The Pat Conroy Cookbook Page 12

  From the first week of school until the last, Bo-Pig received packages of Italian food from his girlfriend and her family. The ethereal Phyllis Parise came from a family that still remained true to the Old World and the old ways, and their gifts of food were prodigal. In my childhood, my mother had served up Velveeta and whatever cheese came with the frozen macaroni, and, of course, the cheese of cottage. I was ill-prepared for the arrival of Gorgonzola, five or six varieties of goat cheese (I didn’t know there was such a thing as goat cheese; hell, I didn’t know there was such a thing as goat’s milk), provolone, and the divine Parmigiano-Reggiano. There was an inexhaustible supply of hard sausages and pepperonis, cans of tuna drenched in olive oil, anchovies, and packages of Parodi cigars. What amazed me was that these gift packages were meant for “the room,” all of us, and not just Bo-Pig. In the first month, I received a letter from Phyllis thanking me for taking such good care of her fiancé. During the second month, Phyllis’s mother wrote me a letter thanking me for the same thing. Before Christmas, Phyllis’s father wrote me a letter promising to teach me how to make a pizza if I ever got up to his pizza shop in Greensburg, Pennsylvania. I had a soft spot for the whole Parise family long before I ever met them.

  • MAKES 8 CUPS, ENOUGH FOR 2 TO 3 POUNDS PASTA

  2 tablespoons olive oil

  8 large garlic cloves, roughly chopped

  8 sprigs fresh rosemary

  One 3½- to 4-pound pork bone-in rib roast, ribs removed and tied onto a roast

  1 red onion, roughly chopped (about 2 cups)

  One 35-ounce can whole tomatoes, preferably San Marzano

  2 pounds pasta (preferably pappardelle), cooked

  Freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano

  1. In a large skillet over moderate heat, warm the olive oil. Add the garlic and rosemary and sauté until the rosemary needles sizzle and turn crisp and the garlic is golden, 2 to 3 minutes. Remove and reserve.

  2. In the same pan, sear the pork in the hot flavored oil, turning it occasionally, until all sides are nicely browned, 5 to 7 minutes. Transfer to a large stockpot and set aside.

  3. Add the onion to the flavored oil and cook, stirring occasionally, until browned (adding more oil sparingly if the pan is too dry), about 3 minutes. Crush the tomatoes with your hands and add, with their juice, stirring to scrape up any browned bits of pork stuck to the bottom of the pan. Transfer the tomato mixture to the stockpot and bring to a low boil over medium heat. Cover the pot, lower the heat, and simmer until the pork is tender enough to shred (when scraped with a fork), about 2 hours.

  4. Cool the pork in the tomato sauce. (The cooled pork roast and sauce can be transferred to a storage container and refrigerated overnight. Wrap and store the garlic and rosemary separately.)

  5. Remove the pork from the tomato sauce and reserve. In a food processor fitted with a metal blade, process half the tomato sauce with the fried garlic cloves and rosemary needles (discarding stalks) until somewhat smooth. Stir the puréed sauce back into the pot with the rest of the tomato sauce. The goal is a sauce with a rough, chunky character.

  6. Shred the pork and strip the meat from the bones. Discard the bones. Chop the meat finely by hand, not in a food processor, and stir it into the tomato sauce. Heat and serve over pasta, passing the cheese on the side.

  WILD MUSHROOM SAUCE During Easter holiday of my sophomore year at The Citadel, I traveled to Greensburg, Pennsylvania, to visit Bo-Pig’s family. They lived in a suite atop the Hotel Greensburg, but we would spend most of our time in Greensburg at the home of the Parise family, where Bo’s charming fiancée, Phyllis, resided. When I walked into the Parise house, my induction as a full-fledged member of the Italian household had taken place without my knowledge. Phyllis hugged me and kissed me on both cheeks, as did her mother, father, and grandparents.

  The family led us into the dining room, where a huge celebratory meal was in progress. What I came to love when I lived in Rome, I came to love in the Parise household that Easter week—a freewheeling, rollicking love of family and friends and a great simplicity, yet complete integrity, when it came to the preparation and eating of food. The table glistened with bowls of olives and pickles, and an array of the cheeses was lined up on a sideboard.

