Erica De Mane

Recipe: Gemelli with Calamari and Pea Shoots

Something happens to my cats when I bring squid into the house. They revert into wild creatures. They howl like babies, clawing up my leg, sticking their warm black-and-white heads right under my ten-inch chef’s knife to steal away as much raw squid as they can. It’s a ferocious battle, and they always win, exasperating me and finally wearing me out. They love it raw. They love it cooked. No other seafood produces such a response from them. They can smell the squid the minute I walk in the front door. And they’re relentless in their pursuit of it.

Buddy chomps on a raw squid tentacle. Fumio looks on.

I myself love squid, too, especially when on a Saturday I can make it to my neighborhood Greenmarket at Abingdon Square and buy it from Phil Karlin, my number-one fish guy,  who fishes off the North Shore of Long Island. His is the squid my cats prefer, too. It’s ultra fresh, as it should be but somehow never quite is when I buy it from a fish shop (frozen and thawed can be okay, but not dependably). When I get small, pristine, fresh-from-the-sea squid from Mr. Karlin, I like to flash cook it so it stays white and juicy.

I made it to Abingdon Square market this week in time for Mr. Karlin’s squid (he often runs out of most fish by about noon, so if I don’t get moving I miss out, and then everyone is pissed).  While at the market, I  also picked up a handful of pea shoots, the first time I had seen them this spring, and fresh, still bulbless garlic and spring onions, both with long, tender green stems attached.

After a little back and forth in my culinary head, here’s what I made.  You can’t really go wrong with ingredients like these.

Gemelli with Calamari and Pea Shoots

(Serves 6 as a first course or 4 as a main course)

3 tablespoons butter
Extra-virgin olive oil
A little chunk of fatty prosciutto end, cut into small dice (about ¼ cup)
1 spring onion, cut into small dice, using the tender green stem
1 stalk fresh spring garlic, thinly sliced, using the tender green stem
1½ cups freshly shucked peas
A generous pinch of ground allspice
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1 cup chicken broth, and possibly a little extra
1 pound gemelli pasta
1½ pounds small calamari, cleaned and cut into rings, the tentacles left whole
A splash of dry white wine
A handful of pea shoots, trimmed of their thick stems
A big squeeze of lemon juice
2 tablespoons grated grana Padano cheese

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

In a large skillet, melt 2 tablespoons of the butter and a tablespoon of olive oil over medium heat. Add the prosciutto and the onion, and sauté until the onion is soft and the prosciutto has given off some of its fat, about 4 minutes. Add the garlic, and sauté just until it releases its aroma, about a minute. Add the peas, seasoning with the allspice, salt, and black pepper. Add the chicken broth, and turn the heat to high. Boil the peas, uncovered, until tender, about 4 or 5 minutes. There should be about ½ inch of liquid left in the skillet. If not, add a little more chicken broth.

Add a generous amount of salt to the pasta water, and drop in the gemelli.

In another skillet, heat a tablespoon of olive oil and the remaining tablespoon of butter over high heat. When hot, add the calamari, seasoning with salt and black pepper, and sauté quickly, just until it’s tender and opaque, about 2 to 3 minutes, depending on its size. Add the splash of wine, and let it bubble for a few seconds. Add the calamari and all the skillet juices to the peas.

When the gemelli is al dente, drain it, and pour it into a large, warmed serving bowl. Drizzle on a generous amount of fresh olive oil, and add the grana Padano. Toss gently. Add the calamari and pea sauce, the pea shoots, and the squeeze of lemon juice. Toss again. Taste for seasoning, adding more salt or black pepper if needed. Serve hot.

Wind and rain Italian style, by Luca Signorelli.

Recipe: Watercress Salad with Strawberries, Chives, and Warm Goat Cheese

Rain and more rain, and not so warm either. That’s been May in Manhattan so far (April, too). I actually really love rain, especially dark rainy afternoons with lots of thunder, but I’m sick of cold. I want warm rain, yet so far all we’ve had is cold rain, and a lot of wind too. I do love wind, but, as you might guess, I like warm wind, Miami Beach wind. Too bad none of my weather desires are playing out right now. Not a problem. To cheer myself up I’ve devised this salad, using all the delicate spring foods I could work in—watercress, strawberries, young goat cheese, and chives. I used big strawberries, but if you can get the little wild type, just leave them whole (it’s too early for them in New York, but Tri Star and other wild hybrids will be available in June at my greenmarket. I can’t wait).

