Lemon

The traditional yogurt-cucumber mix that cools Middle Eastern and Indian barbecue dishes operates the same way with cheater BBQ. This slaw is a natural side to Tandoori BBQ Chicken Thighs (page 96) and Cheater Q’Balls (page 129). When we have any leftover brisket, burgers, or turkey, it gets loaded into pita pockets with as much slaw as will fit topped with whatever hot Indian chutney happens to be in Min’s fridge door condiment collection at the time.

Trout is a popular fish in a landlocked state like Tennessee. It’s fresh, easy, and quick to cook on a grill or in the oven. The presentation of a whole fish at home conjures up the rustic feel of a riverbank campout, and the burnt string used to lash together the lemon-and-dill-stuffed fish creates a real dinner-under-the-stars mood. Complete the faux angler’s mess with Oven Potatoes (page 167) and a green salad with your own smoked paprika vinaigrette.

One hot Tennessee evening Min’s neighbor, Raj Kumar, handed R. B. a green coconut and a cleaver and said, “Chop the top off that thing. Let’s have a drink.” We love Raj. Dinner at his kitchen table is part spiritual recharge, part therapy, part comedy hour. Even better, Raj knows how to cook. After one question too many from us, he took us to Apna Bazaar, Nashville’s Costco of Indian provisions. Soon every dish we made required two kinds of cardamom pods, a chunk of cinnamon bark, cumin and coriander seeds, mango pickles, and a chutney or two on the side. Raj kindly indulged us in our enthusiasm and, in time, our spicing acquired some much-needed subtlety. As Raj advised, one should wonder about flavor, not be hit over the head with it. Tandoori BBQ Chicken Thighs use bone-in, skinless dark meat typical of Indian cuisine and our balanced dry rub approach, accented with either a simple curry powder or garam masala, both readily available spices. Add cayenne pepper for more bite. When time allows, we adhere to the tandoori tradition of soaking the chicken in plain yogurt before seasoning the meat. In 900°F tandoori ovens, the yogurt ensures moist chicken, and it’s just as worthwhile at home. We often substitute buttermilk for the yogurt because it’s cheaper and coats the meat instantly.

Not a terribly sweet sort of breakfast jam, not really a true marmalade, this is the rough condiment Alfonso’s grandmother made when she had a few extra lemons and some even more precious sugar at hand. She served it with her home-smoked swordfish as well as the salt-cured reading. Too, he remembers her smearing it on justbaked bread for him to eat with a slice of fresh ricotta when times were flush.

The Phoenician port of Karalis is Cagliari and, sitting on the island’s southern verges on the Gulf of the Angels, it seems not of Sardegna. The Sards who live away from the port say it is a place doubled-faced and call the Cagliaritani hollow-hearted. They say Cagliari is of the world and not of Sardegna. Sardi falsi—sham Sards—they are called. Surely discordant, as a city, with the Stone Age commonweal of the island’s interior, Cagliari’s most pleasant quarter seems the one raised up in the serene, medieval tracks of the Pisani. There, embraced by walls, new—as measured in Sard antiquity—one senses, still, some sweet press of sympathy. And it is there on its piazzette, where one can sit under broad, blue-striped umbrellas, to sip at cool Nuragus di Cagliari between melting bites of salty bottarga, the Sards’ caviar. Fashioned from eggs harvested from the cefalo—the gray mullet—the roe sacs are taken whole, compressed under thick hefts of marble, rubbed with unpounded crystals of sea salt, then left to dry on grass mats under the Cagliaritano sun. What emerges after several months of patience is a supple, glossy mass that, when shaved or grated gives up an authoritative yet balmy brininess. In the humblest of osterie as it is in the ristoranti, this bottarga, the Sards’ caviar, is presented with simple adornments. Rather easily hunted up in American specialty stores, look, though, for the bottarga di cefalo rather than the more common, far less delectable, bottarga di tonno, made from eggs of the tuna. Here follows a recipe for a most uncommon, sensual sort of overture to lunch.

