Erica De Mane

Mackerel and Pillow, Michiko Kon, 1979.

Recipe: Mackerel Arriganate

Last night I dreamt that mackerel were playing with my head. When I woke I saw that mackerel were, indeed, tumbling around in my bed. But I acted fast, turning a potentially treacherous situation, optimist that I am, into something fine. I cooked them.

And since it’s summer I cooked them in high summer fashion (summer in Naples fashion, actually). “Arriganate” means with oregano. Oreganata is the more familiar Italian-American spelling, but I would guess most of my blog readers will know both terms.

It’s interesting that I’m posting a recipe for arriganate since, I have to admit, I don’t really like oregano, either dried or fresh. What kind of Southern Italian doesn’t like oregano? First off, they put it in everything, and being so strong it gets tired-tasting fast. And to me the dried kind (which they prefer to fresh in Southern Italy), even when it’s imported and still attached to its rustico branches, tastes a little like pencil shavings. The flavor of fresh oregano depends on its variety and how played out the plant is. Often it’s harsh, and  can become more so when its oils are released in cooking. But I’ve come up with a fix. Now what I do when I want that arriganate feeling, I blend fresh marjoram, a sweeter more floral cousin to oregano, with fresh thyme, in about equal parts. I’ve found that this produces the spirit of oregano but without the rough edges. Try it. See what you think.

Mackerel Arriganate

(Serves 2)

3 medium summer tomatoes, peeled, seeded, and cut into small dice (and lightly drained if really watery)
1 tablespoon Spanish sherry vinegar
5 large marjoram sprigs, the leaves chopped
5 large thyme sprigs, the leaves chopped
2 summer garlic cloves, thinly sliced
A palmful of salt-packed capers, soaked and then drained
The grated zest of 1 large orange
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
Extra-virgin olive oil
2 small (single serving) Spanish mackerel, gutted but with the heads left on

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

In a medium bowl, combine the tomatoes, vinegar, herbs, garlic, capers, and orange zest. Season with salt and pepper. Drizzle in about ¼ cup of olive oil, give it all a good stir, and let it sit for a few minutes so the flavors can mingle.

Choose a baking dish large enough to hold the fish and all the sauce with some breathing room (the tomatoes should spread out nicely all around the fish).

Drizzle a little olive oil into the dish. Season the mackerel with salt and black pepper, and then lay them in the dish. Pour the tomato sauce over the fish.

Drizzle a bit of olive oil over the top, and bake, uncovered, until the fish is just tender, about 15 minutes or so, depending on the size of your fish. Check by sticking a knife in at the backbone; the flesh should be just starting to pull away from the bone, but you should still feel a bit of resistance. Take the dish from the oven, and let it sit for about 5 minutes before serving (fish always continues to cook a bit as it sits, and this also gives the flavors a chance to settle). This dish goes well with a simple potato salad, maybe just tossed with olive oil, shallots, and a little parsley, and a glass of lightly chilled Chianti.

Vegetable dress by Sara Illenberger.

Recipe: Savoy Cabbage Slaw with Golden Raisins, Pine Nuts, and Thai Basil

Beautiful dress, no? I’d love to wear that. I’ll bet it’s comfortable, too, and the string bean waistline makes it look potentially quite slimming. This beautiful piece of couture got me thinking about a dish I do a variation on each summer when I start seeing cabbages at the market. It’s a kind of Sicilian-inspired coleslaw. Each year I choose different add-ins. This one includes pine nuts, golden raisins, a touch of anchovy, some fresh red chili, Thai basil (you can, of course, use regular basil, but Thai gives it that important hint of exotica you’ll need if you’ll be eating it while wearing this gorgeous dress), all held together by silky extra-virgin olive oil. It’s the best side to serve with a sausage and pepper barbecue.

Savoy Cabbage Slaw with Golden Raisins, Pine Nuts, and Thai Basil

(Serves 4 as a side dish)

1 small savoy cabbage, trimmed, cored, and very thinly sliced
1 small red onion, very thinly sliced
A large palmful of pine nuts, lightly toasted
A large palmful of golden raisins, tossed in a tablespoon of dry white wine
2 oil-packed anchovies, minced
1 small fresh red peperoncino chili, seeded and minced
2 teaspoons Spanish sherry vinegar
½ teaspoon sugar
Salt
A few big gratings of nutmeg
⅓ cup extra-virgin olive oil
A handful of Thai basil leaves, very lightly chopped

In a pretty serving bowl, combine the cabbage, onion, pine nuts, raisins (with their soaking wine), anchovies, and peperoncino.