Happy spring to you.

Watercress Salad with Strawberries, Chives, and Warm Goat Cheese

(Serves 2)

1 bunch watercress, stemmed
1 small head frisée lettuce, torn into pieces
¼ cup pine nuts, lightly toasted
8 medium strawberries, cut in half
8 chives, cut into long pieces
½ teaspoon balsamic vinegar
½ teaspoon lemon juice
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus a little extra to drizzle
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
A pinch of allspice
4 ½-inch-thick rounds fresh goat cheese
4 ½-inch-thick slices from a baguette, cut on an angle so they’re longer

Place the watercress and frisée in a salad bowl. Add the pine nuts, strawberries, and about half of the chives.

Set out two salad plates.

In a small bowl, whisk together the balsamic vinegar, lemon juice, and olive oil, seasoning it well with salt, black pepper, and the pinch of allspice.

Place the baguette slices on a small cookie sheet, and set it under a broiler. When the slices are golden, flip them over, then place a slice of goat cheese on each one, seasoning them with salt and a few grindings of black pepper. Broil until the cheese is just starting to melt and the edges of the bread are toasted.

Pour the dressing over the salad, and toss gently. Divide the salad onto the plates, and place two goat cheese toasts around each one. Drizzle a thread of olive oil over each toast, and scatter the remaining chives on top of the salad. Serve right away.

Rome’s annual artichoke festival, April 2008.

Recipe: Artichokes Filled with Almonds, Anchovy, and Thyme

Big, scary, painful globe artichokes. How do you deal with something so seemingly impenetrable? Frankly, they are a bit of an ordeal even for me, and I’ve been handling them for decades. They pierce your fingers, they turn your hands black, and they turn themselves black. I almost never see home cooks buying them. They seem to pile up on grocery shelves. Lately they’ve even been cheap, and still nobody’s buying them. Three for five dollars I’ve been seeing around Manhattan. So I’ve been buying them again.

I got out of the habit of dealing with those big globes when I began finding little “baby” artichokes in the markets about ten years ago or so (they are actually little secondary shoots that grow from the middle of a globe artichoke stalk). They have no chokes and need just a quick trimming to cook up tender. I don’t know what ever happened to them, but they seem to have disappeared. I asked the vegetable buyer for Citarella, and he told me he keeps ordering them, but they never arrive. I’ll get to the bottom of this and let you know. In the meantime, I’m going to show you something really excellent to make with the big ones.

Why go through all the work of prepping these things? Because they’re among the most delicious vegetables in the world. The heart of a globe artichoke is an amazing creation. It’s rich, it’s delicate, it’s creamy, it’s just intrinsically Italian. Artichokes are a little rugged, they work you hard, but they give back generously. To me an artichoke sums up the spirit of Southern Italy very nicely.

To be honest, for me the drawback in preparing big artichokes was never really the prep (I can get into all kinds of kitchen manual labor and enjoy it immensely). It was the waste. All the tough outer leaves are really crap. I know you can scrape them with your teeth, but that’s just so American, so boiled-artichokey. When I want to prepare them in true Italian style, I now just come to terms with the fact that a big part of them will wind up in the garbage, and I get on with it.

Stuffed artichokes can be fabulous, but they have to be done with a light touch. It took me a while to put the memory of ten-pound, full-of-sausage-and-soggy-bread, garlic-laden, outrageously greasy stuffed artichoke of my childhood, the standard Little Italy gross-out treatment, out of my mind for good, and create a new standard for myself.

Try these.

Artichokes Filled with Almonds, Anchovy, and Thyme

(Serves 4 as a first course or a light dinner)

3 lemons, 2 cut in half, the other one sliced into thin rounds
4 globe artichokes
2 garlic cloves, peeled and roughly chopped
½ cup sliced or slivered almonds, lightly toasted
¾ cup homemade, roughly textured dry breadcrumbs–not the powdery stuff you buy in a can
4 anchovy fillets, roughly chopped
½ cup grated grana Padano or piave cheese
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
Extra-virgin olive oil
8 big sprigs of thyme, stemmed
About a dozen basil leaves
1 cup dry white wine
1 cup light chicken broth

Set up a big bowl of cold water, and squeeze the cut lemon into it. Drop the lemon halves into the water.

