Seafood

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.

Fresh briny oysters out of a jar satisfy our periodic oyster craving without the hassle of shucking. To cheat, swap the half shell for a casserole dish and dress the oysters with smoky shallots, butter, and lemon. A few minutes under the broiler and you’ve got a seaside party anywhere, anytime. Slurp them up with saltines. Cold beer, sparkling wine, and dry white wine are what we’re drinking.

Once you start using the lighter, larger, crisper Japanese panko crumbs, the usual bread crumbs will feel like sand. A box of panko in the pantry crunches up all kinds of oven-fried seafood and chicken and substitutes for bread crumbs in any recipe. Their airy texture is akin to the difference between flaky kosher salt and dense iodized salt. Figure on about three large scallops per person.

For oven salmon we use either an enamel-coated roasting pan or a foil-lined baking sheet. As much as we love cast iron for its searing qualities and overall old-school cooking coolness, fishy bacon and cornbread are never a big hit with the breakfast club. Any salmon leftovers are earmarked for Two-Timer Salmon Salad (recipe follows). It helps to cut whole salmon fillets into serving-size pieces before cooking. Pay attention to the thickness of the fish (the very thin ends take almost no time) and cook accordingly.

These days quality hardwood-smoked salmon and trout in convenient Cryovac packages are easy to find. What we never expected was that even canned tuna, a product that has required little contemplation beyond water- versus oil-packed, would go through a major transformation with the new retort vacuum-packed foil pouch. No can opener, no draining, and new flavors to play with. A pouch or two of hickory-smoked tuna works for this spread. When we say any fish, we mean any fish or any shellfish, like smoked oysters or clams. We usually use a frozen pack of R. B.’s patio-smoked, fresh-caught Rhode Island bluefish courtesy of his friend and neighbor Chappy Pierce. Vary the ratio of seafood to cream cheese to your liking. If things taste fishy, add lemon juice. Serve the spread mounded in a bowl garnished with capers and lemon slices. We prefer plain water crackers for serving.

A dish old as the ages, one that pungently depicts the Sards’ seminal appetite for the long bathing of fish or game in some puckerish sauce is burrida. Traditionally prepared with gattucci di mare—sea catfish—the sauce is enriched with the pounded raw livers of the fish. Here follows a version using orata—red snapper—or coda di rospo—monkfish—though river catfish can also be called upon with fine result. Present the burrida as an antipasto or a main course to savvy, unshy palates.

A rather sad and barren bit of sand in a Mediterranean archipelago 17 kilometers off the coast of Trapani and 120 kilometers from the brow of North Africa, the island of Favignana is the last of the tonnare—tuna fishing ports—in Sicilia. And it is Gioachino Cataldo who is il rais—“the king,” in Arab dialect—of the rite of la mattanza— the ritual slaughtering of migrating tuna practiced first by the Phoenicians and later by the Saracens. La mattanza remains the most powerful spiritual ceremony in the life of the islanders, as it has for a thousand years. And from then until now, its writs are these. Fifteen huge wooden, black-varnished, motorless, sail-less boats are tugged out into the formation of a great quadrangle around the muciara—the boat of il rais that sits at the square’s center. Ten kilometers of net are laid in the form of a pouch into which the tuna swim. The great fish migrate from the Atlantic through the Straits of Gibralter to spawn, the Mediterranean being warmer and saltier and, hence, a kinder ambience for reproduction. As the pouch—called the camera della morte, the death chamber—becomes full, il rais gives the command to his fifty-seven soldiers to lift the net. The men bear up the nets by hand, hoisting them and the tuna up to a height at which the fish can be speared and hauled up into the bellies of the boats. The rite remains Arab to its core. Arab are the songs that the tonnaroti—those fishermen who hunt only tuna—sing as they wait for the nets to fill, as are the incantations they chant as they are heaving up the fish and, finally, Arab are the screams the tonnaroti scream as they kill them. We saw them take two hundred tuna in two hours—the fish averaging about seventy kilograms. Those the tonnaroti did not keep for themselves were ferried to Marsala for processing. A black-bearded colossus is Gioachino, his face crinkled by the Mediterranean sun, his enormous hands scraggy as an unsharp blade, of a family who, for twelve generations, has birthed men chosen by the Favignanesi to be il rais. The islanders bequeath the post on merit. The credentials, said Favignana’s mayor, are: courage, skill, strength, dignity, and honor. And it is the king himself who determines the duration of his reign. Gioachino told us he would remain il rais “finchè le mie forze mi sosterranno”—“while my forces remain uninjured.” In these last ninety-eight years, Gioachino is only the eighth rais of Favignana. This is the simple way he cooked tuna for us, the way he thinks it best. He always uses flesh from the female fish—hence, tunnina—for its more delicate savor, he told us. Il rais harvested the capers for the fish in his garden while we sipped at cold moscato.