Zagara—flower, in Greek—is the name farmers call their precious agrumi, they, it seems, likening the sweet, spicy perfumes of their oranges and lemons to the scents of blossoms. Thus, citrus fruits are Calabrian flowers. One farmer dared me to try to cook this luscious dish with bergamot rather than oranges and lemons, assuring me that it was the one and only fruit with which the massaie (housewives) braised pork long-ago. Finding none to beg or buy, I cannot tell you how the dish might have been with the ambered flesh and juices of the mysterious bergamot. One day I will.

From Lecce and its environs, quince paste—a deeply bronzed jelly molded into plump squares and tucked inside wooden fruit boxes—is our favorite Puglian treasure to take back to Tuscany. Here follows a lovely sort of pudding made from quince that, though it offers a less-dense dose of the fruit, yields one with all its beautiful, apple-wine sort of autumn savor.

In the autumn, as schools of swordfish swam south into the Bay of Policastro, the fishermen of the Cilento were often their conquerors, luring the great fish with oil-soaked bread and hauling them up from the sea—porting them like vanquished kings, high atop their heads up the steep paths from the water—to their camps to roast them or smoke them over smoldering fires of pine and olive and citrus woods. Sometimes, the Cilentini cured the fish under salt and foraged grasses and spiceberries, dousing the flesh with their own rough-made spirits. Served a dish such as this, one could think it the offering of some cultivated chef, yet, then and there, it was nothing more than the improvised handiwork of hungry men.

One must have a lemon tree or some harmonious acquaintance with someone who has a lemon tree, know a florist or a fruit seller who can procure untreated lemon leaves, or one can let go the idea of the lemon leaves and trump up alternate ones, such as those pulled from a grapevine or a chestnut tree. Lacking all of these, one must know how wonderful the dish will be with no leaves at all, just for grilling the fat prawns, beheaded but with their tails intact, over a good wood fire, then heaving them, all hot and sputtering, into an anise-perfumed bath. Though the lemon leaves, if they’re good and fresh, do add some flavor and keep the prawns moist during the roast, they are, in the end, only a pretty and clever sort of packaging.

A simple-to-make and delectable little paste with which to dress just-cooked pasta, to spoon into vegetable soups, to thin with milk or vegetable stock into, itself, a fine soup, to stuff into fat, ripe tomatoes, to present alongside roasted meat or fish, to spread on great chunks of olive-oil-toasted bread, to eat with a spoon while waiting for bread to bake.

...in the style of Nereto. An old Longobard town in the north of Abruzzo’s province of Teramo, Nereto grows walnuts and breeds turkeys. And when the turkeys grow fat on the walnuts, their just-dressed flesh, roasted with aromatics, indeed tastes of the sweet, smoky nuts. A classic dish for Christmas there, I fix it for our Tuscan version of Thanksgiving. And because our local turkeys, as is likely the case with yours, do not feed on walnuts, I gift the bird with a luscious paste of them smoothed under the skin of its breast. I like the Neretese-inspired turkey infinitely better than the more famous tacchino alla Canzanese, turkey in the manner of Canzano, which typically asks that the bird be relieved of his bones and poached with a calf’s foot and knuckle, then cooled and presented in its jellied broth.

Should there be, one day in your life, both a handful of still-warm-from-the-tree ripe figs and the juice-dripping flesh of a melon, go quickly to find leaves of mint, some good green olive oil, and the juice of a lemon to make this little salad. Use only flawless components and arrange them for someone wonderful with whom to rhapsodize over it. You might, then, need heady, appropriate conversation. You could choose to speak of Platina—one Bartolomeo Sacchi—the Vatican librarian and author, in 1475, of Platine de Honestate Voluptate. The work’s argument concerns the history of Roman cuisine and was the first officially published cookbook since those written during the Republic. Or you might want to chatter a bit about Cantalupo in Sabina—the Singing Wolf of the Sabines—once a papal garden property outside the Roman walls where a strain of tiny, orange-fleshed melons were cultivated, they, no doubt, being the precursors to those we call cantaloupe. Perhaps you might choose not to speak at all, thus distracting nothing from the sweet little figs.

