"To every thing
there is a time..." and it's always
time to eat.
Ecclesiastes 3:
6-10
You Must Remember
This, a Kiss is still a Kiss, a Bean is still a Bean
...and so is a
chestnut still, an eggplant still,
and a mushroom stll.*
Be careful of mushrooms; don't confuse them with
toadstools. They will kill you. If you see a toad
sitting on it, don't eat it. Don't eat the toad
either. You have a brain the size of bowling ball,
so use it. Go bowling.
*Yes, still, not just.
As Time Goes By - words and music by Herman
Hupfeld. 1931.
Turn off your
computer and go watch Casablanca.
Better, go to a sagra. Sagre (plural)are local
festivals held in many villages and towns in
Italy and often dedicated to a local food, such
as chestnuts, wine, and even
beans, Phaseolus vulgaris to you, you
peasant, and other food that crops up (touché!) at sagre
held throughout the year.
Start with dessert. Like this
(image, right). Agatha[a] of Sicily (c. 231 – 251
AD) is a Christian saint, highly venerated in Roman
Catholicism Her feast is on 5 February. She was born
in Catania, part of the Roman Province of Sicily,
and was martyred c. 251. She is the patron saint of
Catania, Molise, Malta, San Marino, Gallipoli in
Apulia, Zamarramala, a town near Segovia in
Spain, among other places. She is the patron saint
of breast cancer patients, martyrs, wet nurses,
bakers, and bell-founders (due to the shape of her
severed breasts). Yes, severed. She was tortured to
death so hideously, you may want to tell your dinner
guests her story before serving dessert, so they
don't ask for more. An annual festival to
commemorate her life takes place in Catania, Sicily,
from 3 to 5 February. The festival culminates in an
all-night procession through the city. The tradition
of making shaped pastry on the feast of St.
Agatha,called "Agatha bread" or buns, is found in
many countries. Saint Agatha
is often depicted iconographically carrying her
excised breasts on a platter, as in Bernardino
Luini's Saint Agatha (1510–1515) in the Galleria
Borghese, Rome, in which Agatha looks at the
breasts that rest on a platter she holds in her
hand.
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Paccheri. I have
taken this from "The Pasta Project", Jacqui
Debono's blog at
https://www.the-pasta-project.com/paccheri/
"The word paccheri comes from the ancient
greek (“πας” -all and “χειρ”
-hand) which translated into Italian means
a pat or a slap given with an open hand, but not in
an aggressive way. In Italian, the word for slap is
‘schiaffo’. Whereas in Neapolitan dialect, it’s ‘una
pacca’. In fact, this pasta has two names, paccheri
and schiaffoni! Many attribute the
name/s to the ‘slapping’ noise made when pouring
sauce onto the pasta!"
I recommend this site highly.
It's laid out well, is friendly, easy to navigate,
and is very informative. -jm
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noodles
"We
Hold these Noodles to be Self-Evident...
Jefferson's
drawing of a macaroni
machine
and instructions for making
pasta, ca. 1787.
Besides
that thing that starts “When in the course of
human events…,” Thomas Jefferson’s other immortal
line was “The best maccaroni [sic] in Italy is
made with a particular sort of flour called
semola, in Naples.” True, he misspelled maccheroni,
but even the Oxford English Dictionary has 6 or 7
spellings for it, from macaroni (the most
common English version) to mackerony. In Italian,
the singular is maccherone; the plural
(obviously the most common form, unless you are
anorexic) is maccheroni. The only correct
Italian spelling in English I have found is one
from 1711 by Joseph Addison, who used maccherone
to mean “a fop" or "dandy."
That is the first paragraph from a longer
article here.Jefferson's adventures in
Noodle Land is quite a story. He came to Italy,
but not as far south as Naples. He did, however,
learn about our pasta and built himself a
noodle-making gizmo so he would never be without.
But —this for the "woke" among
you— he brought two persons
with him, two slaves (!). One was
Sally Hemming, his lovely mistress, and, two, her
brother, his top-notch chef. If you are outraged,
feel free to boycott noodles for the rest of your
life.
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truffles
I know two things about
truffles:
1) Intelligent German shepherd dogs, yes, may dig
them up on a direct order —but they won't
eat them ("Pee-yuuu! You must be kidding. There's
your truffle, maestro. Gimme a biscuit, or I'll
have to run you in. I'm a police dog, too, you
know. And I rescue human children." (This, as
opposed to stupid pigs, which have to wear snout
rings to stop them from devouring the profits.)
(2) Rossini once
called truffles "the Mozart of mushrooms". What
can I say? I still like The William Tell Overture.
