The Real Deal

26 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by julia chews the fat in Cooking For Your Peeps, Lunch & Dinner, The Basics

In the early days of university when I was dating my first boyfriend (three cheers for the late-bloomer!), we used to have our date nights at this bring-your-own wine joint called Eduardo’s. The place was – and by all accounts, still is – a frumpy little hole-in-the-wall on Duluth street, outfitted with the usual harbingers of bad Italian dining: red and white checkered tablecloths, droopy pothos plants, and a menu longer than your arm, with few dishes that would ever come close to anything from terra madre Italia (“Camberelli alla Créole” and “Surf n’ Turf alla Eduardo” are two classic gems apparently still on offer). In our defence, though, we were students without much in terms of disposable income, and the BYOB aspect guaranteed a cheap, loopy night out.

We also didn’t know a whole lot about food outside of our usual repertoire. At nineteen, I only knew how to make a half-dozen of dishes without a recipe: chicken cutlets in mustard sauce, microwave rice pilaf, tomato sauce, blueberry pancakes, minestrone, and the Moosewood Cookbook‘s banana bread, which I’d only learnt by heart after my boyfriend fell hard for its butter and espresso-laden crumb. It wasn’t a bad list of back-pocket recipes for an undergrad student, but it was still fairly limited. And the Italian food I grew up with – thanks to by mom’s side of the family – usually revolved around tomatoes, polenta, or hearty vegetable soups enriched with beans or lentils. In other words, nutritious, sustaining, paesano food from the Abrusso region. Dishes of the northern persuasion, from places like Lombardy and Emillia-Romagna, which tend to favour butter, eggs, cured meats, and abundant quantities of Parmigiano-Reggiano, were still very novel to me.

Which brings me to carbonara.

For better or for worse, I discovered carbonara (or, more accurately, its bastardised second-cousin) in that dingy dining room at Eduardo’s, sitting across from my college boyfriend, contentedly drinking 8$ table wine. It may not have been the ideal venue to have my first go at a venerated Italian classic, but as soon as I tucked into that hot mess of bacon, cream, egg and noodles, I knew I was in trouble. That dish – as far removed from the original recipe as it may have been – slayed me. In the way that a cheap grilled cheese or a good hot dog can still slay me.

—–

Little did I know, the stuff that I’d happily twirled onto my fork all those years wasn’t carbonara. At least not in the traditional sense. And when I look back on it, Eduardo’s version was nothing more than a mound of cloying, overcooked, cream-laden spaghetti littered with nubs of cheap bacon, masquerading as “spaghetti alla carbonara”. It would be enough to throw any self-respecting food purist into a total fit.

Real carbonara would only come to my attention about five years later, in an issue of Gourmet magazine. By this point, my budding interest in food and cooking meant that I was starting to pay attention to the details. I became more aware of the differences between authentic recipes and their imposters. As for carbonara, Gourmet taught me the basics, notably that the original Roman version doesn’t have one drop of cream in it (which, it turns out, is a purely Anglo-American flourish). True Roman carbonara is actually quite simpler – cured pork jowl (guanciale) is diced and then rendered in a hot pan; some eggs are whisked together with sheep’s milk cheese (pecorino), a generous amount of black pepper, and a little of the cooking water from the spaghetti. The whole lot is then tossed into freshly cooked, al dente spaghetti. The final result is a loose mess of noodles slicked in a rich, flavourful sauce dotted with crispy, salty pork belly.

It’s simplicity at its best. The kind of food that makes you happy to be alive.

I hope you think so too.

Spaghetti alla Carbonara – serves 4

Note 1: since guanciale if often hard to find, you can substitute it with mild pancetta (just don’t tell any Roman purists). If using pancetta, add a couple of teaspoons of olive oil to the pan before rendering it – pancetta has less fat than guanciale, so you’ll need the oil to get things going.

Note 2: In a dish this pared-down, the quality of your ingredients is crucial. Make sure to use good eggs, the best guanciale or pancetta you can find, and real pecorino or Parmigiano-Reggiano (No knock-offs! No Kraft parmesan! Don’t piss off the carbonara gods!). Freshly ground pepper is a must too. It’s also worth mentioning that this dish is one of the few that doesn’t reheat well the next day, as the eggs tend to curdle when they come into contact with too much heat. It’s definitely a dish best eaten straight away (which, I suspect, won’t be a problem).

Note 3: Given that the eggs are undercooked in this recipe, most sources would recommend that you avoid serving it to children or anyone with a compromised immune system. (apparently, if you use good-quality, fresh eggs, the risk of salmonella-poisoning is lower than in commercial eggs, which are produced in confined environments where bacteria can spread more easily among chickens.)

Ingredients:

4oz. medium-sliced pancetta (or ideally guanciale), cut into 1⁄2″ pieces
1¾ cups finely grated pecorino cheese (or Parmigiano-Reggiano)
1 egg, plus 3 yolks
freshly cracked black pepper
sea salt
1 lb. spaghetti

Directions

1) Start by bringing a large pot of water to boil (for the pasta). Salt the water once it comes to the boil (about 1-1 1/2 Tbsp) (I eyeball it, but just remember that the guanciale is salty).

