The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [134]
Cannocchie
Buy 1½ pounds of medium shrimp (about 24 to the pound), still in the shell but with the head removed and fresh, if possible. Rinse them in cold water and dry with paper towels. Insert a sturdy toothpick into each shrimp along its back, between the shell and the meat, to keep it straight. Put the shrimp in a large bowl, add ⅓ cup of extra-virgin olive oil, and turn to coat them well. Add 1 teaspoon each of salt and freshly ground pepper and 1¾ cups of fine, homemade toasted bread crumbs. (These hold the other ingredients on the shells during marinating and cooking.) Turn them again and allow to marinate for 1 to 2 hours. Put the shrimp in a hinged rack, gently shaking off any excess bread crumbs, and cook close to the hot coals for 2 minutes on one side and 1½ minutes on the other, until the shells are partly charred. Eat them immediately with your hands, peeling the shell and sucking out the meat as you go.
Grilled Eel
Have your fishman bone a long center piece of eel, or do it yourself by cutting around the backbone through the flesh side and removing it. You should wind up with a reasonably flat rectangular piece of eel with skin on one side and flesh on the other. Cut this crosswise into 4-ounce servings and place them in a hinged rack, latched tightly. Slowly grill the skin side at a good distance from the coals (I measured the temperature at 300°) until it is very crisp and bubbling and the fat under the skin has rendered and drained, about 20 to 30 minutes. Lightly salt and pepper the skin side, and cook the flesh side for 5 minutes, this time nearer the coals, until it is golden. Salt and pepper this side and serve. Lemon is optional.
Grilled Sardines
“There are some smells that have the power to summon intact a whole period of one’s life,” Marcella writes. “For me it is the odor of sardines roasting over a slow charcoal fire … and an image of my father’s mother in never-changing long black dress and black kerchief, bending over a wobbly grill set on bricks in our yard, waving at the embers with a fan of rooster-tail feathers.”
Marcella says that the silvery fish sold in the United States as sardines are probably small, strong-tasting herrings or large Atlantic anchovies, but they work well in some recipes all the same. Or you can use small smelt. In any event, scrape and gut 2 pounds of fresh “sardines,” each about 6 inches long, or have your fishman do it. Wash out the belly cavities, draining the sardines well. Dry with paper towels, and lay them on a platter. Sprinkle with ½ teaspoon of salt, ¼ teaspoon of freshly ground pepper, and ¼ cup of olive oil, and allow them to marinate for 20 minutes, turning once or twice. Put the sardines in a hinged rack and cook them close to the glowing coals, 2 to 3 minutes on each side. To eat, hold the head and pull the meat from the backbone with your lips and teeth.
August 1989
Author’s Note:
Da Fiore is still the best fish restaurant in Venice, especially good at lunchtime. Barbacani has changed hands and is, according to Victor and Marcella, no longer worth trying. Marcella’s fourth book, The Essentials of Italian Cooking, was published by Knopf in 1993. Indispensable and fundamental, it combines her first two books, adding fifty new recipes and improving several of the old ones.
Rosemary and Moon Beans
It was one of the last sessions of the 1988 installment of the Oxford Food Symposium, and Lourdes March was conducting a seminar on paella, which means both the wide shallow pan and also the food you cook in it. (Lourdes wrote El libro de la paella y de los arroces, published in Madrid in 1985, and has been collaborating on a book about olives and olive oil with Alicia Ríos.) She began with the history and etymology of paella and its symbolism as “an ancestral rite of the cyclical fecundation of the earth performed away from the kitchen and thus away from the feminine hand.” Then she attacked false paellas and their jumble of ingredients that “have nothing to do with the well-balanced and true formula,” which she proceeded