In a small bowl, whisk together the vinegar, the sugar, a little salt, the nutmeg, and the olive oil. Pour this over the cabbage, and toss well. Add the Thai basil, and toss gently. Serve at room temperature.

Still Life with Watermelon, Piotr Alberti, 1913–1994.

Recipe: Watermelon and Tomato Salad with Mozzarella, Thai Basil, and Lemon Verbena

Savory Watermelon salads have been kicking around the New York restaurant scene for years now, and for the most part I really like them. The only time I don’t like them is when they’re not savory enough. Some places add sugar, which really misses the point. Last summer I made a few watermelon salads that I was pretty happy with. One that included ricotta salata, pine nuts, shallot, and purslane (I love purslane) was my favorite. It was sweet, salty, lemony, and full of texture.

A few nights ago my friend Jane mentioned a watermelon and feta salad she had loved at some Manhattan restaurant (I can’t remember where). Feta seems to be a popular ingredient in these things, its tartness and saltiness playing nicely against the sweetness of the fruit. Good idea (sort of the same thinking that went into my use of ricotta salata). I also recently had a watermelon salad at Peekamoose Restaurant in Big Indian, New York, that was distinguished by their having dehydrated the watermelon slightly, giving it a concentrated sweetness and firmness. That was a really good idea.

When I went about creating a watermelon salad this summer, I wanted to include tomatoes and mozzarella, ingredients I thought would produce a very savory result with a touch of acidity. But those are also ingredients that, like watermelon, can give off a lot of liquid, diluting flavor and messing up any type of vinaigrette you might want to dress the salad with. I didn’t have a way to dehydrate my watermelon, as they did at Peekamoose, but I lightly salted the watermelon, the tomatoes, and the mozzarella and let them all drain, and that did give me a richer final flavor.

Any perfumey or minty herb goes really well with watermelon. I’d avoid strong flavors such as rosemary, oregano, sage, and maybe even thyme (actually I can see thyme working, but it would really depend on the all-over balance of ingredients). In my apartment building’s stoop pots I’m now producing some amazingly healthy Thai basil and lemon verbena. I’ve tried growing both of those herbs in the past, either on my windowsill or in the two big twin pots on either side of the building’s entrance, but they just kind of fizzled out. I’m not sure what I’m doing differently this time around, but they’re bursting forth (we did just have a fabulously dramatic hailstorm last week, so maybe that had something to do with it). These two exotic and very special herbs not only go well together but, I’ve found, are amazing with both watermelon and tomato. If you can’t get your hands on them, use fresh basil and a bit of grated lemon zest instead. You’ll achieve a similar level of beauty.

To underline the salad’s savoriness, I finish it off with red summer onion and Olio Verde, a lush Southern Italian olive oil produced by Gianfranco Becchina, in Sicily. It’s mellow and less bitter than Tuscan, qualities that, to my palate, allow it to blend more naturally with sweet fruit.

My stoop pot, with Thai basil and lemon verbena.

Watermelon and Tomato Salad with Mozzarella, Thai Basil, and Lemon Verbena

(Serves 4 as a first course)

About 2 cups watermelon, cut into 1-inch cubes
1 pint summer cherry tomatoes, cut in half
½ pound mozzarella (not buffalo, which is too watery for this), cut into ½-inch cubes
Salt
½ red summer onion, very thinly sliced
About 8 big sprigs each of lemon verbena and Thai basil, the leaves very lightly chopped
2 tablespoons mellow, high quality extra-virgin olive oil
Freshly ground black pepper

Place the watermelon in a small colander. Sprinkle it with a little salt, and let it drain for about an hour. Do the same thing with the tomatoes (use the watermelon and tomato juices to make yourself a bloody Mary, a little treat for the cook). If your mozzarella seems watery, you can drain that too.

Now transfer the watermelon, tomatoes, and mozzarella into a pretty serving bowl. Add the onion and the herbs. Drizzle on the olive oil, and give it a few good grindings of black pepper. Toss gently. Taste for salt (you probably won’t need more). This is best served right away and at room temperature.