Cut the stems from the artichokes, and drop them (the stems) into the lemon water. Cut off all the spiky tips from the artichokes (you’ll want to just give the tops a nice clean cut, taking off about an inch or so). Now pull off all the tough, dark green leaves until you get to the lighter green, tenderer ones (when eating, you’ll probably still have to scrape the first layer or two with your teeth, but after that they should be tender enough to eat in toto). Spread the leaves open so you can see inside to the fuzzy choke. Remove the chokes on all the artichokes by scooping them out with a melon baller or a grapefruit spoon (in my experience, the melon baller works best). Place the cleaned artichokes in the lemon water.

Take the artichoke stems from the water, and peel off all the tough outer skin. Chop the stems roughly.

Place the garlic, the almonds, and the artichoke stems in the bowl of a food processor, and pulse until you have a uniform, rough chop. Add the anchovies, breadcrumbs, and the grana Padano or piave cheese. Season with salt and black pepper, and add about 3 tablespoons of olive oil and the juice from the remaining halved lemon. Pulse a few more times to blend everything, keeping the mixture slightly chunky (you don’t want a paste). Add the thyme and the basil, and pulse one or two more times, just to break up the herbs into pieces.

Stuff the insides of the artichokes with the breadcrumb mixture, and work some in between all the leaves as well. Place the artichokes, stuffing side up, in a wide shallow saucepan. Pour in the white wine and the chicken broth. Add the sliced lemons. If the liquid doesn’t come about ¾ way up the artichokes, add a little more wine or broth or water. Drizzle the tops of the artichokes with a little fresh olive oil, and bring the liquid to a boil. Turn down the heat, cover the pan, and simmer until the artichokes are tender, about 30 to 35 minutes. You can test by pulling off an outer leaf. If it pulls off easily, they’re ready.

Lift the artichokes from the liquid. I like to run the tops under a broiler for a minute, just to crisp up the crumbs, but it’s not essential. Serve either warm or at room temperature.

Recipe: Fennel and Fava Salad with Piacentinu Cheese

You know how you can discover a new food and it fascinates you even before you taste it? Bresaola was one of those foods for me. Cardoons were another. Piacentinu is a third.

Piacentinu is a cheese I discovered during my first trip to Sicily, about 12 years ago. It’s a very old and unusual-tasting cheese, dating probably back to medieval times. It’s a Sicilian pecorino from the inland area around Enna. Much like the island’s pepato, Piacentinu is studded with black peppercorns, but unlike pepato it’s infused with saffron, which gives it a beautiful golden color and a taste that might be what you’d call acquired. I’ve now acquired it. At first I wasn’t so sure. I was fascinated with its color, so I tasted it.  This may have been in the fabulous city of Trapani. I was overwhelmed by its beauty—both the cheese and the city’s—and when I got home I tracked down Piancentinu in Manhattan, bought a hunk, and tasted it again. I found it strange, almost medicinal, but I couldn’t let it go. I wanted to taste it again, to keep tasting it. I’m not sure why, exactly. Something was telling me I loved this cheese but just didn’t know it yet.

Saffron is a spice I really had to learn to cook with. It has an alluring bitter edge, which can become less alluring when heated too long, or if you use too much, but in good hands (the hands I now have) it produces an exotic, bittersweet perfume. I believe Piacentinu cheese came into being at a time when saffron, like black pepper, was a sign of wealth and so was an extravagance. The fact that the cheese held on as most heavily spiced foods fell from favor in Sicily is a testament to what I now find to be its lovely flavor. That flavor, like other slightly bitter tastes that punctuate some Southern Italian foods, such as that of Amaro, is something I’ve worked to love. Now I even crave it.

It took me a while to come up with good flavor pairings for Piacentinu, but I finally found them. When I started thinking Arab, it all came together. Piacentinu, I discovered, tastes incredibly good with dates. It’s also wonderful with a glass of good dry Marsala. It marries well with sweet or slightly bitter fruits such as figs or pears, but maybe not so well with acidic ones like green grapes. To my palate it’s a little too rich to match with salumi products like soppressata. When I was looking for ways to incorporate it into a fully composed dish, I thought about some of the classic Sicilian cooking that includes saffron, and I finally hit on what I think is a right-on match for this unusual cheese: fennel. Saffron and fennel are often paired in Western Sicilian dishes, as they are in neighboring North Africa. Think of pasta con le sarde, with its mix of fennel, saffron, raisins, and pine nuts, and Sicily’s version of couscous, usually a fish concoction scented with fennel, bay leaf, and saffron.

