1,000 Foods To Eat Before You Die: A Food Lover's Life List (60 page)

Risotto ai Frutti di Mare.
Finely chopped mollusks and crustaceans—clams, mussels, squid, shrimp, prawns, and so on—season this tomato-based risotto, lightly flavored with onion, garlic, and a liberal sprinkling of parsley, but again, never cheese.

Risotto nero.
One of the richest, most dramatic of risotti and a great specialty in Venice, the nero comes by its name and color from the midnight-dark squid ink that adds a velvety depth of flavor reminiscent of both caviar and the deep blue sea. Again, no cheese, but a few flecks of red-hot
peperoncini
would be a nice accent.

Risotto saltato (or
al salto
).
In the unlikely event that your risotto pan is not scraped clean, this spin-off of the Milanese specialty presents an inspired use for leftovers. Any remaining risotto is chilled overnight, then pressed into a very thin layer on a hot, generously buttered frying pan. When the first side has browned, the rice pancake is flipped (or “jumped,” the meaning of
saltato
) so both sides emerge crisp and golden.

Where:
In Imola, Italy
, Ristorante San Domenico, tel 39/0542-29000,
sandomenico.it
;
in Venice
, Ristorante da Fiore, tel 39/041-721308,
dafiore.net
.
Retail and mail order:
For arborio rice,
in New York and Chicago
, Eataly,
eataly.com
.
Mail order:
amazon.com (search molinella arborio rice; fondo di toscana arborio rice).
Further information and recipes:
The Splendid Table
by Lynne Rossetto Kasper (1992);
The Classic Italian Cook Book
by Marcella Hazan (1976);
Italian Cuisine
by Tony May (2005);
The Da Fiore Cookbook
by Damiano Martin (2003);
foodnetwork.com
(search easy risotto nero);
cookstr.com
(search risotto verde);
starchefs.com
(search frog legs risotto);
epicurious.com
(search seafood risotto);
lidiasitaly.com
(search truffle risotto).
Special events:
Fiera del Riso, Verona, Italy, September through October, tel 39/045-7300089,
fieradelriso.it
; Risotto Festival, Houston, November,
risottofestival.com
.

Broccoli haters may not want to take a chance when it comes to the stunning vegetable
Brassica oleracese
(in Latin) or
broccolo romano
(in Italian), looking as it does like a cross between its broccoli and cauliflower relatives. Their loss. The only problem romanesco poses for the rest of us might be our reluctance to cut into its breathtaking spring-green pyramid, with its craggy peaked buds spiraling up into a single turreted fractal. So ease your aesthetic conscience by rimming it with pink roses and using
it as an ornamental centerpiece for a day before you cook it.

The existence of this venerable vegetable was documented as far back as sixteenth-century Europe, and Thomas Jefferson unsuccessfully planted its seeds at Monticello in the eighteenth century. But romanesco is a vegetable-come-lately to our markets, having become fashionable only in the latter part of the twentieth century. Generally considered a Roman specialty, partly because it grows best between Lazio and Campagna and also because that city’s cooks have developed its best-known preparations, the vegetable’s main season is from mid-autumn through midwinter. The Marche region of Italy, especially around the town of Jesí, has its own version—of a sunlit ivory instead of the more typical brilliant green.

Green or ivory, the vegetable’s cut sections should be gently simmered until their last trace of crispness gives way to a just-yielding tenderness. It’s at that point that romanesco will develop the ethereal, almost chewy flavor that combines the zestiness of broccoli with the buttery, cabbagy overtones of cauliflower. Like its cousins, romanesco delivers generous amounts of vitamins C and K, along with fiber and antioxidants.

Although it can be prepared using any of the methods suited to broccoli and cauliflower, Roman cooks usually stick to one of three ways. It may open the meal as a soup, given a zesty start with a blend of minced garlic, parsley, and guanciale sautéed to mellowness in olive oil, then submerged in a tomato-laced stock that is finished off with thin strands of angel-hair pasta and gratings of pungent pecorino.

For an appetizer or side dish, as it is marvelously prepared at Da Silvano trattoria in Manhattan, the lightly cooked flowerets are served warm with a sprightly sauce of mashed anchovies, garlic, lemon, mint, and olive oil—much like a bagna cauda dip for raw vegetables. Last but not least, there is romanesco with pasta, as a first or main course. The aesthetically correct choices would be the flat, ear-shaped orecchiette, little shell-like cavatelli, or the butterfly-winged (or bowtied) farfalle, and the dish can be served with or without crumbles of sweet or hot pork sausage. No cheese is required, but a sprinkling of dried hot chile peppers—
peperoncini
—would not go amiss.

Where:
In New York
, Da Silvano, tel 212-982-2343,
dasilvano.com
.
Further information and recipes:
cookstr.com
(search spaghetti romanesco);
epicurious.com
(search charred romanesco with anchovies and mint).

