Erica De Mane

Il Buco Alimentari & Vineria
53 Great Jones Street (near Bowery)
New York, NY 10012
(212) 837-2622

Recipe: Bruschetta with Il Buco Lardo and Sautéed Escarole

The cliché about ingredients being the key to good Italian cooking is, like most clichés, partly true. Contemporary Italian has few hiding places (it’s been several hundred years since dishes there were last smothered with spices). When I cook I always try to buy the best I can afford. I need to work with quality. But when I’m eating Italian food out, it’s hard to know in advance what I’ll be getting and if it will be worth it. At Il Buco Alimentari e Vineria it’s worth it, whether you buy there or eat there.

The point of the pretty little place, which is part restaurant and part food shop, is the high quality of its ingredients. Many products are made on premises. The house-made salumi and breads are the best I’ve had in New York. Seriously. The space is chic and somewhat trendy looking, but it’s got the feel of many of the food stores I’ve been to in Italian cities, places where shopping and eating are intimately mingled. Il Buco is the anti-Eatly approach to Italian food, a place to purchase excellent salumi, breads, cheeses, olive oil, dried beans, sea salt, and pasta, among other things, without getting pushed around by celeb-chef-crazed tourists. But it’s also a place, thanks to its chef, Justin Smillie, to sit down and eat simple but creatively prepared dishes made from those lovely ingredients, morning, noon, and night.

When I walked in for lunch the other day I noticed the air actually smelled of bread. In Manhattan this isn’t common even in bakeries (why, I wonder—food should be seen and not smelled?). The bread is intensely flavored, primarily, I discovered, because of the very slow fermentation of the dough with wild yeast. This is the patient work of Kamel Saci, Il Buco’s master baker. You get a basket of sliced breads when you sit at a table, or you can buy a loaf to go. After taking in the baking fumes, I knew that for lunch I wanted a panini, so that’s what my friend and I ordered. I chose porchetta, which they make with pork from local East Coast farms. My friend had a brandade panini, fashioned from house-cured salt cod (wow, that’s kind of special—who bothers to preserve their own cod?). The brandade sandwich also included roasted red peppers and arugula and was finished with really good olive oil. The bread on both sandwiches wasn’t grilled or pressed but just left as is, crusty on the outside and slightly soft within, so it soaked up all the juices from the cod and the tender herby pork very nicely, just what I always crave in a sandwich but seldom get, a melding of bread and filling so the sum is greater than the parts. The panini were highly flavored, and the chef understood that a side of giardiniera, that vinegar-cured Southern Italian vegetable medley, was the perfect accompaniment. That day the giardiniera was a mix of cipollini, baby parsnips, and cauliflower. And it wasn’t mouth-puckering sharp like the stuff my family used to buy in jars from Progresso (or the jars my uncle Tony used to put up in his garage—boy was that ever rugged). It provided a fabulous tingle that lifted the fragrant oils on my palate just when they needed lifting.

I came back a few days later just to do some shopping. I had been thinking about the house-cured lardo I’d seen on the takeout counter on my first visit and wanted to get my hands on some, and maybe some culatello too. They cure and age all their pork products in the basement, with state-of-the-art knowhow. Pancetta, capocollo, finocchiona, and guanciale are other options, either to buy or to fashion into your own custom-made plate to eat there. These amazing salumi, the work of butcher Bernardo Flores and longtime salumi maker Christopher Lee, have the aroma and texture of some of the best stuff I’ve sampled in Puglia and Umbria, smooth, warm, no sharp edges. While browsing the takeout area I noticed they also carried Fra Mani cured meats, a great artisanal product made by Paul Bertolli, former chef at Chez Panisse and Olivera. His excellent salumi has been hard to find in New York since the 14th Street Balducci’s folded. It was nice to see again.

They sell and cook with Gentile pasta, a company from Gragnano, near Naples, that’s been in business more than 100 years and makes dried pasta the right way, with high quality durum wheat, old-fashioned bronze dies, and a slow, natural drying process to heighten flavor. Also it’s packaged in lovely deep blue and gold bags, which I find glamorous. I bought rigatoni and gemelli to take home.

