16. Know what you love
Let’s be honest, not all dishes are initially appealing. Flan di Baccalà, for example. A flan made from dried, salt-preserved cod.
Paul and I prefer our fish directly from the sea, simply prepared. As we scanned the flan recipe, we grimaced. Why buy fish dried hard and salty only to then desalt and soften it? And mashing it with milk and potatoes...?
And yet many Italians relish baccalà, seeking out and willingly choosing to cook with the preserved cod (merluzzo) over freshly caught. In the Veneto region near where my mother's family is from it's considered a delicacy and traditionally was eaten on Fridays and Christmas eve. There's even a yearly festival held in Sandrigo, province of Vicenza, in its honor.
Still...a flan? I offered that at the very least, baccalà was convenient: no refrigeration needed. If preserved properly, who knows, the hardened slabs might last a lifetime. But then there’s the cooking process to be considered, the required two days of soaking (with a change of water every eight hours) to release the salt. All in all, somewhat less than practical. But we’re talking about love here, and when was love ever practical?
DeliciousItaly.com says it took a look at the nutritional tables of the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries and discovered that baccalà has twice as much protein, four times as much iron and only 1 gram of fat per 100 grams (compared to 23 per 100) as salmon.
Impressive. I searched around: Wholey's Market (est. 1912) in Pittsburgh says they can mail me a three pound package of baccalà for $42 plus tax and shipping. Hmmm....
Here’s the process, per Ada.
“After the essential bath...” [If you don’t already know about the “bathing” before beginning, this should warn you to give up right now.] De-skin the baccalà (spellate il baccalà) and de-bone, cut into pieces (approximately 500 grams total), place in a bowl with 2 cups milk and let stand a couple more hours. Heat the fish slowly (pian piano) in a bit of the milk and a little water until cooked. Remove the fish with a slotted spoon (una cucchiaia bucata) and allow to drain well (lasciate ben sgocciolare). Boil four average-sized potatoes. Mash the fish, the potatoes. Then mash together into a smooth dough (un impasto fine).
Prepare a béchamel sauce (una besciamella) with the remaining fish-soaked milk, 50 grams of butter, and 30 grams of flour. Remove the sauce from the stove and add to it the fish/potato mixture (il passato). Add a bit (un pizzico) of white pepper, a little (poco) salt, a non-nothing (nonnulla) [ha! a fleeting, inconsequential dusting?] of nutmeg, 2 spoons of grated Parmigiano, a spoon of chopped parsley, and 2 beaten eggs. Mix together well with a wooden spoon. Generously butter (imburrate abbondantemente) a liter-sized flan dish, and cook over a double-boiler (una bagnomaria) for about an hour, until firm. Let stand five minutes before removing it from the mold (sformatelo) onto a serving plate.
Perhaps, Ada writes, you’ll want to serve it like this, simply. Or pile in its center a pyramid of mushrooms, or peas, or spinach. Or accompany it with a side of a thin besciamella to which you’ve added (at the last moment) an egg yolk and a spoon of grated Parmigiano. Or with a side of fresh tomato sauce finished with butter and parsley....
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There’s some wonderfully rich Italian here.
Spellate il baccalà - La pelle is the skin. The “s” before the noun is used to create a verb meaning to remove the noun in question. In this case, spellate (from spellare) is to remove the skin.
Una cucchiaia bucata – Literally: a spoon with holes. A spoon to drain. A slotted, "punctured" spoon.
Paul was surprised at the feminine gender: a spoon/spoonful (un cucchiaio) is masculine. I looked it up and found it written in Italian texts both ways: una cucchiaia bucata and un cucchiaio bucato. A mystery....
Lasciate ben sgocciolare – Another example: una goccia is a drop. The “s” is a clue indicating that the resulting verb involves removal of the noun. Here: Let it drip well.
Imburrate abbondantemente – Burro is, of course, butter. Imburrare is to coat with butter. The adverb abbondantemente occurs, on average, at least once per recipe. I love this word. Abundantly, generously: a way to move through life.
Sformatelo – A final example: una forma is a mold. Sformatelo – remove "it" (understood by the "lo") from the mold. This single word says it all.
THE FLOOD WATER WAS RISING, FAST. First it approached the front steps then began seeping up through the floor boards. Warren and his wife and his three boys moved up to the second story of their home. “The levees done broke,” he says. “Usually when the rain comes, it flows back out. Not this time.”
Paul and I are passengers in a Lyft, on our way to Louis Armstrong Airport after a five-day stay in New Orleans. It’d rained one afternoon—a brief but shocking deluge—giving me pause. Katrina happened 12 years ago, but to those who lived through it, like our driver, a native and a teddy-bear of a man, it could have been yesterday.
“Something was going clang, woosh, clang, woosh! What’s that, she [his wife] wanted to know. It’s the frig and the deep freezer knocking themselves out, I said.” The appliances were underwater, he tells us, still plugged into the outlet, and there were now waves in the water on the lower level. Warren took a door off a hinge and grabbed his eldest son’s punching bags. “... I’m 43, I grew up on MacGyver, bro. I like to FIX things, you know?” He got some electrical wire and tied the bags to the bottom of the door, trying for a pontoon boat. “Ain’t gonna work, she said. No it ain’t. Sure will, I said.” He looks up into the rear view mirror to make certain we are with him. “Like MacGyver, yeah.” He opened the second story window, floated out his pontoon boat, climbed on to test it. He got to the middle of the street and it sank. “She done jinxed me,” he says.
