The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [129]
Three months later Marcella, Victor, and I strolled across the Rialto Bridge and down into the bustle of the marketplace. The Rialto market is bordered on two sides by water, and in the early morning small boats piled high with seafood and vegetables float down the Grand Canal and converge on the market. The Pescheria itself spills out from under an open, colonnaded Venetian Gothic structure built in 1907 on eighteen thousand larch-wood piles. By nine o’clock, thirty or forty fish sellers have spread their offerings on long tables for both housewives and restaurateurs to inspect. There are few fish stores in Venice, because everyone shops at the Rialto; it is among the best places to buy seafood in all the world. Though some critics consider the market hall entirely without architectural charm, it is for me “the building which occupies the center of the picture Venice leaves in the mind,” as Bernard Berenson mistakenly wrote about the church of Santa Maria della Salute.
I scribbled furiously as Marcella and Victor called out the names of every fish in sight, about fifty in all: iridescent sardines and anchovies flashing silver and turquoise, flying fish with pointed beaks and snails creeping nowhere in their glossy spotted shells, tiny gray shrimp jumping like crickets and huge blue shrimp too stately to move, clams with shells bearing Navajo designs and scallops as small as aspirins, delicate flatfish for grilling or frying and bony striped fish for soup or risotto, diamond-shaped turbot and broad fans of skate, ink-stained cuttlefish, octopus, squid. We watched a fishmonger gut and bone a pile of sardines with his hands, while another butchered a monkfish to sell the tail as coda di rospo, the cheeks for pasta sauce, and the grotesque head for soup. Nearby a boy played with an eel slithering in its tank while his father watched the fishman flay another as it wriggled. The Italians believe that eels must be kept alive until minutes before cooking, the way we behave toward lobsters.
Leaving the Pescheria, we walked past a long line of vegetable sellers. Marcella admired the baskets of peas, pointing to the stems and leaves still attached to the pods; the leaves wither quickly after the peas are picked and are a sensitive barometer of freshness. For the same reason, artichokes in Italy are sold with their stems and outer leaves, tomatoes are still attached to their vines, and zucchini are displayed with their flowers intact. (These are usually removed before cooking. Large squash blossoms for stuffing and frying are grown separately.) Chickens are hung in shop windows with their feet and heads still on—the feet darken with time, and the head tells you whether it is a rooster or a hen.
For my first eating lesson, we walked to Da Fiore, probably the best seafood restaurant in Venice. The cooking is simple and austere, the ingredients are of incomparable quality, and the fish is not even washed until you order it.
Plates of gamberetti appeared almost instantly—crunchy three-quarter-inch shrimp fried whole in the shell with just a dusting of flour—and when I mechanically reached for a wedge of lemon, Marcella proposed that I try it both ways and compare. Her point was that lemon can overwhelm the delicacy of impeccable seafood, and without any doubt she was correct; some restaurants even refuse your request for lemon.
My first taste of cannocchie came next—pink-gray crustaceans found only in the Adriatic and Japan, about two inches wide, eight inches long, and flat as a ribbon, with false eyes on their tails and the sweetest flesh you can eat. They are arranged in one layer in a pan with just a little water, covered closely with a wet kitchen towel and a tight lid to trap the vapor, and briefly steamed. Half the shell is snipped off in the kitchen, and you pry up the white meat from the other half as you eat it.
“Poppa,” I said proudly when the warm young octopi were brought out, demonstrating