After shopping I was really hungry,  so I ordered a glass of prosecco and a plate of spaghetti with bottarga di muggine, the salted, press mullet roe that’s a specialty of Sardinia. For me, good durum pasta with a salty fishy sauce is about as good as pasta gets, and this was sensational. Again, it’s all about the ingredients, and this dish contained three: great pasta, great olive oil, and great bottarga. They also make a bucatini alla gricia with their own guanciale. I’ll be going back for that. Oh and I almost forgot to mention their home-made ricotta, which I also sampled on this visit. Aside from my own, it’s the best I’ve had in this fine, Italian food obsessed city (I wonder if they make it with buttermilk like I do?).

I haven’t yet been for dinner. I hear it gets a little hectic, and in any case I really see Il Buco as more of a lunch and shopping spot. The noise level at lunch, even though the place was completely packed, was not overly loud. I do, however, have one big gripe. The wines by the glass are over-priced across the board. I’m not sure what they think they’re doing with that. Many places in town are now lowering their glass prices, which got completely out of hand about eight years ago during the wine bar boom. I’d knock a dollar off each glass.

Note: Il Buco Alimentari & Vineria has a sister place called Il Buco, a real restaurant, on Bond Street. It’s a wonderful, more formal place that’s been in business for many years. Just so you don’t get them confused.

Here’s what I made with Il Buco’s house cured lardo:

Bruschetta with Il Buco Lardo and Sautéed Escarole

(Makes 4 large bruschette)

1 medium head escarole, cleaned and chopped
Salt
Extra-virgin olive oil
1 stalk spring garlic, thinly sliced, using all the tender green part
The grated zest from 1 small lemon
About a dozen fennel seeds
Freshly ground black pepper
4 large slices good Italian bread (a ciabatta works well), cut about ½ inch thick
4 very thin slices lardo (large enough to almost cover the bread; if needed, use two slices)

Set up a medium pot of water, and bring it to a boil. Add a little salt, and drop in the escarole, blanching it for about a minute.  Pull it from the water, and put it in an ice bath to cool. Drain the escarole, and squeeze as much water out of it as possible. Then give it an extra few chops.

In a sauté pan, heat about 2 tablespoons of olive oil over medium high heat.  Add the escarole, garlic, lemon zest, and fennel seeds. Season with salt and black pepper, and sauté until the escarole is tender and well infused with flavor, about 2 minutes.

Grill the bread slices on both sides, and then brush them lightly with olive oil on one side. Lay the lardo slices on the oil-brushed side of the toasts. Then divide the escarole up on top of the lardo. Serve hot. This is best eaten with a knife and fork.

A table set at the American Academy in Rome.

Recipe: Chicken Soup with Farro, Fennel, and Escarole

About two years ago I wrote a letter to Mona Talbott, the chef then presiding over the American Academy in Rome’s newly revamped kitchen. The Rome Sustainable Food Program, as this revitalization is called, was conceived by Alice Waters in 2007. Miss Waters placed Mona Talbott, a Chez Panisse alumna, in charge, trusting she would be the right person to completely overhaul what evidently had been a lackluster, disconnected cafeteria. Under Miss Talbott’s care an elegant kitchen based on La Cucina Romana, both traditional and creative, emerged. Organic vegetable gardens were planted on the grounds of the academy, and meats and cheeses where purchased locally from some of the best purveyors in Rome. I soon began hearing very good things about this big kitchen, a kitchen that must feed all the artistic and academic fellows who visit the American Academy each year, along with the organization’s large staff.

So with my industrious little mind churning, I thought, what these people now need is a fancy new cookbook to go with their spruced-up kitchen, and I’m just the gal to write it. So off went my letter to Miss Talbott, suggesting just that. Uh, well, she wrote me back, “I’m now working on the American Academy in Rome cookbooks.” Duh, of course she was. She was, after all, the chef. Boy did I ever feel stupid (my usual motto is “It never hurts to ask,” but it can occasionally have embarrassing ramifications).

The American Academy in Rome cookbooks are now just coming out, issued as small single-subject books. Last week I went to a gathering at the Academy’s New York office introducing the second in the series, all published by the Little Bookroom. Miss Talbott’s first was Biscotti. This new one is Zuppe. Now, a book on soup recipes is something I never thought I’d really need, soups being so improvisational by nature, but this little collection is different. It has soul, partly because it’s inspired by Rome, giving it a unified feel, but also because all the soups look really good.

