The Pat Conroy Cookbook Page 15
8 thin slices prosciutto, skin rind removed
8 fresh sage leaves
About ⅓ cup all-purpose flour
4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted butter
1 cup dry white wine
Coarse or kosher salt and freshly ground white pepper
1. Lightly pound the veal scallops until they are of an even thickness. Place a piece of prosciutto over each scallop and top with a sage leaf. Use a wooden toothpick (threaded in and out like a needle) to secure the layers. Lightly dredge in flour.
2. In a heavy skillet over moderate heat, melt 3 tablespoons of butter until foamy. Add the prepared veal scallops and cook until browned, about 2 minutes per side, being careful not to crowd the pan. Cook in batches, if necessary. Remove to a warm platter and cover loosely with aluminum foil.
3. Turn the heat to high and melt the remaining 1 tablespoon butter. Quickly deglaze the skillet with the wine, bringing the liquid to a rapid boil while scraping up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Let the pan sauce reduce until slightly syrupy, about 3 minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste.
4. Transfer the veal to serving plates and spoon the sauce over to serve.
On a hillside street curving off the hind flank of the Borghese gardens, an Italian waiter taught me what it is to perfectly dress a salad. When he took our orders he was unmannerly and dyspeptic, rare qualities in that magnificent, white-jacketed tribe. He acted as though we held some timeless grudge against him because we insisted on ordering a meal in his restaurant. But his mood did not deflect from the perfection of the bruschetta or the bucatini all’Amatriciana that came out of the kitchen.
However, the waiter’s distemper could not hide the artistry that was native to his species when he brought out three insalata mistas for me and my companions. The salads were perfectly composed of curly chicory and escarole with a green and welcome addition of field lettuce and a shy appearance of arugula. The waiter took the salads to a dressing table, where his movements slowed and his work turned sacramental. Surprising me, he turned a salt grinder a single time onto a plate, and the salt snowed down in a soft hail. Then he squeezed the freshest lemon onto that plate, which was ivory white. Slowly, he dissolved the salt by whisking a fork through the lemon juice. When satisfied that the salt had disappeared, he poured a parsimonious amount of red wine vinegar and incorporated that with great care. Afterward, he filled the plate with bright green extra virgin olive oil that looked like it had been harvested from a field of emeralds, again working the fork until the dressing appeared right to him. Then, with an acrobatic move that I advise no one else to emulate, he tilted the plate and dressed the first salad, shifted the dressing to the second salad without spilling a drop, and then moved to the third, his instincts guiding him every step of the way. When he finished, he tossed the three salads in their individual plates and brought them to the table. Each salad glistened like a gemstone. I lifted the salad to my mouth and realized I had never tasted—really tasted—a salad before. The greens were so fresh that they must have rested in fields that very morning; the olive oil was rich and fresh and perfectly complemented by the bite of lemon and vinegar. The salt was a breath of itself, a sea breeze hidden in the salad. I was dining on the mother of all salads, and my mouth could not have been happier. Putting my fork down, I applauded the waiter, but he was disdainful of praise, sniffed, and returned to the kitchen. It was the first and last time in Rome that I would see a salad dressing composed on a dinner plate.
In Italy, the usual order of business is salt, a carefully chosen extra virgin olive oil, and a good red wine vinegar. As far as I can tell, the use of balsamic vinegar in salads is an American fad. Maybe it is used in Modena, where the vinegar is born, but I never got to Modena. The Italians are resolute and athletic when it comes to tossing their salads, and they insist that all ingredients merge. In Italy, the oil is king, queen, and everything when the subject is insalata mista.
BRUSCHETTA Bruschetta is Italian comfort food of a high order, but now that I think about it, the entire cuisine of Italy is based on comfort food. The toasted rustic bread sandpapers the garlic into small, fragrant bits when you rub the bread as it comes out of the oven. I’ve made bruschetta with fresh mozzarella and homemade tapenade, also with arugula, and with great passion when Beaufort’s summer tomatoes come into season. • SERVES 4
1 round loaf hearty rustic-style bread, cut into ½-inch slices (each slice cut in half, depending on the diameter of the bread)
4 garlic cloves, halved
Olive oil
6 ripe Roma tomatoes, cut into slices
Coarse or kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Place the bread slices directly on the oven rack and toast until lightly browned on both sides, about 3 minutes.