Grown around Naples, in the village of San Marzano sul Sarno, at the foot of Mount Vesuvius near Pompeii, these tomatoes are considered by cognoscenti to be the best on earth. Rather scrawny, pointy, and wiggly, they are not
especially beautiful fruits, though they are a deep blood red. But what they lack in physical beauty they more than make up for in deeply concentrated, perfectly balanced acid-sweet flavor. Their thin skins and yielding yet unmushy flesh join the flavor party to create a near-perfect tomato for which there are several factors to credit. One is weather: Summers are long in this part of Italy, which gets almost ten months of sunshine every year. Another is the soil: Enriched by Vesuvius over the years to extreme fertility, it is also loaded with reflective minerals that redirect sunlight to bathe the tomato plants from every angle.

Though it’s hard to envision the Italian kitchen without them, tomatoes were a New World food. And in fact, although they were imported to Europe, they didn’t really take off in Italy until the beginning of the canned tomato industry in the 1800s.

Especially suited for preserving, San Marzanos are known far and wide not just as excellent tomatoes but as the very best
canned
tomatoes. Their skins slip off easily (a boon to cooks) and they retain their distinctive flavor on the shelf; they have less juice than most American tomatoes, and so cook down more quickly. In fact, their quality is so high that, except perhaps in the very peak of summer, it’s often better to have San Marzanos canned than most other varieties fresh.

Not all Italian canned tomatoes are San Marzanos, so make sure you see those words on the label. (Strict government rules regulate the nomenclature.) Also look for a Denominazione di Origine Protetta label (D.O.P.), or protected designation of origin, to ensure authenticity.

Further information and recipes:
The Food of Italy
by Waverley Root (1992).
Tip:
Quality brands include La Valle, San Marzano, DeLallo, Carmelina, and Asti.

Not everything that looks and even tastes like chocolate pudding is in fact that deep, dark, and silken sweet treat. At first glance, the uninitiated might mistake the aromatically spiced winter dessert
sanguinaccio
for an Italian version of My-T-Fine. They would be advised to study their Latin, as the dessert’s name derives from the word
sanguinarius
… for blood.

The use of pig’s blood in this rich Italian pudding harks back to the days when animals were slaughtered without a morsel going to waste—a practice once again fashionable among chefs who advocate the more responsible “nose-to-tail” consumption.

In the rich Neapolitan version of sanguinaccio, the blood (which can be purchased from butchers by city dwellers lacking access to freshly killed pigs) is cooked and folded into a sunny, golden, vanilla-perfumed custard seasoned with molten bittersweet chocolate, cinnamon, cloves, pignolis, and bright bits of candied fruits. It is served well chilled in round glass dessert cups or as a filling for pastry; it can also appear as a dip for plain, crisp biscotti or the tender blond Savoy biscuits called ladyfingers.

Farther south in Calabria,
sanguinaccio con
riso
is much beloved. In this iteration, the blood is cooked with rice, then stirred through with raisins, cinnamon, cocoa powder, and grated lemon rind and chilled to a seductively solid consistency. (A simpler regional variation omits the rice and raisins but includes toasted almonds.)

Always served cold, blood pudding is generally associated with the celebration of St. Joseph’s Day on March 19—largely due to its proximity to the midwinter slaughtering season. (Pigs are usually slaughtered in cold weather, often in February, and the blood—highly perishable when raw—must be cooked to a thick and stable state as quickly as possible, whether for these puddings or for savory dark sausages.) Where the sale of pig’s blood is prohibited for health reasons, the dessert can pose a problem. In the United States, beef blood is often substituted, with slightly less lusty results, although sanguinaccio is so generously spiced that the differences are virtually obscured.

As an added bonus, sanguinaccio offers nutritional benefits: Rich in protein and iron, it is the perfect dessert not only for connoisseurs but also for anemics.

Where:
In Queens, NY
, in winter, Ornella Trattoria, tel 718-777-9477,
ornellatrattoria.com
.
Further reading and recipe:
deliciousitaly.com
(search sanguinaccio).

Complex and artistic.

One of Naples’s most operatic dishes, the fez-shaped
sartù
is a molded dish of risotto-like rice concealing goodies such as tiny beef meatballs, green peas, bits of cooked chicken livers and pork sausage, flecks of molten mozzarella, dried earthy porcini, and sliced hard-cooked eggs. All is moistened with broth, lard, and olive oil and flavored with savory additions such as Parmesan, tomato, grated lemon peel, nutmeg, and basil; packed carefully into a mold and baked, it is ceremoniously unmolded as expectant diners and cooks await with anticipation.

Much like the bowl-shaped
timpano
(a riff on the more common name,
timballo
) made famous in the film
Big Night
, sartù is a culinary high-wire act, the trick being to keep it all together until it is unmolded and cut to reveal a rainbow of flavors and fragrances. Believed to have been created in the seventeenth century by French cooks serving the Bourbon court in Naples, its name developed from
sûrtout
, meaning “above all else.”

Perhaps not too surprisingly, this labor-intensive dish is generally not available on Italian menus, even in Naples, but at certain restaurants it can be ordered in advance for a specified number of diners.

Where:
In Naples
, O Murzillo, tel 39/081-593-7706;
in Brooklyn
, for special occasions such as pre-Lenten Carnevale, Tommaso’s Restaurant, tel 718-236-9883,
tommasoinbrooklyn.com
.
Further information and recipes:
Naples at Table
by Arthur Schwartz (1998);
ifood.tv
(search sartu di riso).