At the event we sampled two soups from the book, one with farro and pumpkin, the other a lentil and spinach soup with hot chili oil (the grains and legumes, by the way, were provided by www.gustiamo.com, the best Italian food importer in the country, so obviously Miss Talbott doesn’t kid around, even when on American soil). Both were excellent, perfect winter-into-spring transitional dishes.

The farro soup got me remembering how much I really love farro soup. That might seem a weird thing to say, but if you’re like me and cook a lot, juggling myriad ingredients every day, you’ve probably had the overwhelming feeling that there are so many foodstuffs (at least in this country) and ways to put them together that sometimes great ingredients fall from your repertoire for a while until coaxed back by, for instance, a new cookbook. I hadn’t cooked with farro in almost a year.

But it wasn’t just farro that jarred my culinary recall. When I got Zuppe home and started paging through it, I was repeatedly reminded of soups my family had made when I was a kid, especially my father’s Puglian mother’s soups (she was the inspired cook in the household). Not that they were the exact same ones, but Miss Talbott’s recipes, chiefly through their ingredients, captured the essence of soups from my childhood, with escarole, dandelions, baby meatballs, pumpkin, zucchini, chickpeas, green peas, grilled bread, chicken broth, pecorino, tomatoes, cannellini beans, rosemary, prosciutto ends, bay leaves, nutmeg, anellini, pastina, and stellini, to name a bunch of things. When was the last time I cooked anything that contained tiny stars?

For me the best way to use this beautiful collection of recipes is by concentrating on the ingredients Miss Talbott has chosen, giving them a gentle shake in my head and then just seeing where they land. An improvvisata. If you prefer, you can, of course, make any of these great soups just straight, but for me they beckoned to be meditated on.

I happened to have a package of Gustiamo farro in my pantry, so as soon as I tasted Miss Talbott’s soup at the signing I decided I really need to cook up a pot of farro right away, maybe even in a soup. Here is my resulting tribute to the soups of the American Academy in Rome.

Chicken Soup with Farro, Fennel, and Escarole

(Serves 4 or 5)

1 cup farro
Extra-virgin olive oil
Salt
A small chunk of fatty end-cut prosciutto, well chopped
1 medium onion, cut into small dice
2 carrots, cut into small dice
1 large fennel bulb, cut into small dice
3 whole chicken legs, with the skin
Freshly ground black pepper
A few big scrapings of nutmeg
A few large sprigs of rosemary, the leaves chopped
A small palmful of fennel seeds, lightly toasted and ground
¼ cup dry Marsala
1 quart homemade chicken broth
1 medium head escarole, washed, dried, and well chopped
1 cup grated grana Padano cheese

Bring a medium pot of water to a boil over high heat, and drop in the farro. Cook at a low bubble until the farro is just tender, but still has a bit of a bite, about 18 minutes (taste a piece after about 15 minutes to check where it’s at). When it’s cooked, drain it well and tilt it into a bowl. Toss with a drizzle of olive oil and some salt.

Choose a large casserole or heavy-bottomed soup pot fitted with a lid. In it heat a few tablespoons of olive oil over medium flame. When hot, add the prosciutto, onion, carrots, and fennel, and sauté a few minutes to soften. Add the chicken, seasoning it with salt, pepper, nutmeg, rosemary, and the ground fennel, and brown it lightly all over, about 10 minutes. Add the garlic, and sauté a minute or so, just to release its flavor. Add the Marsala, and let it reduce by half. Add the chicken broth and enough water to just cover the chicken, if needed. Turn the heat to low, cover the casserole, and simmer, turning the chicken occasionally, until it is very tender, about ½ hour.

Remove the chicken from the broth. Skim most of the fat from the surface. When the chicken is cool enough to handle, pull the meat off it and cut it into chunks. Discard the skin and bones. Add the chicken meat to the casserole, along with the farro and the escarole. Simmer on low heat about 2 or 3 minutes, just to blend the flavors and wilt the escarole. Taste for seasoning, adding a bit more salt and black pepper, if needed. Add a drizzle of fresh olive oil. Serve hot or warm, topped with a sprinkling of grana Padano if you like.

When I first moved to the Village, in the late 1970s, it was very different from now. Union Square, a block away from my apartment, was a creep-infested hellhole you wouldn’t set foot in even in daylight. The now famous Greenmarket was just starting, a few truckloads of old hippies selling sprouts and cat grass. My apartment was burglarized four times in one year, the streets smelled like marinating garbage. It was a ton of fun. CBGB and the Mudd Club were in full bloom, and I certainly took advantage of that.

