Taste: My Life through Food(4)

Pasta con Aglio e Olio


– SERVES 4 —

3 garlic cloves, cut into thirds

? cup olive oil

1 pound spaghetti

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper

Paprika



Sauté the garlic in the olive oil until lightly browned.

Boil the spaghetti until it’s al dente.

Drain the spaghetti and toss with the oil and garlic mixture.

Add salt, pepper, and paprika to taste.

Cheese is not allowed.





My father’s second go-to Friday night dish was uova fra diavolo. For egg-obsessed people, like my father and me, nothing could be as desirous as this rich, visually stunning meal. Imagine a deep frying pan of delicate red-orange marinara sauce (made with more onions than usual for extra sweetness), in which six to eight eggs are poached. The result, as its name implies, is positively sinful. This was accompanied by lightly toasted Italian bread and followed by a green salad. Here is the recipe:





Eggs with Tomato


— SERVES 2 —

? cup olive oil

1 medium to large onion, thinly sliced

1 cup canned whole plum tomatoes

4 large eggs

Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper



Warm the olive oil in a medium nonstick frying pan over medium heat. Add the onion and cook until soft, about 3 minutes. Add the tomatoes, crushing them with your hand or the back of a slotted spoon. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the tomatoes have sweetened, about 20 minutes.

Gently break the eggs into the pan and cover. Decrease the heat to medium-low and cook until the whites are opaque and the yolks are moderately firm, about 5 minutes. Serve immediately, seasoned with salt and pepper to taste.





The third Friday favorite was fried meatballs. This was a meal my parents would make together, my mother preparing the meatball mixture and rolling them, and my father frying them slowly in olive oil. Many meatballs were cooked on a Friday evening, as half were to be eaten that night and the other half were to be used for the Sunday “ragù.” Those eaten on Friday night were served “nude,” or, in other words, without any sauce at all. They were accompanied by a fresh green salad and Italian bread. It was only when this meal was served that butter made a rare appearance on our table.I When spread on Italian bread, it was a sweet and soft complement to the crusty meatballs.II

I remember those Friday night meals with great fondness, as there was a more relaxed feeling throughout the house. The work and school week had ended, and a weekend spent with friends and the inevitable Friday or Saturday night sleepover lay ahead for me and my sisters, while my parents looked forward to dinner parties at home or away. We knew that Sunday morning’s painfully portentous Catholic mass loomed, but we were well comforted by the thought that the remaining meatballs cooked on Friday evening would be given a new and delicious life in my mother’s ragù that afternoon.


I?As butter is not a large part of the Southern Italian pantry, it was seldom seen at our table. Bread was never buttered unless it was to be eaten alone as a snack. Bread was used at meals to soak up the remaining sauce from a pasta, meat, or poultry dish. The thinking is that buttered bread only corrupts the flavors of the leftover sauce.

II?Regarding the use of bread, some argue that the Florentines make unsalted bread to this day so that it might be as “neutral”-tasting as possible, in order to maintain the integrity of the sauce it absorbs. Others argue that the lack of salt in Florentine bread is because unsalted bread lasts longer, or it’s the result of an innate or inherited Tuscan parsimony stemming from a time when Italy was divided into city-states and wars were fought over necessary and coveted commodities such as salt, which was very dear. When we lived in Florence we never could get used to the unsalted bread, which we found dry and tasteless. I must confess that sometimes I think the best bread in Italy is in France.





2


Like many suburban saplings raised in 1960s America, I would bring lunch to school every day. It was a rare occasion that I would buy a lunch the cafeteria provided. This was for two reasons. One, it was cost-prohibitive for my parents to do so, and two, the food the cafeteria served was dreadful. Anyone growing up at this time anywhere in America knows what I mean, and therefore I need not elaborate. (I will confess, however, to a penchant for the excessively glutinous white rice, served by way of an old-fashioned ice-cream scooper and deposited as a near-perfect sphere in a tiny pastel melamine bowl.) Now, there were those students who bought lunch either regularly or on occasion. I, however, was only given money (five to ten cents) solely for the purchase of a half pint of milk. (My lactose intolerance was, as yet, undiscovered.) Though many of my friends brought their lunches, the contents of my lunch box differed significantly from those of my peers. A prime example of my portable childhood lunch, lovingly packed into a pop-image-themed metal container (a.k.a. a Partridge Family or Batman lunch box), would be something akin to the following:

A scrambled egg, fried potato, and sautéed sweet green pepper sandwich on two slices of Italian bread or in a “wedge” or a “hero,” which is a long loaf of Italian bread sliced horizontally and filled with whatever you choose to fill it with. In Philadelphia they are called “hoagies.”