Gutsy Grouper Turns to Crime in Rialto Fish Market · May 15, 12:36 AM by James Martin
The Rialto Fish Market in Venice and the adjacent vegetable market was the scene this morning of a disturbing, hackle-raising crime. A large cernia or Dusky Grouper, was caught red-handed, er, red-lipped with the goods, a string of pre-season pomodorini clearly in the process of being consumed. He is being held on boxes in the market and ordered to pose for tourist pictures. His attorney is appealing the sentence as being too harsh. He’d rather be sauteed, according to a close source.
Gutsy Grouper Turns to Crime in Rialto Fish Market originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com May 15, 2012, © James Martin, 
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Rapallo, Rabbit, and the Sun · May 7, 10:19 AM by James Martin
Finally, there was sun.
So we hightailed it to Rapallo, took the funicular, and found ourselves in the clouds.
But by the time we’d walked the stations of the cross behind the Santuario Basilica Nostra Signora di Montallegro (1559) it had cleared enough to take pictures of the Golfo del Tigullio from our perch outside the Casa del Peligrino where, under the spotty shade of freshly pruned linden trees, we decided to celebrate the lack of rain with a Prosecco.
We were lazy and didn’t want to walk anymore before lunch, so we asked to look at the menu. It had coniglio, rabbit done in the Ligurian style with olives. It was a done deal. We ordered a pitcher of crisp white, a few salads, rabbit, a swordfish (also with olives) and whiled away the afternoon.
Then we headed back to town and tried for a decent gelato. We were too early. “Estate” they said. Summer. Bummer.
In any case, a trip up the mountain on the funicular to have lunch on the terrace isn’t a bad way to spend a sunny day on your Italian vacation. If you want to know more, check out our Rapallo Video. The tram ride is quite dramatic.
Rapallo, Rabbit, and the Sun originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com May 07, 2012, © James Martin,
Caffe Mediterraneo in Conversano · May 3, 09:58 AM by James Martin
Conversano is a very nice town in Puglia near Bari with one of those fantastic, sprawling castles that got a tower or two added to it every time a conquering horde passed through. Inside is a very important set of paintings you must see.
We spent the morning exploring Conversano with journalist Rosalia Chiarappa of am apulia magazine, who lamented the lack of open restaurants on the day we decided to visit. In the end, she took us to the Caffe Mediterraneo, a place she hangs out after work. Casual. Built into a modern apartment complex on the edge of town, not where you’d expect to eat a fine meal.
You see, you walk into the Cafe Mediterraneo through a typical pasticceria arrangement. Sweets. Piles of them. Blech. I wanted a glass of wine and something salty to eat.
Cleverly concealed behind the rows of refrigerators holding all manner of tooth-decay-producing dolce were tables set for lunch. Surprise!
So we sat down and had that glass of wine and some nibbles. There was pasta with mussels, cozze, available so Rosalia and I ordered them. There they are on the right. They look, well, a bit normal.
But oh my! They were good. Unbelievably good. After praising the preparation and the care taken in cleaning the mussels I looked up at Rosalia and said something I’d come to regret, “these are made the way I like my shellfish and pasta, in a sauce enhanced with butter!”
She looked at me like I was nuts. You know I am, of course, but she, up to this time, had been polite enough to ignore the troubling signs. Now she couldn’t avoid them. “They don’t use butter.”
“But,” I said, pausing quite a while because I knew, of course, that the kitchen wouldn’t dare use butter; this is olive oil country and the oil has come so incredibly far from the semi-dreck produced 30 years ago—but still I continued, whining really, “it’s all rich and everything, it’s gotta have butter!”
So we asked the waitress. I don’t think she had ever heard of butter.
So I admit it—I was wrong. It was oil. It surprises you. Olive oil here in Puglia is not that sewing machine lubricant you get at the Safeway, it’s real food that has a character and flavor to die for. It certainly took to my steamed mussels quite nicely.
So that’s my tale. If you’re in town, visit the restaurant. Expect simple food prepared with good ingredients. If you have shellfish, drink the local wine made to go with it: Verdeca. There’s a picture of a very good example of it up there. Click to see it at a reasonable size. It’s got a beautiful label.
Caffe’ Mediterraneo
2011 | Via San Giacomo, 14 70014 Conversano (BA)
Tel/Fax 080 4959121
More Puglia: Lecce Weather & Historic Climate | Puglia Hotels | Puglia Vacation Rentals
Caffe Mediterraneo in Conversano originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com May 03, 2012, © James Martin,
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Food and Knuckleheads · Apr 21, 01:00 PM by James Martin
I came across an interesting graph the other day. It showed the gross amount people from around the world paid for food. It seems China has passed the US up because their country outspends our country for food. They have more people of course, and spend way less per person, but there you have it.
