recipe below: Riso Nero Venere with Scallops, Saffron, Pastis, and Basil

A good way to expand your cooking knowledge is by buying an ingredient you don’t use and making yourself cook with it. Sounds obvious, but I think we all know how easy it is to recycle the same things over and over (penne with tomato sauce again?). I recently bought a bag of riso nero, Italian black rice, just because I hadn’t cooked any in years.

Riso venere, or Venus rice, as they call it, is mostly grown in the Lombardy and Piedmont areas. As I said, it had been a while, so I wasn’t expecting its color to change with cooking, from black to a very dark, sultry, gorgeous purple. A lovely thing to witness. I’m thinking that tells me it’s got a lot of the same antioxidant properties as other purple and red foods such as berries and grapes. When I looked it up, I found that it is in fact rich in fiber and in minerals like calcium, manganese, selenium, magnesium, phosphorous, zinc, and iron, which all make it much more nutritious than the denatured white rice you probably, like me, eat a lot of. It certainly tastes and smells richer. Some people say it smells like freshly baked bread. I get that. I’ve also heard sandalwood. That I don’t pick up.

Italian black rice is a hybrid of emperor’s rice, from China, also known as forbidden rice (meaning forbidden for anyone other than the emperor; seems he didn’t want his people to be healthy, and he also thought it an aphrodisiac that, if released to the public, could leave the masses out of control). The original Chinese version grows best in warmer climates. This variety was created to grow in cooler places such as Northern Italy.

For my recipe I pulled up some classic Marseille flavors, saffron, pastis, basil, and thyme. The dish itself is elaborate and feels very special-occasion to me. I found great-looking scallops at my farmers’ market, so I decided to make this for my husband’s birthday. He loved it. Seafood goes beautifully with this rice. You can use shrimp or calamari or clams instead of scallops. Or, if you prefer, you can leave out the seafood entirely and just serve the saffron pastis black riso alone, or as a side dish. The rice is so intrinsically flavorful, you might at times want to serve it very simply, maybe just tossed with soft herbs (basil, parsley, tarragon, chives, fennel), pine nuts, and good olive oil. It also makes a nice summer rice salad with seasonal vegetables such as zucchini with summer garlic and mint. And it looks beautiful on a picnic table.

I chose a riso nero from Pacifico Crespi, a producer in Piemonte. It’s imported by Gustiamo. You can also get a riso nero from a company called Marhaba at Kalustyan, and you can find several other producers on Amazon, but I like the Gustiamo one the best.

If you give this rice a try, let me know how it turns out.