When the hurricane made landfall there was nothing but an unending, deafening WHOO WHOO! The roof blew off his neighbor’s house, swirppp!, just flew through the air like a piece of cardboard. And as water filled the streets, the pressure blew the ponderous circular sewer caps straight up into the air. Ten to twenty feet. “Like popping a cap off a bottle of shook soda. Waawhp! Waawhp! Waawhp! One after another, all the way down the street...”
Warren got a bed, (I don’t understand this, but maybe he had an inflated mattress?) and he and his wife found two planks of lumber floating by. A second try at a makeshift boat. He climbed on with his sons and his wife and—success—they paddled out of the neighborhood.
Hey, save us! His neighbors called. He felt bad but there wasn’t any room; he was a large man and there were already five of them on the fashioned raft.
Paul: Can I ask, where were you going...?
“The courthouse,” Warren says, “and we made it.” [A long pause] “I thought I’d seen some of the worst of it,” he says. “But you see, the jail was there. And it was a single story. And all the doors were on an electrical system. Air, too. And the flooding done take out the electricity. And the water was filling the building. They couldn’t get out. Some of them tried breaking through the glass. Those that got out began swimming away. Police came and began shooting at them. Everyone screaming. One got shot right near us. Bro, I tell you, it was terrible, terrible.”
He and his family were taken to a shelter in San Antonio. Nine months they were there. His boys tried to get into a local school. He struggled to find some temporary work. It was difficult because his money was in a local New Orleans bank, and he couldn’t get access to it from Texas. Eventually he was able to rent a small place for a couple months and find a bit of work.
Paul: Did you ever consider not coming back?
Warren shakes his head. “I love it here. This is home. In San Antonio, they don’t know what gumbo is, don’t know what a Po’ Boy is. They eat those beans and Texas fixings.” Another shake of his head. “I need my Po’ Boys.”
Me: So it was all about the food!
“I’m telling you. We have family here. Christmas is at our house. Seventy-five relatives. And we cook for them all. Two turkeys, two hams, two huge pots of gumbo—that’s my doing. And cakes. My older son helps. He took Home-Ec, thinks he’s now a cook. Yeah. And sweepatatah pie.”
Me: Mmmm...Sweet potato pie!
“Um hmmm, love that sweepatatah pie. You want a good one? Patti LaBelle. She makes a real good pie.” [I look it up. Patti LaBelle Sweet Potato Pie, 21 ounces. $3.48 at Walmart.]
His wife is a teacher, he tells us. She gets off two weeks before the holiday and goes shopping, buying buckets of small gifts, some for girls, some for boys. “She don’t want no one extra showing up at our place and not getting something for Christmas.”
Paul: Sounds like you have a good woman there.
“Good? Yeah, she's good. She always getting me to do something. Here, she says, wrap some of these presents. So I wrap them and she says, What? That ain’t wrapping.” Warren laughs, and it’s the deep gurgle I anticipate from this man so musical in his descriptions. “Only women can wrap presents, that I’m sure of. And I say, But they’re gonna just rip that paper right off, why's it got to be so tidy...? And my sons try to help but they're worse than me.”
There’s thick traffic now on Highway 10, but Warren remains cool. As do nearly all the drivers, I realize. There’s no aggressive lane-switching, no horn-honking. Rather an awareness that—at least with driving—calmly staying the course is the way to go.
“And when we were back,” Warren says after several minutes, “was more terrible... Prices! Ten dollars for a little milk, even more for water. And I’m thinking, we've got no house, we've got no work, we've got kids to feed, and you are charging what for food...? And these were big places, too. They didn’t have to charge that. Everyone was trying to pocket some extra. Politicians were the worst.”
Days before as Paul and I waited at a stop in New Orleans’ Uptown for the local streetcar, a woman joined us, and when we inquired about the political ads peppering the lawns, she let loose, ranting about the runoff elections taking place that week. There were more lawn signs than people who were going to vote, she said. Those running were all corrupt, she said. Been that way forever, she said.
“And now we have Trump,” Warren says. We all moan. “I mean,” he says, “if they take away welfare, ain’t gonna be nothing left. People are gonna take to the streets with guns. We've got kids. We've got to eat. We’re doing what we can here, but we've got to eat. And Trump goes down to Puerto Rico. Mmm mmm. Can’t believe it. Those poor people and he’s doing nothing to help.”
We pull into the airport. I’m hoping to part on a happier note.
Me: There’s a spice I’ve tasted in some gumbos here.... Let me in on the secret?
[Honestly, I don’t much like Louisiana gumbo. I ate it twice during our stay. Once it was fresh, a second time it tasted as if it were a reheat of a reheat. Regardless, I feel there’s simply too much in it: too many flavors which don’t blend. Shrimp, lump crab, fatty sausage, a roux that begins with bacon fat, hot sauce, Cajun sauce, Worcestershire sauce, gumbo sauce, Okra. I mean, why? It’s all over the place. I love soups, and bisques and stews...but gumbo? Give me a fresh cioppino any day.]
“Don’t know about the spice,” Warren says, “but what goes in the gumbo's got to be cooked good through first, then added to the soup.” He stops the car and opens the door for me. “That’s the thing. Cook everything real good first.”
He waves as we depart. It’s about four in the afternoon, I wonder if he’s had a chance yet to eat lunch. He’s looking wistful. And hungry.