  The grandfather eyed me with a discriminating and unnerving discernment before pronouncing, “Irlandese.”

  “Sì, Irlandesi,” Phyllis said. “Irish.”

  The grandfather handed me a bowl of olives and said, “Mangia, Irlandese.” I ate the olive, but the pit surprised me, and after I ate around it, I didn’t know what to do with it. I sat immobilized with every eye in the room observing me. The grandfather lifted a relish plate to my lips and I deposited the pit on the plate to cheers. The grandfather said, “Buono.”

  Phyllis nodded, and I said, “Buono.”

  He cut me a piece of cheese and said, “Mangia.”

  I ate the cheese and said, “Buono.”

  He said, “E Italiano. Provolone.”

  When the pasta dish arrived at the table, the grandfather said to me, “Pappardelle. No spaghetti. Pappardelle,” opening up the mysteries and the shapes that Italian pasta could assume, all of them glorious.

  The whole week was like that, the grandfather leading me on an idyllic voyage through the pronunciation and devouring of splendid food. In the afternoon, Bo and Phyllis would slip away to be alone, and I would go over to her parents’ mom-and-pop pizza shop. Mr. Parise put me into an apron and taught me how to make pizza dough. “It’s easy. You just do it,” he explained.

  By the end of the day, they were selling the pizzas I was making from scratch, which pleased me enormously. The Parises brought me out and introduced me to the woman who had purchased my first pizza. In my exuberance, I kissed her hand, thinking it was the Italian way. The woman was Irish, and she looked at me like I was nuts.

  • MAKES 6 CUPS, ENOUGH FOR 2 TO 3 POUNDS PASTA

  3 ounces dried wild mushrooms (look for an Italian mix, heavy on the porcini and easy on Asian mushrooms like shiitakes, or use just porcini)

  4 cups boiling water

  ½ cup dry vermouth

  3 tablespoons olive oil

  1 pound cremini mushrooms, cleaned, stemmed, and thinly sliced

  1 teaspoon coarse or kosher salt

  ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

  1 heaping tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary

  1 garlic clove, finely minced

  One 35-ounce can whole tomatoes, preferably San Marzano, broken up into small pieces, with their juice

  Pinch of sugar

  2 pounds pasta (preferably pappardelle), cooked

  1. Place the dried wild mushrooms in a bowl and cover with the boiling water. Let soak until softened, at least 30 minutes. Remove the mushrooms with a slotted spoon and strain liquid through a double thickness of cheesecloth, reserving 1½ cups. Mix the reserved liquid with vermouth.

  2. In a small saucepan over moderate heat, bring the liquid to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer until reduced by half. Finely chop the softened mushrooms and set aside. (This can be done in the food processor, but do not pulverize them.)

  3. In a medium stockpot over moderately high heat, heat the olive oil until hot but not smoking. (A drop of water should sizzle immediately upon contact when dropped in the oil.) Add the cremini mushrooms and cook until golden brown, stirring occasionally, 5 to 7 minutes. Lower the heat, sprinkle with salt, pepper, rosemary, and garlic; and cook for another 2 minutes, stirring frequently.

  4. Add the chopped dried mushrooms and the mushroom broth, stirring as the liquids simmer to scrape up any browned bits from the bottom of the pot. Cook until slightly reduced, stirring frequently, about 2 minutes. Stir in the tomatoes with their juice, add the sugar, and simmer over low heat until thickened, about 25 minutes. Serve with the pasta.

  QUICK PAPPARDELLE WITH PANCETTA AND CHESTNUTS

  • SERVES 4

  1 pound pappardelle

  1 cup diced pancetta


  1 cup chopped roasted chestnuts

  1½ cups heavy cream

  2 fresh sage leaves

  Freshly ground black pepper

  Freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano

  1. Cook pappardelle according to package directions in abundantly salted water.

  2. Brown the pancetta in a medium skillet. Remove and reserve. Heat the chopped chestnuts in the cooking fat. Add the heavy cream and the fresh sage leaves. Reduce slightly before returning the pancetta to the pan. Add black pepper to taste.

