Snack

Deviled eggs can create a fair amount of anxiety. It’s the peeling that’s the problem. Experts say older eggs with more of an air pocket peel more easily, some say leave the cooked eggs in the fridge a couple of days before peeling, some say add a little vinegar to the boiling water. All we know is that when it counts, they don’t peel. Deviled Egg Spread with Smoked Paprika is the happy outcome after a fit of frustration with a bowl of broken hard-cooked eggs. Hey, you’re thinking, that’s just egg salad. So what! The smoked paprika adds the devil and makes a perfectly lovely spread for party rye or crackers.

Before he discovered cheater BBQ, the only indoor kitchen appliance R. B. had a serious relationship with was the toaster oven. He fancies himself the master of all things topped with melted cheese. Predictably, leftovers of this smoky cheese spread went right into the toaster oven on slices of thick rustic bread. Smoky Pimiento Cheese Bruschetta! Min took it to the next level with sliced fresh tomato, a few green onion bits, and a basil leaf for a “New South” Italian appetizer. Of course, the pimiento cheese is fantastic on a big juicy Cheater Kitchen Burger (page 119). We also serve our pimiento cheese along with Cheater Foie Gras (page 21), each spread on tart Granny Smith apple slices.

Like popcorn, nuts taste best sprinkled with extra-fine-grained salt that sticks to the snack. That’s why the cheater thing to use here is Lawry’s seasoned salt, a ready-to-go finely ground blend of salt, seasoning, and sugar that becomes one with the nut. If you use coarse kosher salt, you’ll find the flakes sitting in the bottom of the bowl. You can smoke all kinds of nuts—peanuts, pecans, whatever you like—but the nuts must be raw. Stay close to the oven during the final ten minutes of roasting. The toasty fragrance will let you know when they are ready.

In the Sard dialect, the town of Villagrande is called Biddamanna. There, a vast parcel of Sard earth is su cumonale—owned by everyone of the community. Shepherds can pasture their sheep, townsfolk can collect wood for their fires, a family can cultivate a small orchard, a garden of vegetables. The Biddamannesi can walk kilometer after kilometer through forests, into the mountains, onto the moors, hunting, foraging, gathering, as they have done forever in this town with no walls, no fences. And, too, they cook for each other over great fires laid in the piazza near the village hall on feast days. Cauldrons of thick soups, mutton poached with wild grasses, and beautiful handmade pastas are offered with baskets of pane carasau and barrels of rough, purply cannonau. Though all Sards seem passionate about making packets of their food, these Biddamannesi seem more devoted, even, to the pursuit. They urge rough doughs into pouches and pillows plumped with all manner of savories and sweets, the bundles tumbled into gurgling oil or baked over wood embers or gently poached. Culingionis are raviolo-like pasta typically stuffed with bitter greens and an acidy, fresh ewe’s milk cheese or a paste of potatoes, nutmeg, cloves, wild mint, and pecorino. Though these are luscious, it is a half day’s ceremony to make them. Hence, I sometimes wrap the good potato paste in a crisp quilting of cheese pastry, a quickly done deed that gives up all the savor of the culingionis plus the prize of a gorgeous scent as the crostata bakes to crispness.

The poorest, perhaps, of all Sard dishes, some version of mazzamurru is often a shepherd’s supper or humble sustenance for a bountyless hunter’s family. Made of whatever stuffs might be at hand, the commonalities of mazzamurru are rich ewe’s milk, some rough bread, and shards of sharp, salty cheese. The ornaments are often a handful of wild grasses or a few sun-dried tomatoes, some olives, a crush of dried herbs. Present the mazzamurru with a bowlful of some simple tomato sauce or, better, no sauce at all, its nakedness tasting of such goodness.