That is an excerpt from this
longer article:
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lentils
I have spent the last hour or so
examining the lentil—yes, the common lens
esculenta. Neapolitans go on a lentil binge
at the New Year. It’s because the lentil resembles
a coin —I am here repeating what unregenerate
lentophiles tell me— and if you gorge yourself on
them at the beginning of the New Year, it bodes
well for you; that is, you can expect lots of
little metal lentils—commonly known as coin of the
realm— to come your way. (You have a special
reward stored up for you in Paradise if you can
say “little metal lentil” five times really fast.)
I have eyeballed lentils even with a magnifying
lens (hence the name lens esculenta—they
look like a lens… lenses?…lensi? Esculenta
means "edible"), and they still look like little
beans to me. OK, a little convex on one side
(which maybe means they are concave on the other
side, but I’m not sure —I failed fabatopographics,
the study of the description of beans. I majored
in music in college), but, essentially, it’s a
funny-looking bean. I don’t get it. After all,
Averroes claimed that lentils cause melancholic
blood, obscure vision, constrict the stomach and
impede sexual activity. So, come on. Is a little
extra money in the new year worth all that?
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slow food
I
remember the First International Pasta
Exhibition at the gigantic passenger terminal
of the Port of Naples. They spent a lot of
time talking about eating and not enough time
actually handing out free samples. There was a
panel of self-important sociologists holding
forth on "Societal Incorporation of Emerging
Syntheses in Higher Order Gastronomic
Structures". They whined about "fast food".
MacDonald's are all over and —food philistine
that I am— I have eaten there. The main one is
in the university district and is actually not
a bad place for students to sit and read. No
one hassles them if they nurse a soft-drink
for an hour or so. I am reminded of the title
of Hemingway's short-story, A Clean
Well-Lighted Place. Everyone needs a
place to sit sometimes. There is an
Italian anti-fast-food society with the
English name "Slow Food". They use a stylized
image of a snail as their logo (photo) and
send out invitations to their monthly affairs.
You show up and spend a half-hour or so
warming up by admiring the vittles— the
texture of this noodle or aroma of that
artichoke. Ah, maccheroni 97!—an excellent
year—with an aggressive but not presumptuous
bouquet that we think will amuse you. After all,
they reason, their imperial ancestors
dined slowly, sumptuously, in the most
leisurely Claudius-peel-me-a-grape fashion
imaginable. Right?
Uh...no, wrong.
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Roman
Fast-Food
"Possum tubera
solani fricta habere?"*
I
call the sloth-besotted attention of my
fast-foodlers to Dr. Penelope Allison's recent
book The Insula of the Menander at Pompeii
Volume III: The Finds, a Contextual Study
(Oxford University Press,
2007). It has catalogues, analyses, photos and
drawings of 2,000 archaeological artifacts
excavated in Pompeii. The great empire builders
were out of the sack by mid-March at the latest.
The average ancient Roman ate on
the run (!) and—(drum-roll)—did not wine and dine in
measured decadence the way you see them doing in
movies about ancient Rome. As a matter of fact,
the ancient Romans never even saw
movies about ancient Rome! (Dr. Allison doesn’t
say that; I’m just trying to help out.) She
says, "In many parts of the western world today,
a popular belief exists that family members
should sit down and dine together and, if they
don't, this may represent a breakdown of the
family structure."
* "Can I get fries
with that?"
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wine
Of wine,
wine Pest, Names of Wine
& Leonardo da Vinci's vineyard
We had good wine some time
ago right down at water's edge of Lake Averno,
the place of the fabled descent into the Inferno
(from the name "Averno," by the way). Our host
told us that his vineyard and a few others down
along the slopes of the lake and in a few other
places in Italy produced unusual wine for this
day and age in Europe; this is because they
enjoy the same soil characteristics (having to
do with nearby volcanoes and other subterranean
goings-on).
(The entire article is here.)
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haggis
Address to a haggis pizza. Many
Neapolitan restaurants I walk into have a bit of
verse on the wall, some sort of poetic tribute
to pizza, telling you how hard it is to make a
real pizza. The poem might be by a local dialect
poet or even Robert Burns (image) or something
by Dante, himself (the so-called 'massimo topping
of Italian literature', who once said of the
Neapolitan delicacy, "Insomma"
("yeah...well"). Richard Feynman supposedly (I
suppose) once said that "Quantum mechanics does
not impose upper limits on what you can put on a
pizza." Scientific guy that I am, I have held to
that. This, in spite of my wife's declaration,
after enjoying a Taco pizza in Honolulu, that
"this is good, but they should call it something
else because it's not pizza." But I kept true to
science. I accepted (as reported in my bible, The
International Journal of Gastronomic
Syncretism) such international delicacies
as a squid ink pizza; a pickle, port and grape
pizza; a marsh-mellow and dark chocolate pizza;
and, in Finland, a smoked reindeer pizza called
"the Berlusconi." (Yes, they all
exist.)
