Spring in New England
...means two things: shad roe and fiddleheads.
This year it also means chevre rolled in dill from
Beltane Farm in Lebanon, CT. This cheese tastes like freshness. Tangy, sweet, herby, milky combine to taste. just. fresh.
I always cook my shad roe according to instructions from John McPhee, published in the
New Yorker in August, 2002. He wrote the
book on shad so I figure he knows from cooking it.
Dinner is served, covered in a thatch of bacon, alongside fiddleheads that I sauteed in olive oil and champagne vinegar:
John McPhee writes:
You have your shad roe! You are in business! This is always exactly how we feel. Like we have just won the lottery and cannot help dancing in our chairs as we eat these huge lobes of fish eggs. The foie gras of the Connecticut River valley.I also purchased two other amazing things recently. One is the loveliest watercress in the world, grown hydroponically by Two Guys from Woodbridge and available locally at Romeo's, Nika's, Bishop's Orchards, Limon Fine Food, and the Cityseed Farmer's Market at Wooster Square:
And the other is this Brazilian delicacy, available locally at the Shop-Rite in West Haven:
We haven't tried Ham Snack yet because the package is too beautiful to open!
You Asked For It
On August 23rd, 2004, Andy and I celebrated his birthday by having dinner with a group of friends, including Garett and his sister Erika, who shares Andy's birth date. None of us had ever been to
Eccolo, a new-ish Italian restaurant on Fourth Street in Berkeley whose kitchen, like two of every three restaurants in the Bay Area, was run by some
Chez Panisse alumni. It was a long and delicious meal: the first time I ever tasted tripe (it didn't look, feel, or taste like stomach lining! Amazing!); the first time I ever tasted Barbaresco; and definitely the first time I'd ever heard of bread soup. That soup was a revelation. In fact, "I'd never had a soup so silken and concentrated", as I described it in a letter that I wrote to
Gourmet magazine begging them to ask the chef to share his recipe.
I received a letter from
Gourmet a few weeks later, thanking me for writing and enclosing the recipe for
"Pappa al Pomodoro" on Eccolo letterhead. I made the soup -- which was of course not as delicious coming off my home stove as it had been that night, but was still good -- and that was the end of it.
Until I received this month's issue of
Gourmet. There, on page 38, two and a half years after our dinner, is my letter to them asking for the soup recipe! It even has my old location information -- my dateline reads
Berkeley, California. The magazine adapted the recipe somewhat from the restaurant's original to allow for the use of fresh tomatoes and some standardized measurements.
Here, for my loyal readers, is the original recipe verbatim, straight from the mouth and kitchen of Eccolo:
Pappa al Pomodoro
serves 6 to 8 people
Extra virgin olive oil
4 red onions, chopped finely
3 cloves garlic, sliced thinly
2 28 oz cans San Marzano tomatoes, chopped
2 bunches fresh basil, leaves washed and picked
Salt
1 2 lb. loaf of stale rustic bread, crust removed and torn into 1-inch pieces
Heat a large soup pot over a high flame and coat the bottom with extra virgin olive oil. When the oil begins to shimmer, add the chopped onions and saute until they are soft and golden brown (about 10-15 minutes), stirring occasionally, and adding a little water if necessary to prevent burning.
When the onions are cooked through, add the garlic and tomatoes. Cook over a low flame until the tomatoes begin to sweeten and concentrate, about 25-30 minutes. Stir occasionally. Tear the basil leaves into the soup as the tomatoes are cooking. Add salt to the pot. It's important to correctly season the soup with salt at this point, because it is difficult to adjust the salt once you've added the bread.
Now add the bread to the tomatoes and cook over a low flame for about 5-10 minutes, until the bread has absorbed the tomato. If the soup seems too thick, add a little water, but this is one soup that really should hold up a wooden spoon stuck into it.
Serve the pappa warm or at room temperature, with some freshly torn basil and a liberal dousing of olive oil.