My buddies and I spent a lot of time roaming the streets looking for cheap restaurants. John’s Italian on 12th Street was one we’d go to a lot. Allen Ginsberg lived across the street from it, and he was always milling around. That was a plus. The place opened in 1908, and the inside remains unchanged even today, with beautiful multicolor tiled floors and murals of Tuscan cypresses and Mediterranean villas. The food at John’s was never great, pretty standard red sauce stuff, but we’d go for the romance and the funk of it. They had big Chianti bottles overflowing with wax from the candles stuck in them. They were a bit disgusting and dirty but sort of fabulous, too (and they’re still there, though reined in and tidied up). If back then I ordered an eggplant parmigiano with a side of spaghetti and a glass of red house swill, I was safe and happy. John’s was one of the only affordable Italian games in town. Now you can’t walk a block in the East Village without coming across three good to great Italian places, all with more contemporary food and prices just as reasonable as John’s. But John’s endured. I went in about a dozen years ago just for old time’s sake. The food was exactly the same (not so good), the décor the same (good), but the place was almost empty. I couldn’t blame my neighbors for going instead to the cute Sicilian brick oven place around the corner that had house-made mozzarella, freshly grilled sardines with orange salad, and great nero d’Avola for six bucks a glass. That one last visit got me over the need ever to eat at John’s again. Or so I thought.

I happened to walk past good old John’s the other night and noticed a change. The gorgeous red neon sign was still lit and spectacular as ever, but the awning lettering had changed. What had for years said simply “Italian Restaurant”now read “Traditional & Vegan Italian Restaurant.” Vegan Italian? What is going on here? I marched in. No apparent change in the atmosphere, thank God, but I grabbed a menu and there it was, the insert, an addition to their usual, a complete Italian vegan listing, including seitan Parmigiano, ravioli with vegan Alfredo, and chocolate soy cannolis. Oh, what are you guys thinking? I supposed their business had become so precarious they were taking a tip from Angelica, the always packed vegetarian place next door. A last-ditch attempt to stay afloat. Wow, how sad, was all I could think.

I’m not vegan, but I eat a lot of vegetables, and I have a high regard for vegetarian cooking. Vegan really only works well when you tailor it to a basically nondairy cuisine, as they do at Angelica’s, where most of the stuff has an Asian feel. There they don’t need to substitute that much. The food can just be. But Italian? Parmigiano, mozzarella? What could possibly replace those classic tastes? The perversity of it all captivated me. I had to try it. So I grabbed my sister, the only person I knew who might be game, to eat vegan Italian at John’s.

The place was fairly busy, but a quick glance at the tables told me that almost everyone was ordering off the traditional menu. Plates of veal Marsala, chicken parm, and spaghetti with meatballs were everywhere and looked just as they had in the seventies. Then two twenty-something girls came in, sat next to us, and grabbed the vegan menus. They were excited. I asked how the vegan food was. “Excellent. I eat here all the time. The ravioli is to die for.” Really? Both of them ordered the vegan Alfredo ravioli, big green lumps, as it turned out, covered with a creamy whitish sauce. One of them let me taste a bit of the sauce. It tasted like soy milk (something I had sampled exactly once). A shaker of vegan parmigiano was brought to their table, which I also tasted. The flavor was not remotely cheese-like, more like a mix of wood chips and MSG. It was truly odd. I couldn’t imagine wanting to put it in my mouth, but the girls were in heaven, oohing and ahing. They ate really fast. Then their chocolate tofu cannoli came out, and they screamed with joy. It looked liked a dried-out doggy doodie. I don’t know whether is was the three rum-and-cokes they each consumed or what, but this food was the living end for them. To each her own, I suppose, but Southern Italian cooking is my passion, and it really pained me to see it messed with that way.

Seitan Marsala with a shaker of vegan Parmagiano.