The big spenders, per person, turn out to be the French. This doesn’t surprise me a bit, having once picked up a whole Bresse chicken, the celebrated kind, all wrapped in plastic in a French supermarket, and almost dropping the thing when I saw the price. 23 euro for a very small chicken!
Another interesting thing is that Americans pay about the same as Italians for food. Italians pay just slightly more. But from my experience, you’re getting a much better deal here in Italy. I mean even the industrial chickens you get here are way, way, way better tasting and have better and crispier skin when you roast them, for example. But real chickens, like the ones the butcher claims are “nostrano” are cheaper than the marginally better than industrial chickens in the states.
Which brings us to this little tidbit, as part of the reasons that “The Myth of Sustainable Meat” exists in someone’s mind:
Advocates of small-scale, nonindustrial alternatives say their choice is at least more natural. Again, this is a dubious claim. Many farmers who raise chickens on pasture use industrial breeds that have been bred to do one thing well: fatten quickly in confinement. As a result, they can suffer painful leg injuries after several weeks of living a “natural” life pecking around a large pasture.
What kinda idiotic argument is that? I mean even Jethro who got kicked outta the second grade and then happened to get hit on the head with a rock the size of Kansas on the way home could still look up at pappy with his puppy-dog eyes and say, “Pappy, how cum dey use deez kinds chickens when theys real chickens what could walk real good?”
I mean the hatchet job argument that we’ve bred chickens that can’t walk so we are forever doomed to having chickens stuffed two million to a barn and injected with all manner of crap before being sold and therefore we have to accept that there are no alternatives to these sorry experiments in nature is absolute crap as anyone with a tenth of a brain can understand. I’ve actually seen Italian chickens walking around like they owned the place. Armando’s chickens. We haven’t made walking chickens extinct. There’s still time!
James E. McWilliams is the idiot who wrote this diatribe against common sense that was published in the NYT. You can read it but don’t pay for it, you don’t want to be encouraging such chickenshit: The Myth of Sustainable Meat.
You can see the chart of various nations and their food expenses here: China overtakes America to become the world’s largest grocery market
Food and Knuckleheads originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Apr 21, 2012, © James Martin,
A Rombo You Can Stomach · Apr 7, 04:27 AM by James Martin
Language is a funny thing. Here in Italy, for example, a Rombo is a fish. God has made the Rombo in just the right shape to fit a platter of the type Italians use to serve fish on. Imagine.
However, in the US a Rombo is quite a different thing. If you are there partaking of the great American pastime of sitting and watching the television, you are likely to be subject to a great many advertisements. This time of year you will be rewarded with political advertisements—a bonus! One of the politicians has made an ad called “Rombo.” It is not about a fish. It is, evidently, about a man who has committed the egregious crime of actually doing something to reform health care in the United States, which we all know is perfect and the best in the world. (After all, we wouldn’t want to have a bad health care system which makes us live two years longer like you Italians. We couldn’t afford the health care if we lived so long!)
Anyway, here’s an Italian Rombo. It is not a television commercial:
A Rombo You Can Stomach originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Apr 07, 2012, © James Martin,
Cima alla Genovese · Apr 2, 05:54 AM by James Martin
There are just some things that you arbitrarily find to be what people call comfort food—you know what I’m sayin’? Perhaps it is that traditional Genovese dish called Cima, a stuffed veal breast that’s oh so good. In my mind Cima alla Genovese is a fine example of cucina povera, too, but different from the simplicity of many Italian dishes. It’s got lots of ingredients. Ingredients that can surprise you.
But first a picture of Cima alla Genovese
The surprising part: There are some things in there that come from the basic innards of the animal you don’t often see chopped up into food. I know this because I happened to consult Kyle Phillips, my go-to guy when it comes to the cuisine. He has a Cima recipe of course. The third item on the rather long list of ingredients sorta floored me.
1/4 pound (100 g) cow’s udder
Hmm. This would scare some folks away. They are folks I never understand. You know, folks who look back at what they’ve eaten and point to the dish they’ve cleaned with that scarpetta, the little shoe of bread, and can’t help exclaiming, “What’s in this? It’s the most fabulous thing I’ve ever wrapped my tongue around. I’m going to make this for sure. Gimme the recipe, dammit. I gotta have it. This dish is gonna be on my special Christmas menu, I can tell you that!”
And then you tell them that Cima alle Genovese contains, among other things, exactly 1/4 of a cow’s udder.
That’s when you see them shrink away, like when that rubber fantasy lady (or man) you have in the closet (and use in an emergency) springs a leak (I mean an air leak of course).
In any case, they’ll be left gasping for air after you tell them the next ingredient: half a calf’s brain. By the time you get to the testicle you’ve lost them. They may need artificial respiration.
(On the other hand, the recipe can be used to teach your gourmet-inclined children about fractions. Just a thought.)
