Local in Rhode Island: Italian Rules

I am back in Rhode Island, and some things never change. This past week, our twice-mayor (6 terms in bundles of three)—and twice-convicted/once jailed-- talk show host, and pasta sauce entrepreneur Buddy Cianci announced he will run for another mayoral term. The legislature voted calamari the official state appetizer. Note the themes: food, corruption, Italian.

So for my son’s birthday I made a typical Rhode Island Italian meal. I was going to do the squid, but forgot to get it on my shopping trip, so for appetizers we had some Italian cheeses, some perfect melon and imported San Daniele prosciutto di Parma, and some wild shrimp with an orange-mustard-tarragon sauce. And Americanos for drinks. For the main course, for a special dinner in Rhode Island Italian world you want to start with some giant veal chops from Venda Ravioli (Costantino’s). I cooked them on the grill and served them with a little roasted garlic and sage butter, accompanied by grilled veggies (red peppers, zucchini, yellow crookneck, and radicchio) with reduced balsamic and thyme, and a very Rhode Island jonnycake polenta. A nice Fossacolle Rosso de Montalcino. Had to buy dessert (horrors) because the cooking equipment I’d ordered to make a cake was inadvertently shipped to Arizona. But it was good. 

So I just said that some things never change, but, you know, some do. I am not in Little Compton this summer. I’m on Conanicut Island—Jamestown—in the middle of Narragansett Bay between Newport and the mainland, or as we say here, between West and East Bay. As master of the neither here nor there, the generally at sea, I am perhaps unsurprisingly right at home. It is, after all, almost as old a Rhode Island settlement as Little Compton, and still Newport County. A short sail away.

Rhode Island Jonnycake Pan-fried Polenta

I used Kenyon’s meal for this; you can use any of our RI stoneground white flint cornmeals. You can, of course, serve the cooked polenta soft, with butter and parm, or tomato sauce and/or some sausage and mushrooms. Serves 4.

1 cup RI johnnycake cornmeal

4 cups water, approx.

2 T butter

2 tea salt

Freshly ground pepper

In a 3-qt saucepan (nonstick is useful if you have one), whisk about 1 ½ cups water into the cornmeal, then whisk in the additional 2 ½ c water. Bring the mixture to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring fairly continuously. It will begin to thicken rather quickly. Be careful not to splatter yourself as it reaches a boil. Stir in the salt, butter, and pepper. Reduce the heat and let it simmer/heave for about 45 minutes; it will have the consistency of mashed potatoes, and pull from the bottom of the pan.

If you plan to pan-fry it, pour the polenta into an ungreased glass pie plate or 8” square pan. Let stand for about ten minutes, then cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate until firm—a few hours, or overnight. Cut into wedges, squares, or diamonds, dredge lightly in seasoned flour, and fry in a little olive oil or butter or olive oil until nicely golden. Serve immediately. 

Artichokes: Grilling the Globe

The opposite of the baby artichoke is the giant globe. Years ago when I lived California, artichokes were a plentiful and relatively cheap staple, and were common on the restaurant menus and friends’ tables. I lived not too far from Castroville, the “artichoke capital of the world,” and would go to the annual fair and eat them, large and small, every which way. I took them rather for granted.

Since then—and it has been a very long time—I have largely bought artichokes when they looked particularly good, and were at a particularly good price, in the market. This was not all that often. When I lived in Nashville, I discovered a grilled artichoke at Bricktop’s that became one of my mainstays in that otherwise food-bereft and regressive Deep South town. Bricktop’s is a chain, which tells you something about the food scene in Nashville at the time, but it was a good, reliable place, and it and its grilled artichoke became something of a comfort to me during my years there. I would often stop in after teaching late—until 7:30 p.m.—on a Thursday night, the end of my teaching week, and order a grilled artichoke and a glass of red wine. That grilled artichoke, served with melted butter and remoulade (they have since switched to aioli, apparently), remains for me the gold standard of grilled artichokes.

