Taste: My Life through Food(35)

Gianni Scappin comes from the tiny village of Mason Vicentino in the Veneto region of Northern Italy, where his family owned a small restaurant. After a brief stint in a seminary school as a young boy, Gianni realized he was not destined for the priesthood, and at the age of fourteen he began a four-year course at the Recoaro Terme Culinary Institute, which expanded his knowledge of Italian regional dishes. At the age of eighteen he moved to England and honed classic cooking skills in the French-influenced kitchen of the Dorset Hotel in Bournemouth. After a two-year obligatory stint in the Italian army in an Alpine skiing regiment, where he also cooked for his commanding officers (enlist me now), he worked at the famed Hotel Excelsior on the Lido in Venice. In the early 1980s he became the head chef at the very successful Castellano in New York for a few years until moving to New York’s Bice (where he trained the late, great Anthony Bourdain) and finally to Le Madri. He eventually stepped away from the kitchen to oversee Pino Luongo’s five New York restaurants. He left the city in 2000 to open his own restaurants in upstate New York and taught at the Colavita Center for Italian Food and Wine at the CIA (that’s the Culinary Institute of America, not the governmental spy organization).

Gianni could not have been more welcoming, and even though I had the option of visiting some of Pino’s other kitchens, after meeting Gianni, I never left Le Madri. Over the next couple of years, as we searched for funding for the film, whenever I wasn’t working I would spend time in Gianni’s kitchen, learning everything I could from the staff and picking Gianni’s brain. One of the things I asked Gianni to teach me was how to make a frittata because at the end of the film my character, Secondo, makes a frittata, which he shares with his brother, Primo, and the busboy/waiter, Cristiano. Our rather bold plan was to shoot the scene in one continuous take with no coverage. This meant that there would be no possibility of editing it down, and therefore every element would have to work perfectly, so I needed to be very adept at making it. Also, with the exception of a couple of lines at the beginning, there is no dialogue, so it almost felt like a scene from a silent film. Shooting the scene in a single wide master shot meant that I would have to cook the frittata in real time. If something went wrong, I would have to cut, reset, and begin another take.

We rehearsed a number of times to solidify the blocking of the actors and the basic timing of everything. During rehearsal I was using a pan that I had chosen from the prop master. Like all the props, it was or resembled a pan of the period, late 1950s, which meant there was no hope of slipping in a Teflon-coated pan to make my job a little easier. Needless to say, the frittata kept sticking to the pan, and I started to panic, because if it didn’t work seamlessly we would have to shoot coverage and end up editing the scene. Instinctively we all felt this would compromise the emotional integrity of the scene and rob it of its tension. So I grabbed a large aluminum pan and gave that a try, and luckily it worked perfectly every time. We ended up doing seven takes, two of which we had to abort partway through for reasons I can’t remember, but the other five were “keepers,” as they say. I don’t know which take we finally chose to use, but the entire scene is a single shot that lasts about five and a half minutes. I am so glad we were able to successfully shoot it as one continuous wide shot from beginning to end, as I believe it’s what makes the scene so compelling. I still make frittatas all the time but they often end up sticking, no matter what pan I use, and I kick myself for not slipping that perfect pan into my bag on the last day of filming.

Here is a recipe for a frittata as taught to me by Gianni Scappin.





Frittata


— SERVES 2 —

5 or 6 large eggs

3 to 4 tablespoons olive oil

Kosher salt

A good pinch of chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley (optional)

A good pinch of freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano

Freshly ground black pepper



Crack the eggs into a bowl and beat them gently with a fork for a minute or so, making sure you angle the bowl so that you really blend them well. You could use a whisk instead of a fork, if you prefer, but you will end up with a puffier-textured frittata.

In a 10-inch sauté pan with sloping sides, heat the olive oil over medium-high heat. You want to get it pretty hot and tilt the pan to make sure the sides are well coated. When the oil is hot, season the eggs with salt and add the parsley, if using, then pour the mixture into the pan. Scramble the eggs vigorously with a silicone spatula, tipping and moving the pan continuously and drawing the eggs from the sides into the middle. Keep the pan moving to make sure the eggs don’t stick. Add the Parmigiano and a good grinding of pepper. Then flip or turn the frittata and cook for a minute or so more, until golden and cooked through. Serve immediately.





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A couple of years later the same company that produced Big Night brought me to Rome for about five weeks to act in a film. My only friend in Rome at the time, Claudia Della Frattina, was working for a producer in a small office not far from where I was staying, and we got together for lunch the day after I arrived. I walked to her office thinking we would take a stroll and grab a bite, but we were in a slightly more residential area of the city, and when I arrived she said that she usually just ate in. I imagined she would have brought sandwiches like many people the world over, but there was no lunch box or takeaway bag on her desk. Instead I saw a small kitchen at one end of the office, to which a moment later Claudia was headed.