Biscotti for Apicius

One day I set out to research the origins of today’s Western cuisine, expecting a long drawn out ordeal. But no, after 5 or 10 minutes on line I learned that the inspiration for much of what we eat these days in the U.S. is attributed however remotely to a noble party-loving gentleman who lived in ancient Rome. Apicius by name. He had a nick name – “Peachy.”

Apicius is associated with what is considered the authoritative cookbook of its time – appropriately titled “Apicius”, a copy of which I have managed to acquire via Amazon.com from that portion of the Roman Archives not destroyed by the fire that Nero started.

The fact is, though, Signor Apicius had not the slightest connection with the ponderous volume bearing his name. It was apparently named posthumously in his honor by subsequent unknown Roman authors who had recollections of his love of food and drink (mostly drink I bet). They simply copied down the recipes for his favorite goodies and gave him all due credit hoping that name recognition would boost sales.

So among other things this explains how one of the most prestigious cooking schools in Italy, affiliated with the University of Florence, is named “Apicius School of Culinary Arts”. I had the pleasure of attending an extended course of study at this institution recently. But to no one’s surprise not a single dish we prepared had the slightest connection to any items on Apicius’ fave list.

Instead the school focused for days on end on the cuisine of Tuscany with occasional detours to the other regions of Italy. Of the approximately 45 dishes we created under the superb direction of Chef Silvia (pictured left) one stuck with me as I traveled back from Florence to the real world here in Bishopville, Maryland. The recipe I wanted to perfect once back at home is none other than Biscotti!

I settled on to the biscotti recipe for a number of reasons among which (1) I don’t have baking skills and need more experience, (2) biscotti are hard to screw up, (3) they last for months on end in a big glass jar and (4) they can be thrown in with any breakfast, lunch, snack or dinner menu you can imagine. I mean you can serve them at Hawaiian luaus even. They’re also great for teething babies!

So herewith the Apicius School’s recipe for Tuscan biscotti, better known in the region as Biscotti di Prato, referring to the town where they were first prepared. Apicius himself never tasted them but no doubt he would approve.

Biscotti di Prato

Serves 12

2 cups all purpose flour
1 cup sugar
1 cup almonds (preferably salted or lightly salted)
3 eggs + one egg yolk
2 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. In a large bowl combine flour, sugar, almonds, baking powder, vanilla, salt, eggs and yolk. Unfortunately bare hands are the only effective tools for this step. Set mixed dough on a floured pastry board and separate into two baguette-shaped loaves. Transfer to cookie sheet lined with oven paper. Bake for 15 minutes. Remove from the oven. When cooled cut loaves diagonally into 3/4 inch slices. Return to the oven and bake again until lightly browned all over, turning over as necessary to achieve even color.

Save one slice for Apicius should he unexpectedly show up at your door. He’ll be wearing his favorite toga.

June 22, 2013April 26, 2015

Chef’s Shrimp “Caprese”

Shrimp "Caprese" Posting this particular recipe not only highlights one of the tastiest entrees ever to emerge strictly by accident from my kitchen, but also provides pretext for calling attention to one of the most widely-spoken mispronunciations in all recorded history.

As soon as this post spreads world-wide people will no longer mispronounce the name of one of Italy’s most charming, romantic and utterly beautiful getaways within its territory. Italians call it the “Isola di Capri” and the accent for both words is on the first syllable. The Island of Capri. It is not “caPREE.”

All right so much for the obnoxious language lesson.

It so happens that many dishes are named after the famous island situated a few miles out into the Bay of Naples and hence sport the adjective “caprese” in the name. “Insalata Caprese” is a probably one of the more well-known examples. Somehow anything concocted with fresh tomato and basil among other ingredients has earned the right to be designated a “caprese.” Historically no one really knows how this came about.

In any case I have adopted the “caprese” modifier for this particular shrimp dish, which includes the obligatory fresh tomato and basil.

But, to be perfectly honest the inspiration came from a close and dear friend from the Maryland Eastern Shore who one night executed, dare I say, the “original” Shrimp Caprese, not exactly the same as the one below but close.

In any case, as a tribute to the Island of Capri try this:

Chef’s Shrimp “Caprese”

For 4 persons:

1/2 cup finely diced celery
2 tbsp. chopped scallion
1 small onion finely diced
2 medium garlic cloves minced
1/2 cup diced fresh ripe tomato
Olive oil as needed
White wine for deglazing (approx. 1 cup)
1 cup very thinly sliced or finely chopped small red and yellow peppers pre-softened in a saute pan
1 tsp. Old Bay seasoning
1/2 cup or so chicken broth
1/2 cup chopped fresh basil
1 lb. large (21-25 per pound) uncooked shrimp shells removed
Salt & pepper to taste

Have oven ready at 350 degrees.