  3. Drain the pasta and add to the skillet, stirring gently to coat the noodles. Transfer to a warm plate and sprinkle with Parmigiano-Reggiano.

  QUICK PAPPARDELLE WITH BLACK TRUFFLE SAUCE

  • SERVES 4

  1 pound pappardelle

  8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter

  1 cup (4 ounces) mascarpone

  1 medium fresh black truffle

  1 cup freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, plus additional

  1. Cook pappardelle according to package directions in abundantly salted water.

  2. Melt the butter and mascarpone together in a medium skillet over low heat. Shave the truffle into the butter mixture, giving it a minute to perfume the sauce, and sprinkle in the Parmigiano-Reggiano, gently shaking the pan to incorporate.

  3. Drain the pasta and add to the skillet, stirring gently to coat the noodles. Transfer to a warm plate and sprinkle with additional Parmigiano-Reggiano.

  SUGARED BLOOD ORANGES

  Slice the blood oranges as thinly as possible and spread out on a platter. Sprinkle them with raw, or turbinado, sugar and let them sit at room temperature until the sugar dissolves. Serve with biscotti and gelato.

  The skin on real Italian blood oranges is typically very fragile and therefore difficult to peel without damaging the fruit. Leaving the skin on the orange makes it easier to pick up the slices with your fingers or a fork.

  The irresistible desire to travel is known in my family as being “Jasper-blooded.” The idea of voyage, of breaking out into the unknown, of those unappeasable dreams of the road, is central to the identity of my family, but is also nonetheless profoundly troubling and distrusted. There are those among us who live in the South our whole lives and rarely venture very far from the places we were born. Then there are the others, like me, who are Jasper-blooded.

  My grandfather Jasper Catlett Peek was a restless, godstruck man who roamed around the small towns of the South selling Bibles and cutting hair. It was said he could not bear to stay in a place for more than three months at a time. “Jasper could never stay put,” my grandmother once told me. “But he never had much imagination about traveling; he only traveled the South.” But if any of us move away from our hometowns, take a job in a distant city, or marry boys and girls from “away,” it is always blamed on Jasper. He was the first holy man of the open road our family produced, and he looked forward to the journey more than the arrival. Such figures define families.

  My grandmother did not lack imagination and she never sold a Bible in her life. Margaret Nolen Stanton, Jasper’s wife, circumnavigated the globe three times by ship, sending back commemorative postcards from Madagascar, Hong Kong, Egypt, India—from everywhere. As a boy, these postcards were the first travel literature I ever read. Her handwriting, unintelligible as Arabic, seemed congruent with the exotica she described. She posted them with exotic stamps, as strange and luminous as the cities she celebrated in the hurried prose-poems she wrote from along the shipping lanes of the world. My grandmother traveled to be amazed, transformed, and to build up a reserve and bright ordnance of memories for her old age. She was the first philosopher of travel our family produced, and I became an acolyte of that philosophy.

  When I was thirteen, my grandmother took me aside and announced to me that she had studied me carefully and that I was destined to be the real traveler among her grandchildren. She then described the most wonderful thing she had ever seen in her journeys around the world. In the Atlantic, off the coast of Africa, at dusk, a sea monster had surfaced near her ship. She told me the rest of our family had laughed at her when she described this miraculous experience, but she knew I would not. She proceeded to describe her monster with such precision, vitality, and even affection that, to this day, I believe in the existence of the fabulous unnamed creatures navigating the darkest streams and currents of the oceans. And I believe they appear to special people who find the proof of God and the reason for travel in the wildest ecstasies of the sacred imagination.

  As an advocate of my grandmother’s philosophy, I have traveled to twenty-five countries and have plans to visit fifty more. She passed her inextinguishable curiosity on to me, and I am a changeling because of the urgency of her love affair with the world. My ex-wife Lenore and I once rented an exquisite house in the center of Rome. Our terrace overlooked Capitoline Hill, the Campidoglio, and the northern section of the Roman Forum. I would have liked to bring my grandmother there and shown her the view from that terrace.

