Olive

This steak fits right into your schedule—it can marinate for as little as 30 minutes or as long as 8 hours—and it is equally good whether cooked on the stovetop, grilled, or broiled. Rice and Vegetable Pilaf (page 252) goes well with it.

These smoky flavored olives are always the first thing to disappear off an antipasti platter or hors d’oeuvres spread. The brightness of the orange zest enhances the earthy flavors of the olives; you can use freshly squeezed orange juice if you don’t have zest. I love to serve these straight from the oven, still warm.

Olive oil is very good as a poaching liquid, especially when you want the poaching liquid to gently transfer heat yet not penetrate the food. This method yields amazingly moist fish. And it’s lovely to use the infused oil in the salad dressing for the accompanying salad.

A pissaladière is a crisp, flaky pizza-like pastry popular in the south of France. This version is made with prepared puff pastry, then topped with the traditional olives and anchovies. Here it is made as one rectangular tart, though you can make individual ones as well. The onions are roasted in the oven until soft, jammy, and a bit smoky. If you don’t have oven-roasted tomatoes in your pantry, sun-dried tomatoes packed in olive oil can be substituted. My favorite element is the grated dried goat cheese at the end.

This is not your basic antipasti. Serving a beautiful platter of wood-roasted seasonal vegetables, cured meats, hand-crafted cheeses, home-cured olives, and smoke-kissed crusty bread to family and friends as a prelude to dinner is an artful way to honor guests. This is just what chef Chris Bianco does at his restaurant, Pizzeria Bianco, in Phoenix, Arizona. Chris’s wood-fired pizzas are now legendary, but his wood-roasted antipasti platter sings. I hope you will enjoy my version, and create many versions of your own.

The Swiss chard in this dish has a slightly bitter flavor that works well with the fragrant fennel and salty olives. The sliced meat is topped with a delicious uncooked Italian sauce thickened with leftover bread and pulverized toasted nuts.

Cookbook author Joanne Weir is known for her flavor-packed Mediterranean-inspired food. Her book From Tapas to Meze shows the breadth of her Mediterranean influences. Here, Joanne shares a favorite pizza recipe that we adapted for grilling using a Tuscan grill that fits into the fireplace of her home in San Francisco. The bitter escarole on this pizza is balanced by the sweet pine nuts, creamy cheeses, and the salty olives. The dough for a grilled pizza needs a bit more structure from gluten to keep it from oozing through the grates of the grill, which is why this one is kneaded for a longer time than other pizza doughs.

Of all main-course salads, the Niçoise is my all-time favorite, with its fresh butter-lettuce foundation; its carefully cooked, beautifully green green beans; its colorful contrast of halved hard-boiled eggs, ripe red tomatoes, and black olives; all fortified by chunks of tunafish and freshly opened anchovies. It’s a perfect luncheon dish, to my mind, winter, summer, spring, and fall—an inspired combination that pleases everyone.

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.

The jots of coast and whatever sea fish they might offer have little embellished the Lucanian cuisine, yet the fat, brown trout from her rivers and lakes are coveted, stalked. The most characteristic prescription for their cooking is to scent them with the wild herbs one finds near the water, stuff them with a few crushed olives, wrap them in a slice of pancetta, and roast them, on site, over a beech or chestnut wood fire.

...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.

This illuminates the pervasive Napoletano mastery over vegetables, the charred, sweet flesh of the peppers invigorated by the brine of the capers and olives, excited by the potency of the garlic and the pecorino, all of it hushed, then, by the raisins and the bread.

It was not often,that one was plump enough in the purse to buy a kilo or so of meat from the butcher, carry it home, and cook it up into some luscious, soulful dish. When fortune placed in one’s purse a few centesimi more than were necessary for subsistence, one sought out the carnacottaro (an itinerant seller of cooked meat).