Gratuitous advice: One, this dish cooks up best when made in a large cast iron skillet. Two, the most annoying task is peeling fresh shrimp, but substituting pre-cooked supermarket shrimp simply does not work!

Saute the celery, onion, scallion and garlic in olive oil until well softened. In a separate pan heat the thinly sliced peppers in olive oil until softened. When all is ready merge the peppers with the other ingredients and heat under medium heat and then add the white wine. Heat until all the alcohol is evaporated. Sprinkle a teaspoon of Old Bay. Add the fresh tomatoes, basil and chicken broth and toss. Add salt & pepper to taste.

Finally add the peeled shrimp, toss well, and bake everything in the oven for 25 minutes or until the shrimp has turned pink.

Optional: to expand the calorie count serve over linguine. That’s what I do.

April 21, 2013April 26, 2015

Eggplant Parmesan – Case & Controversy

How is it that the eggplant, a vegetable grown since before recorded history and consumed today around the clock like pasta and pizza, still fires up controversy? You’d think we all would be on the same page by now. Or maybe I’m the only one off the page with the rest of the world. I’ll explain.

It’s time to nerdle over two questions that come up from time to time. Number one, should you peel the eggplant before cooking, and two, should you salt the slices and lay them in a colander under a large can of tomatoes sitting on a dinner plate to get rid of the alleged noxious bitter flavor from the ugly brown juices?

As to the first question my answer is the typical legal sidestep: It depends on how you want the presentation to look. Some eggplant dishes need the skin to provide color contrast, some don’t. I happen to be an enthusiastic peeler.

As to the second my answer is a resounding never!

To defend these viewpoints I first enlisted the help of the International Society for the Advancement of Eggplant Cuisine based in Tangier, Morocco. Turns out they never considered the questions and weren’t interested. So much for those people. Thus I turned to the usual suspect sources, i.e. the internet and in particular Wikipedia, not to exclude my standby web-based experts from Italy.

First as to peeling off the skin my reason for doing so is that in many cases the cooked skin tends to separate from the flesh by itself as you consume the course, leaving an unsightly tangle of loose black skin, edible as it may be, hanging around in the dish waiting for you to suck it up. No thanks. Try ordering Pasta alla Norma sometime and watch what happens when you start poking at the unskinned eggplant chunks.

To execute the peeling process I use a standard dollar eighty-eight vegetable peeler. Takes a little practice. It’s better than hacking away at the eggplant with a 10-inch chef knife, which takes out half the pulp along the way. I watched Rachel Ray do this once. I wanted to cry. Actually I did cry – briefly.

Second as to salting and draining, it seems that cultivation and cross breeding over the centuries has had the effect of reducing the bitterness of the seeds and ugly brown juice surrounding them. Leaving out the step saves more than an hour of prep time for my eggplant parmesan, which is a time consuming enough of a dish as it is.

All that said I also discovered through my usual thorough research that the foregoing opinions are at variance with just about everybody in the cooking world, even the Sicilians, who claim eggplant as their national vegetable.

I was particularly devastated to watch a video on an Italian website that I consider reliable, wherein Sonia, the nice young lady chef coolly sliced up the unpeeled eggplant lengthwise and then proceeded with the tedious dehydration process, with heavy can of tomatoes sitting on top of the serving plate, sitting on top of the eggplant, sitting in the colander, sitting on a plate to catch the liquid. You know the drill.

If I’m not mistaken Mario Batali may be the only chef around who agrees with me about skipping the salt ritual. Or is it vice versa?

Baked eggplant parmesan Now the challenge. I propose to make eggplant parmesan with the same recipe except for one variation, one with the salting business and one without. I then propose to seat my committee of Sicilians at the table and defy them to identify which version was salted and drained and which was not. One Thousand Euro to the team if they get it right. Any Sicilians in the audience wanna step up?

All of which mercifully brings us to the actual recipe, knowing full well that there are as many variations as stars in the sky. But my theory is that somewhere in the dim past an unknown chef stumbled onto what eventually became accepted as the “original.” As usual I entered the Italian sites and looked around for a recipe version that more or less incorporates as many consensus features as possible, yielding as close to the elusive original as one can create.

To make it interesting I set up a comparison sheet showing my preferred style compared with two others, one from my reconstruction of typical Italian recipes from the web and another from Chef Alex Guarnischelli whose variation can be found on the Food Network site.