2) Whisk together the egg (1) and yolks (3). Stir in 1½ cups of the cheese and mix to combine; add a generous amount of freshly ground black pepper (about 2 tsp). Set aside.

3) Heat a medium skillet or cast-iron pan over medium heat (add oil if using pancetta). Add guanciale (or pancetta) and cook, stirring occasionally, until lightly browned (about 6–8 minutes).

4) Meanwhile, cook the pasta until al dente. Reserve 3⁄4 cup water; drain pasta and transfer to the pan with the cooked guanciale (or pancetta). Toss, then and it off the heat.

5) In a slow, steady stream*, add the 3/4 cup of pasta water to the egg/cheese mixture. Add to the pasta and toss to coat (the residual heat from the pasta will lightly “cook” the egg, without scrambling it). Transfer to a serving platter and season with salt and some more freshly ground black pepper; sprinkle with the remaining cheese and serve straight away.

*if you add the hot cooking water too quickly to the egg mixture, it will curdle. The slow, steady stream allows you to “temper” the egg mixture, ensuring that your sauce comes together smoothly. In other words, you want to avoid too much heat too quickly, or else you’ll end up with scrambled eggs.

Olive Oil Carrot Cake

19 Sunday Apr 2015

Posted by julia chews the fat in Breakfast & Brunch, Snacking, Sweet Tooth

≈ 1 Comment

Today, dear friends, I’m offering you cake.

Does it matter that it came from the (very boring) utilitarian impulse to rid my fridge of a 5lb bag of carrots? Or that it burnt a little along the edges because I forgot to set the timer? Or that the carrots strewn decoratively over the top came out a bit crisper than expected? No, none of the this matters. Because, it is, after all, still cake.

Glorious, glorious cake.

Or at least that’s what I’m calling it, even if it’s worlds apart from the butter-and-frosting YOLO carrot cake I made a few weeks ago (if that thing were a person, it’d be the first one to finish the keg at the party and do a cannonball in the deep end of the pool.)

No, this cake, this loaf, marches to the beat of a different drum.

The original recipe refers to it a “bread”, but I think it feels and tastes a lot closer to a pound cake, the only real difference being that you swap the pound of butter (hence, POUND cake) for one cup of olive oil. (cardiologists, rejoice.) To be clear, though, this isn’t exactly health-cake either. At least not in the strictest sense of the word. It’s still got white flour and sugar (one and a quarter cups to be precise!) and all that good stuff. Which brings me back to the reason I’m calling it “cake”. It’s got a very moist crumb – thanks to the olive oil – and crisp edges, making it perfect for dunking into coffee or tea. The fact that it’s jam-packed with strands of fresh carrot leads me to believe that it’s also perfectly acceptable to call it breakfast cake. (If you’re not convinced, just leave half a loaf in the copy room at work. By 9:30am, that thing will be demolished. Ta da! Breakfast for all!)

Olive Oil Carrot Cake – slightly adapted from Brooklyn Supper

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
1 tsp sea salt
½ tsp freshly grated nutmeg
½ tsp ground ginger
3 eggs
1 ¼ cups sugar
2 cups grated carrots
1 Tbsp lemon zest
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup extra virgin olive oil

1) Preheat oven to 350°F. Liberally butter a 9 x 5 inch loaf pan.

2) In a small bowl, combine the flour, baking powder and soda, salt, and spices.

3) In a large bowl, beat eggs and sugar on low speed (or with a whisk). Add grated carrots, zest, and vanilla. Fold in half the flour, all of the olive oil, and then the remaining flour. Mix just until everything is well combined.

4) Spoon into prepared loaf pan and bake for 40 minutes. Pull bread from oven and carefully lay 3 or 4 candied carrot halves across the top; spoon 2 tablespoons of the syrup over the top. Put back into the oven, and bake 20 – 30 minutes more or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out with just a few crumbs attached.

5) Cool for 20 minutes, and then flip out onto a platter or rack to cool completely.

For the Candied Carrots (optional)

4 small carrots
1 cup sugar
1 cup water

1) Trim the tops of the carrots, then peel and halve them. (if you’re using pretty, market-fresh carrots for this, you can leave a little spray of greens at the top.)

2) In a wide saucepan, heat the sugar and water over medium heat. When sugar has dissolved, add the carrots and turn heat down so that mixture bubbles ever so gently. Cook, swirling pan occasionally, for 20 minutes or until thinnest part of carrot is translucent.

Note: the carrot bread will keep for a few days, well-wrapped at room temperature.

A Soup Lost in Translation

08 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by julia chews the fat in Cooking with Nonna, Lunch & Dinner, The Basics

≈ 10 Comments

In a recent phone conversation with my mother:

Me: Hi. What’re you up to?

Mom: Grandma and I are making cazzorelli.

Me (long pause): Wait, what? Cazzorelli? As in, cazzo?

Mom: Yeah, I guess so. That’s what grandma calls them. Hold on, let me ask her. Sono chiamati cazzorelli, no? (comes back to the receiver) Yeah, grandma says that’s it.

