Eating (2 page)

For the sauce, heat just enough extra-virgin olive oil to cover the bottom of a heavy pot large enough to hold a pound of cooked penne. As the oil warms but before it begins to shimmer, add two or three cloves of slivered garlic, and a minute later a medium-size jalapeño, minced, its seeds removed. Then reduce the flame to its lowest point. The idea is to infuse the oil with the various flavors over a very low flame until the fragrance fills the kitchen but before the jalapeño begins to brown. If it does brown a little, don’t worry. But keep an opened can of tomatoes nearby, to add as soon as the garlic mixture softens and the aroma rises from the pan. If you turn your back for a minute and the jalapeño blackens or the garlic becomes acrid, toss it out and start over. After you’ve chopped
the jalapeño, wash your hands lest you inadvertently rub your eye.

If your tomatoes are watery and shapeless, throw them out and try another brand. To the tomatoes, add one or two tablespoons of dried oregano and reduce over a medium flame. Fresh oregano, if you have some in your garden, will give the dish a perfumed lift, but it is much less intense than the dried. You will have to strip from its stems more than twice as much as the dry for the fragrance to take hold: a chore perhaps not worth the effort. The sauce will thicken as the water evaporates in ten or fifteen minutes. It should be somewhat tight. If it thickens too much, add a little water. If it is too watery, reduce it further or it will not grip the pasta. Then add coarse sea salt and pepper to taste, adding the salt carefully, a few grains at a time, until the sauce comes smartly and suddenly to life. Some cooks add a little sugar or soften carrot and onion with the garlic and pepper. I usually don’t. The San Marzano tomatoes are sweet enough.

Meanwhile, fill a large pot halfway with water, and add salt until you can just begin to taste it. Then bring the salted water to a rapid boil and add a pound of dried or fresh penne, either ridged (rigate) or smooth, preferably an Italian brand. I keep a small bowl of cool water nearby so that as the penne cooks I can extract a few pieces with a slotted spoon or tongs, drop them in the cool water, and taste them without burning my mouth. Fresh pasta will take only a few minutes to cook, so watch it carefully lest it turn to mush. Dried pasta may take as many as seven or eight minutes, though some imported dried pastas cook almost as quickly as fresh, so, unless you’ve used the brand before, taste and be careful not to overcook it. It should be firm to the bite—al dente—before you add it to the tomato sauce, where it will cook a little more. When the pasta is ready, lift it out with a long-handled strainer—the Chinese version is best. Toss the strained penne into the thickened, warm sauce, and with a wooden spoon mix it about until the pasta is well coated. The idea is to flavor the penne, rather than think of the sauce as the main ingredient and the pasta as its conveyance. Discard the pasta water if you plan to serve the penne at once. If you choose to serve the pasta later, save the water, bring it to a boil, and ladle some slowly into the pasta as you reheat it over a moderate flame until the penne loosens. The pasta will no longer be al dente, but will be edible nonetheless. Serve very hot in large pasta bowls. Top each bowl generously with hand-shredded—not chopped—fresh basil, and cube for each serving a small handful of the freshest possible mozzarella, being careful that the cheese rests upon the basil leaves and not
the hot pasta, lest the cheese melt and become stringy. Use only very fresh mozzarella, made the same day. Avoid the plastic-wrapped product sold in supermarket coolers. You may prefer buffalo mozzarella from Italy for a tangier flavor. Unlike mozzarella made from cow’s milk, which toughens as it ages, buffalo mozzarella becomes sharp and softens with age. Dieters should know that it takes four quarts of whole milk to make a pound of mozzarella. In this recipe, a half-pound cubed should be enough for four.

The secret is the jalapeño, which adds subtle heat from the bottom up and intensifies the other flavors. You will not notice it at once, but it will be awaiting you at the back of your tongue. If instead of jalapeño you use dried Italian red pepper flakes, the heat will be less subtle, though a quick dusting of a few flakes reduced to a powder by your fingertips before you add the basil and mozzarella complements the jalapeño from the top down. Another secret is the cool mozzarella contrasting with the hot, peppery pasta and spicy basil. I have seldom served this to anyone—even dieters—who didn’t ask for more until there was none left.

