Search for struffoli - 3 results found

cod; squab, juniper, grapes; sweet potato; collards; struffoli

sable_sauce_cress

it seems Barry couldn’t wait to start, but it had been some time since lunch

 

It was the 25th of December, and so it was an almost perfect excuse for a feast.

  • 3 ounces of smoked wild Alaskan black cod (sable) from Blue Hill Bay Smoked Seafood, via The Lobster Place, brought to room temperature and served with a sauce of créme Fraîche from Ronnybrook Farms stirred with zest and juice from an unidentified small citrus fruit from Fantastic Gardens (it looked and tasted a bit like a ripe, small yellow lime), 5 whole tiny chive plants from Rogowski Farm, scissored from the bottom all the way into the green tops, and a little chopped tarragon from Stokes Farm, with cress from Max Creek Hatchery, dressed with good olive oil and more lemon/line juice, and some Grand Daisy Pugliese toasts on the side
  • the wine was a German (Pfalz) white, Becker Family Pinot Blanc, 2013, which Appellation Wines was kind enough to special order for us when we asked them to

squab_sweet_potatoes_collards

Pigeon. These weren’t wood pigeons, which are smaller, leaner, tastier, but wild, and therefore cannot be sold inside the U.S., but these domestic squab were almost as delicious, and at least there were no worries about biting into shot.

  • 2 air-chilled California squab from D’Artagnan, via O. Ottomanelli & Sons Meat Market, seasoned with salt and pepper inside and out, cooked, breast side down, in rendered goose fat (gifted from our hosts the night before), turning a few times, until richly browned all over (about 12  minutes), before being transferred to a tin-lined copper au gratin pan, the cavities rubbed with 2 tablespoons of softened butter which had been mixed with 2 teaspoons of crushed juniper berries, each bird covered with a round of sliced guanciale (also from O. Ottomanelli & Sons), then surrounded in the pan by nearly a cup of seedless California white grapes from Whole Foods, placed in the upper third of a 450º oven for about 15-20 minutes, or until the thickest part of the thighs had been cooked to medium-rare, removed and let rest for about 5 minutes
  • Japanese sweet potatoes from Lani’s Farm, unpeeled, but washed thoroughly, cut as french fries, tossed in a bowl with olive oil, salt, and pepper, than roasted above 400º in my trusty well-seasoned Pampered Chef unglazed ceramic oven pan for about 35-40 minutes
  • red collard greens from Tamarack Hollow Farm, cut in a rough chiffonade, then braised in a heavy pot in which one halved rocambole garlic head from Keith’s Farm had been allowed to sweat in some olive oil, the dish finished with salt, pepper, a drizzle of olive oil, and a sprinkle of juice from the same lemon/lime described above
  • the wine was an Italian (Sicily) white, Benanti Etna Rosso, Rosso di Verzella 2013, from Flatiron Wines & Spirits

 

struffoli

If I retain any Christmas traditions from any of my past lives, struffoli is one of them, and it can always make me smile.

  • the struffoli was from Buon Italia
  • the music was a continuation of  WQXR‘s annual 10-day, year-end Bach Festival, streaming until midnight, New Years Eve

Struffoli, and friendship

Struffoli_large_detail

Struffoli.  For me it means an Italian Christmas, but it also means the memory of one Providence Christmas almost half a century ago, and the very generous love of a good friend.  It’s a small story, but my recent revisiting of handmade Struffoli at Buon Italia made me think of Bernie.

I had never cooked anything, anywhere, until the first week I had my own kitchen.  The year was 1964, I had rented a grand studio apartment on Benefit Street in Providence. It was my first year as a graduate student in history at Brown. My introduction to cooking was both forced and an assertion of independence.  I knew I wasn’t going to trudge up College Hill to the campus for all my meals, and that I couldn’t afford to eat out regularly.  Besides, having just returned from a year in Munich, where I had immersed myself in German Gasthaus cookery (including excellent venison dinners for the equivalent of $1.25!), I decided that I wasn’t willing to go back to school cafeteria fare.

Eventually I built up my confidence, thanks to some improvising in my simple, one-wall kitchen, and leaning on The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, and later supported by The Joy of Cooking and Mimi Sheraton’s wonderful, The German Cookbook.  Perhaps just as important, in 1967 I moved around the corner into a large, two-story home along with a magical new lover; the house on South Court Street had both a dedicated, real kitchen and a separate dining room, and I began to think I really could prepare at home the food that interested me most at the time.  When the holidays approached that year, and I realized that neither of us, like many of the people I had come to know and love in Rhode Island, would be going home, naturally I decided it was the perfect time to roast a suckling pig.