But on to our meal. There was a vegan Caesar salad I wanted to try, but it scared my sister. She assumed it would be loaded with garlic and the same vegan Alfredo sauce that covered the ravioli (and what’s a Caesar without anchovies?), so we scratched that idea and started with the stuffed mushrooms instead. For a main, my sister ordered seitan Marsala only after I promised to pay for her entire meal (this dish we couldn’t help calling Satan’s marsala). It had an odd bitter sweetness that hit you at the back of the throat, almost as if it contained a sugar substitute, and it seemed to completely lack salt or pepper (as did the girls’ ravioli). Its liquidy brown sauce didn’t taste like Marsala, but I was told it contained it. And the seitan slab was covered with extremely soggy mushrooms. Soggy seems to be the prevailing texture with the vegan menu. There was traditional food that looked like it had been properly roasted, but all the vegan stuff seemed to be steamed. Like the eggplant parmigiano I ordered, a heavily breaded dish so mushy and gummy it dissolved in my mouth in an unpleasant way (I mean, it wasn’t supposed to be a soufflé). That was especially disappointing because the dish looked relatively normal, with its stringy melted “cheese” topping. I discovered  that the “cheese” was made by Daiya, a Canadian company. It melted well, but it had no flavor at all. I don’t mean no particular flavor; I mean literally no flavor. I looked up the company, and all they make is vegan cheese substitutes. They’ve actually won awards. Well, I suppose if you’re desperate for a cheese substitute. Wikipedia tells me that the main ingredients in the Daiya product used on my eggplant are arrowroot, cassava powder, and titanium dioxide (yes, the same white stuff that’s in your sunblock, but a version of it used as a food dye—how vegan).

Our stuffed mushrooms were filled with breadcrumbs and I think some of that Daiya cheese, but they had the same mushy consistency as the eggplant dish. The traditional eggplant parm and stuffed  mushrooms I saw on other people’s plates didn’t look steamed. They were browned and seemed to have some texture. They had obviously been baked. Just because a dish is vegan, does that mean it can’t have texture or seasoning? Vegans, to my knowledge, aren’t opposed to ovens. They just don’t like to eat animals and their byproducts.

As I see it, the moral of this story is, if you insist on eating vegan, don’t make it Italian. Go with a cuisine that lends itself more naturally to vegan, like veggie Japanese. Or if you somehow must have Italian, pick dishes that are naturally vegan, such as orecchietti with broccoli rabe, garlic, chilies and pine nuts, and forget about the cheese, or make yourself grilled eggplant with a salsa verde using great olive oil and Sicilian capers and fresh mint.

If Allen Ginsberg were alive today and still living across the street, I can’t imagine he’d eat that stuff, and he actually was a vegan (or was he macrobiotic?). I think he’d head over to Angelica’s instead, and try to preserve his dignity.

Cleaning ricci in Sicily.

Recipe: Spaghetti with Sea Urchins, Hot Chilies, and White Whine

Maybe you’ve noticed, or maybe not, but it’s sea urchin season again, at least at Citarella (actually has been for more than a month now). They’ve got piles of these beautiful spiky things, trucked down all the way from Maine to Manhattan. I find it quite exciting.

I first tasted ricci, sea urchins, years ago on Mondello beach, a middle-class seaside resort just outside of Palermo, Sicily (where people pronounce the word reetzee). Mondello is full of simple waterside restaurants that serve almost nothing but ricci, mostly raw, where locals  and the occasional tourist get down  into huge platters of the round, spiky creatures, picking out the orange roe with little forks and letting them slither down their throats, often followed with a glass of limoncello. Ricci means hedgehog in Italian, hence hedgehogs of the sea, with their spiny shells.

At most of these places you can also order ricci lightly cooked and tossed with pasta. I love them that way. Just a quick sauté with a few standard Sicilian ingredients produces a miraculous dish. The freshly plucked ricci roe is usually flash-seared in a skillet with olive oil, garlic, white wine, a touch of tomato (or not), and hot chili flakes, and then tossed with very al dente spaghetti. The sweet but slightly bitter taste of the sea urchin, raw or cooked, seems perfect to my taste buds.

The whole fresh ricci I buy from Citarella’s fish counter, covered with two-inch-long dark-green spines, are fished wild in Maine, but sea urchins live in every ocean around the world. California is another big harvester; I’ve seen sea urchins from there with dark red spines. In Palermo the spines were a glistening black, but elsewhere they can be ivory-colored or even a gorgeous lavender, sometimes as long as a porcupine’s quills.