Recipe: Swordfish Spiedini with Farro Strozzapreti, Tomato, and Mint

In my first book, Pasta Improvvisata, I had a recipe for grilled calamari spiedini served over a bowl of herb-tossed pasta, a vibrant yet easy summer dish (vibrant yet easy is best accomplished in the summer, don’t you think?). I made the pasta a bit ahead, to serve just warm, threw the spiedini on the grill, and arranged one over each bowl of pasta. I love this type of concoction, a real piatto unico. Possibly it’s not classically Italian, but I’ve certainly seen dishes like it in Southern Italy, at some of the more creative restaurants. It makes a lot of sense to me. The flavors stay separate and clean, and you get that good grilled flavor. I’ve made the spiedini with shrimp and scallops, too, and various kinds of sturdy fish. Fish seem to work better than most meats. You want something easy to cut, so you can eat it along with bites of pasta without needing a steak knife, which is alarmingly inappropriate for pasta and would certainly have the Italian food police all agitated.

I tried this theme again last night with swordfish and sweet pepper spiedini over a cherry tomato and mint-dressed farro pasta. Finished with a sprinkling of slightly salty, crisp breadcrumbs, the dish felt summery but solid and boldly flavored, partly because I marinated the fish in assertive spices and then set it over a pasta loaded with fresh herbs.

You can really get creative with this two-piece assemble. Any sort of summer tomato sauce can be your pasta condimento. Or try just tossing a pasta with fresh herbs, garlic, and olive oil. I like playing around with pesto, too. Arugula makes a great pesto, so does a mix of parsley and mint, or parsley and marjoram, or basil and mint, or basil and a little tarragon. And any type of seafood that will stay put on a skewer can work here. Try oysters, big shrimp, tuna, or chunks of monkfish. Delicate whitefish like flounder are really out of the question. You’ll just wind up with a big mess and all the fish lying around on the sizzling coals.

Give this recipe a try, and if you like it, then go for broke. It’s what I consider summer cooking at its most freewheeling and happiest.

Swordfish Spiedini with Farro Strozzapreti, Tomatoes, and Mint

(Serves 2 as a main course)

½ cup homemade breadcrumbs, lightly toasted
Extra-virgin olive oil
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
¼ teaspoon sugar
1 pound swordfish, about 1½ inches thick, skinned and cut into approximately 1½-inch chunks (have four short shish kebab skewers ready)
½ teaspoon each of cumin and fennel seeds, lightly toasted and ground
1 large sweet red pepper, cut into chunks
About 6 scallions, chopped into large pieces
½ pound farro or whole wheat strozzapreti or penne
2 pints sweet grape tomatoes
2 summer garlic cloves, very thinly sliced
A splash of sweet Marsala
A large handful of both basil and fresh spearmint, lightly chopped, plus a few sprigs of mint for garnish

Mix the toasted breadcrumbs with a drizzle of olive oil, salt, a few grindings of black pepper, and the sugar, and set it aside.

Put the swordfish chunks in a bowl, and sprinkle on the ground spices. Season with salt and black pepper, and give it a good toss to coat the fish well.

Skewer the swordfish, alternating with pieces of red pepper and scallion (you’ll have 2 skewers per person).

Set up a pot of pasta cooking water, and bring it to a boil. Season with a good amount of salt.

Drop in the pasta, and give it a quick stir.

In a large sauté pan, heat 3 tablespoons of olive oil over medium-high flame. When hot, add the tomatoes, and shake them around for a few minutes. When they just start to burst, add the garlic, and season them with salt and black pepper. Keep shaking the tomatoes until they’ve all burst and started to give off some juice. Add the Marsala, and let it bubble for a minute or so. Press down on the tomatoes to extract more juice.

When al dente, drain the pasta, and place it in a serving bowl. Pour on the tomatoes with all their juice, and add the basil and mint. Add a drizzle of fresh olive oil, and toss well. Check for seasoning. Keep warm.

You can use an outdoor grill or a stove-top grill pan next. I used a grill pan, which I let heat up for a few minutes to get really hot.

Drizzle a little olive oil over the spiedini, and give them an extra sprinkle of salt and black pepper. Grill briefly on two sides, just until grill marks appear and the fish is tender, about 4 minutes total.

Arrange the spiedini over the pasta, and scatter some of the breadcrumbs over them. Garnish with the mint sprigs.

Woman Loves Fish, Maggie Taylor, 2003.

Still Life with Tomatoes, Artichokes, and Green Beans, Luis Egidio Melendez, 1716-1780.