So of course, I try to make mine taste just the same. While I don’t have their superhot restaurant grill, I can come pretty close. Here is how to do it, using globe artichokes purchased for $1.00 each at my local supermarket. They are a sign or spring. Like the gila monster, who comes out around the same time of year, and has similarly vicious tendencies in its natural state

Grilled Artichokes with American Remoulade

I like to have an artichoke all to myself, and make a meal out of it. If following with a steak, half an artichoke per person will do. And you can dip it into anything creamy mayonnaise-based sauce that suits your fancy: aioli, lemon mayo, ranch dressing, or this Americanized version (minus capers and cornichons) of remoulade. Just be sure you make it fresh.

1 artichoke per person                

Lemon juice

Flour

Olive oil

Salt and pepper

American Remoulade

1 cup mayonnaise, preferably homemade

1 1/2 T mixed tarragon, parsley, chervil, chive; the tarragon and parsley are essential

1 T Dijon mustard or more to taste

1 anchovy filet, mashed, or 1 small garlic clove, crushed

1 tea minced shallot

Drop or two Tabasco sauce

1-2 tea lemon juice to thin

Salt and pepper

Lemon wedges

Melted butter

Trim the stems of large artichokes to about ½” and remove any loose lower leaves. Using a sharp knife, square off the top of the artichoke, cutting across the top spines, and then, using sharp kitchen shears, cut off the tops of the other leaves, removing all spines.  Put a few inches of water in a 3-4 qt saucepan with a lid, add a little lemon juice and a sprinkling of flour, and place in the artichokes, stems down, so the artichokes are touching and remain upright. Bring to a boil, covered, then reduce the heat and steam until you can pierce through the center straight to the bottom with a sharp knife, about 15­-20 minutes. Do not overcook.

Remove, allow to cool, then cut in half vertically. With a spoon, remove and discard the fuzzy choke. Combine all the remoulade ingredients to taste and set aside.

Brush the artichokes with olive oil seasoned with salt and pepper.  Grill face-down on a hot grill for 5 minutes; turn to grill  for another 3-5 minutes, until nicely charred. Serve with lemon wedges, the sauce, and some melted butter or more olive oil mixed with salt and pepper for dipping.

More Bread: Poolish Makes Perfect

Continuing with the Forkish book, I tried another bread, on a day with no expectation of power outage at baking time. This one was what he calls his "Harvest Bread with Poolish." The recipe calls for 10% whole wheat, for which I substituted organic pumpernickel, and 5% wheat germ and 2% wheat bran; I used all wheat germ, or 7%. I seem to like more hydration, or maybe I was a little sloppy when adding water, so increased that too—probably to 80%. This dough is about 50% poolish. Interesting.

Poolish after 13 hrs

The bread is just as Forkish describes: buttery and aromatic. It is soft, flavorful, with a moist open crumb and a nice crisp crust. In addition to being very good, this bread suits my lifestyle, at least on weekends. You mix the poolish at 6:00 pm, leave it on the counter overnight, mix the dough at 7:00 a.m. next morning, and bake around 10 a.m. A couple of folds early in bulk fermentation.  A total breeze. Much more convenient, and better taste and texture, than the Saturday Bread.

In fact, I am a little worried about just how easy and convenient. Bread like this is just about the best thing to have for breakfast, toasted or not, with butter, and jam or not. And just about the best thing to have for lunch, with a good cheddar or gruyere.  And just about the best thing to have for dinner, with a salad or some sautéed mushrooms and wine. Or both. Pretty soon you’ve eaten half a loaf in a day. Half of a two-pound loaf, that is. Yikes!

Thank goodness I have friends who like bread. 

Can’t Buy Me Bread

Last Fall the local French bakery, run by a young French couple, closed shop and, with it, their stand at the farmer’s market where I bought my bread, and moved onto the more appreciative climes of LA. That left what I consider to be the only worthy bread baker, but his business model doesn’t suit me: you have to remember, on Friday morning, to go online by 7:00 and wait for him to post the bread offerings for ordering and then pick-up the next day—at another prescribed time, 11:00 a.m.—at a different, less convenient local farmer’s market. If you are a little late, what you want may be sold out. Then of course you might forget to pick it up, if you, like me, get up early and are already well into your day by 11. Pity those who like to sleep late, too! They would have to set their alarm to order bread.