Me: That’s crazy. How come I’ve never heard of these? What are they?

Mom: They’re just these little polenta dumplings that you cook into a soup. They’re nothing special.

Me: Nothing special? Mom, please. THEY’RE CALLED CAZZORELLI. They’re special. Why are they called that?

Mom: I don’t know. They’re Abruzzese. I guess it’s because the dough is cut into little pieces…and so the idea is they look like…little penises? (long pause) You’ll have to ask grandma.

If you know my family, you’ll understand that this is a pretty typical conversation – about food, about dialect, about the where-what-how of my grandmother’s recipes. While Nonna holds a relatively small repertoire of recipes, each have their own backstory. Some are direct imports from her tiny village in Abruzzo, others are improvised dishes pulled together from the resources they found when they first moved to Canada. Some of them are vestiges of wartime food rationing, while others are decadent offerings served up on big platters at weddings, baptisms and religious holidays. Every single one of them – from the soft lemon cookies with the crackled tops, to the peas fried in onion and rosemary – has a story, an anecdote, a memory attached.

Up until this conversation with my mom, I thought I knew all of Nonna’s recipes. But for some reason, “cazzorelli” were never part of the rotation of dishes I grew up with. The crudeness of the name, and the casual way that mom and grandma threw around the word, were an open invitation for follow-up questions. So, you’re telling me that people just go around Abruzzo saying, “Today I’m making little penis soup?” What if you make it for your in-laws? Do you still call it the same thing? Am I the only one that thinks this is hilarious?

I felt like I’d hit the dialect jackpot.

That is, until a few days ago, when I discovered that they’re not actually called “cazzorelli”. No. It turns out they’re called “cazzarielli”. Perhaps even worse, this (subtle! So, so subtle!) orthographic error was exposed, not by Nonna, but by a standard Google search. So technically, this dish isn’t called “little penis” soup. At best, it’s called “little pieces” soup.

Trust me. I’m just as disappointed as you are.

This kind of mix-up is par for the course in dialect-speaking. Entire syllables get lobbed off; vowels at the end of one word melt into the next. Genders get jumbled. And, inevitably, bits of the message get lost in translation. This soup (the one I began to call by a name that didn’t exist) is the perfect example of how dialect speaking – based almost entirely on phonetics – has a sticky habit of transforming words and their meaning. Food customs also travel an imperfect road, which is why it shouldn’t come as a surprise that there are pieces missing by the time they get to us. But I like to think that all that shifting and travelling allows them to gather substance for new stories and, ultimately, new memories. Like the name of this soup. Cazzarielli will always be cazzorelli to me, because that small phonetic flub is something I will always look back on with a big, stupid grin on my face when I think of that conversation with my mom. It’s one of the few things that’s worth being wrong about.

—–

And now, a few notes on this soup itself:

Like any good Italian peasant food, this soup fulfills three basic tenets – it’s inexpensive, easy, and satisfying. Small polenta “gnocchi” are cooked in a thick broth made up of water, potato, Brussels sprouts, fried garlic, and some chili flakes, all of it simmered with a slab of well-marbled pancetta. I imagine this was the kind of food they’d feed soldiers, or farmers, or the pregnant women who tended the fields in their third trimester (yes, yes they did). It’s robust, no-frills fare. And it certainly doesn’t win any points in the looks department. But what it lacks in aesthetics it more than makes up for in flavour. It’s rich, garlicky and full of pleasantly chewy bits of polenta, potato and cabbage. In other words, pure comfort in a bowl.

Grab a spoon and tuck in.

For the dough:

1 ½ cups dry polenta (grade 400, extra fine)
1 cup flour
1 ¾ cups hot (just boiled) water

For the soup:

4-5 cloves garlic, halved lengthwise
2-3 yellow, waxy potatoes (like Yukon Gold)
1/4 cup olive oil
1 tsp chili flakes
1 small slab of pancetta (about 2 oz)
2 cups Brussels sprouts (or the equivalent in Savoy cabbage)
7-8 cups cold water

Directions:

1) Start by making the dough: pour the polenta into a large mixing bowl and slowly whisk in the hot water until the dough comes together. Then work the dough lightly with your hands to form a loose ball. Sprinkle with flour and set aside.

2) Start making the soup: heat the olive oil in a large soup pot; fry the the halved garlic cloves with the chili flakes until garlic is golden brown. Add the Brussels sprouts, pancetta and potatoes; stir to combine and allow to cook for 1 minute. Add seven cups of water and reduce the heat to medium-low.

3) While the soup simmers, make the cazzarielli: cut 1″ pieces of the dough and roll lengthwise into “snakes” on a floured surface. Cut the long pieces of dough (“snakes”) into small 1/4″ pieces. Place on a parchment or towel-lined baking sheet and sprinkle with flour to avoid sticking.

4) When the cazzarielli are all made, lift them in batched in your hands to allow excess flour to “sift” through your fingers and add to the soup pot. Allow to cook about 15 minutes, or until they are tender. You may need to adjust the amount of water if the soup gets to thick (helloooo starch!). We like our soup to be somewhere between a minestrone and a chowder in terms of thickness and texture. Serve hot.