1,000 Foods To Eat Before You Die: A Food Lover's Life List (50 page)

At once acidly tangy, sweet, and creamy, the blue-veined Gorgonzola is justifiably one of Italy’s most celebrated cheeses—and it has been since before Italy even was Italy, as far back as the fifteenth century, in the town of Gorgonzola in Lombardy.

Gorgonzola is colored by blue-green veins that are strands of mold grown from the bacteria
Penicillium
, which is present in the drafty, damp caves in which the cheese is aged. Before it reaches the cave stage, however, the cheese is already distinguished by being made from two different milk curds.

Because, historically, the town of Gorgonzola was situated between cattle pastures, ranchers would often stop there to spend the night and milk their cows. The old-fashioned cheese makers began to use the excess milk to make cheese. The curd from the evening’s milk was wrapped in cloth and then suspended so that the whey would drip out and the curd could ripen overnight. In the morning, the curd was transferred into a wooden mold and covered with the fresh morning milk. The mixture was then placed inside damp, drafty caves to age, and the rest is history.

Modern demand for the cheese has necessitated faster production, and technology has obliged. Most cheese makers today pierce the cheese with copper and stainless-steel needles, permitting the bacteria-laden air to enter and shortening the cave-aging period to three months.

There are two general types of Gorgonzola. Gorgonzola
dolce
is the soft, mild, fragrant young cheese, while the longer-aged Gorgonzola
naturale
is firmer in texture, with a more intense flavor. Gorgonzola is often confused with its French cousin, Roquefort (see
listing
), a sheep’s milk blue. Although the two bear the same characteristic blue-green veins and were developed around the same time, Roquefort is crumblier, saltier, and more subtly complex, whereas Gorgonzola’s flavor is stronger, more rustic, and earthier.

The strongly flavored cheese stands on its own merits, but to take the cheese to the next level, Peck, Milan’s famous gourmet shop, prepares a specialty that showcases Gorgonzola in the most decadent of ways. In
zola crèma
, a wheel of Gorgonzola naturale is split horizontally, then reassembled with layers of fresh, soft, sweet mascarpone in between. The palate-seducing result is irresistible, especially when accompanied by some of Italy’s summer-ripe muscat grapes or winey pears.

Retail and mail order:
In New York
, Murray’s Cheese, tel 888-692-4339,
murrayscheese.com
.
Further information and recipes:
Cheese Primer
by Steven Jenkins (1996);
Giuliano Bugialli’s Foods of Italy
by Giuliano Bugialli (1984).
Tip:
Notable brands include Galbani, Klin, Lodigiani, and Mauri.

Given the quality of the sublime oranges grown in Sicily, it’s no wonder they tend to find their way to center stage. In this tantalizing salad, as delicious as it is colorful, pale jade-green fennel with subtle hints of licorice is tossed with slices of sun-gold oranges. A teasing appetizer or a restorative follow-up to the main course—particularly refreshing after a fish meal—the combination of juicy orange and firm fennel bulb gets a pretty touch from the feathery fronds of the fennel, a delicate herb that acts as a final grace note. Black olives, arugula, and/or endives are sometimes added to the salad as diverting accents.

The best extra-virgin olive oil is glossed over all, along with freshly ground black pepper and—for an extra bit of zing, by way of both flavor and color—almost invisibly sheer slivers of ruby-red onion.

Because fennel can be tough and so resistant to a salad dressing, it is a good idea to sliver the tenderest inner stalks and relax them in ice water for two or three hours before drying and adding them to the salad bowl.

Where:
In New York
, Patsy’s, tel 212-247-3491,
patsys.com
.
Further information and recipes:
Patsy’s Cookbook
by Salvatore Scognamillo (2002);
saveur.com
(search sicilian fennel salad).

A bulbous stalk with wispy green fronds, fennel has a flavor suggesting a cross between celery, dill, and licorice and a crunch that is all its own. Long regarded for its health benefits, this vegetable is also especially high in Vitamin C.

Raw fennel is sweet and refreshing, with a snappy texture that makes it a welcome and bracing addition to salads. Its bulb and stalks soften as they are cooked into side dishes like creamy gratins, and its frilly fronds work herbaceous wonders in seafood, poultry, and rice, providing one of the essential flavors of bouillabaisse. It also adds crunch and interest to the Sicilian salad in which it is combined with oranges (see
listing
), and fusion-minded Japanese chefs add paper-thin slices of fennel to their tempura menu.

The versatile vegetable grows in California and throughout the Mediterranean, particularly in Italy and France, where the stalks can reach upward of five feet. During the Middle Ages, the tall stalks were supposedly wielded as weapons by the
bernandanti
, an agrarian group in Northern Italy whose members claimed to fight evil at night. (Despite the seemingly benign aim of their night watch—ensuring a season of healthy crops—they were tried as witches by the Roman Inquisition.)

