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La Gricia, ”la cucina de na vorta’

La-Gricia

We never tire of this recipe .  It’s ‘La Gricia’, generally described as a traditional dish of the shepherds in the hills of Lazio, the province of which Rome is the center.   The name comes from the name of a valley which is no longer inhabited, perhaps by either sheep or shepherds.  I first came across this regional classic when the amazing inimitable Fred Plotkin once described it in the New York Times many years ago (in fact almost 26 years to the day before I prepared it last night).  In 1989, fascinated by its simplicity and apparent authenticity, I immediately cut the recipe out of the page and put it into my file, but I don’t think that I actually used it until years later, after we found ourselves dining at the Trastevere restaurant featured in Fred’s article.

That means that we first enjoyed it in 1996, in the form of Spaghetti alla Gricia, although we did not know its association with the clipping back at home, while sitting at a table in the little street outside Piccola Trattoria da Lucia.  We went back to the address in the Vicolo del Mattonato two days later, and at least once again the next time we were in Rome a year after that.  The founder, Lucia Antonangeli, had served ”la cucina de na vorta” [the cooking of once upon a time] at her eponymous trattoria from 1939 until she died in 1967.  Her grandson, Renato Bizzarri, who had himself succeeded his mother Silvana Cestier in running the restaurant, recognized us as soon as we sat down.  Now that’s a civilization!

Some time after we had returned to New York I found the old clipping in my ‘pasta’ file, amazed at the coincidence of our two encounters with La Gricia.  The recipe had come home to stay.

Since then the dish has become a standard – and a great favorite – in our own kitchen; I make sure that I always have the ingredients on hand, including, most essentially, a chunk of guanciale in the freezer.  If you don’t have access to guanciale, pancetta is almost as good, but it must be in chunk form.  I also prefer to use penne rigate, although a reasonably thick long pasta is probably just as correct, and perhaps as good, as the short, ridged form.

  • the Afeltra Pasta di Gragnano penne liscia from Eatlay was boiled until barely al dente, some of the liquid reserved and the pasta drained and mixed into a large pot in which 8 ounces of guanciale from Buon Italia, cut in 1/2 to 1 inch square pieces, had been heated with 4 tablespoons of olive oil for about a minute, a bit of pasta water then added to the pot, everything stirred for a minute to emulsify the sauce; several tablespoons of freshly-ground black pepper added and stirred into the mix, which was then removed from the heat and about 3 or 4 tablespoons of roughly-shredded pecorino, also from Buon Italia, tossed in, the pot left standing for 30 seconds or so, the dish then served in shallow bowls, with more cheese and black pepper on the side
  • the wine was an Italian white, Le Salse Verdicchio di Matelica 2013

one Amatriciana among other Amatricianas

We’ve been enjoying sugo all’amatriciana for decades, but I’m only now beginning to understand how many subtle variations there are to this classic Italian, or Lazio (Roman?) dish, in spite of the fact that its components can almost be counted with the fingers of one hand.

I went with Kyle Phillip’s recipe this time. He writes, “Roman versions tend to use bucatini..”, and that’s what I used, 10 ounces of Setaro Bucatini from Buon Italia, mostly because, of the pastas I had, it was the closest to spaghetti, which is probably the more usual choice. I used a ‘pancetta pepato‘, also from Buon Italia, substituting for the customary guanciale (cured pork cheek); a Sini Fulvi pecorino cheese from Romano, and not Amatrice, from Chelsea Whole Foods Market; true Italian San Marzano tomatoes, like the cheese, La Fede D.O.P. dell’Agro Sarnese, also from Chelsea Whole Foods Market*; whole black pepper, ground fresh; sea salt from the French Mediterranean coast,; and 2 small dried chili peppers, peperoncino Calabresi secchi, from Calabria via Buon Italia. I also used local garlic, Sicilian Rocambole, from Keith’s Farm, and a little local sweet yellow onion, from Norwich Meadows Farm, both of which which would apparently be condemned in Amatrice itself, and I didn’t use any white wine this time, an omission which it seems would also offend some purists.

*Ah, those tomatoes.

I’m going to try to remember to go with the classic formula next time (wine, but no garlic, and no onion), and I’ll compare the two, if I can remember well enough what this one tasted like.

