What to do with Sardines, Part 2

Ok. So. Sardines. Leftover sardines. Or perhaps, simply a few sardines, not enough to make a main dish by themselves. Perhaps it’s time for Sunday night dinner, and to be honest, the work week looms, it’s been a busy weekend, and something simple and tasty is needed. A Sicilian approach seems appropriate, something any hungry fisherman might throw together. Any garlic left? A few small cloves bouncing around behind the salt pot. In the fridge, a sorry display of fading parsley, but still serviceable, enough good-looking sprigs remaining for our purposes. Raisins hiding in the back of the baking cupboard, good and dry. Hard, in fact. Break out a handful and put them in a bowl with some hot water and let them soften.

Now the pasta water goes on the fire, well salted.

You have scraped the scales off the fish. No? Go ahead and do that , and scoop out the innards with your forefinger (see What to do with Sardines, Part 1) and arrange the fish, otherwise whole, in an oiled pan in a single layer, and sprinkle some salt and pepper inside each. Splash a little white wine in the pan and cook the fish for about 8 to 10 minutes over a brisk flame. Then remove the fish from the pan to a plate and let them cool a bit.

Meanwhile, some bread, a few days old. Slice it up thinly (about two slices per person) and dry them out in the toaster, or in a pan on the stove, and break them down into crumbs. They don’t have to be fine crumbs. If you have some ready crumbs already available instead, those will do nicely.

Once the sardines are cool enough to handle, remove the meat of the fillets into a mixing bowl, and discard the heads, spines and any little fins. Chop the garlic with the parsley, as much or as little as you like, and mix this into the sardines with half the breadcrumbs, some salt and pepper, and moisten all this with some olive oil, extra-virgin if possible. What happened to that little jar of pine nuts? Just a couple of tablespoons worth. In they go.

Raisins? Good and soft now, so they get drained and mixed in, too.

Pasta. Penne? Fine. Spaghetti? That will do. Drain it, and toss it well with the sardine mixture. Taste a noodle for salt and correct it if needed. Serve and pass the remaining bread crumbs separately, instead of cheese. No cheese for this dish. Some dry Sicilian or Campanian white, like a Fiano, would go well, or maybe a Cannonau, or a light Calabrian red like a Ciró, or if all else fails, a Nero d’Avola.

eat and mess

The British couple sit at the wine bar at the restaurant. They eat antipasti and pasta dishes, while their young son devours a plain cheese pizza. They own a local French bakery and prepared foods shop that serves up tasty fare. One of their shops is right below our restaurant in the space we used to have. They call it Allechante. We think this translates into Go Sing which sounds so whimsical that we’ve decided not to ask in case we learn the definition or inspiration is different and changes our understanding. When we decided to move upstairs in our building, they moved in at street level and opened a second store. We are glad to have them as neighbors.

They decide to finish their meal with a classic Italian dessert that we serve in a variety of ways. This night, we have vanilla merengue with fresh whipped cream and bitter cacao. In the summer, we serve lavender merengues with the cream and fresh berries. Nicki and Steven tell us that in England, it is also a traditional dessert served with berries called Eton mess. We think what a perfect name for such a delicious and spontaneous treat.

A pantry should always be well-stocked with merengues. Made from just eggwhite and sugar, they have a long shelf-life, and they make an impressive impromptu dessert for unexpected guests, or a decadent midnight snack.

Vanilla Merengue
cup of egg whites
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup confectioners sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees. Beat the eggwhites. While beating whites, slowly add the granulated sugar in a steady stream. Add vanilla when the whites begin to increase in volume in the bowl. Beat until the whites form stiff peaks. By hand, mix in the confectioner's sugar using a rubber spatula or your hand. Don't incorporate it completely. You want to be able to see bits of the confectioner's sugar through the merengue. They help keep the merengue dry. (If you overbeat the confectioner's sugar, it liquifies, which causes trouble.) Spoon out onto a cookie sheet covered with parchment paper. Bake for thirty minutes until set. Turn off the oven. Leave in the oven overnight.

