Grilling

Lamb, pomegranate, and apricots is a classic Mediterranean combination. Pomegranate molasses, which is sometimes called pomegranate concentrate, is a pantry staple in parts of the Mediterranean. It serves as a meat tenderizer as well as a flavor enhancer. Look for it in specialty foods stores, or online (see Resources). Serve this dish with a rice pilaf or couscous. Note: You will need 16 wooden skewers for this recipe.

A rich, fragrant dish, these duck breasts are perfumed with the aromatics of southwest France, then grilled to crisp the fatty skin. Served sliced and fanned over tender baby greens lightly dressed with citrus vinaigrette, this is a wonderful dish to serve as a first course or as a light main course.

Italian cuisine often features stuffed and rolled meat or fish. This recipe uses inexpensive yet flavorful flank steak. Pounded chicken or turkey breast, pork loin, or fish can be substituted. The grilled rolls are sliced into beautiful spirals and serve with gremolata reserved from the stuffing and a wonderful wood-roasted wine sauce.

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.

Jerry Traunfeld was the executive chef for many years at the HerbFarm in Woodinville, Washington, near seattle and now owns Seattle’s Poppy Restaurant. Jerry’s finely tuned palate served him well in the development of an expansive herb-focused menu at the award-winning restaurant. Jerry’s version of naan, a simple flatbread from India by way of Afghanistan, was created for this book. Filled with a combination of flavor-packed herbs and richly flavored cashews, it’s wonderful!

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.

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.

A humble prescript that flaunts the goodness of summer tomatoes, that asks their roasting over wood, concentrating, ennobling their sweet juices. Propped, then, on crusty seats of bread with a gloss of good green oil and the grace of basil and mint, they soothe hungers for purity.

Soppressato is a dried sausage of large, oval shape, refined texture, and vivid spice, the masterwork of the salumieri lucani. This sausage is a fundamental offering on the Lucanian table and its goodness is often celebrated, imitated—in longer, more slender shapes—in all the regions of Italy, under the all-encompassing name of luganica/luganega, after Lucania. Here follows a recipe for a fresh sausage that embraces the flavors and perfumes of the traditional salsicce of Lucania.

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.

The hefts of lamb, perfumed with aromatics and roasted over a wood fire, speak of a primordial innocence. Make a feast of them. Bake some pettole (page 153) and offer a great wedge of young pecorino and a jug of honest red wine.