Demeter, the goddess of grain, hallowed by i siculi—the warrior tribe that inhabited the island before the Greeks—was all of resplendence, even to the high crown formed from her flaxen braids. It was she who illuminated the magic of sowing seeds beneath the earth and then protecting them, feeding them, and growing them up into ripeness. The tribe’s harvests grew ever more abundantly, the goddess conjuring the sun and the rain and the breezes on their behalf, they honoring her with great bonfires under the full moon’s light and ritual offerings of bread and wine. The island was Elysium, uninterrupted. And then, heaving himself up through a rent in the earth’s crust, Pluto stole Demeter’s daughter, Persephone, as plunder for his abyss. Demeter screeched and mourned and cast Sicilia into darkness. There was nothing to nourish her tribe save the tears Demeter cried down from the heavens. So clamorously did the goddess petition him that Pluto succumbed, vowing riddance to the child as much as to her shrewish mother. He would liberate Persephone. Only then, though, did Pluto take note that Persephone had cut in two a pomegranate, and that she sat slaking her child’s thirst on its juices and its glistening, rosy seeds—a blunder. He howled up at her mother that Persephone had devoured the sacred seeds of fertility, and for this sin he must halve his promise. Just as she had broken the fruit, Persephone would be liberated for only six months of every year. And, as penance, she must, each year and everlastingly, stay six months in the shades of Hades. And so it was that Demeter heralded the sun and the rain and raised up the wheat, thick and golden, from May through October, when Persephone was at her side, leaving the island barren and under an impotent sun from November until April—her half-mourning an allegory of the seasons, of life and of death. In the early springtime, one can see still the great roaring fires lit by Sicilian wheat farmers and whole villages in dance and song, invoking the gods’ promise to keep safe their newly sown fields. Only now, old, sweet Demeter, pagan that she was, has been supplanted by St. Joseph, her powers having been ferried over into his realm. Not so long after a woman in Palermo had told us this story of Demeter, we were staying awhile in Enna, an interior agricultural city. One evening, the man who served our supper of rough-cut semolina pasta with a mutton sauce and thick chops of pork, oven-roasted with wild onions, dispatched to our table his mother—a fine country cook—with the sad news that she’d had not a moment to put together some rustic little tart or other that day. There would be no sweet. Unless, of course, she murmured, we’d like a pomegranate with un cucchiaino di zabaglione—a small spoonful of custard. We agreed. What she brought forth to us on an old plate of cranberry-colored glass were two pomegranates that seemed to be broken rather than cut in two, their crimson juices spilling out from the jagged shells with tiny coffee spoons plunged into the hearts of seeds. Two diminutive porcelain pitchers of some winy custard were laid beside the plate. We were urged to pour the custard over, into the pomegranates. Sweet but not quite sweet against the tart, peppery seeds, the sauce was the color of ambered muscadine, its scent that of crushed violets. It was a plate quietly, achingly beautiful to see and to eat. Later, when we asked her son if we might give our thanks to his mother for the fine supper and, especially, for the pomegranates, he told us that she’d gone upstairs to bed. Thinking to write our thanks in a little note, I asked him, “What is her name?” “Mia madre si chiama Demetra,” said the man. “My mother is called Demeter.” Startled, dazed even, for a moment, the story of Demeter came racing to mind. Thinking the note unnecessary, all we said w...

There is wild tufted mint between the megalithic stones of its befogged and silent fields. And Africa whispers up sultry winds, caressing the place, adding to the sensation of faraway. This is the island of Giovanni di Lampedusa, author of Il Gattopardo, The Leopard. It is a mystical space etched by the ancients, one after another of them who, having stayed for a while, imprinted it, abandoned it, to its own muffled secrets and to the great lumbering turtles and seals who live there still. Surely not Italy, not, perhaps, Sicilia nor even Africa, it is somewhere else, this Lampedusa. Inhabited, finally, without interruption since 1843, when the king Ferdinando II came to claim it, a family descended from this settlement was once our host. The children and their nanny showed us the best, most secret places to collect the wild mint of which we’d grown so fond, we making a salad of its leaves and other wild grasses when enough of it could be foraged. One afternoon, after a particularly good harvest, we emptied our pockets of it onto the kitchen table, thinking we’d all feast on it at dinner, and went upstairs to bathe and rest. Later, the loveliest of perfumes told us that the mint had been seized by the cook and that she’d done something magnificent with it and tomatoes. Here follows a version of her gorgeous frittelle.