For our version of eat-and-mess (that's what we like to call it now), dollop whipped cream in the center of a plate. Break and crumble merengue over whipped cream and stick broken pieces into the cream. Sprinkle with fresh berries. In the winter, when berries are scarce, sprinkle bitter cacao over top, or stud with candied chestnuts.

wish you were here: piazza centrale, sutri, italia

Space is a funny word, and we use it all the time. We talk about the space we live in, work in, the space we need; we covet more space. We talk about space as a room with four walls, or as the distance between us. We talk about outdoor space which may or may not have boundaries, as in “wide open spaces”. And of course, there’s outer space, the limitless world of the sky, or the nature of our minds.

It is human to define ourselves by the spaces we inhabit, whether they are mental, emotional, or physical. Spaces can comfort us, they can put us more inside ourselves, or take us out of ourselves. Caleb and I love spaces that draw our attention and make us think or feel, either in the scale and effort at design, or the happy way nature arranges itself.

One of our favorite spaces by definition is the Italian piazza, the French place, the Austrian platz. The communal center of a town, or a neighborhood, and the way it interacts with its inhabitants is full of constant visual intrigue and spatial notions. Piazze are the outdoor living rooms or ballrooms of urban life. Wasn’t it Napoleon who called St. Mark’s Square in Venice “the world’s drawing room’?

One of our favorite piazzas of all is a demure space in a small Etruscan village about an hour outside the city of Rome. It is the hidden heart of this village, the center space in which all the buildings radiate outward. It is enclosed by tall, elegant buildings in the washed ochre stone native to the area, but is wide and the presence of the sky above does much to make it feel expansive rather than claustrophobic. It is grand, but human in scale and feels comfortable with clearly defined and visualized streets and portals that take you out into the larger world. At the center, but not exact center, of the piazza is a fountain. A strong piece of sculpture its scale too seems to be in perfect proportion to the space, not too big, not too fussy. On the piazza, there are three cafes where you can sit and have a coffee or an early evening prosecco. The town hall and municipal offices, including the police barracks, fronts onto the square. There is a bakery, a small grocery, a bank, a chic clothing store, an all-purpose store typical to Italian towns that sells everything from lightbulbs and brooms to wedding registry. There is the tabacchi where you can buy cigarettes, matches, postcards, and ask Antonio where to buy firewood. Above the ground floor businesses, the grand buildings house apartments with old grandmothers and young children hanging out the windows. In short, it has everything.

The piazza in Sutri is a meeting place, a watering hole, it is the short distance between events or places. People stride across its openness getting from one place to another; children play soccer, or ride their new bikes and eat gelato in the dying light of an afternoon. We can sit there for hours, taking no note of Time other than the way the sky shifts.

--Deirdre

a brief notation on lists

The first months of the new year always seem to bring on a flurry of list making: lists of New Year’s resolutions, lists of projects to do, lists of hopes, lists of long range plans. These rather serious lists are punctuated by daily lists: the grocery list, the to do list, our daily provisioning list for the restaurant, the wine-to-buy/stock-list, the don’t-forget-to-do-this list. We also make lists at the new year of favorite meals, lists of restaurants or places we want to go, lists of films we want to see, lists of books to read, lists of recipes to make.

All these lists came to a crossroads recently along with a list of questions and inspiration. A friend asked where to find good farro; a customer at the restaurant asked what kind of olive oils we use and like; another asked where we got the hanging screens of disks at the entrance to the dining room,;and yet another asked about how to find a certain wine they’d never tasted before. A visit to a favorite blog, thecureforlife, which includes a list of favorite spaces labeled Espace leads us to think about our own beloved spaces and how great to consider the environments we move through. The coincidence of these questions and our list-making, along with a clever idea and the suggestion of writing about where we procure ingredients (by the same friend who asked where to source farro) made us think a little more deeply about the true nature of lists.