One departs Italy—and the European continent—for the journey to Sicilia through the narrow Straits of Messina. The city is an unlovely place, the ravages and wrecks of her face so corrected that she seems benign, with few of her old graces. Snugged inside the tumult of her port sit a few humble houses still dispatching, to the fishermen and the local citizenry, the stews and broths from the old tomes. And it was at one table there where we ate a most luscious rendition of swordfish. A dish typical of Messina, and now of the whole island, it seems, this one was extraordinary for the rich elements of its stuffing, but more for the divine splash of Malvasia in its little sauce.

Daughter-of-the-wind is her name in Arabic—Bent el-Rhia—the gorgeous island of Pantelleria sits seventy kilometers from Tunisia in the Egadian Archipelago. She is full of sea caves and strange, vaporous grottoes. She wears Neolithic ruins among her palms and oleander. And in the contrada, neighborhood, called Favarotta, we ate swordfish—thin steaks of it cut from the center of the just-caught fish, first rubbed with olive oil and then quickly roasted over a red-sparking grapevine fire. The fisherman/cook laid them over a cool tomato jam and we feasted. Too, we ate yellow-crumbed semolina bread roasted over the then quieter fire, and when its heat was nearly spent, we skewered figs—green ones and the first of the summer—onto grapevine twigs and held them near the fire until their juices were warmed and we ate them with the last sips of Pantelleria’s luscious moscato.

Harvests from the great, silent fields of sun-bronzed wheat result in more bread than pasta for la tavola siciliana, yet there is a trio of pasta dishes that is cooked throughout the island. One of them dresses pasta in eggplant and tomatoes perfumed with wild mint and basil, the whole dusted with grated, salted ewe’s milk ricotta. Called often pasta alla Norma in celebration of Catanian son Vincenzo Bellini it can be a gorgeous dish. Then there is pasta chi vrocculi arriminati—dialect for a dish that calls for a paste of cauliflower and salt anchovies studded with raisins and pine nuts. Although it is luscious, it cannot compete with the glories of the island’s pasta con le sarde. A dish full of extravagant Arab timbres, it employs fresh, sweet sardines, salt anchovies, wild fennel, and a splash of saffroned tomato. One presents the pasta cool, as though heat would be violence against its sensuousness. Wild fennel grows abundantly on the lower shanks of Sicily’s mountains and, too, along the craggy paths of some of her islands. I used to collect wild fennel along the banks of the Sacramento River and I’ve heard tell of great clumps of its yellow lace heads bobbing along country roads in America’s Northeast. Now I find it a few kilometers from our home in thickets against the pasture fences along the Via Cassia on the road to Rome. Though the scent and the savor of cultivated fennel is sweeter, it behaves well in collaboration with these other elements and yields a still-sumptuous dish.

Whaling and swordfishing have been the tempestuous business of Bagnara for three thousand years. Wedged as the port is twixt great rocks and the Mar Tirreno at the savage hem of the Aspromonte, it forms a fittingly folkloric tableau for the lumbering black ships trudging out for the hunt. A tower, higher than the masts, is the tight, trembly perch from which one man sights the fish. As did the Greeks from whom they are descended, the harpooners tramp out onto walkways hinged a hundred feet out from the ship over the sea, spears at the ready, to wait for the fish. Once the ships are sighted from the lighthouse, the fishermen’s wives gather on the beach with carts and wagons, transport to take the fish to market. Sometimes, fires are laid right there by the water, one fish whacked into trenchers and roasted, a barrel of wine propped against the rocks, the unfolding of an old ceremony. One fishes, one builds a fire, one eats his supper.

Perhaps the most elegant version of Sicilian tuna for us was this one that we ate in the kitchen of a tiny, chalk-white house set in the curve of an alley and whose arch-walled garden looked to the sea. The lady who cooked it for us—the owner of the house—was born there in that most ancient parish of Trapani more than ninety years ago. Warm, insistent winds—the breath of Africa, one thinks—billowed up the old blue curtain that was her back door, bidding in the damp, balmy spice of her wisteria as she sat there, beatific, talking and working. It was as though pressing peppercorns into the flesh of a fish was a most magnificent task.