An intriguing bread both sweet with honey and anise and savory with pepper and pancetta, versions of it have been baked for pagan and sacred and secular festivals since the epoch of the Greeks. Giuseppe Fazia sometimes bakes the gorgeous, fragrant bread at his forno in Via Tommasini in Reggio Calabria.

Sitting a few kilometers from the snarls of the city’s traffic, Mondello is Palermo’s beachfront. Less chic than it is drowsy, the tiny port’s center is paved with little trattorie that offer still-writhing sea fish from which one can choose a fine lunch. And at noon, just as bathers and strollers longing for some icy little aperitivo start off for the bars and caffès, a husky, microphoned voice seeming to come from the fat, dark leaves of the old plane trees intrudes on the operetta. With the precision of a corps de ballet, the cast of characters pivots in the direction of a small white truck, chugging slowly, then edging to a stop in their midst. Lo sfincionaro has arrived. In another place, he might be called the pizza man, though his is hardly some prosaic pie. His voice invites: “Just come to see them. They are warm and fragrant. I don’t ask that you buy one. I only invite you to admire them.” We watched as there came a fast gathering of his devoted. Mothers and babies, men in rumply Palm Beach suits, Australian fishermen on holiday, an Englishwoman with a great yellow hat and a silver-headed cane. Children clutching five-lire notes collected, each of them waiting for lo sfincionaro to enfold a great, warm heft of his beautiful onion-scented bread into a sheet of soft gray paper. A traditional confection of Palermo, it is called lo sfincione. It is a crunchy, rich, bread-crusted tart—and close kin to southern France’s pissaladière—that cradles sautéed onions, dried black olives, sun-dried tomatoes, anchovies, pancetta, and pecorino. Fashioning smaller sfincioni and piling them up, newly born, in an old basket and passing them about with jugs of cold white wine can make for a lovely summer supper.

Once used only to bake the fanciful soldiers on horseback given to children on the festival of San Martino, the short, buttery dough, in less fantastical shapes and forms, is a daily offering now in every pasticceria, luscious even with the slurring of its namesake.

To tear at a beautiful, newborn bread and eat it with fat, salty olives, a potent red wine sipped between them, is a meal everlasting in its innocence and sensuality. Here follows the simplest of recipes that pairs the soft creaminess of roasted garlic with the olives for a lush result. The dish asks only a little dalliance in the oven. Roasting the olives plumps them, renders them voluptuously fleshy, tender. And when whole, fat garlic—caramelized in a long, slow roasting—confronts the salt-tinged meat of the warm olives, the whole becomes quietly paradisiacal. As beautiful as it is, stray for a moment from the red wine idea and consider a fusion, instead, with an iced Marsala Superiore Riserva or Marsala Vergine or Marsala Soleras Stravecchio—altogether different wine from the often industrially produced sweet varieties that find their way to the States and are used to make zabaglione or to splash sautéed veal. The crackling, almost dry golden chill of them leaves just a point of sweetness on the tongue.

So unlike the exquisitely wrought sweetmeats of other southern pasticcerie, pastry in Basilicata is often in the form of some rustic fried fritter, its batter honey-sweetened and studded with raisins or nuts. The most luscious version, though, is the one that asks for ricotta and dark rum. We found them being made in a small shop with an even smaller selling counter on a little street off the Via Pretoria, just before one reaches Piazza Mario Pagano in Potenza. On more than one iced winter’s morning have we stood outside its doors and waited for the sugar-dusted, crisp-crusted warmth of them.

A pastry reflecting the famous half-roasted, almond-stuffed, bay and anise-perfumed figs that Puglia exports to all of Europe, the ripe sensuality of it merits a true hunger, one not dulled by the prologue of some long, winy supper. Nibble only at a plate of fresh cheeses before it. Better, present it with no prelude at all.