Lists are a guide to memory. We write the grocery list in order to collect our thoughts about what we need for the kitchen, what we need to try a new recipe, or to make a favorite dish. Recipe means to procure. The grocery list helps us remember what we need when we actually get to the market. The to-do-list helps us remember all the things that help us corral the general chaos of everyday work and living. The New Year’s resolution list helps us remember how we’d like to do things better. But as we remember the items on all these lists, we spend only a fleeting moment actually remembering why we have put that thing on our list in the first place. We put the rustichella d’abruzzo farro on our grocery list because we want to make a farro soup, but the story is actually deeper than that, and if we take a moment to remember why it’s on our list, we know it’s not only for its taste and wholesomeness, but because we know the family that mills the farro at their small agriturismo in the Abruzzo where we’ve stayed and dined, and we can remember the warm spring day we arrived at the farm and we were shown our freshly painted and comfortable rooms, and we went for a walk in the olive grove, then came into a dinner at which we started with a plate of local salame and cheeses, then ate a farro soup thick with spring vegetables from the garden. The fire was roaring, and the wine was young and smelled of licorice and red currants. This is the real reason we love rustichella d’Abruzzo farro.

Camelia red beans are a staple in our larder at home because these are the red beans my mother uses, and with which she made classic red beans and rice. The brand was named after the grand-daughter of their neighbors who lived on Sycamore Street in New Orleans. The same little girl who accidently exploded a fire cracker in her mouth (same girl was alright after said event). Camelia red beans not only provide the right consistency and flavor for red beans and rice, but for me they are threaded with a series of memories: my own, my mother’s, my sisters’, and my father’s.

We always take a month or two to finish our list of New Year’s resolutions. At the top of the list now is the reminder to remember the stories of the things that comprise our lists, or if it is something we have yet to experience, like a future trip to a new place, what about it has ignited our imagination. The effort at memory marries our effort to create Time. We must make or take Time to remember.

Remorseless thieves, we start by making a list of spaces we love to include on this blog. We’ll make a list of the ingredients in our pantry. We’ll write about why these spaces speak to us; we’ll write about why we choose these staples for the larder. We plan to take the time to write about why they have inspired, so that in the end, we honor the spirit of a series of words written in a line, or in a column, on a piece of scrap paper, in a formal book, or on a cocktail napkin. We hope to add lists of favorite restaurants, hotels, cities, towns, cookbooks, plants, fruits, wines, gardens….

--Deirdre

dreaming in Belorussian

We go to friends for dinner. It is a cold winter night, the temperature dropping, the air slightly metallic, and wickedly cold. Their house is warm and when we walk in through the kitchen, the scents of a day of cooking draw us to the pot of beautiful green soup simmering on the stove, then on into the dining room which is festively set and a table already full with cheeses, Russian salad, and artichoke croquettes. We spend some time talking about the soon arrival of their baby, discuss paint colors for the nursery and how to hang the curtains, then we settle down to a feast.

Ryan is a chef, and his wife Olga hails from the now resplendant city of Minsk. Olga and her sister Tatiana, are not related to us by blood, but they have become our family in the strange way that people born thousands of miles apart can connect and form bonds of choice and necessity that are as strong as any familial line. We’re all in the long haul together.

Following the soup, the croquettes, the quintessential Russian salad of carrots, potatoes, ham, eggs, and mayonnaise, there are sausage-stuffed cabbage leaves, and galushki --round potato dumplings served with country bacon. There is beer to wash it all down, and of course, once stuffed like the cabbages, there are cookies, oranges, and tea.