2. Quickly remove toasted bread and rub the cut side of a garlic clove on one side of each slice. Transfer to serving plates, drizzle lightly with olive oil, and top with sliced tomatoes. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and serve immediately.
BUCATINI ALL’AMATRICIANA In my travels around the world, I have never seen the word “amatriciana” without its being introduced first by its brother pasta, the thick, tube-shaped bucatini. This is a fast, delicious meal that is both easy to make and sexy. The two small red chiles provide the heat that gathers all the flavors of this dish in its arms. Like pasta carbonara, this recipe is claimed by the Romans, its provenance being the Roman town of Amatrice. • SERVES 4
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
½ cup finely chopped onion
⅓ pound pancetta, cut into ¼-inch slices, then into ¼-inch strips
2½ cups canned whole tomatoes, preferably San Marzano, drained and diced
2 small red chiles, crushed
Coarse or kosher salt
1 pound dried bucatini
Freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
1. In a large skillet over moderate heat, melt the olive oil and butter together until slightly foamy. Add the onion and cook until lightly colored, about 8 minutes. Add the pancetta and cook, stirring frequently, until the fat on the pancetta is slightly translucent, about 2 minutes.
2. Add the tomatoes, chiles, and a pinch of salt. Adjust the heat to bring the mixture to a low simmer and cook, uncovered, until thickened, 20 to 25 minutes.
3. Meanwhile, in a large pot of abundantly salted water, cook the pasta according to package directions until al dente. Drain in a colander, but do not rinse.
4. Add the pasta to the sauce and toss. Immediately transfer to serving plates. Sprinkle with grated cheese and serve, passing extra cheese on the side.
INSALATA MISTA (MIXED LETTUCES AND GREENS)
• SERVES 4 AS A FIRST COURSE
4 handfuls mixed young lettuces and greens
¼ cup extra virgin olive oil
Sea salt
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
Freshly ground black pepper
1. Inspect the lettuces. Remove any brown or old leaves.
2. Wash the lettuces in a sink filled with cool water. Dry in a salad spinner. If not completely dry pat with paper towels. Place the lettuces in a salad bowl and set aside.
3. Combine the oil and salt to taste in a small bowl and whisk with a fork to dissolve the salt. Add a small amount of the vinegar. Taste the dressing, then dip a leaf in the dressing and taste again. If the lettuces are young, they may not need all the vinegar.
4. Toss the lettuces with enough dressing to coat well and distribute the salad among serving plates. Offer freshly ground black pepper at the table.
When I moved to Rome, Italy, in 1981, I did not expect to meet the large number of American Southerners who had ventured to Rome in their youth and never gone back to their homeland. They popped up everywhere and in strange contexts. The word “expatriate” took on a dark, smoky luster that it had never had before for me. To find the courage to give up everything that had made your childhood either
immemorial or unbearable was a vanity of freedom I had never encountered. As an adult, I found myself so haunted by my parents and my geography that I have spent a lifetime trying to write my way out of my addiction to their memory. The American expatriate I had expected to meet in Italy, certainly; the Southerner, never. I thought all unhappy Southerners migrated to New York. Never did it occur to me that for some of them, New York was just a stop-off point where they made their flight connections to distant points on the globe.
During the whole first year in Rome many of those disaffected Southerners I met said, “What a shame you missed Eugene Walter. A magnificent Southerner. More like a Renaissance man than a sad-sack Alabamian. A novelist. A poet. An actor. He was in Fellini’s 8½, you know. A songwriter. A translator. An Air Force cryptographer living in the Aleutians during the war. A famed gardener. And the best cook in Rome.”
