Sixty Mediterranean Recipes for the Way We Actually Eat
Almost every Italian recipe I went looking for, and kept, was written for six people. Six, eight, however many show up. Banquet numbers, for cousins who arrive unannounced. Dinner, most nights, is two plates and two glasses.
This book counts to two.
Sixty recipes from the coast and the islands: oil instead of butter, bread instead of rice, fish that costs little, vegetables chosen by looking at the calendar. Tomato, eggplant, anchovy, chickpeas, a clove of garlic thrown into hot oil. They call it the Mediterranean diet, with the solemnity of a conference. I call it dinner.
In these pages you will not find the ragù that simmers for four hours, the seven-layer lasagna is missing, and there is no trace of risotto finished with butter taken from the fridge at the last minute. Dishes I adore, let it be clear. But they belong to another Italy: that of the plains and the fog, of butter and rice, of braised meats that demand good wine and all of winter to succeed. It is a cuisine of high rank. It already has its books, written better than I would write them, and it does not need me to meddle in it.
There is the dinner you put together in twenty-five minutes coming home, and the Saturday work that takes its own time and a part of your dignity. Every recipe tells you, before you start, which kind of day you have gotten yourself into. Two of them, as they open in the book.
Tuesday
Some consider this the recipe for those who don’t know how to cook or those who have nothing in the house. They are wrong on both counts. If anything, it is the recipe that unmasks you: with only four ingredients, you have nowhere to hide, and a burnt clove of garlic here is as noticeable as a discordant note in an empty room.
Saturday
There is a persistent prejudice that a meatless dish must necessarily be a side dish, a supporting act. The parmigiana refutes this with a certain solemnity. A practical warning: the baking dish does not know the meaning of a “half portion”. Make enough for two evenings and eat it lukewarm the second night, once the layers have finished settling.
Cooking for two is not cooking less. It is cooking in the right measure, the one in which even a Tuesday has the right to a proper dinner.
Drawn for the book, in the manner of a nineteenth-century herbarium: the chili, the caper in flower, the squash blossom, the broccoli rabe. And one octopus, which is not botanical and was not consulted.
Everything else in this book has an alternative. If you cannot find friarielli, broccoli rabe is an honest substitute. If the tomatoes are out of season, drained canned San Marzano beat a tasteless winter tomato.
The oil has no substitute, and good intentions are not one.
Buy a real one, keep it away from the light, and use more of it than your sense of guilt suggests.
The table is set for two. I do not ask you to cook Italian every night: that would be a demand, and demands spoil the appetite. I ask you, tonight, to do just one thing well.