We are thrust back several years now, to the first time we came to Minsk. Olga and her father Slava meet us at the modern and then empty airport well outside the city, and we drive through a flat, snowy countryside marked by collections of dachas, or small county houses (during the Soviet regime every worker was granted a piece of land to build a small cottage and grow their own vegetables and fruits), and broad copses of birch, poplar, and evergreens. The city comes upon us quickly, first the large Soviet apartment complexes, along with newer building, and then the various plazas and wide streets of a rather Hausmanesque urbanity. When we arrived, the President was beautifying the city: buildings were being cleaned, parks restored, restaurant culture was growing and booming. (Olga does not remember many restaurants growing up, just the few Belarussian spots for diplomats and wedding receptions). Now, the city is full of cafés: Italian, Mexican, and pan-European. There is also MaxiBis, the Belarussian answer to fast food which is a meticulously run cafeteria with modern design, and a darn good borscht. There are bakeries and chocolate shops also full of fresh fruit to accompany the confections.

We tour the clean and wintry city. We eat out, we go to the ballet where the intermezzo is defined by smoked salmon, caviar, and champagne. We wonder the markets—meat, produce, furs, shoes, clothing—which are bursting with the bounty of their own harvest as well as imported produce and ideas. Grocery stores have whole sections devoted to the making of sauces, an element of cooking that used not to exist in Minsk. Life was too spare for such frippery. The government stores are full of goods and the women walking the streets, lean in high-heeled boots, are dressed in the latest fashions. If one squints, Minsk appears to be a thriving, capitalist city, full of energy and forward-thinking. But there is, of course, a darker side as there seems to be to all the post-Soviet countries. The President is a smart man; he knows that if he provides all the trappings to the good life, who will want to rebel? There is no revolution when there is too much to lose.

Some of the best moments are at home, eating in the kitchen, Raisa cooking classic Belarussian dishes that embody sweet and savory, the taste of their land. Belarussian cuisine is not far from the Italian peasant recipes that we prepare everyday. There is an elegance and richness to the imagination of this comforting food. Clear soup with little meatballs, veal with a sauce of currents, potato pancakes with sour cream, a variety of what we call crostini, and what Belarussians call sandwhich: little toasts covered with spreads or cured meats, delectable little bites. We are treated to the spoils of their country house garden, fruits and vegetables preserved in vinegars or sweet liquids, or fresh root vegetables that have been cellared at the dacha.

The memories provided by Ryan’s interpretations of his mother-in-law’s food draw us up short. We long to sit at the cozy table over dinner, our vocabulary book open as we write down words in our newly found Russian, sitting over tea and a platter of petit-fours made at the patisserie around the corner. The longing to be somewhere we are not is the bain of the traveler and haunts us on most nights. But it also deepens our gratitude for what we have.

dispatch from the dark

At about a quarter of six on Sunday night, fifteen minutes before we open, the lights went out at the restaurant. The lights, the refrigerators, the freezer, the music. After the initial shock of being plunged into the dark, we ran outside to see if anyone else was without power, and the whole village was black. We had been open without electricity once before and had managed with our gas stove and gas oven, so we took a deep breath, and set about coping with the change in the rules.

We lighted all the tea lights in the dining room and kitchen, dialed reservations on the cell phone to be sure the patrons were game if we were game, and set up the laptop computer on the bar with a music playlist of old jazz that would play until the battery ran out.

Customers arrived with reports of a power outage that stretched over two towns. Some came with flashlights, others with a sense of adventure, and all wondering how we would be able to cook in the kitchen. The tealights were pretty, but not quite enough to read menus by, so the stash of wine bottles to be recycled became employed fitted with long tapers to cast a grander light.

The rhythms of the restaurant adjusted. We have always operated under the mission of slow food, but the lack of electricity created another layer, or perhaps removed a layer of expectation, of routine. It was as if all the patrons released a bit of themselves and settled even more comfortably in their chairs. Time expanded, or perhaps no longer mattered for the night. People laughed, diners at separate tables spoke to each other, “Do you have power at home? Do you know what happened? No? Neither do we! Happy New Year!” Wine flowed, dishes emerged from the kitchen. A woman sang. The food was eaten with real pleasure, attention, and thankfulness for finding a warm meal in the good humor of others on a cold, dark night.