Melanzana alla Parmigiana – Three Ways

Chef L	Italy	Chef Guarnischelli

2 large or 3 medium eggplants skin removed	2 large or 3 medium eggplants	2 medium eggplants
1 cup all purpose flour for dredging	no flour	1/2 cup all purpose flour
fine salt, preferably popcorn salt	table salt	table salt
freshly ground black pepper	no pepper	freshly ground black pepper
no eggs	no eggs	five large eggs
no milk	no milk	3 tbsp. whole milk
no breadcrumbs	no breadcrumbs	4 cups breadcrumbs
dried thyme, dried oregano, fresh basil	fresh basil only	dried thyme, dried oregano, fresh basil
mozzarella cheese	no mozzarella	mozzarella cheese
parmesan cheese	parmesan cheese	parmesan cheese
no provolone	caciocavallo or “provola”	1 lb. provolone cheese grated
tomato sauce NO SUGAR	tomato sauce NO SUGAR	tomato sauce w/sugar added

So here are the differences:

First, the recipe with the fewest ingredients is the Italian. This contrasts with the Italian-American chefs tendency to load up a recipe – any recipe for that matter. It’s like the more ingredients the better it must be. Certainly that is my tendency unfortunately, and apparently the same for Alex Guarnischelli. At least I ditch the eggs and breadcrumbs.

Second all three sauces are no doubt different BUT NOTE — the Guarnischelli recipe adds sugar to the tomato sauce, a practice which I condemn as grounds for excommunication! In Ms. Alex’s defense I am well aware that hundreds of professional and home chefs in Italy do the same, which does not excuse the offense. You don’t need the extra carbs.

Lastly, all three recipes ultimately call for lightly frying the eggplant slices, whether dredged in only flour, flour, egg, milk and crumbs, or plain naked, draining on paper towels and then alternately layering the sauce, cheese and eggplant in a baking dish in the typical fashion. Baking temp is around 375 degrees for 30 minutes or so.

It’s all a matter of taste to repeat the cliche’ but nonetheless if you’re a cardiologist you will quickly choose either my version or the one from Italy and skip Alex’s. In any case please also skip the salting ritual. If you can’t, I suggest counseling.

February 27, 2013January 19, 2018

Bolognese Sauce Deconstructed

To demonstrate my ability to nitpick any topic I recently completed a 3 volume study about originality and authenticity of the world famous ragu’ alla bolognese or bolognese pasta sauce.

The theory sought to be proven is simply this: There is such a thing as an authentic and original sauce of this kind coming from Bologna Italy, compared with which which all other pretenders to the name – whether from Italy or outside – can be regarded as utterly shameful and deplorable imitations.

How’s that for a mouthful?

After slogging through a number of historical volumes, the web sites, and topping that off with a walking tour of Bologna, during which I struck up a conversation with any attractive female in the town who showed the slightest evidence of being someone’s grandmother I came up with proof. Yes, you might say I went to the source to learn about the sauce. (In Rhode Island these two words are pronounced exactly the same, i.e. sauce).

I discovered that in 1982 the Italian Academy of Cuisine registered with the Bologna City Hall what it states is the correct recipe for ragu’ alla bolognese. This is a fact. But there was a problem. I could not locate this official registration anywhere on line so I have to rely on the pronouncement of the Academy.

On a recent visit to Rome I dined at the well-known restaurant called, appropriately enough, “Dal Bolognese,” a restaurant so famous that it soon became a small chain – sort of like Ruth’s Chris in the U.S. Nonetheless it produced the appropriately concocted ragu’ for my bucatini pasta, both of which, in addition to being “authentic and original” were absolutely phenomenal!

After all the effort, particularly the part about interviewing the good looking grandmas, I am 100% confident that the true recipe for ragu’ alla bolognese must contain at least the following items: pancetta, ground beef, ground pork and/or ground veal, chopped celery, garlic, carrot and onion, red or white wine, beef broth and tomato paste. Period.