Not Recommended
Possible alternative titles for Gael Greene's memoir of New York food and sex,
Insatiable:
Insufferable
Intolerable
Interminable
White Merlot
Is this an actual wine? Or is it Hawaiian Punch? Or is it something whereupon it touches your lips your nerve endings hit the REJECT button and you spray it across the table?
The Sutter Home White Merlot that we drank in a blind tasting of cheap, mass-market wines on Tuesday at
Seppi's was, hands down, the worst wine we tasted that day. Worse than any White Zinfandel "blush" concocted by Franzia, ever. We were all in agreement on that, if on no other wine that afternoon.
The tasting was organized by Robin Goldstein, Mr.
Fearless Critic himself, recently decamped to Austin after several years on the I-91 corridor, publishing books on where to eat and where to avoid eating AT ALL COSTS in New Haven and the Northampton/Pioneer Valley area of Massachusetts. It's him that I have to thank for introducing me to Roy Ip and
Le Petit Cafe, and Roy that I have to thank for inviting me to the tasting. There is no better way to play hooky mid-week than to run off to New York on a perfect spring day to begin drinking lots of wine at 1:00 in the afternoon. Lady of leisure
manque,
c'est moi.
First, mad props to my tasting table compatriots Tom, Chris and Dave, all urologists at
Yale-New Haven Hospital. Drinking wine in the afternoon with urologists is wonderful. After the first flight we had a long chat about Things That No Longer Gross Them Out.
The tasting was set up so that each of about eight tables had six bottles of wine in the middle, all wrapped in brown bags and labeled with a number. We were to sample each wine and immediately record our impressions as to its aroma, its taste, its other desirable or undesirable qualities, and how much we would pay for said bottle of wine at the grocery store. (Each of the wines we sampled was to have cost under $15 and be available widely in grocery stores or basic liquor stores; excluded, then, were many inexpensive-yet-wonderful wines from lesser-known regions that might not be easy to find outside knowledgeable wine shops). We were encouraged to be as blunt, honest, and perhaps sarcastic as we needed to be to express our true love or loathing for the wines in question. After each flight of six wines, the table was to move as a group to the next table over to sample another six. This happened three times: a group of rose wines, another of white, and another of red. Our opinions would be recorded and synthesized for the upcoming book, edited by Robin, entitled
Cheap Wine Review.
First quick generalization: As a rule, my taste in wine was the exact opposite of that of all of my tablemates, including that of the sommelier from a well-known restaurant on the Upper West Side who joined us partway through. Things I liked, they hated. Things they liked, I spat out. Quick generalization #2: Cheap wines are very, very sweet. This is a wonderful quality in a well-balanced Riesling, an off-dry Gewurtztraminer, a ripe Muscadet. Not in a Chardonnay. Not in a "White Merlot". Certainly not in a Shiraz. However, this is not to discount the opinion of my fellow tasters: it may be that the memory of my overly-sweet and underly-cooked lemon pancakes from the VASTLY overrated
Norma's at breakfast was lingering too near in my memory.
We got the roses over with first. (Pardon my lack of
accents aigus and other diacritics -- I don't know how to make them in Blogger.) Please note that I adore a good rose. They can be wonderful summer wines. There were two that I tasted that I might have enjoyed at home (and, in fact, after the wines were revealed at the end, I realized that I had enjoyed one of them at home -- the Marques de Cacera), but on the whole, they tasted like Raspberry Diet Rite. With extra aspartame. We were all grateful to move on to the whites.
It was at this point that James the sommelier joined us. We all sat up straighter in our chairs and began to rinse our glasses between tastes. James told us the story of how, at a recent blind tasting of wines at a fellow sommelier's bachelor party, he snuck a bottle of
Yellow Tail Shiraz in with the heavy-hitters. His friends, all professional wine drinkers, couldn't quite tell what it was, concluding that it was not great but surprisingly well-balanced, nice fruit notes, etc. When he tore off the brown wrapping, many of the assembled guests demanded non-disclosure agreements with the rest of the guests there.
