No-Cook

In Italy, wild fennel grows literally wild, all over the place, especially in the south of the peninsula. Duringmy travels across America, I also found it abundant as well, wild and cultivated, but the wild fennel grows especially aromatic in California. You can buy wild-fennel seeds to make this recipe, but you can just as well harvest them in the wild by picking the dried flower tops that harbor the fennel seeds in late summer. The anise-licorice flavor brings freshness to any meat when used as a rub.

This quick salad delivers a lot of flavor. The radicchio has a touch of bitterness, but the raisins bring in the sweet element, and the goat cheese the creamy complexity. It is a great appetizer, or can be a main course.

You might be familiar with this salad made with stale bread, but for some more texture and taste, try making it with taralli, often sold as pepper or fennel round bread biscuits at Italian specialty stores in the United States. Actually, taralli are small bread rounds, much in the style of bagels, which are baked and toasted to a crisp. It is a traditional food from Puglia, Calabria, and Basilicata. The story goes that the taralli were made specifically for the shepherds and workers to take to their fields. The taralli lasted and traveled well, and, once tossed with some condiments, they would revive and be delicious.

I picked up this simple, delicious, and very Italian cake on a visit to Angelo Brocato’s ice cream and confectionery in New Orleans. I am sure you will want to make this dessert over and over again. If you are going to freeze it, keep the taste fresh by wrapping it tightly in plastic.

Prickly pears—or fichi d’India, as they are called in Italy—grow wild and abundant in Sicily and are eaten simply as a fruit, as a salad, or churned into a dessert, as in this recipe for granita. In the Southwestern United States, the prickly pear grows abundant and wild, and when I visited the Salinas Valley in California, I was delighted to see acres upon acres of this cactus plant growing for commercial harvesting. The Mexican culture uses it in their cuisine, but I was especially happy to see a demand for it here in the States. When you find it nice and ripe in your market, buy it and make this simple and delicious granita with it.

Spumoni is a delicious dessert made from three flavors of ice cream stuffed into a cup, and cut in four when frozen. The ice-cream colors reflect the colors of the Italian flag—red, white, and green—and spumoni has long been a big item on the menus of Italian American restaurants. Spumoni has its origins in a Neapolitan dessert, and supposedly came to America in 1905 with Salvatore Lezza. Lezza’s spumoni can still be had on Chicago’s Upper West Side. I filled many a cup with my own homemade ice cream in my early restaurant days, in the seventies, but spumoni is still delicious when made with good store-bought ice cream as well. Here rum gives the spumoni an extra layer of flavor, but the juice of the sour cherries is a great alternative.

It seems that the muffuletta sandwich originated in Sicily, set on what most likely was flatbread sprinkled with sesame seeds. And since the Sicilians were the first mass wave of immigration to the port of New Orleans, it would seem that the soft sesame-seed bread of the muffuletta is an American cousin of the bread of the pane ca’ meusa (spleen sandwich) still sold in Palermo markets today. This meatless rendition of the muffuletta was made on All Souls Day; the one with the cold cuts and salad is served on more festive days.

There are many versions of the muffuletta sandwich around New Orleans, but it seems that Central Grocery in the French Quarter is the place to go. The store is charming enough, but at the back counter, seated on a stool with a muffuletta sandwich in front of you, is where you want to be. We sat down across from a man who told us he’d had his first muffuletta sandwich here fifty years ago and came back regularly for more. Next to him were a couple who have been coming to Central Grocery to enjoy the muffuletta sandwich for more than forty years. We ordered one without any hesitation. The large hamburger bun–like bread was soaked significantly with the olive-oil dressing of the olive salad; then layers and layers of the salad and the cold cuts were added. The sandwich was cut in four and wrapped in parchment paper. It was ten in the morning, one would say time for breakfast, but the two of us savored the muffuletta sandwich as did all the other customers.

In creating this recipe, I added the mortadella on the spur of the moment. I love raw artichoke salad, but have often prepared this salad with many other, different ingredients, such as raw mushrooms, or shavings of Grana Padano or Parmigiano-Reggiano. Recently I made a beautiful salad of small artichokes, crunchy celery, and some great imported mortadella, which I happened to have on hand. And so this salad was born: it certainly is based on tradition, but with my own touch. It has now become a family favorite for buffets, antipasto, or just for lunch.

This is a recipe from the Sardine Factory in Monterey, California. My longtime friends Ted Balestreri and Chef Bert Cutino smoke fresh sardines for this dish, but smoked canned sardines are delicious as well. However, I enjoy regular canned sardines packed in olive oil in this dish as well.

When I ate my way through Baltimore, crabs were to be had in many ways. It was spring, and soft-shells were on every menu, as were crab cakes, crab cocktails, and crab salads. Most of the dishes had some version of tartar sauce, ketchup cocktail sauce, or rémoulade served with them. I got a yearning for a crab salad Italian-style, so, without much ado, here is one that evokes a lobster salad they often make in Sardinia.