One of my best friends, Bernard Scola, (who was actually going to be home, in Providence, for an elaborate Christmas dinner with his Italian family) offered to arrange to get a pig for me from a local farmer his family knew.  I don’t even remember whether I was the one who ended up paying for it, but I do remember that when we realized it might be difficult for me to transport a freshly-slaughtered animal, even a small one, in my little gray 7-year-old Porsche (yeah, I was spoiled), Bernie offered me the use of the large trunk of his big brand-new Thunderbird Landau Sedan (for those who car, it was the rather elegant one with the ‘suicide doors’).

As it turned out, the ‘suckling’ pig handed over to us in the farmyard could better be described as a ‘porker’, and that meant that it would occupy a good part of the T-Bird’s luggage space. Bernie himself was always elegant, and he was known for being perhaps the most fastidious member of our group, so when he opened the car’s trunk outside the barn, and I saw that it was beautifully lined with a light-gray patterned fabric, I froze.  But Bernie was a good sport, and gracious enough to allow me to think that it wasn’t a problem for him.  Fortunately several layers of plastic managed to do their job, and the trunk survived the trip back to Providence without a stain.

For now I’ll skip the details about preparing the pink, baby-like pig, including the part about soaking it upstairs in the tub in saltwater the night before, while we were having a party, and warning my friends not to pull back the shower curtain (we heard screams; they obviously hadn’t listened).  There’s also the part about the pig being too long even for our 30″ oven, so I had to scrunch it up on its side in an improvised pan.

But I’ll finally get to the original point, or at least the occasion, for this story.

In spite of his obligations to his own family, and to the large feast prepared every year by his mother, my dear friend managed to make it to our own Christmas dinner in the old wooden row house, not only as an honored guest and confederate, but as dessert angel:  Earlier in the day he had dropped off a large Struffoli his mother had made (here is Michele Scicolone’s recipe), which she had formed inside an angel food cake pan, removed and then carefully wrapped in cellophane and ribbon.  Of course it wasn’t very German, but it was very, very beautiful, and I had never seen anything like it.  It was also delicious. I had not even heard of Struffoli, before, but that Christmas I decided that it was the happiest, most festive cake I had ever seen.  It still is.

Earlier this year I learned that my old friend, with whom I had lost touch after he had married, died four years ago.  In case I didn’t say it enough back then, I’ll say it again.

Thank you Bernie.

 

* For far more information on preparing suckling pig than I had back in the 60s, see this site.

haddock, cress; Kassler Braten; horseradish potato; tardivo

haddocj_upland_cress

Yesterday I tweeted that our New Years Day dinner would be “Germany with some Italian, and, as always, New York too”. I followed through later in the day, and this post describes what it looked like, as prepared for four.

We began with bread sticks and a sparkling wine, to toast good friends and the new year

I had hoped to serve smoked eel for the first course, but there was none in site in the Greenmarket or anywhere else I look. Instead, I connected with some great smoked halibut from North Atlantic waters.

  • smoked haddock from the Lobster Place, with a little dressed upland cress from Two Guys from Woodbridge (a Campania olive oil, Lamparelli O.R.O. from Buon Italia; Maldon salt; freshly-ground black pepper; and a squeeze of juice from a sweet lemon from Fantastic Gardens of Long Island)a
  • slices of an Eric Kayser ‘Pain aux Céréales’
  • the wine was a German (Franken) white, Weingut Schmitt Kinder Gutswein Silvaner Trocken 2014

 

kassler_braten

Since there would be 4 of us at dinner, my idea of a smoked pork roast for the main course seemed to make sense for the wow factor, for deliciousness, and for ease of preparation, and that’s what we got.