We tasted the whites, all of which I identified as Chardonnay (in the end, I was wrong, but only by two). One of the wines was corked, according to James -- a first for me, and I am so pleased to know, at last, what a corked wine tastes and smells like (think your grandmother's attic). Again, the one I liked was reviled by the rest ("number three smells like a baby's ass"). About the favorite, number two, I had written, "This is the '70s cliche of California in a bottle -- sweet, buttery, over-oaked, cheap cheap cheap Chardonnay." About number two, James said, "I thought it was balanced, nuanced, much more interesting than it needs to be for a wine at this price point. A lovely Viognier."
I was crestfallen. I love Viognier. How could I have been so wrong about a wine I have professed to love? Am I really that snobby person who is so easily seduced by the name of an under-grown grape? I blushed furiously and struggled mightily to come up with a witty way to save myself. I couldn't. I didn't even try.
James called Robin over to our table to ask what wine #2 had been, since it was well-received by the group at large. Robin consulted his labyrinthine chart of numbers and cross-references for several minutes, then delivered the verdict: Wine #2 at our table was a Yellow Tail Chardonnay.
"The best-selling wine in the world," said Robin.
I will say no more on this matter.
Everyone in our group was anxious to taste the reds, which we shouldn't have been. Gross generalization #3: if you are going to take a chance on bringing a cheap wine to a party, make it a cheap white. Cheap supermarket reds are so, so terrible. Red wine should not be sweet AND tannic AND high-alcohol. Most cheap reds seem to be all three. Or at least five of the six we tasted were. The only one that had any dryness, elegance, and depth of character was the Chianti I tried (another first for me). A distant second was Cline's Red Truck. The rest were not worth mentioning, aside from the sneaky trick Robin pulled in putting TWO bottles of Yellow Tail Shiraz at each of the tables to see whether we would say different things about them. Honestly, after three hours of lots of tasting and not much spitting, I don't remember what I wrote about them aside from "SWEEEEET!" And not "sweet" meaning
sweeeeeeet.
I am very curious about seeing the
Cheap Wine Review in print after this experience. I didn't talk to many people at the event aside from Roy and the others at our table, but I do wonder if my preference for dry, lean wines will be the outlier that's averaged out of the overall opinions of these wines. I like a wine that smells more floral than it tastes and that doesn't hit you over the tongue with an alcohol afterburn. I'm anxious to see what my fellow tasters end up preferring, and what, in the end, makes for a "good" cheap wine. I wonder if I'll agree, or if I'll use the book to pick the Least Favorite Wines as a guide to what I'll like instead.
Aside from the White Merlot.
And hey! Do you want to taste cheap wine, too? Do you live near me? Roy is hosting a tasting for the book at Le Petit Cafe on June 23rd -- let me know if you want to go.
This is Getting Embarrassing
Yes, I know. The computer demands a blog. Here's how I've really been feeling: paralyzed. I have an embarrassment of riches, so many things to write about. The Sysco food show. Our nine-course tasting dinner at Ibiza. Seeing Harold McGee give a talk at the law school about "molecular gastronomy" and having him sign my copy of
On Food and Cooking the next day. Making a reservation at Mr. McGee's favorite fancy restaurant, Alinea, for July 18th, during our trip to Chicago. Next week, a wine tasting for the upcoming book
Cheap Wine Review in New York with Mr. Ip. Our first Rhubarb Collinses of the season. The loveliest watercress I have ever seen in my life, picked by Two Guys from Woodbridge.
It's all too much, and all these subjects deserve more coverage than I am up to giving them right now. Spring is here, the nights are warm, and who wants to come home from staring at a computer all day at work to staring at one at home on a spring evening? I want to cook, not compute!
But here's something small to think about in the meantime: is Sysco any more evil than Stop & Shop? Or are the restaurants that serve "Sysco truck" food (thanks, Meredith) the ones really trying to pull one over on their customers?
I need to get a scanner. I wish you all could see the photos from my Sysco Fried Appetizer catalog.