It was nearly eleven on Saturday and Fernando was standing under the open roof in the rain, tender, silvered glissades of it plashing quietly, as it has for two thousand years, onto the black and white marble of the temple floor. He, not minding, stood directly in the puddle, its depths caressing the tops of his shoes, looking up at the sky like a child in wonder, the water settling in fine mists on his cheeks and eyelids. He turned fifty that morning in the Pantheon. His spiritual birthday thus celebrated, he pronounced that his carnal festival was to be solemnized in not less than six of his preferred ostarie/trattorie/ristoranti. Fernando wanted to eat artichokes. More, he wanted an artichoke crawl—a critical journey up and down the vicoli (narrow streets), an earnest search for great, golden-green, crisped Roman roses—as many of them as he might vanquish in a day and its evening in a half dozen genuine houses—we were in search of the one perfect carciofo alla giudia. Ten years ago, I might have propelled him into the arms of the trattoria da Giggetto, when I was still convinced of the authenticity of its cooking. Sidled up as it is to the edge of the Portico d’Ottavia, perhaps it was only the taberna’s majestic old neighbor that wooed me. Fernando had his own ideas. At midday, we made quick aperitivi e antipasti visits to Arancio d’Oro in Via Monte d’Oro and La Campana in Vicolo della Campana, taking only one or two artichokes and a glass of white wine. We would settle in at Agata e Romeo in Via Carlo Alberto for a proper lunch that would start with another of the little beauties. The evening’s gallop would open at Tram Tram in Via dei Reti before a stint at Il Dito e la Luna in Via dei Sabelli, where we would crunch on more fried thistles. Our palates veneered in stainless steel, our bellies convulsing, plumped, we brushed sea salt and crisp freckles from our lips and our chests and stepped at last inside the dimmed sanctum of Piperno in Via Monte dei Cenci. Murmuring something to our waiter about not having much appetite, he assured us that he would carry to us only those plates that could titillate a dead man. He started us with a salad of puntarelle—a thick-bladed wild grass collected in the Alban hills— glossed in sauce of anchovies. Then came the misty comfort of stracciatella, chicken broth scribbled with a paste of egg and pecorino. Expert by now, able to whiff their very presence from twenty meters, we knew then the artichokes were only moments away. He set them down, clucking over their beauty, assuring us their salty vaporousness would coax our hunger. He was right. We continued with la coda alla vaccinara—oxtail stew—abbacchio—roast suckling lamb—a few crumbles of a hard, piquant pecorino pepato—peppered pecorino—a soft brown pear, and sealed it all with a great fluff of roasted chestnut mousse that we ate with small silver spoons.

Savory is possibly the most underappreciated herb in this country. I fell in love with it many years back when I was cooking in France. There, it’s used in the traditional seasoning mix herbes de Provence and added to all types of stews, ragoûts, and sauces. Its aroma—earthy, slightly sweet, and a little bit peppery—reminds me of the brush-covered hillsides where we played growing up. Winter savory, summer savory’s seasonal opposite, is more robust in flavor but would be a fine substitute in this recipe. If you can’t find either of the savories, substitute a combination of equal amounts of thyme, rosemary, and mint. This isn’t a difficult dish to make, but it does require some last-minute multitasking. Have your prepared ingredients—or, as we say in the kitchen, your mise en place—ready to go. Be sure that your herbs are chopped, the vinaigrette is made, the crème fraîche is mixed, and your seasonings are in reach. This dish is a great way to initiate the unconverted to the Church of the Fava Bean. The potatoes and favas are mashed together with butter and finished with pea shoots and a vibrant Meyer lemon salsa. The seared halibut goes on top with a dollop of savory crème fraîche.