Recipe: Romano Beans Braised with Tomatoes, Sweet Vermouth, and Marjoram

Long, flat, and fuzzy, that’s how I like my green beans. Romano beans, a happy memory of my dad’s little backyard garden and a vegetable that oddly creeped out a few of my non-Italian girlfriends when I was a kid. Was it the fuzz? Yes, I think it was the fuzz, but these things are really delicious, especially prepared the way my grandmother and mother always made them, slow simmered, a braise really, with garlic, summer tomatoes, sometimes basil, sometimes dried oregano, occasionally a mix of both. The flavor was deep, the texture soft, amazing with pork chops straight off the grill.

I found Romano beans at Migliorelli’s farm stand at the Union Square market this week, so I went right ahead and prepared them in this old mezzogiorno style, very Campanian (my grandparents came from a sad little town on the border of Campania and Puglia, so their cooking had elements from both regions). These string beans were vital to their summer table. Sometimes my family threw in little cubes of potato. That was good too. Sometimes bacon was added (not even pancetta!), but I thought that was too much and kind of ruined the all around vegetableness of the dish. A little pancetta can be nice, but the smoky flavor of American bacon is, sorry Nanny, overwhelming here.

I play around with this dish every summer, and this year I’m including onion, garlic, a splash of sweet vermouth, and the season’s first tomatoes, and then finishing it off with a scattering of fresh marjoram, which is much better, in my opinion, than dried oregano. I know the dried version of this herb is almost ubiquitous in Southern Italian cooking, but it can be harsh, and why be harsh in high produce season? I’d rather be fresh.

Romano Beans Braised with Tomatoes, Sweet Vermouth, and Marjoram

(Serves 4 or 5 as a first course or side dish)

1½ pounds Romano beans, the ends trimmed
Extra-virgin olive oil
1 medium summer onion, cut into small dice
1 large fresh summer garlic clove, thinly sliced
Salt
⅛ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
Freshly ground black pepper
¼ cup sweet red vermouth
3 medium summer tomatoes, skinned, seeded, and cut into medium dice (don’t drain them; you’ll want their juice for this)
About 6 or 7  large sprigs of marjoram, the leaves very lightly chopped
1 tablespoon grated grana Padano cheese

Set up a medium sized pot of water, and bring it to a boil. Drop in the Romano beans, and blanch them for about 3 minutes. Drain them into a colander, and run cold water over them to bring up their green color. Drain well.

In a large sauté pan, heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil over medium flame. Add the onion, and sauté until just starting to soften, about a minute or so. Now add the garlic and the Romano beans, seasoning them with a little salt, the nutmeg, and a few grindings of black pepper. Sauté the beans about a minute, just to infuse them with flavor. Add the vermouth, and let it bubble for a minute.

Now add the tomatoes, and simmer, uncovered, until the beans are very tender, about 5 or 6 minutes. The tomatoes should stay a bit wet, so if they’re too dry, add a little hot water. You might want to turn the heat down a notch if it starts to move into a high boil.

Turn off the heat, add a generous drizzle of fresh olive oil and a few more grindings of black pepper, and let the pan sit on the stove for a minute or so. This well help the flavors develop. Now taste to see if it needs more salt. Add the marjoram, and give everything a stir. Pour the beans, with all their sauce, into a serving bowl, and scatter on the grana Padano. Serve warm.

Lots of healthy basil on Rosemary’s roof garden.

Rosemary’s
18 Greenwich Avenue (at 10th Street)
New York, NY 10011
(212) 647-1818

On July 4, Oliver, my 90-year-old father-in-law, decided he was strong enough to go out to dinner for the first time after having heart surgery seven weeks earlier. I chose to take him to Rosemary’s, a new Italian place a few blocks from my apartment in the West Village, because he loves to try new places, and because I had applied for a job there, sort of.

My initial interaction with Rosemary’s took place a few weeks before it opened. I saw a write-up in The New York Times dining section mentioning that the new restaurant was thinking about giving cooking classes for kids. Rosemary’s has a rooftop garden where they’re growing herbs, lettuces, and vegetables to use in the restaurant, and the classes are to center on showing local kids how vegetables grow and then teaching them to cook with them. (Considering that most of these local West Village kids also have lovely country homes, I’m not sure how groundbreaking these vegetable demos will be for them, but no matter.) The idea appealed to me, so I walked in while they were still hammering the place together and asked for the e-mail address of Wade Moises, the former chef de cuisine at Eataly and now in charge of Rosemary’s kitchen. I wanted to offer up my considerable teaching expertise. Weeks went by, the place opened, my father-in-law had heart surgery, and I haven’t heard from Mr. Moises. Oh well, you never know. I still might.