This an extract from a longer article, here.
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Easter
On the Thursday (yesterday) before
Easter, my neighbors were having "zuppa di
soffritto" a sautéed, "strong soup", a
highly seasoned stew of pig lung, trachea, heart
and skin." Since I wouldn't touch that even with
the proverbial 3.048-meter barge pole, I shall
move on. There are wonderful things to eat in
Naples before, on and after Easter: such as the
Colomba, a special, dove-shaped Easter bread
(symbolizing hope), embedded with candied orange
peel and topped with almonds and sugar bits
(symbolizing your sweet tooth). And boiled eggs
are always a prominent part of Italian Easter
meals, symbolizing life, renewal and fertility.
Sometimes, parishioners bring boiled eggs or
chocolate ones to church to be blessed at Sunday
mass.
Chocolate eggs are
indeed very big; that is, very popular, but some
of them are also gigantic in size. Our famous Gay
Odin chocolate makers are powering through their
busiest time of the year. (No, that name doesn't
mean "Happy Wotan", but nice try.) In Naples, you
will have soup or pasta for the first course. If
you are undecided, put the pasta in your soup.
Some will call you a slob. I call it gastronomic
daredevilry.
Lamb is a common
second course. You can get solemn and ruin the
meal for everyone by noting that only the cross is
a more powerful Christian symbol than the lamb.
"The Lamb of God" is one of Messianic titles of
Jesus. Capretto (roast kid goat) is another
popular choice. I have only had that once, and I
was in Greece. I was the guest of honor and they
offered me the specialty, a "variety meat", one of
the glands used as food and sometimes called
"sweetbreads". "They're small. Take two." They
always come in pairs. Over home we call them Rocky
Mountain oysters. In Italian they are "granelli"
(lit. 'granules'). You don't need them to enjoy
your Easter meal.
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The Wizard's Secret
"They still say that
late on a Saturday night in the house of the
Cortellari, up in the wizard's room, Cicho returns
to cut his maccheroni, and Jovanella can
be seen stirring the pot of sauce while the devil,
himself, grates cheese with one hand and fans the
flame with the other."
That is the
last paragraph of "The Wizard's Secret," one of
the marvelous stories in Matilde Serao's Neapolitan
Legends, first published in 1891. The
complete story is here.
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PIZZAGATE
Recent stats tell us
that 7,000 pizzerias in Campania closed during the
pandemic . Northern businessman., Flavio Briatore,
wants to do us a favor and open a northern pizzeria
down here. (My computer balked at that: "Are you
sure you want to write "northern pizzeria"? It gave
me two choices: NO and VERY NO. To
interpret the symbolism of the image (right) that
ran with this item in la Reppublica, that is
the maw of a pizza oven from whence is being taken
out a good-looking pizza... the banked oven
itself... hmmmm .... that is Mt. Vesuvius, The whole
8.23 meters of the symbolism is "light at the end of
the tunnel". Thus: "From us in the north to you
in the south, this is where you are get good pizza
from here on. From us!" To be impartial --you
know me-- Flavio Briatore is a total douchebag,
convicted in Italy on several fraud charges and
currently enjoys spending what little remains of his
81-year-old life hanging out with supermodels. He
reminds me of the next food item.
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Oh, yeah?!
A
point-by-point rebuttal to Johnny Burke, who
whote the lyrics to Swinging on a Star,
sharing an Oscar with Jimmy Van Heusen for Best
Original Song of 1944. For THIS?!
"A pig
is an animal with dirt on his face, /
his shoes are a terrible disgrace,
he's got
no manners when he eats his food, / he's fat and
lazy and extremely rude,
but if
you don't care a feather or a fig, / you may grow up
to be a pig."
1. So? They cleaned me after
slaughtering me, without even stunning me first.
Bastards.
2. I don't wear shoes, you moron, and you are
about to get a cloven hoof up where the moon don't
shine.
3. I do oink a bit when I eat, yes. What,
you've never slurped soup? 4. I'll cop to
chubby and indolent. I am not rude, so oink you!
5. Shove your feather and fig. 6.
Burke was right about the mule —stupid and stubborn.
But I was proud to be a pig.