Unlike the ricotta forte of Puglia, prepared laboriously, asking that the fresh cheese be left to drain off its opaline waters and to acidify, the dry cheese to then be kneaded, worked each third or fourth day for at least two months until it takes on a burnt ivory sort of color and its perfumes come up stinging, pungent, this version is prepared in moments. Yielding a condiment less punishing in its aromas, the Calabrian ricotta forte is still of an assertive and keen savor, which when smoothed over warm, crusty bread, glorifies the richness of spiced sausages and salame presented as antipasto. A few dollops of it, thinned with drops of pasta cooking water and tossed with bucatini or spaghetti, make a fine dish. Tucked away in a crock in the refrigerator for a week or so, the vigor of ricotta forte ripens and intensifies.

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.

Once Kallipolis—“beautiful city” in Greek—Gallipoli is a tumult of white-chalked abodes heaped up under a feverish sun. A fishing village three thousand years ago and now—after its episodes with pirates and slavish dominions, its risings and its fallings—it is a fishing village still. Affixed to the newer town by a bridge, its oldest quarter is a quaint islet in the Ionian. And it was there that we first saw Rosaria. It was in the pescheria (fish market). It was the late-afternoon market where the day’s second catch—and what might have remained from the morning, at a smaller price—was offered. Admiring her confidence, her stroll over the slippery, sea-washed stones of the market floor, inspecting the gleanings—silently, unerringly, one thought—and transacting prices with the fishmongers only with her eyes. When she was convinced by something, she pulled coins and bills from a small pouch hung around her like a necklace, then positioned the parcels in a basket she carried atop her head, leaving her small, elegant hands free to repose on her hips, to move in agreement or discord or exclamation. We dared to ask her the names of the more exotic offerings and, so encouraged by her gently spoken responses, we opened discourse on the celebrated fish soup of Gallipoli. Through her laugh, she told us that the allure of the soup seemed perplexing to her. It was, after all, a potful of humble fish. Nearly everyone cooked it, in one form or another, every day. “We cook what the sea gives up to us. It’s our garden,” she said. She told us she had cooked the soup for as long as she could remember, and that the perfumes of it being cooked by her mother and grandmother were older yet in her sensual memory. She volunteered news of her evening’s program and said we might join her if we wished. She was to prepare a supper for three old friends, widows all, and molto simpatiche—most pleasant. She said we might meet her at 7:45 in front of Sant’ Agata. Timid, pleased, we sealed our agreement. By then, the weak February sun was readying itself to slide into the sea, rosying the clouds in its path, bedazzling them in washes of gold. We watched her climb the curling road farther up into the old town until her narrow, top-lofty form melted into sweet lilac dusk. We looked at the last of the sunset from the terrace of a little bar, adding jackets and sweaters and scarves against the winds, sipping at red wine, imagining what would be our evening with her. We found her in front of the cathedral and, following her the few meters to her door, were welcomed into her apartment in whose parlor we sat whilst she collected, arranged the soup’s elements. Only then did she invite us into the kitchen. First, though, the ceremony of gli aperitivi—cold, pink wine poured into small, rounded crystal cups. Then was Rosaria ready to dance. She set about by whacking the filleted fish—sea bass and red hogfish—into great chunks; she warmed oil in an old coccio, adding garlic, onion, and crushed salt anchovies. In the scented oil, she deftly browned the fish—removing it to await the second act—adding fat prawns, heads removed, tails intact, and rolled them about, flourishing her wooden spatula with a sort of spare drama and sending forth great sea-scented mists. She made the sauce by adding peeled, seeded, chopped tomatoes and white wine. After ten minutes or so, she reunited fish to sauce, rubbing peperoncini—I saw three for certain, but there might have been four— between her fingers into the pot and leaving the soup to gently simmer while she fried trenchers of rough bread in sizzling oil. I flashed a moment upon the contortions I’d suffered to build a bouillabaisse, one whose directions filled more pages than a play by Pirandello. I thought, too, to the flushed, moist faces of cooks—spent, brokenwinded&mdash...

After the fast demise of Sybaris, it was Taranto that grew up, the city most splendid of Magna Graecia. And it was there that oysters were first cultivated, for the coddling, I suppose, of true sybaritic cravings. Taranto was and is quite perfectly situated for the business, sitting, rather like an island, between the mar piccolo—the little sea—a coastal lagoon fed by both fresh and sea water and the mar grande—the big sea—part of the Gulf of Taranto in the Ionian Sea. And it is this very shifting in the salinity of the waters around Taranto that builds up the sweetest, fattest oysters. Nothing better can be done to a fine oyster than to slip it down one’s throat, chasing it with sips of some crisp, icy white wine. But here follows a recipe for barely roasting oysters that, if not ennobling them, at the least takes nothing from their own natural goodness.