I’ve sampled ricci with pasta several times in Manhattan. The best version so far was served to me at Esca. The ricci was made into a raw, puréed sauce, creamy and rich, that enveloped the bucatini beautifully. For a little crunch and contrast, the dish was topped with a scattering of slivered scallions. Very nice. That was a few years back, so I can’t say if this exact dish is still on the menu, but I’m sure the chef is doing something with sea urchins right now. But forget  about restaurant cooking for a moment. Let’s take a walk on the wild side.

When you bring whole ricci into your kitchen (and I know you will), you’ll need to extract the lovely orange roe by cutting a slice off the urchin’s underside with a sharp knife or kitchen shears (which seem to work better for me), holding the thing with a thick rag or something so you don’t stab yourself.  Once the roe is exposed, you gently lift the pieces out with a small fork. It’s not the hardest thing to do. Pour yourself a glass of wine to get in the mood, and then just have at it.  You’ll realize it’s worth it when you taste this pasta, plus these are absolutely fascinating things to look at, so there’s another bonus in bringing them home.

Spaghetti with Sea Urchins, Hot Chilies, and White Wine

(Serves 2)

Salt
1/3 pound spaghetti
Extra-virgin olive oil
2 garlic cloves, very thinly sliced
About ½ a fresh red peperoncino, minced, with seeds
The tongues (that’s what the pieces of roe are called)  from 8 sea urchins (see above for how to extract them)
A splash of dry white wine
6 canned plum tomatoes, lightly drained and very well chopped
A few sprigs of marjoram, the leaves lightly chopped
A handful of flat leaf parsley leaves, very lightly chopped

Put up a pot of pasta cooking water, and bring it to a boil. Add a generous amount of salt, and then drop in the spaghetti.

In a large skillet, heat about ¼ cup of olive oil over medium high heat. Add the garlic, the peperoncino, and the sea urchin pieces. Sauté for not more than a minute. Season with a little salt, and then add the white wine, letting it bubble for a few seconds. Now add the tomatoes, and sauté for about a minute.

When the spaghetti is al dente, drain it, and add it to the skillet, saving about ½ cup of the pasta cooking water. Sauté quickly, tossing everything around until well mixed. Add a little of the cooking water if it seems dry, and then add a generous drizzle of fresh olive oil and the marjoram and parsley. Correct the seasoning with a little more salt, if needed, and give it another gentle toss. Divide it up into two pasta bowls, and eat it right away.

Sardines at the Campo de’ Fiori Market, Madeline Sorel, 1980.

Recipe: Sarde in Agrodolce

I love whole fried fish, especially very little ones, like sardines. They’re excellent pan fried in breadcrumbs and served hot with fresh lemon, or dredged in flour and deep fried. But I also love some of the more elaborate takes on little fried fish. Sicily’s got a few great ones.

If you’ve been following my recipe posts, you’ll know I’ve been on a Sicilian raisin and pine nut roll. It has not abated. While gazing at lovely silver-skinned sardines fresh from Rhode Island at Citarella the other day, I recalled how much I love them made agrodolce, a Sicilian preparation that, wouldn’t you know it, includes raisins and pine nuts.

Agrodolce, sweet and sour, mostly means very old, pre-tomato dishes down there. Caponata, made with eggplant, is the one the most people are familiar with. When you make agrodolce with sardines, you sauté a copious amount of onion until sweet and melting. Then you mix it with raisins, pine nuts, wine, a splash of vinegar, fresh herbs, a little honey or sugar, and sometimes capers, too. You pour this rich sauce over the just-fried little fish and then, traditionally, leave it all to marinate for about a day before serving it at room temperature. Marinating makes the dish pungent, the vinegar and the sardines coming to the forefront. I like this intense version. It’s great for an antipasto offering along with maybe a glass of Falanghina, a nice, fresh white from Campania that I’m liking a lot lately. But I’ve come to prefer eating the fish hot, right after cooking, so there’s a more unified balance of sweet and sour, the fish gentle and the onion rather pronounced.

For an herb I’ve chosen spearmint, but basil would work well too. The cumin and allspice are my additions, adding a touch of Renaissance flavor to a dish that probably once had it anyway, since many sweet savory Sicilian foods were laced with spices back then.