That I had missed the best cook in Rome caused me great anguish and keen regret. What was remarkable was that I rarely met a single American who had not known Eugene Walter and could not share a tale about this garrulous and perfectly whimsical enchanter. Rome had soured for him when the Red Brigades began to set off bombs in his neighborhood and to kidnap policemen he knew by name who were guarding the headquarters of the Communist Party and the Christian Democrats, both of which were a block from his garden apartment. As for timing, my family and I passed Eugene almost in midair over the Atlantic. As we began our first day in Rome, he ended his last. Eugene returned to his roots in Mobile, Alabama, where he would live out the rest of his artful and over-achieving life. Because I listened so ardently to the plainsong of his nearly inconsolable friends, I always felt that I had missed one of the great opportunities of my life by not getting to sit at the feet of Eugene Walter.
“The food you missed,” Alfred de Rocca, the composer, would say, shaking his head sadly. “The meals were simply magnificent, spread out like works of art.”
The great artist Zev, whose artworks seemed painted with peacock tails and the dreams of preoccupied children, told me, “Eugene Walter was a walking civilization. He could do anything and knew everything. The conversation you missed! He didn’t just talk. It was never just talk. It was grand opera.”
I could not pass a restaurant without being told by some new friends that they had dined on that terrace with Eugene or walked along the path of that park or sat in the shadows of that ruin talking to Eugene Walter about Camus or Sartre or Genet, all of whom Eugene Walter had known and entertained and fed. I met more Italians who were in love with the whole state of Alabama just because Eugene Walter had sprung so fully formed and elegant from that Deep South state. Many Italians were fully prepared to like me because they knew my native state of Georgia was contiguous to the one that had produced the incomparable Eugene Walter. His footsteps were numerous and broad and just by tracing them through his abandoned Rome, I realized the part expatriates play in defining the American spirit to their host countries. More than all the diplomats I met abroad, Eugene spread the joy and honor and wonder of being American and represented the essence of our finest selves as he told his incomparable stories and wove his tantalizing web during his Roman years.
I never saw Eugene Walter in Rome, but I felt his presence keenly. When my family returned to America after two years in Italy, I placed a call to him in Mobile and sent pleasant greetings and a hundred “ciaos” from a diverse and fervent group of friends from Trastevere to Parioli.
“You must come to meet me at once,” Eugene said, after I had delivered the message from his Roman life. “There’s friendship waiting here for you in Mobile. Time is swift and glorious friendship is one of the few condiments that makes life both sweet and sour. What sign are you?”
“Scorpio,” I answered.
“How dreadful. But it cannot be helped. I’ll do the best I can to like you. Though I can’t promise a thing. You are a large man with a weak voice, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Your family is not much, I would guess. Good solid peasant stock, but nothing to write home about.”
“Exactly.”
“Call your travel agent this moment,” Eugene Walter said to me. “I know destiny when I hear her precious heartbeat.”
I followed the call of destiny’s precious heartbeat the following summer and found myself embracing Eugene Walter as though we had known each other for many years. He walked me through the dining room of a very fine restaurant where he was well-known. Every eye was on him. He was wild-haired and fixed you with dark, piercing eyes. His voice was honeyed and piping and his pronunciation was precise as befitted the actor and the linguist he was. He sounded like Nero with lines written by Truman Capote.
“Let us get something straight between us,” Eugene said as we took our seats and the busboy filled our water glasses. “Your mother misnamed you. She was a frittery, vain woman who did not take the trouble to get your name right. You have never been a Pat and never will. It’s a name for other people of no consequence. I will think of a name for you.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“No need to thank me. That’ll come due when I find the exactly right name for you. Naming is one of the most important things. Ah! It’s coming to me. I’ve got it. It’s perfect. Do you want to hear what you should’ve been called all your life?”
“Yes,” I said. “I guess.”
“Lyon,” Eugene said. “L-Y-O-N. You are Lyon and will always remain Lyon to me.”
And so I did. Each time I called to check in with him in Mobile from that day on, Eugene Walter would say, “Greetings, Lyon. You evade me because you know you should be here in Mobile, living across the street from me, sitting at my knee and writing down every word I utter. It troubles you, Lyon. You could be my Boswell. Instead you are vegetating in a perfectly empty and licentious life in Atlanta, the whore of Georgia. Do you know the oldest thing I’ve ever seen in Atlanta is a traffic light or maybe a half pound of rat-trap cheese? You belong to the ancient places, Lyon. You are an Etruscan and that is both your honorific and your tragedy.”