Just in case you still have a fondness in your sweetbreads (yeah, it’s got that, too, and so do you), you can find this fine specimen at Osteria da Vittorio in Chiavari. The whole plate with the vegetables and all will cost you a mere 6 euro. Yes, you should do the whole tour of Chiavari I’ve outlined in Hidden Liguria: Chiavari
You don’t have to worry about coming to my house and having Cima alla Genovese forced into you because I don’t even know the words for “cow udder” in Italian, nor have I ever seen a quarter of one stuffed in a Styrofoam tray over at the Conad Market. So you’re safe. Really.
Cima alla Genovese originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Apr 02, 2012, © James Martin,
Lardo Tales: Part 2, Italian Law is Not Always Your Friend · Mar 22, 05:47 AM by James Martin
After we had squeezed ourselves between the vats of Colonnata lardo producer Al Lardo, Al Lardo so we could get as comfy as one can when wedged between cool marble slabs, the owner points his foot at a floor tile and begins to outline it with his toe.
“We cut the lardo into squares about the size of one of these tiles,” he says (calmly, but with an edge; you can tell there’s something on his mind and it’s not comforting). “Now, here’s the thing. The government allows us a single tag identifying the lardo as Lardo di Colonnata IGP on the whole square of lardo. Nothing wrong with that.”
(The problem is that almost nobody wants to eat that much lardo, even on a bet. I mean, just tell your cardiologist that you had a picnic and ate a kilo or so of cured piggy backfat because you had to buy it that way and felt you didn’t want to waste it. He’d likely tell you never to come back again if you were gonna treat your ticker so horribly. [Of course, he would be wrong, but we’ll discuss some surprising health issues in our next edition of Lardo Tales.])
“So we cut it into smaller pieces. But then there’s only one piece which carries the tag. So if we cut the slab into ten manageable pieces to sell, there’s only one that qualifies as Lardo di Colannata IGP, the one with the tag, and we can’t sell the other nine pieces with that designation, even when it’s cut off the same slab.
But get this: A supermarket can sell all the pieces they cut as Lardo di Colannata IGP, it’s just the supplier who can’t sell them that way.
So click the picture up there to see it larger. What you’re lookin’ at is two packaged pieces of lardo, one with the tag and the label “Lardo di Colannata IGP” and the other labeled “Lardo Artigianale.” Behind the two are two slabs of lardo still covered with salt in the process of being packaged. Each is showing the official tags.
Life is a bit odd in LardoLand.
Lardo Tales: Part 2, Italian Law is Not Always Your Friend originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Mar 22, 2012, © James Martin,
The Lardo Tales: Part 1 · Mar 20, 01:05 PM by James Martin
I love to write about Lardo. Mostly because it’s something my fellow American’s can’t seem to stomach. And I, being a contrarian, can’t seem to stomach the American propensity for wretching over the concept of a thin sliver of the spiced and cured backfat of a pig laid gently over a slice of grilled bread—who then moments later bellyache over the fact that Italians don’t serve butter with the bread that comes to the table.
In any case, I’ve made it my duty to study this delectable victual. So when super-guide Serena Giovannoni invited us to tour the lardo works of Al Lardo, Al Lardo in Colonnata, I jumped at the chance (well, as high as an old fat man can jump that is).
After we had awakened the owner from his mid-day slumber he walked us to his laboratory, wrenched open the door and walked over to this huge conca, or marble vat. He opened the lid. “This, he explained, is lardo that’s been aged over six months and is just about ready to package.” I remembered that he eyed us suspiciously, looking for signs of a reaction. I asked him about the liquid on top. It was a brine solution, liquid that had been drawn out of the backfat by the copious amounts of salt that had been used to cure it—and the spices, including fresh rosemary and garlic, were floating in it as you can see in the picture (click to see it larger).
Then he continued on with his tour, always eying me suspiciously as if I was about to make off with one of his vats full of fat. We saw some lardo that had just been started on the curing cycle. We saw an old conca that was maybe 200 years old and was caked in the salt that the process and the humidity had drawn from the inside to the outside of the marble. It was impressive.
Then the tour was over.
We left through the little shop. Serena bought a package of guancale for pasta all’Amatriciana and I bought some lardo in a tub. While we’re waiting for him to ring us up the guy casually asks me where I’m from.
He’s surprised I’m from the United States. Really surprised.
“You’re one of the few Americans who didn’t run when I opened that first vat,” he said.
Yes, he estimates more than 90% of Americans scapare when they see the curing brine. No other nationality can even come close to that figure. I mean really folks, it’s salt water. It’s like the Med only garlicky and murky. And you swim in that.
I don’t understand the squeamishness of Americans. Pink slime in our burgers? No problem. Brine? Lemme outta here!
What’s up with that?
The Lardo Tales: Part 1 originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Mar 20, 2012, © James Martin,