It’s interesting that three of Rome’s classic pasta dishes, Gricia, Amatriciana, and Carbonara, are so closely related, despite being very distinctive in taste. I’ve prepared two of them recently; I expect to move to a Carbonara, the most modern of the 3, in the near future, to complete the trilogy.

 

three inspired by Marlow & Daughters

Marlowe_&_Daughters

(probably not your mother’s butcher:  a detail of the meat case at Marlow & Daughters)

Marlow & Daughters

The post which appears just before this one describes a dinner which, although it did not include meats from the Williamsburg butcher shop Marlow & Daughters, was almost a natural segue from the three meals which immediately preceded it, which did.  The connection is their components, which were importantly either blood or liver (discouraging all but the heartiest meat eating readers), specifically the blood sausage in the Huevos Flamencos and the poached links of lamb liver sausage which dominated the meal the previous night.

It was only a coincidence that we had also enjoyed lunches with two different kinds of delicious liverwurst sandwiches on Monday and Tuesday (thanks again to the Union Square Greenmarket and the people at Flying Pigs Farm), but it appears that in those four days we were deep inside territory many might consider (excuse the pun) too gutsy for their taste.

The lamb liver sausage was the third in a series of dinners inspired by our visit to Marlow & Daughters on Sunday after our afternoon visiting Williamsburg galleries.  We’ve long been fans of the restaurants Diner and Marlow & Sons, which share a connection with each other and with Tom Mylan, their former in-house butcher.  Now Mylan is a food blogger, and has his own Broadway meat shop, for which he purchases only local, pasture-raised whole animals and then butchers them on-site.   The meat can often be cut to order, and there’s a generous charcuterie selection.

We had been reading exciting things about his independent venture and had been impressed with Mylan’s appearance on NPR’s “All things considered” last spring, but hadn’t actually visited the site until now.

On Sunday we brought home two beautiful, thick, sirloin steaks.   They looked like giant tournedos to me, but still somehow managed to tip the scales at only about 6 ounces each.  Perfect.    It was almost closing time when we arrived, but when the butcher I spoke to saw how disappointed I was that there was only one steak left in the counter, he told us that if we could wait a few minutes he’d cut two in any size we wanted from a large slab of dry-aged beef he had in the cooler.  Wow.  I was impressed.

It took me all the way back to the little full-service Italian grocery store down the street from the house where I grew up, in pre-breakdown Detroit:  I was probably thirteen or fourteen, and my first (after-school) job was as a stock boy and bag packer at “Nino’s Market” (it was probably only the size of our Manhattan apartment), and I clearly remember that, after the manager, who was the proud and very hot young son of the owner, the butcher was treated like a God!

I’ve never been afraid of meat since.

We also bought half a pound of beautiful house-cured guanciale, since it seemed about time for Pasta alla Gricia once again.  We never tire of that dish, which ideally includes properly-cured pork jowl, but a number of different pasta choices (we usually use a penne).  We first enjoyed it in 1996, in the form of Spaghetti alla Gricia, while sitting at a table on the street outside the Piccola Trattoria da Lucia, in Rome’s Trastevere (Chiuso il lunedì).    We went back to the Vicolo del Mattonato two days later, and at least once again the next time we were in Rome one year later (the founder’s son, Renato Bizzarri, who succeeded his mother in running the restaurant, recognized us as soon as we sat down).

Back at Marlow & Daughters, I looked around for lamb, and was sorry to hear from another butcher that the shop was altogether out of it.  Then he told me that he did have some lamb liver sausage in the back and wondered if it might interest us.   He was asking the right guys:  we were both game, and of course the medium-dark, purply sausage itself looked and smelled like game.  I knew I already had the wintry vegetables which would complement it.  We asked him to wrap up two links (11 or 12 ounces total).

The small shop also has some great cheeses, a small selection of pickles and preserves, milk, some fresh vegetables and fruit, and a carefully-selected assortment of dry food products.  Heaven.

This is a more complete description of our three Marlow & Daughters meals, whose vegetable ingredients (as well as the ice cream) were all gathered from the Union Square Greenmarket:

dinner, December 8, 2009

upland_cress_Paffenroth

dinner, December 9, 2009

penne_rigate_Rao

dinner, December 10, 2009

mustard_greens_red_frisee

[image at the top from Rotating Corpse]