If I were given the task of choosing one bread from all the bakers of Italy, one that I could eat everyday and forever, it would be the golden-fleshed bread of Altamura, its thick skin, parched, crackled, its form a fat, crisped heart, cleaved nearly in two.

...Anchovies, and Black Olives) Brindisi, the ancient Brundisium of the Romans, is a sort of rough, emotionally bankrupt port city. Still, we like to walk and sit, sometimes, on the edges of its rickety old wharfs early of a morning to inhale the bright, briny tableau of the place. And round about eight-thirty—high noon for the fishermen, who rise before the sun—we wait to see the baker’s boy running down the docks, toting a great basket of puddica—traditional Brindisino flatbreads—just born and sending up great hungering perfumes for the fishermen’s lunch. It seemed to us the highest form of ceremony left in the dour old place.

A while ago, I’d heard from a friend about a tart made with oranges from the groves on the island of Capri, it, once an idyll and now mostly a tourist ruin just seventeen kilometers across the bay from Napoli. Specifically, it was the island’s village of Anacapri that was the scene of my friend’s tart story. She told me that the confection was barely sugared, so perfect were the oranges of its making. She said it was all of a cool cream in the mouth, each little bite of it a sensual, sweet/pungent explosion. She said that even the crust was scented with oranges, perhaps with some locally distilled liqueur of the fruit, and that, too, the crust gave up some soft breath of herb, like wild mint or rosemary. But where in Anacapri, I begged, never having seen the sweet in any pasticceria nor read of it on any menu nor found it perched on any dessert cart. Worse, everyone I asked about the tart shook their heads. “Non c’è una cosa del genere qui, signora.” “There is nothing of that sort here, madam.” This bantering betwixt my friend and I has endured several years. She insists that the tart, indeed, exists. I think it some citrusy half-dream of hers, a tart that should have been, perhaps, but one that never yet was, at least not in Anacapri. And so I baked it, hearing her gurglings and swoonings in my mind at every step. Though I’ve yet to make it for her—she living in Oregon while I’m here in Tuscany—I offer it here and tell you, humbly, of its goodness, of its simple sort of persuasiveness. I think it is the pastry I would make and share and eat on the last day of the world.

Historically the Napoletani have been able and brilliant friggitori—fryers of food. Until only a few years past and sometimes, still, in the quarters of the poor, the very air was thick with the scents of food being crisped to a light gold in boiling oil. The humble kiosks of the friggitori, traditionally wagons fitted with cauldrons, were wheeled about the dank alleyways, the friggitori wailing out the worth of their salty wares, promising them to be “nuvole ricoperte d’un manto dorato”—“clouds mantled in gold.” Sometimes, the offering was a nugget of simple bread dough stretched out and fried, then dusted in sea salt and anointed with oil, other times there might be little croquettes of rice and cheese or fritters of broccoli or artichokes. Often, though, the friggitori brought forth lusciously crunchy half-moons of dough plumped with mozzarella and known as panzarotti. Our favorite kiosk sits, still, in front of the Pizzeria Bellini, just down the street from the Accademia delle Belli Arti in Via Costantinopoli, a tiny quiver of space where one can stand, at nine in the morning, even, to bite at hot, too hot, savories while listening to two violins, a viola, a violoncello, and a Baroque guitar working through Boccherini. Here follows a version of panzarotti made from course dough rolled thin, laid with mozzarella, pecorino, and bits of salty meat or tomato or anchovy, folded over and cast into whorls of bubbling oil.

Perhaps the essence of Campania is this, of the countryside, of the pastoral innocence of the good, pure foods one eats there. Search, beg, grow, procure these few ingredients, first eating them with your eyes, dashing all record of plastic mozzarella and dusty-fleshed fruit masquerading as a tomato. This is not a recipe as much as it is quiet illustration of one fine way to eat in Italian.