The lights came on at eight o’clock, a strange sensation after having become comfortable in the candlelit glow of the evening. No one clapped, and their was a brief moment of disappointment in the dining room, a collective silence as if mourning a loss of something truly bright. Then the voices started up again, and the music played over the sound system. Someone shouted, “Let’s turn the lights off again!” reminding us all that we are not always in perfect control of our fates, and sometimes it doesn’t hurt to surrender.

--Deirdre

old long since

The snow has almost all gone. A January thaw, rain, and freezing rain, and rain again make the landscape look like the month of March. The dirt roads are wet and muddy and soft. If we do not get more snow soon, we will start to wish for Spring.

Especially since Spring taunts us. Caleb went to investigate his cold-framed lettuce bed once the two feet of snow had disappeared and was shocked to see radicchio still growing. The little heads that were too small to pick in December are still delicate, but big enough to cut now. So, cut them he did, and we brought them into the restaurant to wash, their beautifully speckled leaves smelling of earth and water.

These still growing greens point us both forward and backward. We are nostalgic for summer and our raised garden beds thick with small wild arugula and bitter chickory, yet the miracle of our own lettuces still alive after harsh below-zero temperatures and crushing, thick pelts of snow pull us toward our seed catalogs and writing order lists for spring planting. Deep winter after the anticipation of the holidays and New Year seems to heighten the bittersweet, in what we sense, experience, and remember. It is that time before rejuvenation in which we seem to feel more keenly our losses and our pleasures. In this moodiness, we somehow become nostalgic for the season yet to come as if we are already on the other side and looking back.

This feeling is sharpened as we have not yet shaken off our reading of The Auberge of the Flowering Hearth. Now that we have finished the book, there is the nostalgia for the story, for being in the middle of the reading and looking forward to so many more pages. And there is the nostalgia for what no longer exists. This book, which was a touchstone for so many of those American chefs who started out in the early ‘70’s (the Alice Waters and Jeremiah Towers), captures a private world that is now gone. The two Frenchwomen that Roy Andries de Groot writes about, Vivette and Ray, no longer own the Auberge, and are most likely no longer. Mr. Andries de Groot, a master of prose and whose masterpiece is this book, died by his own hand in the early ‘80’s, confronted with the difficulties of a long, arduous illness. His wife, the actress Katherine Hynes, died of a stroke in the early ‘90’s. The de Groots, like anyone else, experienced the difficulties and joys of any life: the loss of children, the loss of health, Mr. de Groot lost his eyesight twenty years after an accident in WWII. He wrote this book with his other senses, Katherine at his side describing the sights while he recorded minutely the world of sound, scent, and taste, and feeling. Perhaps this is why this book is so successful because it is full of so much joy, the delight in the friendship between the author and the two women, the utter happiness created by the harmony of good food, good wine, and perfect hospitality all within a memorable setting. And how happy we are to have experienced the reading of this story, and how sad we are that all the players are gone. Yet, we still have the book, to read again and again. And of course, there are the recipes to be prepared and eaten. This is the only way we know how to recreate a memory, a history.

Change is inevitable and necessary. The Auberge de L’Atre Fleuri does in fact still exist, as does the wild and extreme valley of Chartreuse in which it is nestled. It is run by Bruno and Veronique, and you can see the house and the rooms on-line at www.atrefleuri.fr. You can book your stay there via the internet, now fifty years later. It won’t be the auberge of Vivette and Ray, but it will be Bruno and Veronique’s and contain the stamp of their vision and personalities. How remarkable that there is still even an auberge in the same place under the same name.

At the restaurant, we make a soup of barley and vegetables in a veal stock. Caleb finishes the dish with a clutch of slivered radicchio from the garden and fresh frisée. It is a dish that pays hommage to the de Groots and the Mademoiselles of the Auberge. Created from local elements, it tastes of our home, our earth.