March-April-2018

ROUSES

EVERYDAY

MARCH | APRIL 2018

the

Authentic Italian

issue

You know pasta. You know red sauce. Maybe

you know risotto and polenta. But that’s just

the beginning of the love affair with the carbo-

hydrate you’ll find in Italy.

knew I’d love Italy before I even got

there. Everything I’d experienced —

second-hand, from here in America

— about that country and its people,

history and art, and most of all, its food,

had me convinced.

And yet. For all the knowledge I’d supposed

I had, when I actually went to Italy for the

first time, what I ate there left me speechless

with delight. I was especially dazed by the

simplest things, like fresh fennel served as

an appetizer, with only superb olive oil and

coarse salt to dip it in — how could this be

good? How could

everything

be so good

(the nettle risotto! The tiramisu!)? How

could

everything

, simple or elaborate, taste

so much like heaven?

And how, given that I had been an Italian-

food-loving American my entire life, could

I not have known this?

Because, until I got there, I thought there

was such a thing as “Italian food.” And this,

it turns out, is … wrong. Italy is a land of

fiercely regional cuisines,and to homogenize

them as “Italian”(as happens inmost Italian-

American restaurants, and certainly as I

had previously done) is a dumbing-down

and grave — if unintentional — culinary

disrespect. Though in recent decades

the regional cooking has traveled — for

instance, you can get risotto, traditionally

Northern, in the South of Italy nowadays —

distinctions of preparation are kept, though

with this proviso, which we Americans are

truly just beginning to catch on to:

What’s

fresh? What’s local?

Now, my previous experience as an

American eater who had not yet visited Italy

was not

just

bastardized Italian-American

food. My father, who for years wrote about

wine and spirits for

Playboy

, would today

be called a “foodie” (how he would have

winced at the word!). Not for

our

family

canned raviolis with an Italian chef ’s name

on the label, or fast-food pizzas delivered in

beat-up cars bearing lit-up blue rectangles.

Though we did occasionally eat out at

two family-style, classic, old-school, red-

sauce restaurants nearby: they were called

Scappi’s and Manzi’s, and I am not making

this up. Both specialized in huge portions,

zitis drenched in red sauce and covered in

enough melted cheese to sink a battleship,

and good enough in their fashion — but, I

vaguely knew, not “real” Italian food.

As I think about it now, and wonder how I

knew this, I come back to two points.

The first was pasta, as it was cooked in our

home (by my mother) and explained (by my

father). It was always al dente: “It means,

to the teeth!” my father would exclaim

enthusiastically. “It means, not mushy, still

with

bite

!” The pasta my mother made

was only rarely done with red sauce and

meatballs; it was more often elegant and

simple, tossed either with Parmesan and

freshly ground black pepper or garlic, olive

oil and finely minced parsley. (The first,

cacio e pepe

, I enjoy to this day.) This, by the

way, was an era when not many American

homes even

had

a peppermill.

The second factor was the

other

Italian

restaurants. These were in New York City,

polestar of sophistication to the blander

suburban planet where we lived. Of these,

there were many such fine restaurants over

the years, but the first and most vivid in my

memory was the Isle of Capri. Intimate,

white-tableclothed, its interior warm with

brick and shades of rose and red — my

father had told me about it for some time

before he finally took me there. I was eight

or nine. My expectations were high. “It’s

different,” he told me. “It’s

real

Italian food.”

When I first tasted the Isle of Capri’s

lasagna, I remember pausing, sitting still in

my chair, almost quivering. What

was

this?

PASTA,

RISO E POLENTA

Crescent Dragonwagon