Erica De Mane

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.

Recipe below: Risotto with Preboggion, Upstate New York–Style

I love a big foraged armful of spring greens from my upstate New York backyard. They’re the best thing to eat not just for health but mostly because I like them. They look good too, with their various shades of green. I’m especially drawn to dark leaves, like the ones on stinging nettles. And all this rummaging around drags me back in time to my Puglian and Campanian ancestors. I imagine that Achille, Fortunata, Caprina, Tecla, Assunta, and Leonardo also liked the look and aroma of wild weeds and herbs. Dandelions smell pissy and sweet. The wild thyme and mint around my place are pungent, almost too bitter to eat, but a little heat tames them, so they’re good in a marinade for stuff destined for the grill. The southern Italian foraging genes that I imagine I have in me are great for a touch of romantic misery. But there’s no misery for me, and hardly even any effort. That was probably not the case for my dirt poor (but possibly dirt rich in some respects) ancestors in Southern Italy, whose lives likely depended on those greens. I can wander around my backyard ripping up weeds while sipping a cold glass of rosé. Kind of decadent, but interesting.

The first thing I ever foraged was wild garlic, although back when I was a kid we called it onion grass. It was all over the place in my not-so-rural Long Island community. I and a few of my buddies used to rip up the bulbs with their chive-like tops and take them to a secluded place in the woods, start a scary little fire, and cook them up in a beat-up aluminum pan I found in our basement. We sautéed the onion grass in a pungent and in retrospect not great quality olive oil I took from our family kitchen. The whole thing had an intense, unfamiliar smell, different from the sweeter supermarket garlic I was used to. I remember cooking hot dogs back there, too, and now that I think of it I’m almost sure we ate the wild garlic on blackened hot dogs we speared with sticks. Not bad for a wild adventure 30 minutes from Manhattan. I also gathered dandelion greens, dropping them into our dinnertime salad bowl. My grandmother taught me about dandelions.

Preboggion is a Ligurian mix of wild greens and herbs. The name may come from the Ligurian dialect verb preboggî, which means to preboil. It’s used as a filling for pansoti, a type of swollen-looking ravioli, in soups such as minestrone, and stuffed into torte, tossed with pasta, or just eaten boiled and dressed with olive oil. I love the aroma of boiling preboggion. In Genoa I ordered it as a contorni that also contained potatoes, and I couldn’t stop eating it, really wanting a second serving but knowing I’d never finish it all. Depending on the time of year, preboggion can include borage, dandelion, nettles, galatsida (a type of Mediterranean daisy), wild chard, rampion (another Mediterranean flower, with leaves that taste like spinach), parsley, fennel, anise, or marjoram.

For my Upstate New York version, I found stinging nettles, field cress, garlic mustard, dandelion, wild garlic, and wild thyme. I threw in a bit of Swiss chard and some marjoram I had in the fridge. Later in the season I can find purslane and lamb’s-quarters, which tastes like strong spinach. In a month or so I’ll add borage, which I grow myself. That’s often an element in the wild Ligurian mixes, but I can’t find it wild around here. It tastes like cucumber, both the leaves and the electric-blue, star-shaped flowers. I also grow fennel. I can’t find that wild around here either, but it’s another item Ligurian cooks often include.

In my recipe I’ve listed all the wild greens and herbs I used, but you can make a nice version of preboggion with stuff from the farmer’s market or grocery store. I’d suggest a mix of arugula, Swiss chard, spinach, chicory, and maybe some watercress. And a few herbs such as marjoram, thyme, and parsley or basil.

Risotto with Preboggion, Upstate New York–Style

• Servings: 5
• Print

For the preboggion:

A handful each of  stemmed field cress, stinging nettles (the leaves pulled from the tough stems using gloves), garlic mustard, dandelion greens, and Swiss chard
The leaves from about 6 big sprigs of marjoram
A handful of basil leaves
The green tops from a few ramps
Extra-virgin olive oil
Salt

For the rest of the risotto:

6 cups vegetable broth or light chicken broth
Extra-virgin olive oil
4 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 large spring onion, cut into small dice, using a lot of the tender green part
The leaves from a few big sprigs of thyme, lightly chopped
2 cups carnaroli rice
Salt
A few scrapings of nutmeg
½ cup dry vermouth
Black pepper
½ cup freshly grated grana Padano cheese (I don’t like this risotto cheese-heavy; I want to taste the greens)

Set up a big pot of water, and bring it to a boil. Add all the greens and herbs. Blanch them for about 2 minutes. Drain them into a colander. Run cold water over them, to stop the cooking and set their color. Squeeze out as much water out as you can. You’ll want about 1½ cups of blanched greens for the risotto. If you have extra, add it to a soup or a pasta dish, or just eat it drizzled with good olive oil and a little salt. You want to make the blanched greens and herbs into a simple pesto, so put them into a food processor, add about 2 tablespoons of olive oil and a little salt, and pulse 4 or 5 times, until you have a kind of rough purée. Scrape the purée into a small bowl.

Pour the broth into a saucepan, and bring it to a boil. Turn down the heat to low, and keep the broth at a simmer.

Get out a large, wide pan with not too high sides. This is best for risotto since the surface area provides good evaporation. Add a big drizzle of olive oil and half the butter, and get it hot over medium heat. Add the onion and the thyme, and sauté until fragrant, about 3 minutes. Add the rice, season it with a little salt and the nutmeg, and sauté it until it’s well coated with oil and is just starting to toast, about 3 more minutes (although it shouldn’t actually start to brown, so don’t let it get that far). Add the vermouth, and let it bubble away.

Start adding a few ladles of broth, stirring often until the pan goes almost dry. You want to continue adding broth, stirring, and letting the pan go almost dry until the rice is just tender. In my experience the process takes about 17 or 18 minutes. After about 15 minutes, when the consistency starts to look creamy, give it a taste to see if it’s tender but al dente.

When the rice is just tender, add the preboggion, stirring it in. The rice will turn a lovely deep green. Turn off the heat, and add the rest of the butter, the grana Padano, and some black pepper, stirring it all in. Add a bit more broth to retain a loose but not soupy consistency. Taste for salt, and ladle the risotto into bowls. Serve right away.