I decided to include Piacentinu in a raw fennel salad, and I was extremely happy with the opulent results. I added pine nuts because Sicilians love pine nuts. And since it’s springtime, I threw in a handful of fresh fava beans and a little watercress. I hope you’ll like the salad, too. It is, I think, I  nice way to coax your palate into spring, and a good way to make your acquaintance with Piacentinu.

You can order Piacentinu from Dipalo’s or Buonitalia.

Sicilian Piacentinu, flavored with saffron and black pepper.

Fennel and Fava  Salad with Piacentinu

(Serves 2)

1 pound fava beans, in their pods
1 small fennel bulb, very thinly sliced, plus a few fronds reserved for garnish
About ¼ a red onion, very thinly sliced
A small bunch of watercress, the thick stems trimmed
A palmful of pine nuts, lightly toasted
About 10 big shavings of Piacentinu cheese
The juice from ½ a small lemon
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper

Shell the fava beans. Set up a small pot of water, and bring it to a boil. Drop in the fava beans, and blanch them for two minutes. Drain them, and then run cold water over them to stop the cooking. Now pierce the skin of each bean with your nail, and pop the bean out. The skins should slip off easily. Now you’ll have a nice pile of tender, smooth bright green fava beans.

In a small salad bowl combine the fava beans, fennel, red onion, watercress, pine nuts, and Piacentinu. Mix the lemon juice with the olive oil, and season it with salt and black pepper. Pour this over the salad, and toss gently. Garnish with the fennel fronds. Serve right away.

The Cook, by Pieter  Aertsen (1508-1575).

Recipe: Roast Chicken with Leeks, Thyme, and Black Olives

I never had roast chicken when I was a kid. We had chicken alla cacciatora, chicken with lemon and garlic, or we barbecued chicken, lots of it, all summer. The idea of the perfect still-life whole roast chicken came later for me, when I started reading French cookbooks. Jacques Pépin’s cookbooks introduced me to roast chicken, and I love him for it. I love him for a lot of things. His big technique books were the guidance I turned to first when I decided to get serious about cooking. I also love the fact that he slaughters and sautés frogs he catches in a pond on his Connecticut property. I somehow find that incredibly alluring.

From Mr. Pépin I learned to roast chicken on high heat, but he also always recommended turning the thing around a bunch of times during the cooking. I used to do that, and the results were very good. I don’t know what happened, but somewhere along the way I completely lost patience with the technique and just stopped doing it. But then a curious thing occurred. I started producing really good roast chicken by just sticking the thing in the oven and letting it sit there. Sorry Jacques. I still love you.

What I do now is put the chicken in legs first, so the dark meat, which cooks slowest, is in the hottest part of the oven. That gives me tender dark meat and moist breast meat without having to keep moving the bird. And I’ve found that an even 400 degrees is a good roasting temperature for the entire stint. A 3½-pound chicken takes about 1 hour and 20 to 25 minutes at this temperature (with a read of about 165 degrees at the upper thigh joint, next to the bone, when perfectly cooked). I start the chicken on convection, which helps boost browning, but then I turn it off after about a half hour so the skin doesn’t get too dark too early.

A roast chicken is something you can really play around with. I’ve done the million-cloves-of garlic thing, I’ve gone Sicilian with anchovies and orange, I’ve tried the tarragon-and-vinegar approach. Oh, I’ve been all around Europe with my roast chickens. I love the flavor combo of fresh thyme with black olives, and I reach for it when I want something easy but lush. So this time I started with those flavors and then added leeks and Marsala to the roasting pan. They become central components of a rich pan sauce that basically made itself. I hope you like it.