So, for the presumed authentic and original recipe my recitation is as follows:

Ragu’ alla Bolognese

for 4 servings:

1 lb. ground skirt steak (70% lean ground beef will do)
1/2 cup finely chopped pork pancetta (now available everywhere except maybe 7-Eleven)
1/4 cup or more olive oil or olive oil plus butter
1 cup red or white wine (there is beef plus pork in the recipe so you take your pick. I use red)
1 cup beef broth (another reason for using the red wine)
1 can tomato paste
1 medium onion, 1 medium carrot, 1 medium celery rib – all finely diced
salt and pepper to taste

Lightly oil a large saute’ pan with butter included if desired. Cook the pancetta and diced vegetables at medium heat until softened . After about 10 minutes add the beef and cook until browned. In this case “browned” is meant literally. Try to achieve a darkened coloration to the meat being careful not to burn. Add the wine and allow to evaporate. Scrape the pan. Add the tomato paste and beef broth, lower heat and stir from time to time. At this point the tough part begins. As the ragu’ thickens add water a little at a time and go around the track again. Repeat the cycle until the meat breaks down almost completely and the sauce is thickened.

After about 5 hours of very slow simmer the exercise is complete.

Now to further belabor the subject I consulted Mario Batali’s award winning volume Molto Italiano (Harper Collins, New York 2005) and found on p. 245 Mario’s version of the official recipe. It includes all the necessary basics plus one extra ingredient – thyme. I respect this deviation but I don’t follow it. If you note in just about all of Mario’s cookbooks and TV shows that feature red sauces for pasta you will find him adding thyme to the recipe.

I suspect the restaurant Mario interned at in Italy had a couple of acres of thyme growing in the back. Nevertheless on the Italian websites I have yet to find a bolognese sauce recipe that calls for it. Thyme is not of the esssence but in the last analysis, in deference to the now banished-from-tv Mario Batali, go ahead and throw it in.

February 17, 2013October 4, 2019

Macaroni and Beans

Inevitably we come around to the No. 1 staple dish for all Italians and Italian-Americans, not to mention a few million Brazilians and Argentinians whose Italian ancestors boarded boats for the U.S. that ran off course.

Macaroni and Beans, best known as “pastafazool,” is the subject on the agenda today.

Skipping the tiresome discourse and getting right to the bottom line there are two paths to pasta e fagioli.

The first is to buy a can of cannellini beans, a can of sliced button mushrooms, a can of cream of chicken soup, a can of chicken broth together with two cups or so of precooked elbow macaroni, a pasta variety found in every food cabinet on the planet. The cans are opened, the mushrooms drained, the elbows made ready, and then all is tossed into a big sauce pan, heated and served. This process takes maybe 20 minutes.

The second is to reach for your apron, pour a glass of Chianti Classico, take a deep breath and then follow the instructions below translated and assembled from two reliable web sources in Tuscany, the reported place of origin of the soup in question:

Pasta e Fagioli

For 4-5 kids plus 2 adults

1 lb. fresh cannellini beans soaked overnight in cold water
1/2 small cabbage
1 cup rehydrated porcini mushrooms otherwise one cup assorted fresh mushrooms from the store roughly chopped
1 chicken or beef bouillon cube
1 cup tomato sauce or 1 tbsp. paste plus one cup water
olive oil as needed
1 medium onion
1 medium carrot
1/2 celery stalk
1 large garlic clove
about 1/2 box little pasta shells cooked in rapidly boiling salted water for five or six minutes, removed from the water with a slotted spoon and set aside with a tablespoon of olive oil to prevent sticking (apparently elbow pasta is frowned upon in Florence)
salt and pepper to taste

Cook beans in sufficient water to cover. Simmer until well done. Puree’ half the beans with a cup of cooking water and set aside. Save remaining cooking water.

Finely slice the cabbage and set aside. Mince the onion, garlic, carrot and celery. Saute the three vegetables in a 6 qt stock pot with 1/4 cup olive oil and a tsp. of salt until softened thoroughly. Then add the mushrooms and stir until softened.

Add the pureed beans plus two cups of the remaining cooking water. OK so far?

Add the chicken or beef bouillon cube, the tomato sauce or paste, salt and pepper to taste and cook until cube is entirely dissolved, 5 minutes or more. I recommend dissolving the cube ahead of time with a 1/4 cup of water and microwaved.

Add the shredded cabbage, the remaining cannellini, 2 more cups of the beans cooking water and cook for an additional 20 minutes. If necessary substitute beans’ cooking water with hot tap water or chicken broth. Add more broth or water if needed. Consistency of the soup is your choice. Check for salt and pepper. (Now kill the 20 minutes by enjoying the aforementioned Chianti Classico).

When all is done toss in the previously cooked little shells and mix well at high heat for a few minutes. Sprinkle some parmesan or romano on top, remove apron and pour another Chianti Classico.

Not that bad.

Obnoxious note: In one of the Italian web recipes they puree’ all the beans. This is goofy. If the dish is called ‘macaroni and beans’ one would expect to see both some whole beans and the pasta in the final presentation. I have fired off a memo to the authors.