14. Sprinkle and consume
Finocchio. Bulb fennel. Not to be confused with the herbal plant (also fennel) that produces the aromatic seeds.
It is these seeds which give Italian sausage its distinctive flavor. The two—the bulb and the herb—are different but related, both belonging to the carrot family. Wikipedia tells me that other bulbs in the species quite similar to fennel can be toxic, such as poison hemlock, and that as with mushrooms, it's probably well-advised to know what you have before taking a bite.
Fennel is something of a wonder. Roman warriors believed eating it made them strong. The Greeks, however, gave it the name marathon, which means "to grow thin" as they believed it suppressed appetite. And in India fennel seeds are eaten after meals to aid with digestion.
I picked up a bulb at the market and opened Il Talismano to see what I could find. The most common preparation was the simplest: sprinkle with salt, olive oil, a bit of lemon juice, and consume raw. A perfect antipasto.
Finocchio can also be prepared with tomatoes, used in stews, or with a béchamel sauce and is often served with a fatty fish, according to Ada.
Alla besciamella: Preparate una besciamella piuttosto liquida con 50 grammi di burro, due cucchiaiate di farina e un paio di bicchieri di latte, sale e noce moscata. Prepare a fairly liquid béchamel sauce with 50 grams of butter, two tablespoons of flour, a couple glasses of milk [...what is the quantity of a 'glass' I wonder], salt, nutmeg.
The besciamella is poured over fennel slices (first blanched in boiling, salted water) placed in a greased baking dish. A light sprinkle of breadcrumbs, a few pats of butter, in the oven for 20 minutes.
Un Assaggio : (A further taste, of the language.)
Fino a che. Ada suggests baking the finocchio....."fino a che salsa e pane saranno leggermente coloriti." Until the sauce and bread crumbs are [will be] lightly colored. Fino a che: literally, until that. An interesting combination: in English we simply say until. It seems the additional "che" is required in Italian when a specific condition is described...? Notably, it's also followed by the future verb tense. According to Paul, what is most often used today is "finché," a compounded/abbreviated form.
Piuttosto: rather. A new word for me! As in: Piuttosto la morte! I'd rather die! Or: Sono piuttosto stanca. I'm rather tired.
Una cucchiaiata. "A spoonful." It's also a mouthful, having the beginnings of a yodel as I attempt to get it out in a fluid breath. I have a friend who travels to Italy on occasion and has picked up a handful of words. Cucchiaio is his hands-down favorite. Compared to the English "spoon", a monosyllabic, hard sound with its beginning spitting "sp" and the solid "n" ending, the Italian is a four-syllabic, lyrical sensation. The IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) link shows the pronunciation like this: kuk'kjajo.
THE SPOON. I remember watching its steady approach in my mother’s hand, the crushed tablet settling in its concave bottom, a cloudy liquid rising on top, my face puckered in pre-disgust, anticipating the bitter grit, its lasting sour.
This was the 1960s. There were no children’s liquid pain relievers, nothing grape or orange or candy flavored. No sweet gummy chews. When there was fever there was only Bayer: dry, uncoated, white aspirin tables that grabbed at the lining of your throat, seemingly impossible to swallow whole.
It was a simple solution: one or two aspirin, crushed dry between two spoons, thumbs pressing down, an added sprinkle of water making it a semi-liquid, ingestible.
Even after my sisters and I were able to swallow the tablets, they were for years still crushed between two spoons and fed this way. Was this a more effective delivery? Easier on the stomach? Or just the irrefutable recommendation of a stubborn, old-school doc?
His name was Mansdorfer. He was short, German, balding. Ancient, I would have described him, but Google tells me he was then only in his mid-sixties. Did he have a kind face? My mother thought so, though I don't recall ever seeing him smile.
His Baltimore townhouse—both residence and office—sat on a busy, tree-lined stretch of the 3200 block of north Charles Street. A polished brass plaque—Dr. G. Bowers Mansdorfer, pediatrician—was posted adjacent to the massive, wooden front door. I remember the interior entrance corridor as a tunnel, long and dark. (But this was a townhouse... how long could it have been?) Sniffling kids, wailing newborns, pregnant women waited here, queued on benches and chairs pressed against the right side of the narrow hall. An occasional small lamp lit the space in an eerie amber glow.
I suppose my mother called Miss Kaskie, Mansdorfer’s nurse-secretary, to let her know we were coming, but no one as best I could tell was ever turned away. You just showed up. The office stayed open until everyone had been seen. On evenings and weekends, Mansdorfer packed his black bag and made house calls.
I remember it being hot, a swelteringly humid Baltimore heat. (Were we sick only in summer?) Home air conditioning was a luxury then; I didn’t know of one family, mine included, that had any cooling. Mansdorfer’s solution was a cluster of standing industrial strength fans blowing in the rear room of the townhouse—a formal dining room, stale and motionless as a museum, with cumbersome furnishings, walnut paneled walls, and a soaring grandfather’s clock my mother adored, insisting on each visit that we go back and “have a look.” The clock sounded a deep, hollow gong every quarter hour. I remember counting the gongs as I sat in the stuffy entrance hall. Another fifteen minutes, then another—that meant already a half hour—and the wait went on.
On his desk Mansdorfer had a cup which contained—this, the clearest and strangest recollection of all—half sticks of Wrigley's mint gum. When researching online I came across a posting from a former patient with the same recollection, I learned that I wasn’t the only one who thought halving sticks of gum was, if not totally weird, certainly quirky. The posting asked if there were any other former patients out there (there must be several hundred) eager to reminisce about the doc, about those days. (Not a one.)
Gum was the reward for being “good” during the visit. It was a big deal, Mansdorfer selecting a piece from his cup and solemnly sliding it across the desk. Since my sisters and I were always good (let’s be honest: angelic), I’ve no idea where the “good cutoff” was and whether or not some kids, after suffering an intolerable wait and various prods and vaccination needles, maybe whimpered a bit too much in the end and walked out empty-handed.
Crushed aspirin was distasteful to be sure. Still, it was nothing like Argyrol, Mansdorfer’s sole curative for sinus ailments. Near-black in color, it came in a tiny dark bottle with a dropper in the lid. Head held back, the liquid was dripped into the nose where it would burn through the sinuses, land in the throat, nearly trickle out the ears. I suppose in the end it must have done some good, though maybe not.
Several years ago, after reminiscing with my older sister during which she remarked painfully, “God, and then there was that Argyrol....”, I became curious and looked it up. A silver protein compound invented in 1902, it had been actively used during WWII to confront...gonorrhea. Alfred Barnes, the chemist who’d patented it, made a cool fortune, left chemistry, and became a flamboyant rare art collector. When I first researched Argyrol, I read it had been removed from the market. Reason: toxicity. Curiously, though, its Wikipedia entry has since been revised—somewhat over emphatically—and the black poison is apparently back in business.
Why did you like Mansdorfer so much? I asked my mother in 1990 when she related his death and the obituary that had filled half a page in the Baltimore Sun.
Mansdorfer? A wistful sigh. He was a comfort, she said.