Roast Chicken with Leeks, Thyme, and Black Olives

Extra-virgin olive oil
2 tablespoons melted butter, slightly cooled
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
½ teaspoon sugar
An approximately 3½-pound free-range chicken
A small bunch of fresh thyme branches
3 garlic cloves, peeled and lightly smashed
2 large leeks, trimmed, split lengthwise, and cleaned
4 carrots, peeled and cut lengthwise in two
A big wine glass of dry Marsala
2 cups chicken broth
A tiny splash of Spanish sherry vinegar
A handful of black olives, such as Niçoise
A tiny splash of Spanish sherry vinegar

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

In a small bowl, mix the butter with 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Season well with salt, black pepper, the nutmeg, and the sugar. Rub the chicken all over with this seasoned oil. Shove the garlic cloves and the thyme in the chicken’s cavity. I don’t bother to truss the thing, but I do fold the wings under so they’re neatly tucked in.

Choose a roasting pan that will hold the chicken with a little room to breathe. Place the leeks and carrots in the pan, making a flat bed. Place the chicken on the vegetable bed, breast side up. Pour the Marsala and about ½ cup of the chicken broth into the pan. Give the chicken an extra little sprinkle of salt, and put it in the oven, legs toward the back.

Roast for about 1 hour and 20 to 25 minutes, adding more chicken broth from time to time when the liquid gets low. I use convection for the first half hour, which cuts the cooking time by about 5 minutes or so. You can test the upper thigh joint with a thermometer. It should be perfectly done when it reads between 160 and 170.

When the chicken is done, take it from the oven. Pour any juices that run from the cavity into the roasting pan. Place the chicken on a serving platter. Take the garlic and the thyme out, and add them to the pan juices. Take out the leeks and carrots. Place the carrots around the chicken, and cover everything lightly with aluminum foil.

Skim off as much fat from the pan juices as you can. Chop the leeks into small dice, and return them to the roasting pan. Heat the pan juices over a medium flame until bubbling. Add the olives. Add enough chicken broth or water to create a thin sauce. Boil for about a minute or so. Remove the thyme. Add a tiny splash of Spanish sherry vinegar, just to bring up the flavor. Taste for seasoning, adding more salt or black pepper if needed. Pour the sauce into a gravy bowl.

Cut the chicken into pieces ,and pour a generous amount of the sauce onto each serving.

Recipe: Scampi with Almonds, Mint, and Lemon

I went out to dinner a lot as a child, mostly to Italian places in Nassau County, Long Island, and in Manhattan (the City, as we called it). My father was a golf pro, which meant he had erratic hours, especially in warm weather, so dinner at home was hit or miss. He also loved to party, and taking everyone out to dinner was very much a part of his ring-a-ding life. I’m grateful for it. The flavors of the 1960s Italian-American food on all those usually fun restaurant evenings are permanently embedded in my palate memory. Shrimp scampi, as it was always called then, was something I ordered constantly. I became quite the snotty little expert on the scampis served in the greater New York area. Scampi then meant lots of garlic (sometimes burnt black and acrid), lots of olive oil, and lots of lemon. It also more than occasionally meant horrendously overcooked shrimp, which was a big disappointment. This glamorous dish, I discovered, could be amazingly delicious or disgusting, depending on the time and place. But I was always up for the confrontation.

Going home with the garlic burps after a night out with my father, my clothes stained with  olive oil, red wine, and Shirley Temples and reeking of cigarette smoke, was a recurring experience of my childhood. It was also the beginning of my culinary education. What I learned back them was that a good scampi was gentle on the garlic and not hammered to death.

In Italy real scampi look like beautiful mini lobsters, but with a thinner shell (or maybe a better description is that they look like big shrimps with claws). They’re most often served just cracked down the middle and sautéed or grilled with a simple mix of olive oil, herbs, garlic, and breadcrumbs. I don’t often see real scampi here, but Citarella almost always stocks jumbo shrimp. They’re excellent for what I suppose should be called shrimp scampi-style (or gamberi (the Italian word for actual shrimp) scampi-style). I make variations on this dish often. This time I decided I wanted a springtime feel to it. I added ground almonds, which lighten it up, since they don’t soak up oil the way the straight breadcrumbs do. I added fresh mint instead of parsley. I also decided to serve the shrimp on a bed of watercress. It came out pretty springlike, I think.

True Italian scampi.

