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It was my 80th birthday, and the dinner – including the wines – was as exceptional as the occasion.<\/p>\n
I might say that in this latest appearance, our storybook ‘Magic Mea<\/a>l’ was actually upstaged by the first course, but I won’t, out of huge personal sentiment – and loyalty to both a great restaurant (Al Forno<\/a>, in Providence) and a home kitchen that has seen a lot over the decades.<\/p>\n Still, the sturgeon was a tough act to follow. Some of it may have been the pure novelty, and the fact that the recipe,\u00a0 in all its simplicity, was entirely mine, but it really was<\/em> delicious. That I grew up in the midwest, mid-century, where I was surrounded by sturgeon legends, and that Barry comes from Arkansas, one of the homes of the pallid and shovelnose<\/a>, had almost nothing to do with it.<\/p>\n The magic part of the meal was\u00a0Conchiglie al forno\u00a0<\/em>(last night it was actually Lumaconi al forno<\/em>, the pasta this time being Setaro’s\u00a0‘snails’,\u00a0<\/i>from BuonItalia), a rich pasta course with a very friendly history con noi<\/em> that goes back 20 years. This pasta is sometimes described as\u00a0lumache<\/em>.<\/p>\n It combines a pound of a large Campania artisanal shell shape pasta with roughly half a pound of sliced mushrooms, half a pound of butter, 4 Italian cheeses, lots of double cream, one head of sliced radicchio, and a generous amount of fresh sage.<\/p>\n\n
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