Further information and recipes:
A Mediterranean Feast
by Clifford A. Wright (1999);
Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone
by Deborah Madison (2007);
The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook
by Ina Garten (1999);
cookstr.com
(search shaved fennel salad; braised fennel malouf; fennel soup with pernod cream).
Tip:
When selecting fennel, look for bright green fronds and a small, intact white bulb. If you can find only large bulbs, remove one or two tough and fibrous layers until you reach the more tender, whiter ones. Reserve the removed tough portions for flavoring soups and stews.

Bring the colorful bounty of the ocean to your table.

An edible still life in shellfish, the classic Neapolitan seafood salad presents a shimmering rainbow of whites, silver-grays, rose-pinks, and deep purples, with flutterings of emerald parsley. Silky, barely steamed, recently shelled mollusks (including the mandatory clams and coral-tipped mussels) are combined with the ivory rings and lacy tentacles of baby squid. Rosy shrimp nestle between amethyst puckerings of boiled and sliced octopus. To that basic combination may be added a more expensive array of shellfish such as scallops, crab, or lobster—delicious, of course, even if each supplement makes for a more costly dish.

After each variety is cooked separately, and ever so lightly to avoid toughness, the seafood is combined while still warm in a sunny bath of olive oil, lemon juice, lots of black pepper, and minced Italian parsley leaves. A lustier, more colorful version of the dish includes hot red flakes of
peperoncini
, finely diced roasted sweet red peppers, and slivers of raw garlic; for the faint-of-palate, the garlic can be stuck onto toothpicks for easy removal (though it does lose its sting after the salad has been marinating for a few hours).

Served just a bit below room temperature,
insalata di frutti di mare
can be part of an assorted antipasto, but it deserves to be appreciated on its own—hopefully without a superfluous, bourgeois nest of bottom-dwelling lettuce leaves.

The elegant way to serve insalata di frutti di mare is to arrange it on a salad plate in a little of its own juice, garnished with only a wedge of fresh lemon. Mop up the sauce with generous hunks of crusty bread and wash it all down with a light and flowery white wine.

Where:
In Venice
, Corte Sconta, tel 39/041-522-7024,
cortescontavenezia.it
;
in New York
, Rao’s, tel 212-722-6709.
Retail and mail order:
In New York and Chicago
, Eataly,
eataly.com
.
Further information and recipes:
Rao’s Cookbook
by Frank Pellegrino (1998);
The Classic Italian Cook Book
by Marcella Hazan (1976);
saveur.com
(search seafood salad rao’s);
thefoodmaven.com
(search neapolitan seafood salad).

With Italian food so thoroughly assimilated into global food culture, one might think it would have few surprises left to reveal. But food lovers visiting the northern provinces of Lombardy and Piedmont in autumn still have a sublime salad to discover—the enjoyment of which is likely to dispel any resentment over what will surely be an exorbitant price.

Elegantly prepared to order at the table, the salad bewitches by way of its luxurious simplicity. It boasts only two main ingredients: white truffles, the aromatic treasures with a rabid fan base (see
listing
), and the lesser-known but no less ecstatically delicious ovoli (pronounced OH-voe-lee), an orange mushroom that is egg shaped (hence its name, which means egg).

Ancient Romans cherished the ovoli and nicknamed it Caesar, because it was favored by the emperors. Germans know the mushroom as the
kaiserling
, another reference to royalty, and even the French declare it
impériale
.

The smooth, coral-red, half-round cap of the young ovoli turns convex and striated as the mushroom ages. Thriving in dark, dank broadleaf conifer forests and starting in midsummer, the mushroom is ready for harvesting in mid-October. (Better not to do the foraging yourself, lest you mistake the benign
Amenita caesarea
for its wicked, highly poisonous doppelgangers,
Amenita muscaria
and
Amenita phalloides.
)

Almost always served in thin raw shavings, the ovoli reaches its gastronomic apotheosis in this gold-and-ivory-colored Italian
insalata.
The moist, faintly earthy yet airy flavor of the ovoli, as well as its tender, gentle texture, make it a perfect foil for the heady richness of the shaved white truffle. The fungi are enhanced by tiny crunches of celery, gratings of fragrant Parmesan cheese, and a light dousing of lemon juice and olive oil, resulting in a salad that is undeniably fit for royalty—or for an Italian food lover who thought there was nothing left to discover under the Italian sun.

Further information and recipes:
rossa-disera.com
(search ovoli e tartufo).