Spaghettini or linguine with clams is another simple dish, too often made to seem complicated. All you need is a pound of pasta; two or three garlic cloves, peeled;a jalapeño, finely chopped;just enough olive oil in which to heat the garlic and pepper; two cups of dry white wine; some Italian parsley; and, for two people, two dozen littleneck (small, hard-shell) clams,
rinsed, or, much preferably, two pounds of manilla clams if you can find them (and if you can’t, look for New Zealand cockles, a close relative). Manillas are sweeter than littlenecks and used widely in Italy. Dried red pepper flakes are optional. Fill a stockpot half full of water, add salt, and bring to a boil. Meanwhile, heat a little olive oil in a heavy-bottomed pot just large enough to accommodate a pound of cooked pasta and the clams, and add the whole garlic and chopped jalapeño and cook gently until the garlic and pepper soften. Add the wine, and reduce quickly by half. Then add the clams, cover the pot, and when the clams open, after a few minutes, remove the cover and turn off the flame. Add the pasta to the boiling stockpot, and when it is al dente, lift it with tongs and add it to the clam sauce. Coat the linguine or spaghettini with the sauce, and put in large pasta bowls. Sprinkle with coarsely chopped Italian parsley and serve. A sprinkling of red pepper flakes and a dash of extra-virgin olive oil are optional. If the pasta seems dry, add a ladle or two of hot pasta water. This quantity will serve two, maybe three.

Since we’re on the subject of pasta, I should mention the irresistible Bolognese ragù from the great Mario Batali’s
Babbo Cookbook,
which I have somewhat modified.

This is one of the all-time great ragùs, and easy to make after a little trial and error. Again, you will need a pot large enough for the rather substantial sauce and a pound of imported tagliatelle, Spinosi brand if you can find it. Batali uses pappardelle, and you may, too. In the pot, heat a
little olive oil and soften a few chopped garlic cloves with some diced onion, carrot, and celery. Then cube a quarter-pound of pancetta (unsmoked Italian bacon) or, preferably, guanciale, cured from hog cheeks but not smoked, if you can find it in your Italian specialty store, and spin the cubes for a few seconds in a food processor. Scrape the pancetta or guanciale into the pot, and stir until it begins to melt. Then crumble a pound each of ground veal and pork into the pot and over a medium-hot flame brown the meats. Then toss in a small handful of dried oregano leaves, and mix everything together. Batali calls for a small can of tomato paste at this point, or use three generous tablespoons of strattu instead.

Now add a cup of milk and another of white wine, reduce the flame to a simmer, cover the pot loosely, and let it simmer over the lowest flame for an hour or so, checking from time to time that the sauce hasn’t dried out and begun to burn. Add more milk and wine as necessary. Add sea salt and fresh-ground pepper to taste carefully. Then sprinkle a good handful of very fragrant fresh thyme leaves, from the garden if you have one, into the ragù. Meanwhile, bring a large pot of salted water to a boil, cook a pound of tagliatelle until it’s al dente, and transfer the pasta with tongs to the ragù and mix thoroughly,
saving the pasta water if you’re not planning to serve the ragù immediately. Drop a tong-full into each large pasta bowl, sprinkle with grated parmigiana, and serve while hot. The dish is even better the second day, as leftovers.

In childhood, I became interested in cooking as I watched my grandmother Ida bake pies, preserve peaches and applesauce from her own trees, and roast chickens that she had fattened herself in the cellar when it was too cold for them outdoors. My grandparents’ old house, atop a steep hill in Auburn, Maine, had a primitive coal-burning furnace which kept the cellar warm but didn’t do much on icy days for the big, drafty parlors, despite heavy wood-framed storm windows. Ida was tall, handsome, and amiable. She carried herself with dignity and smiled often and easily. She was not a great cook and not always even a very good one, but she tried. Her grandchildren respected and loved her and went along with the pretense that her food was delicious. Or perhaps, being children, they didn’t know any better. At the age of ten, I did know better, for my parents would often take me with them when they dined out with friends on Sundays at country inns—including the Toll House, with its famous cookies—around Boston, where we lived when we were not visiting my grandparents in Maine.