  I would have shown her this: in the summer, in the opaline light of late afternoon, the city is the color of pale bruises and softly spoiled fruit. The history of the Western world rises up in the wordless articulation of ruins. I have watched friends grow mute as the light dispersed behind the palms and cedars, and the cats began to move out of the caverns that led to the buried city beneath Rome. In Rome, I learned that with every step I took, I was walking on the remains of empire. The proper study of Europe is impermanence; dust and stone are the true vassals of time. There is such a thing as too much beauty and too much history. There is even such a thing as too much travel, and thus I will add to my grandmother’s philosophy. But first, I must explain why to her. She is part of the change.

  Several decades ago, in the Villa la Massa outside of Florence, Lenore and I decided we would not live in Rome for more than two years. The decision was a complicated and painful one, and we needed the ambience of the Massa, our favorite hotel, to make that decision.

  On the appointed day we walked through the Uffizi Gallery looking at Renaissance art. Lenore’s face was like that of one of those mysterious, sensual women who stood in radiant attendance to those leaf-crowned goddesses in Botticelli’s paintings. Later, at the perfect hotel, which had a view of the water, Lenore and I watched the fishermen on the Arno casting for trout as we dressed for dinner.

  We then went down to the bar for a glass of wine. At the Massa, they know that there must be private, well-lit places to write letters and to observe other guests. There must be places to talk about how you want to live the rest of your life. The bar is an elegant room on the river side of the hotel, intimate and charming, where the gold-leaf wallpaper and candlelight turned Lenore’s face into something less than gold and something more. The bar itself is centrally recessed, the Arno like a side altar in an unpraised cathedral. It gleams with marble and the bold, glossy images of heraldry. The bartender worked on a crossword puzzle between fixing drinks for the guests. Elegantly, he presided over his well-appointed fiefdom, and there was no drink he couldn’t make. He was never rushed because the Villa la Massa inspired a wish that time would come to a complete stop and a moment of grace would last forever.

  Our wine was there. It was there at that moment. It was white and cold, a pale Chianti from the hills above Siena. The bottle sat beside pink roses, arranged in a crystal vase. When the wine was finished, my wife’s lipstick was on the glass, and thirty minutes of our lives were over. My mother was very ill, my grandmother had had a stroke, and Lenore and I had decided that there was too much of America in us to become permanent expatriates.

  The bartender was half-finished with the crossword puzzle when we approached the bar. He was stuck on three or four words as we departed. You left the bar and the roses and hoped the bartender completed the puzzle, because you had just sat and thought about the puzzle of time passing, of mortality, of human choice, and you wished you were smart enough to invent some explanation or to write a perfect poem
that ended with the print of Lenore’s lips on the wineglass. Our lives are longer but as fragile as roses. There are always three or four words in our lives we can never articulate. They are always the three or four words that would solve the puzzle. But on that night, Lenore and I solved part of it: we were going home, we said. My grandmother had left out an important part of her philosophy. I knew she would always travel, but I never thought she might leave me.

  On the terrace overlooking the Forum, I tried to write my grandmother a love letter. I tried to give her a summing-up, a bedazzled inventory of all I had seen and learned while living in Europe. She was recovering from her stroke in a nursing home in Jacksonville, Florida, and I wanted my letter to be perfect.

  I told her about the previous summer, about renting an old farmhouse in France, in the town of Meyrals in the Dordogne Valley, and about taking her great-grandchildren into the prehistoric caves of Font-de-Gaume. I had bored my older daughters senseless by force-marching them through the major museums of Europe. But standing in half-light before the paintings and carvings thirty thousand years old, I watched the eyes of my daughters change as they studied the delicate etchings of mammoth and deer. In the cold and darkness of those caverns, we watched the movement of the silent, immemorial herds of bison that in their passage across the stone express something ineffable and fine about the human spirit. I had taken my children to the dawn of creation and shown them the first immaculate urge toward godhead and art. In the intimacy of those caves, I heard the breathing of my children, the soft voices of their astonishment, and I knew I had changed their lives forever.