You’ll notice that I use Japanese rice vinegar, which is obviously not an Italian product. The reason is that I don’t like a very sharp vinegar taste here. The sharper the vinegar, the more it brings out the strong oils in the sardines, making them fishier. This slightly sweet vinegar blends seamlessly with all the other ingredients, resulting, at least to my palate, in a perfect balance of flavors.

Sarde in Agrodolce

(Serves 2)

Extra virgin olive oil
1 Vidalia onion, thinly sliced
1 tablespoon sugar
½ teaspoon ground cumin
½ teaspoon ground allspice
2 tablespoons Japanese rice vinegar
¼ cup dry white wine
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
⅓ cup raisins
⅓ cup pine nuts, lightly toasted
½ cup all-purpose flour
6 sardines, scaled and gutted but with the heads and tails left on
A handful of mint leaves, lightly chopped, plus a few whole sprigs for garnish

In a medium skillet, heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil over medium heat. Add the onion, and sauté until it’s starting to soften, about 6 minutes. Add the sugar, cumin, and allspice, and sauté a minute to release their flavors. Add the vinegar, and let it bubble for a few seconds. Add the wine and the raisins, season with a little salt and black pepper, and let simmer until the onion is quite soft and the sauce has a pleasant agrodolce flavor, about another 5 minutes (it shouldn’t be too sweet, so adjust it with a few extra drops of vinegar if necessary; also make sure some liquid, just a few tablespoons, remains throughout the cooking, and if you see the skillet getting dry at any time, just add a little warm water). Turn off the heat, add the pine nuts, and let the sauce sit in the skillet.

Dry the sardines with paper towels. Pour the flour out on a plate, and season it with salt and black pepper.

In a large skillet, heat about 5 tablespoons of olive oil over high heat.

Dredge the sardines in the flour. When the oil is hot, add the sardines to the skillet, and brown well on one side. Flip them over, lower the heat a bit, and brown them on the other side. Depending on their thickness, the cooking should take about 4 minutes.

Reheat the agrodolce sauce, adding the chopped mint.

Lift the fish from the skillet with a slotted spatula, and place it neatly on a serving dish. Pour the hot sauce on top. Garnish with the mint sprigs, and serve right away.

A mosaic of lemons from the Piazza Armerina, eleventh-century Sicily.

Recipe: Swiss Chard with Yellow Raisins, Lemon Zest, and Pine Nuts

You may have noticed that I’ve lately had a renewed interest in Sicilian flavors. Not that culinary Sicily is ever far from my mind. I routinely let my head travel through the south, working back and forth between Puglia, Campania, Basilicata, Calabria, and Sicily. I refresh myself periodically just to make sure some tastes have not gone dormant or to unearth something previously unknown to me.

I’m now rereading Pomp and Sustenance,  Mary Taylor Simeti’s excellent book on the history of Sicilian cooking. It has got me reexploring the island’s traditional raisin-and-pine-nut combination and thinking about new ways I can use it, or ways I haven’t thought of in a while. My last post was for a pasta dish with swordfish, raisins, and pine nuts, but now I’m thinking green.

In fact I am antsy for spring greens—watercress, baby leeks, dandelions, even those terrible fiddlehead ferns that are always the first thing to show up at New York Greenmarkets, usually in late April. Since there’s nothing local around yet, I trotted over to my supermarket and just picked the nicest looking leafy green vegetable I could find, to give it a Sicilian treatment. I chose Swiss chard, since it was big and ruffly and looked healthy. In addition to the raisin and pine nut duo, I also included a splash of dry Marsala (the fortified wine from Trapani, which I find better to cook with than to drink) and some lemon zest, and I finished it off with a sprinkling of grana Padano, which added a bit of salty sweetness to balance out the astringency of the lemon and the somewhat irony taste of the chard. I served this as a side with roasted rosemary chicken, but you can thin the finished dish with a little pasta cooking water to make a great condimento for any kind of substantial chewy pasta such as penne or cavatelli.

 Swiss Chard with Yellow Raisins, Lemon Zest, and Pine Nuts

(Serves 4 or 5 as a side dish)

⅓ cup yellow raisins
2 tablespoons dry Marsala
2 large bunches Swiss chard, the thick center stalks removed (you can leave some of the more tender stalks) and the leaves roughly chopped
Extra-virgin olive oil
2 garlic cloves, peeled and thinly sliced
¼ teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
Salt
⅓ cup pine nuts, lightly toasted
Freshly ground black pepper
The grated zest from 1  lemon
1 heaping tablespoon grated grana Padano cheese

Place the raisins in a small cup. Pour on the Marsala, and give them a toss.