My grandmother was from Russia and said she liked cold houses with warm kitchens. Her husband, my grandfather, was born prematurely and kept in a shoe
box wrapped in fur until he was old enough to survive, or so I was told. When I knew him in old age, he wore in winter what was called a pelt, a stiff canvas coat lined with a sheepskin, an echo, I thought, of his primitive incubator. On bitter winter days when the frost formed peaks on the storm windows in the unheated parlor, my cousins and I sat in the kitchen warmed by the big woodstove with its nickel trim and the words “Model: Home Fireside” in raised letters above a temperature gauge on the oven door.

Prospect Hill, where my grandparents lived, was almost perpendicular, and with my friend Raymond Begin, who was smart and funny and spoke French—he would become a Roman Catholic priest in Canada—I skied down it on heavy wooden Norwegian skis with knobs at the tip. Then, with sealskins attached to our skis, we would herringbone back up. Afterward we would go across South Main Street to Cloutier’s store (pronounced “Cloochies”) for frozen Milky Ways and root beer.

On stormy winter mornings, you could see from my grandmother’s kitchen windows the windswept snow swirl against the blackness of Mr. Jackson’s open barn doors across the road. Pete, my grandparents’ old English bulldog, slept on a braided rug in front of the stove, so that my grandmother had to pirouette awkwardly around him as she lifted her roasts and pies from the oven. From my perch next to the stove, atop the big box painted blue with a slanted top, like a saltbox, where the firewood was kept, I effortlessly absorbed from my
beaming grandmother, with her Oxford glasses on their gold chain, the ambience of warmth and safety from which the desires of a lifetime were formed, including the desire that persists long after her death to help her improve her cooking. Like the walls and ceiling of my New York kitchen today, hers were wainscoted, but the varnish was older and mellower than mine. The copper plumbing must have been added after the house was built, since it was bracketed to the walls rather than embedded in them, and it rattled and groaned whenever the brass faucets were opened over the heavy slate sink.

In summertime, when the kitchen became uncomfortably warm and the fumes of melting tar rising from the street clutched at our throats, I would retreat with a book to a cool pantry just off the kitchen which my grandmother called her “shed,” its walls lined with her preserves in gleaming jars: crab apples, peaches, cucumbers, pie fillings, hot peppers, eggplant, green tomatoes. Since I don’t recall ever being served any of these preserves, I assume the handsome jars were meant for display. My grandmother had an eye for décor. The floor was covered with old patchwork quilts where Pete slept in the summer, and where, under a single dim bulb hanging from a wire, I read the novels of R. L. Stevenson and E. Nesbit, and, with difficulty,
The Pickwick Papers
and
A Tale of Two Cities
in an edition given to subscribers to the local newspaper. I still associate these novels of Dickens with my grandmother’s shed and Pete the bulldog growling softly in his dreams beside me.

My grandmother was born to a prosperous family of Odessa grain merchants who later fell on hard times. She was not meant to be a cook, or a gardener, either. Instead of arranging her plants in rows, she grew them wherever it suited her and them: rhubarb beside the barn, dill by the front door, cabbages beside the hydrangea, rutabaga in the orchard. Her family in the Crimea had been able to keep servants, educate their children, and move in style, first to Argentina and then to the United States, where her father, a grim, bearded presence in an oval frame in the front parlor, speculated in ostrich feathers and lost everything in the Panic of ’07. His wife hung beside him in the parlor, scowling, almond-eyed, and padded like an old samurai.

My grandmother was a brave and cheerful soul and did her best to maintain a certain tone, particularly at mealtime. But some of her special dishes I recall to this day with dismay, especially her chicken pot pie made from a worn-out laying hen. The crust, shiny on top, was gummy underneath, the broth was thin, and the chicken itself overcooked, dry, stringy, and tasteless. Yet our family romance declared her chicken pie a favorite, and my cousins and I dutifully cheered when my dear, beaming grandmother brought the pie in from the kitchen. She had an infectious gift for conviviality. So when the family gathered around her big, round golden-oak dining-room table there was joy despite the pie. She wanted us to be happy, and we were eager to accommodate her belief that the pie made us so.