So here are some preliminary thoughts about Rosemary’s, based on a pre-opening go see and one dinner since. Not enough for a standard restaurant review, but I never write true critiques. What I do is focus on one special aspect of a place. In the case of Rosemary’s that would be its local produce (very local, since much of it comes from the roof) and its house-made items.

The place is big and airy, with lots of faux rustico touches that are really quite pretty if you don’t examine them too closely. It isn’t the Disneyland of Italian food that Eataly can feel like. My first mission, after procuring a glass of sparkling rosato, was to check out the upstairs garden. It was lush and thriving. It certainly wasn’t big enough to carry the produce load for a large place like this, but it did contain a ton of beautiful basil, and also tomatoes and zucchini blossoms, lots of baby arugula, and herbs, many of which made appearances in our dinner dishes. Everything looked well tended. I’m eager to see how the garden comes together in the future.

There is a flavor of Southern Italy at Rosemary’s. It doesn’t advertise itself as Southern Italian, but its hits of raisins, pine nuts, hot chilies, almonds, anchovies, basil, and lots of lemon are the brash hallmarks of Southern Italian cooking. And there are dishes like caponata, and several labeled as Sicilian.

The menu is broken down into small dishes, salads, pastas, main courses, cheeses, and salumi. I loved the spaghetti with preserved lemon and pickled chilies that Deborah, my mother-in-law, ordered. A touch of parmigiano blended with good olive oil rounded out the stronger flavors for a really nice plate of pasta. I often make something similar that I learned in Palermo years ago, with a flavor that is predominantly fresh lemon. Rosemary’s is more forte. Orecchietti with sausage and broccoli rabe is something we’ve all tasted often. It appears on plenty of Italian menus in this city. But taking the trouble to make both the orecchietti and the sausage on the premises makes a huge difference. The sausage had serious depth of flavor.

Oliver ordered cavatelli with peas, asparagus, and ricotta, and the pasta and ricotta were both homemade, so the result was a chewy pasta with a rich, creamy slick of ricotta—and not too much ricotta, either, so the texture stayed light, not clunky. Deborah started with a chopped salad that was loaded with cubes of ricotta salata and olives, escarole, and capers, another very Southern dish. I love escarole used as a salad green—my mother often served it—so this was a fine combination, as far as I was concerned. I ordered a small dish of cabbage with almonds, raisins, hot chilies, and a little pecorino. It was delicious, and its intense flavor made its small size  right. My husband had a celery root and celery salad tossed with anchovy dressing, what they call a celery Caesar. I love anchovy with celery. It’s a combination I often use in my own cooking, but a little goes a long way, and this salad was big. Next time I’d split it.

I followed with two small fish dishes. The first was olive-oil-poached tuna tossed with capers, fried chickpeas, olives, and parsley. The tuna was soft and lovely against the bracing capers and olives, and it was rightly served in a small portion. An octopus salami, called that I imagine because the octopus was sliced really thin, was topped with a sharp sauce of preserved lemon and tomato that to my palate was a little overpowering and salty. We also ordered a house-made capacolla that was very gentle in flavor except for its spicy red dried chili coating. I found it off balance. They also make their own testa, which I’m eager to sample.

On this first try here I found all the dishes well prepared, extremely flavorful, and assembled with high-quality ingredients such as fine olive oil, excellent anchovies and capers, and Maldon sea salt. My only complaint, and it’s not an insubstantial one, is that across the board I found every dish a little too salty. At first I thought it was just the place’s emphasis on salty ingredients, but the three pastas, none containing anything innately salty, were each too salty for me (I think my father-in-law’s taste buds aren’t what they used to be, so he had no problem). This is a common trick used in restaurants to allow flavors to jump out at you and to ensure that the food makes a lasting impression (hopefully a good one). I’m not fond of the trick. I’m trusting, though that at Rosemary’s it’s just a kink that the kitchen will work out as the place settles in. The place hasn’t been open for even a month yet.

Woman with Fish Hat (and kitty), John Bellany, 1987.