In the restaurant that night, Eugene took the pepper shaker, unscrewed the cap, and poured the pepper into an ashtray on our table. When the waiter appeared, Eugene said, “Take this and flush it down the toilet of the men’s room. It is dead dust and has no relationship to the sacred pods of real black pepper. This has the taste of talcum or black sand formed on volcanic beaches. Freshly ground pepper has volatile, tempestuous oils which only last about an hour after grinding. This oil is an aid to digestion. It also cleanses the blood, like garlic or cognac. Rid us of this sawdust, good man. What sign are you?”
“Sagittarius,” the young man answered, removing the offending ashtray filled with the discredited pepper.
“Splendid,” Eugene said. “Sagittarians are the blown kisses of the Zodiac, sweet-natured but peppery, like old-fashioned nasturtiums, not the sickly aromatic hybrids of today’s tacky gardens.”
I was in Mobile with my lawyer, Jim Landon, and we were staying with his sister, Sue Beard, in an area of the city near Spring Hill College. Eugene insisted that he would cook lunch for Jim and me the very next day, but he warned me that we should come prepared for chaos and surprise. Those were two watchwords of Eugene’s life that he shared with me whenever I saw him in Mobile. He took the idea of whimsicality to almost absurd heights. Jim and I entered the shabby foyer of a nineteenth-century house that Eugene was “renting for a song and the utter prestige of having me lease such a déclassé abode.”
The cats that moved throughout the house were named with boisterous, T. S. Eliot flair. Boxes, piled to the ceiling, still bore the name of an Italian shipping company. Eugene brought an insouciance to the science of disorder. Jim and I cleaned off a sofa as Eugene served us a glass of red wine.
Jim Landon possesses one of the most spectacular visual memories of anyone I have ever known. This lunch took place in Mobile eighteen years ago, yet when I called Jim at his law office at Jones, Day in A
tlanta, he began speaking of it in precise detail.
“Eugene served us on beautiful Capodimonte china, although I do not think the word ‘china’ is correct. It is simpler than that. Very elegant. Let’s say plates. Yes, that will do fine. His wineglasses were thick, unwieldy, the provenance, I would venture, Woolworth’s. The tablecloth was lovely and I first guessed mohair, but upon further examination, I ventured it was cat hair. He served us barbecued chicken with a barbecue sauce I can taste to this day, taste but cannot duplicate. Pat, do you remember the orange slices floating in it, mustard and vinegar and we just raved about it? Then a perfectly composed salad, dressed with balsamic vinegar and extra virgin olive oil. We peeled our own oranges for dessert. You mangled yours of course. I cut my peel very precisely in one continuous piece that sprang back into its original shape when I laid it upon my Capodimonte plate. Afterward, he served us a demitasse of strong Italian espresso. Then he gave us each a teaspoon of sugar moistened perfectly with Angostura bitters.”
“No wonder people think I’m a redneck, Jim,” I said. “I never think about moistening sugar with Angostura bitters.”
“That is only the beginning of the thing, Conroy” Jim said. “I must take my leave now. I have real paying clients who actually require my legal services. ‘Capodimonte,’ I believe you will discover, means ‘at the head of the mountain.’”
Eugene Walter sent me a paperback copy of his cookbook when it was published in November of 1982. He had titled it with a baroque Eugene Walter–like flourish, Delectable Dishes from Termite Hall: Rare and Unusual Recipes. I read the book from cover to cover the day I received it, and it remains one of my favorite cookbooks in a collection that has grown into a fairly extensive library. There is not a recipe in the entire book that does not shine with a ray or two of Eugene’s strange, piquant life. On every page, his complaints and prejudices about food and life spill out, staining the napery and the carpets with his vinegary opinions about everything. I have not come across a bad recipe in the book, and certainly not a dull one. It was Eugene who told me that as a cookbook writer he was always trying to disguise the fact that “my real job is to be a philosopher king or a prince of elves. If it has magic, Lyon, look for my footprints nearby. Promise me that, Lyon. Always.”