Scampi with Almonds, Mint, and Lemon

(Serves 4)

12 jumbo shrimp
Extra-virgin olive oil
The juice and grated zest from 1 small lemon, plus lemon wedges for garnish
¼ cup dry white wine
2 garlic cloves, very thinly sliced
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
⅓ cup homemade dry breadcrumbs, not too finely ground
½ cup whole lightly toasted almonds, half finely ground, the rest roughly chopped
1 heaping tablespoon grated Grana Padano cheese
A handful of fresh mint leaves, half chopped, the rest left whole for garnish
2 bunches watercress

Peel the shrimp, leaving the tails on. Then make a deep slice into the back of each shrimp, removing the vein. You’ll want to go about halfway in, just far enough so the shrimp will open up and lay flat in the baking dish. Put the shrimp in a large bowl.

In a small bowl, mix together the lemon juice, about ¼ cup olive oil, the white wine, and the garlic. Season with salt and black pepper. Pour this over the shrimp, giving them a good toss.

Preheat your broiler.

Place the shrimp in a shallow sided baking dish, cut side up, curling their tales to the side so they can lay flat. Pour any remaining marinade over the shrimp.

In another small bowl mix together the breadcrumbs, ground almonds, Grana Padano, lemon zest and chopped mint. Season well with salt and black pepper. Add about 2 tablespoons olive oil, and mix well.

Place the watercress in a salad bowl.

Broil the shrimp about 4 inches from the heat source for about 4 minutes. Pull the dish from the broiler, and scatter the breadcrumb mixture over the shrimp. Return the dish to the broiler, and cook until the breadcrumbs are a nice golden brown, about another 4 minutes. Pull the dish from the broiler, and garnish the shrimp with the chopped almonds and the mint sprigs.

Dress the watercress with a little olive oil and lemon juice, and serve alongside the shrimp. You can drizzle any juices left in the dish over the shrimp if you like. Serve with lemon wedges.

Eat Smart in Sicily, by Joan Peterson and Marcella Croce, published by Ginkgo Press in 2008.

Recipe: Penette con Pesto di Pistacchio e Mandorle

Considering the size of my apartment, I have to say my collection of Italian cookbooks is almost out of control. But whenever I try thinning it out, I find there’s a fine and true reason to keep every one of them. They’re a family, and I can’t break them up. These books comfort me when my sense of identity slacks off. They remind me of things I need to remember, of specific dishes I love and want to cook again, and of flavor combinations I shouldn’t forget to play with. Most of all they bring back to me all my trips to Italy that can sometimes feel so far in the past. I especially treasure the little regional Southern Italian cookbooks and pamphlets I’ve collected from various excursions into Sicily, Campania, Puglia, Basilicata, and Calabria. Those are my people, that is my food, and now these are my books. They are where I find recipes for the home cooking in little corners of the world, for traditional dishes that may be fading out of people’s lives. These little paperbacks, often sold in the town hall or visitor center of a village (a room in a church), written by local cooks or historians, their covers decorated with illustrations of elaborate pastries or coiled sausages, or people picking olives, or a photo of a lady in a ridiculous regional outfit, complete with wacky headgear, taken during some sagra, make me cook with heart. When I cook from one of these books, I travel back to a place no big chef’s book can take me to.

Recently I entered “Sicily” in the Barnes & Noble search window, as I do from time to time, just to make sure there isn’t something new needed on my shelves, and up came Eat Smart in Sicily, part of an Eat Smart travel series published by Ginkgo Press. With its generic-looking travel-guide cover, I imagined it would be the opposite of the pinpointed, regional ones I love. But since I have to keep nurturing my big collection, I ordered it anyway.

In format the book turned out to be what I expected , but its content was much more involved than I’d imagined, more homey and intimate, with no slick edges. In fact it was like my beloved little regional books. The dishes and the names of the dishes, often presented in Sicilian dialect—a kind of Arab-looking and -sounding form of Italian—were truly foreign and distinct, drawing me right in with their poetry.

The book begins, as it should, with a rundown of Sicily’s checkered past, with all its Greek, Roman, Arab, French, and Spanish invaders, and how each contributed to what Sicilians eat and why. Interesting, but I’ve been there before. Once I got past that, and the authors started talking about the food, I was knocked out by its richness.