So while I have done this a few times, and it may all seem so quaint and local at first blush, I quickly tired of it. There was a tendency to feel like you had to order bread while you could, resulting in your buying too much—or settling for a bread you don’t really want if others were already taken. And of course, even when you set your phone alarm, missing either the ordering or the pickup for one reason or another. To say nothing of the somewhat soup-Nazi quality of the baker, complete with long—yup—bread lines for pickup. Not for me.

I absolutely adore bread, carbohydrates be damned, and from time to time over the course of the last 40 years or so, have made my own bread on a regular or semi-regular basis. Bread books take up a full shelf in my very large cookbook collection, and I can’t resist a new one (or a new old one if I come across something forgotten but interesting), and recently added the Forkish book after reading a lot of praise. I have several artisan books, so there’s not a lot new here, more of a synthesis, and I don’t know if it will become a favorite—won’t know ‘til I try the levains. But trying the first simple bread gave me a story to tell, so here it is.

Finding myself with a free day—amazingly, having finished project grading early—I thought, why not stay

home and bake bread? The whole thing is so simple that I had a lovely, relaxing day, reading and puttering between stages. I used a local Arizona heritage grain flour from Hayden Mills, mixed with a little first clear flour and dark rye, and adjusted the hydration to 80%. This was going to be good!

When the dough was perfectly proofed, I was just about to put it in the oven when: the electricity went out. Which means, of course, my oven did too.

I waited a few minutes—maybe this was just a blip?—but no. I looked out—everything, the entire city, was in the dark; we had been having a wild storm all day, the first rain in months. I put the proofed dough in the refrigerator. The oven went cold. Forty-five minutes later, the electricity came on, and I pre-heated the oven again.  By the time it was ready, my dough had spent about over an hour in the fridge, and it had suffered by becoming a little overproofed despite the cold. I knew what that meant.

aving

They say every cloud has a sliver lining. Here is a golden one, complete with rainbow, snapped from my patio while waiting for the lights to come back on. And here is the bread. Worth another try.

The Last Supper: In Memoriam

The last meal of the year should be special in some way, and I always make myself something of which I am particularly fond, like a good veal chop or an old-fashioned London broil; something symbolic, like lentils; or something I don’t often have time to do, like a classic lobster bisque with a New England twist.  Whatever it is, it is something comforting. This year, as all you true foodies know, was a year of lost luminaries in the food world, and two in particular, Marcella Hazan and Judy Rogers, were old kitchen friends of mine. What to make in memoriam for the year and these women whose food has comforted me and millions over many years?  I will save Judy Rogers’s roast chicken with bread salad for another tribute meal, soon. Marcella and I go way back, and it is one simple dish—spaghetti with smothered onions—that I have made and loved scores of times, that seems the perfect punctuation for the year, and the perfect emblem of the genius of Italian cooking.

After the news of Mrs. Hazen’s death, when everyone was talking about their favorite dishes, I realized that I had really learned to make Italian food from her books, The Classic Italian Cookbook and More Classic Italian Cooking. This actually came to me as somewhat of a shock, because I had literally internalized so many of the recipes that I scarcely open the books anymore, which I bought when they were first published by Knopf: 1976  and 1978, respectively—I was still in my 20s! I had completely forgotten, for example, that I learned to make pizza, which I made every single Friday night for more than 20 years, and still do often, from her second book. I still make my dough, and my sauce, the same way. I could list dozens of dishes that are just as second-nature, and just as frequently made.

Marcella Hazan once said, “"I am never bored by a good old dish and I wouldn't shrink from making something that I first made fifty years ago and my mother, perhaps, fifty years before then.”  I couldn’t agree more.

Happy 2014. Eat well, and stay healthy.

Spaghetti col Sugo di Cipolle

(Spaghetti with Smothered Onions)

I have made only one minor change to this perfect recipe, indicated below. It contains lard, which you all know I adore; you can substitute butter or use all olive oil if you must. But do try the lard in Mrs. Hazan’s honor. Serves 4-6 as a first course.