  • one 6-rib 5-pound (more than enough for this meal) smoked pork rack (Kassler), from Pennsylvania, possibly an Amish farm, via O. Ottomanelli and Sons on Bleecker Street in the West Village, trimmed and the fat scored by Joe Ottomanelli (on the side not seen in the image below) rubbed with a mix of salt, pepper, a little of both picante and dulce Spanish paprika, placed in a large enameled cast iron dutch oven with 4 yellow onions and 3 garlic cloves, all diced and all from Lucky Dog Organic Farm, 5 Italian bay leaves from Buon Italia and 8 juniper berries, 6 cups of water and 2 cups of a decent red wine, covered with a lid and cooked in a preheated oven 375° for about 30 minutes, the cover removed and the pork continued cooking for another 25 minutes, basting occasionally, removed from the oven, the meat cut into chops, one rib each, kept warm while some of the cooking liquid was transferred to a smaller saucepan where it was stirred with about 4 tablespoons of water mixed with 2 tablespoons of arrowroot to bind them, served on pre-heated plates with some of the sauce on the top, the remainder poured into a pre-heated sauceboat which was added to the table

 

kassler_roast

yellow_onions

The Kassler was accompanied by Quince chutney remaining from several earlier meals, a potato-horseradish gratin, and roasted tardivo radicchio.

 

quince_squared

russet_potatoes

tardivo3

  • quince chutney, made following this theKitchn.com recipe, using a shallot from Keith’s Farm, a garlic clove from Stokes Farm, quince from Red Jacket Orchards, dried sweet cherries from Whole Foods, fresh ginger from Lani’s Farm, apple cider from Locust Grove Fruit Farm (the recipe asked for apple cider vinegar, and I do have a bottle of the local stuff, from Race Farm, but I misread the instruction and the dish still turned out more than fine)
  • three pounds of russet potatoes from Norwich Meadows Farm, washed, peeled, and thinly-sliced, tossed in a large bowl with 1½ teaspoons salt, ¾ teaspoon pepper, ¼ teaspoon of ground nutmeg, 3 Italian bay leaves from Buon Italia, half of a cup of shaved fresh horseradish from Eataly, and almost 3 cups of Ronnybrook heavy cream, arranged inside a buttered shallow 3-quart enameled cast iron baking dish, pressed to submerge the potatoes completely, covered in aluminum foil and baked in a 400º oven for 25 minutes, the foil removed and the dish continued to bake until the potatoes were tender and the top is golden, about another 50 minutes, removed to rest on the top of the stove until ready to be served [the dish can be prepared ahead of time, allowed to cool, and reheated for 12 minutes]
  • two heads of tardivo radicchio, one from Campo Rosso Farm, the other from Italy, via Eataly (Chris and Jessi had only one left when I stopped by their stall in the Greenmarket on Friday, and I really wanted to serve this wonderful vegetable to our guests), prepared pretty much according to this simple recipe, which is to say, washed under cold running water, the moisture shaken off, each head cut in half lengthwise, and a V-cut made inside the root end to allow it to cook more rapidly, the halves arranged inside a ceramic oven pan cut side up, covered with thyme sprigs from Stokes Farm, seasoned generously with salt and pepper, drizzled with2 tablespoons of olive oil, baked for about 12 minutes, turned over, baked for about 8 minutes more, turned so the cut side is up and once again returned to the oven, this time for only a couple minutes or so, or until the stems were tender [the tardivo can be served hot or warm]
  • the wines were, first, an Austrian (Burgenland) red, Sankt Laurent ‘Konkret,’ Meinklang – 2009; and then a German (Baden) red, Pinot Noir, Dr. Heger – 2012, both from Astor Wines

 

cheeses_four

There was a cheese course.

  • the cheeses were, from left to right in the picture above, Consider Bardwell Farms ‘Manchester’ goat cheese; their ‘Pawlet’ cow cheese; ‘Barden’, a cow blue cheese, also from Consider Bardwell; and ‘Arethusa Blue’, a Connecticut cow blue from Eataly
  • thin toasts from the same Eric Kayser ‘Pain aux Céréales’ with which the meal began
  • and I brought out a dozen dried Calabrian (Amantea) figs from Buon Italia
  • the wine was a California (Napa) white, Matt Iaconis Chardonnay Napa Valley 2015, from Naked Wines

 

There was a sweet, a very festive sweet!

 

struffoli_large_detail

  • struffoli from the Magliulo family’s shop, Buon Italia, made by Tonia, who, with her husband Mimmo, owns this wonderful place

 

  • the music throughout was the conversation of four friends and one very smart baby

[the image of the struffoli is from the archive, although the sweet was made by the same woman; the one I took last night turned out a little blurry after several courses with wine]