The next chapter is called, plainly enough, “Local Sicilian Food.” Just  scanning through it, picking out words on the pages, got me really tasting true Sicilian food. Some of the words that popped out at me: sesame seeds, swordfish, tuna, capers, fichi d’india, citrons, pine nuts, tomatoes, artichokes, sheep’s milk ricotta, olives, eggplants, cipolle, zucchina lunga, tenerumi, peperoncini, ceci, fiori di zucca, lumache, mint, parsley, wild fennel, saffron, maiali, agnello, capretti, horse meat, gamberi, calamari, seppie, polpo, fava, ricci (I love sea urchin), sarde, lenticchie, blood oranges, limone, aceto, chestnuts, caciocavallo, tuma, primosale, pecorino, honey, vino, acqua minerale, espresso, wild asparagus, almonds, figs, pistachios. What a glorious jumble.

Which leads to what in my opinion is the best part of the book, its “menu guide.” This is an extensive alphabetical list of Sicilian dishes that reads like a great nonfiction book (at least to me). Here’s a sampling of the names of some of the amazing dishes that it covers (for a description of what these things actually are and how they’re made, you’ll have to look at the book itself). I love the sound of ammogghiu, babaluci con aglio e prezzemelo, cappidduzzi (my favorite), ericini, filetto di suino, frascatole in brodo di pesce e gamberi, gelo di melone, impanatigghi, latte di mandorla, minne di vergini, olivette di Sant’Agata, pane e panelle, quaresimali, rosolio, salame di cinghiale, tagliancozzi, uva al liquore, vurrania bollita, zucca all’agrodolce, and zuppa di crastuna, to name a few.

And just to hep you up further, and get you wondering why you’re not booking a trip to Sicily right now, the authors include a handful of recipes, both traditional home-cooking types and contemporary restaurant dishes. I’ve always been fascinated by Sicilian nut pestos, the classic one being a mix of almonds, tomato, garlic, mint, and basil. But evidently the pure nut pestos like the one I made from this book, which contain almost nothing but ground pistachios and almonds, are more contemporary (you’d think it would be the other way around, since tomatoes came along relatively late in Italian history, but that’s evidently not the case).

Pennette with pistachio and almond pesto, the recipe I chose, turned out to be a great dish, but I do have a few things to say about making this opulent pasta outside of Sicily. As with all pestos, this one is best when prepared no more than about an hour before serving, so that it stays fresh and brightly colored (and it’s really quick to make, just a few ingredients thrown into a food processor). I did, however, have to make several changes to the original recipe, because the nuts I find here at not all that flavorful. I can sometimes track down Sicilian Bronte pistachios and decent almonds, if I run all over town, but I usually have to make do with nuts from a health food shop, which seem to have more flavor than supermarket ones. At any rate, I found I needed to toast them a little to bring up their taste. Even with the toasting, I found I needed to add a little garlic, which is not present in the original recipe. I didn’t cave in and add cheese or black pepper, though, two ingredients most Americans seem to think belong in every Italian dish.

I have to say, this pesto was delicious. If you find the freshest, best nuts you can, and use good Sicilian olive oil (I would suggest Ravida), you’ll get excellent results. Maybe not quite as wonderful as you could get in Sicily; for that, you’ll just have to book a trip.

Penette con Pesto di Pistacchio e Mandorle

This recipe is my adaptation of one in Eat Smart in Sicily. The authors got it from Giovanni Farruggio, chef at the Ristorante La Pigna in the Hotel Villa Paradiso dell’Etna, in San Giovanni La Punta in the province of Catania.

(Serves 4 as a first course)

½ cup unsalted, shelled pistachios, lightly toasted
½ cup blanched almonds, lightly toasted
1 small garlic clove, roughly chopped
Extra-virgin olive oil, preferably an estate-bottled Sicilian oil such as Ravida
Salt
About 20 basil leaves
¾ pound pennette (small penne)
A handful of chopped fennel fronds for garnish (if you can find wild fennel that will be best, but I used the fronds from bulb fennel, which weren’t bad)

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

Put the pistachios and the almonds in the bowl of a food processor. Add the garlic, and give it a few quick pulses. Add about a third of a cup of olive oil and some salt, and pulse a few times more. You want to chop the nuts into little pieces, but you don’t want to create a paste. When the nuts are fairly uniformly chopped, add the basil, and pulse once or twice more, just to break it up. The texture should be pebbly.

Cook the pennette al dente, and drain, saving about a cup of the pasta cooking water.

Pour the pennette into a warmed serving bowl. Add the nut pesto and a few tablespoons of the cooking water. Toss well. Add a drizzle of extra olive oil if needed for texture. Taste for salt. Garnish with the fennel fronds. Serve.