1 ½ T lard

5 T extra virgin olive oil

1 ½ lb sweet onions, liced very thin

Salt

Freshly ground pepper

Freshly grated nutmeg (my addition; optional)

½ cup dry white wine

2 T chopped fresh parsley

1/3 cup freshly grated Parmesan

Heat the oil and lard in a large sauté pan; add the onions, cover, and cool over very low heat for 45 min or more, til soft.  Uncover, raise the heat to medium-high, and cook until golden brown, scraping with a wooden spoon occasionally. Sprinkle liberally with salt and pepper, and a whisper of nutmeg. Add the wine, raise the heat, and stir until the wine has boiled away and you have a golden, creamy-looking mass. Stir in the parsley and remove from the heat.

Cook the spaghetti until firm—about 10-12 minutes. Reheat the sauce gently. Drain the pasta and add to the sauté pan; raise the heat and toss for a minute. Serve with the grated cheese, tossing lightly. You can also have a little garlic bread, really a bruschetta, the way Mrs. Hazen directs: toast the bread lightly; rub with a smashed clove of fresh garlic; and drizzle fairly generously with olive oil so it softens nicely. Mangia!

Catching Up On Christmas

Sometimes the holidays sneak up on you—or rather, you are able to disregard their advancing pace—while you are getting your work done. I have gotten good at that—simply not thinking about Christmas until, well, I can: until all the grades are in, and I’ve given myself a day to recover. This seems to be a little later every year, as judged by the dwindling number of types of cookie I manage to make. This year, only two. Will there be, in some not too distant future, a cookieless Christmas? Or will I retire, and once again be able to bestow (to the worthy, of course, and assuming I still had the energy) tins bursting with an assortment of my critically collected, carefully curated favorites?

 

Time will tell what cookies lay in my—and your--Christmas future. But for 2013, Christmas was simple all around.  No fancy dinner like last year or so many others. In fact, Christmas Eve this year was almost like a weeknight supper—homey, comforting, easy-peasy, special only in that it was a little rich for nowadays. You all know this old-fashioned meal very well: a glazed ham (with a sauce made with preserved Little Compton sour cherries); scalloped potatoes; roasted cauliflower with hazelnut buttered bread crumbs; a Christmasy red and green salad. A deep fried appetizer, cheddar cheese puffs, for a little festivity, with champagne. My favorite chocolate cake for dessert, which we did not eat until last night, as it turned out. All in all, a pretty good dinner for a Christmas Eve that arrived early, or to which I arrived late. 

I hope you had a happy holiday, whenever yours began, and that you had time to make at least one cookie.

Scalloped Potatoes

Something creamy for Christmas is always in order; something that can be assembled ahead is doubly so. Here is how I make scalloped potatoes, learned by watching my grandmother. Do not expect measurements(and none needed)! Serves 2-3.

2 large russet potatoes (I urge this  variety on you.)

2-3 thin slices from a large onion, chopped

Flour

Unsalted butter

Salt, freshly ground pepper, freshly grated nutmeg

1 ½ cups light cream or half-and-half

Butter a 1-qt gratin dish. Preheat the oven to 300 F.

Peel the potatoes and slice them very thin, about 1/16.” Place a layer of potatoes neatly into the dish; sprinkle with a little of the chopped onion;

strew lightly with a little flour from your hand; dot with a little butter; sprinkle lightly with salt and pepper and—sparingly—nutmeg. Repeat, filling the dish to within about ½” of the top.  You will use about 1-2 T each of butter and flour in all, but don’t measure, just use your judgment and keep a light touch with the flour.

Barely scald the cream and pour it over the layered potatoes; press the potatoes down lightly with the back of a wooden spoon. Bake about 1 ½ hrs (the cream will bubble up) until golden.

National Indian Pudding Day

Lest it pass you by, I come briefly out of blog hiatus to give a shout out to Indian Pudding.  I knew it had its own day, being from the land of its provenance, but I suspect that you were shamefully unaware. So now you know. Today is National Indian Pudding Day, and if you have never had it, do try. It is one of the many items that uses our wonderful jonnycake cornmeal, and there is a recipe right here on this very blog—omg, posted five years ago—that you can use. If you're not sure which cornmeal to choose, I refer you to this completely scientific comparison.

There is even a story on NPR about it. It says that interest in New England cooking is on the upswing. As usual, I seem to have been ahead of my time (always have problems with timing); guess I should get back to this….but when??