Eating - Jason Epstein [48]
Thanksgiving had always been my favorite or least unfavorite holiday, since, unlike Halloween, Christmas, and Easter, its pagan soul had not been turned into a marketing opportunity by monotheists. On eastern Long Island—amid the late-fall harvest, with rows of pumpkin, cabbage, and cauliflower still on the ground, and the cornstalks not yet cut—the ritual feast seemed real: a brined wild turkey stuffed with local oysters and corn bread and served with sweet local rutabaga mashed in butter. Because Lincoln had made it a national holiday, Thanksgiving also retains an element of the sacred, especially in Sag Harbor, with its Civil War monument and old houses, most of which, like mine, were standing just where they are today when that war was fought.
Maida’s Miami, with its sea-washed sunlight, was not a typical Thanksgiving venue, but in her sunny kitchen, with its polished copper and its graduated nest of red Le Creuset pots, and her ginger biscotti, panforte, and chocolate brownies on the spotless counter arrayed as if for a photo shoot, everything was clean, well lit, and in its place, comforting, reassuring, mellow, with the Inter-coastal Waterway sparkling just beyond the glass doors to the deck. Maida’s husband, Ralph, was alive then, and the other guests besides myself were Maida’s great friend Wolfgang Puck, whose cookbooks I had begun to publish; his wife, Barbara; and Craig. Judy, who was not yet my wife, had flown in from North Africa via Paris, arriving with a branch of fresh dates and a vacherin cheese just as Maida was lifting her magnificent popovers from the oven. Wolf had brought with him from California pumpkin soup and the turkey, which was now out of the oven. I brought caviar, Craig brought champagne; and so we celebrated the harvest.
My publishing career has been an extension of my formal education, a lifetime enrollment in a personal university whose faculty is the authors I publish and whose curriculum is their books. But with cookbooks the rewards can be more than merely intellectual. A dozen years ago, for example, I signed a contract with Frankie Pellegrino, the co-owner of Rao’s, a tiny Italian restaurant with a mere ten tables on the corner of Pleasant Avenue and 117th Street in East Harlem, a relic of the old Italian neighborhood that had once flourished there, before East Harlem became Latino. Rao’s is an intense distillation of that old Italian culture, and its tables are the de facto property of their longtime occupants:so-and-so “owns” table number one on Mondays, someone else has it on Thursdays, and so on. So, to book a table when one of the regulars stays home, you have to call Frankie on his private number. I offered Frankie a contract for Rao’s Cookbook not only because Rao’s serves the best Southern Italian menu in New York, if not the world, and I wanted the recipes, but because I hoped that Frankie would award me a table of my own. My scheme backfired. Rao’s Cookbook became a best-seller, and the demand for tables swamped Frankie’s facilities.
One of the charms of Rao’s had been that when you booked a table you had it for the night. You could sit over a bottle of wine and dessert and listen to the jukebox while now and then Frankie or one of his operatic customers would sing arias and others would join in. I was always surprised by the number of passable tenors at Rao’s. But now that the book had become a best-seller, Frankie had no choice but to book two seatings and let people wait three deep at the bar for the regulars to leave. Before I published Frankie’s book, I managed to eat at Rao’s three or four times a year. Now I don’t go at all. Instead, I make Rao’s seafood salad, his orecchiette with broccoli rabe and sausage, and his chicken scarpariello at home. The dishes are utterly simple to prepare, and after the usual trial and error you will think they came straight from Rao’s kitchen.
RAO’S CHICKEN SCARPARIELLO
For my slightly modified version