Set up a big pot of water, and bring it to a boil. Drop in the chard, and blanch for 2 minutes. Drain the chard into a colander, and run cold water over it to stop the cooking and to bring up its green color. Now squeeze as much excess water as you can from the chard.

Pour 3 tablespoons of olive oil into a large skillet, and get it hot over medium heat. Add the garlic, and sauté just until it gives off a gentle aroma, about 30 seconds. Add the chard, seasoning it with the nutmeg, and sauté quickly, stirring it around a bit. Add the raisins with their Marsala soaking liquid. Take the skillet from the heat, and add salt, the pine nuts, black pepper, and the lemon zest. Transfer to a large serving dish, and sprinkle on the grana Padano, giving the chard a good toss. Serve hot or warm.

Recipe: Bucatini with Swordfish, Raisins, Pine Nuts, and Sweet Breadcrumbs

I have a habit of seeking out and falling in love with dishes that include raisins and pine nuts, dishes from Spain, from Provence, and from Sicily. Historians pretty much agree that this culinary pairing was invented by Arabs and transported to places they invaded, letting this sweet and savory duo mingle with the established cuisine of the invaded, often with fabulous results. Sicily’s famous pasta con le sarde comes to mind, but many of Sicily’s pasta dishes can include this combination, such as pasta with anchovies, or cauliflower, or tuna, or eggplant.

It’s not that pine nuts and raisins didn’t both already exist in Sicily in the 800s, when the Arabs first landed, but I guess it took the Arab cooks, so familiar with mixing fruits and nuts, to use them in new, Sicilian-influenced ways. Sicilian cooking has a lot of sweet in it, one of the culinary features that makes it stand out from the food of the rest of Southern Italy.

Here’s my take on a Arabo-Sicula pasta dish. It of course contains raisins and pine nuts, but I’ve also added fennel, lots of soft onion, anchovies, and lightly sweetened, toasted breadcrumbs to sprinkle on top, a feature very typical of many Sicilian fish and vegetable based pastas, and one that I find completely alluring.

Bucatini with Swordfish, Raisins, Pine Nuts, and Sweet Breadcrumbs

(Serves 2)

Extra-irgin olive oil
½ cup dry homemade breadcrumbs
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
A big pinch of sugar
1 teaspoon ground fennel seed
⅓ cup golden raisins
Enough dry Marsala to cover the raisins
1 large, sweet onion, cut into small dice
6 anchovy fillets, roughly chopped
½ pound bucatini
½ pound swordfish, skinned and cut into little cubes
The feathery tops from 1 fennel bulb, chopped
A few large dill sprigs, chopped
⅓ cup pine nuts, toasted

In a small skillet, heat a tablespoon of olive oil over medium flame. Add the breadcrumbs, seasoning them with salt, black pepper, the sugar, and half of the ground fennel. When they just begin to turn golden, after about a minute or so, pull them from the heat, and put them in a small bowl.

Set up a large pot of pasta cooking water, and bring it to a boil. Add a generous amount of salt.

Soak the raisins in dry Marsala, just to cover.

In a large skillet, heat about ¼ cup olive oil over medium flame. Add the onions, and let them sauté until softened, about 3 minutes. Now add the anchovies, stirring them around until they melt into the onions. Add the raisins with their Marsala soaking liquid, and let bubble a minute.

Start cooking the bucatini.

Add a little pasta cooking water to the skillet, and let the onions simmer until very soft, about another minute or so. Season very lightly with salt and more aggressively with black pepper.

Toss the swordfish cubes with the remaining ground fennel and a little salt and pepper. Add them to the skillet, and cook gently just until tender, about a minute or so. Turn off the heat, and add half of the chopped fennel tops, half of the dill, and the pine nuts.

When the bucatini is al dente, drain it, saving about a half cup of the cooking water, and place the pasta in a large serving bowl. Toss with a little fresh olive oil. Now pour on the swordfish sauce, and give it a toss, adding a little of the cooking water if needed for moisture. Top with the remaining fennel tops and dill. Serve hot or warm, topping each bowl with a generous amount of the breadcrumbs.