Archive for Food
Venetian papa who?
Posted by: | CommentsEven if you were to speak Venetian, you may have occasionally overheard an expression being used that expressed almost nothing to you:
“No ti xe gnanca sangue da papalina.” (No tee zeh NYANG-ka sang-way da papa-EE-na.)
It literally means “You (or he, or they) don’t have even as much blood as a papalina.” It figuratively means, “There’s essentially no connection between us” — referring to relatives who are along the line of being a second cousin twice removed of the aunt of your stepsister. The underlying concept is that a papalina is so small that it contains perhaps two drops of blood, if that much.
So what, I hear you cry, is a papalina?
It’s a fish. It’s a member of the sardine family, and in English it’s called a sprat. If you like sardines (fresh, I mean, not canned), you will almost certainly love its modest but abundant little relative, if you can find it.
Because now that so many people have switched from the finny food of their childhoods to the fancy fins of today, it’s not easy to find papaline (the plural) in the fish market. They might occasionally be lying there on some intrepid vendor’s long icy counter, between their more glamorous cousins, the bigger sardines and the smaller sardoni, or anchovies. And besides being good, and good for you, they’re delightfully inexpensive. Mainly because hardly anybody wants them.
I’m writing this today because Lino’s quest was rewarded yesterday and he came home with a pound of the little critters. Lunch that day was an unprogrammed gorgefest.
These are papaline. Each is about three inches long and provides two enthusiastic mouthfuls. In our case, very enthusiastic.
There is only one truly correct way to eat them, and that is grilled. (You can do whatever you want, obviously — I’m just telling you.) And not merely grilled — you must eat them when they come right off the grill. Or, as the Venetians say, “a scotadeo” (ah scotta-DAY-oh). Literally “burning your fingers.”
Funny, they don’t say “scorching your tongue” or “searing your lips.” Venetians obviously reject the Japanese concept that if it’s too hot to hold (they’re referring to a cup of tea), it’s too hot to eat.
Unfortunately, the only place you’re ever likely to have the chance to incinerate your fingerprints will be at somebody’s house, or a picnic/party of some kind. You might find a few thrown anonymously into a mixed fishfry or even platter of mixed grilled fish at a restaurant. But it’s Not the Same.
There’s another comment which invokes this member of the Clupeidae family. It’s something only Lino says, and it comes from his heart: “You grew up eating papaline.”
He will utter this in an accusing way to the air as we pass the guilty individual. Sometimes he goes on, “You’ve forgotten when your nose ran all the time and you wiped it on your sleeve because you didn’t have a handkerchief.” Lino still sees some of this category of person around the neighborhood. “We were kids together,” Lino will tell me. “Now they’re eating LOBSTER and SOLE. But what can you say? They grew up eating papaline.”
He says this with a delicate blend of disdain and regret, because whoever he may be referring to has progressed far — too far — beyond his or her hardscrabble childhood, a life in which cheap fish and several tons of polenta were about all there was to keep you going till tomorrow.
Forgetting when you ate papaline means you’ve abandoned your roots, gotten above yourself, become mutton dressed as lamb. Rejecting papaline is the tertiary stage of voluntarily transforming yourself into something that may be real, but it’s phony. Kind of like Formica that looks like wood. It doesn’t have anything to do with how you dress, because there are plenty of people even in this neighborhood who have banished as many tokens of their past as they can. Their wives even have coats of some kind of fur. So it’s not about appearances, essentially, but attitude.
You get a pass because you never ate them in the first place, so you’re okay But if you should ever have the chance, I advise you to take it. Because in their own little way, the papaline are another Disappearing Venetian, like the itinerant knife-and-scissors grinder.
But tasting better.
Venice in January
Posted by: | CommentsDays — and I suppose nights — can become as routine (fancy way of saying “monotonous”) here in the most-beautiful-city-in-the-world as they can in Tick Bite, North Carolina, or wherever the daily round has worn a groove into your Day Planner, however gorgeous the surroundings may be.
I love January here for many reasons, and one of the big ones is that nobody else seems to. Which is to say that almost all the tourists are dormant somewhere, with the kids in school and the budget busted by Christmas and Crisis, and dark coming on early and so on.
Exhibit A: The #1 vaporetto on the Grand Canal last Friday morning. In a month or so, Carnival will be here, and if you can find a way to force yourself into the crush on every vehicle in the city then I admire your spinal cord, or your love of your fellow man, or your skill with a flooring chisel or Irish shovel, or whatever. I would gladly supply a photograph of this inescapable fact of life here, but I never use the vaporettos during Carnival, except maybe at dawn.
And not long after that, the Tourist Season will be declared open, and the vaporettos will become troop transports loaded with brigades of touristic infantry loaded with all their battle gear — suitcases, duffel bags, backpacks, strollers, children and dogs. If there were a way for them to bring their pet guppy to Venice, people would do that too.
So this scene, which may look to you like just a lot of plastic seats, is a Thing of Beauty because those seats are empty. This vision is so rare and wonderful that it’s almost worth getting on the #1 to go nowhere for no reason just so you can savor it, like a 1997 Brunello di Montalcino, but for a lot less money.
This is what the #1 looks like at 11:00 AM in January, coming up to the Rialto stop, one of the busiest points in the city. There will always be shopping carts, but seeing only two is remarkable. And not seeing strollers loaded like hopper cars hauling iron ore, and ponderous rolling suitcases, and monstrous backpacks, is simply amazing. Plus the fact that everyone in this vaporetto, as far as I can make out, is Venetian.
This time of year doesn’t call to mind mere metaphors involving food and drink. The real thing is at hand.
Last Saturday I was in a big supermarket on the Lido and came upon this heavenly vision of something wonderful about Carnival, the quintessential Carnival pastry. You can get the same items in pastry shops, naturally, for more money, naturally, but the important thing is, they’re here. The galani have returned, like the migrating monarch butterflies landing in Milwaukee.
Crostoli. It's not a trick of the lighting that makes them look so good. They are so good.
As you see, there is freedom of expression in naming this delicacy, whether baked or fried. ”Galani,” “crostoli,” (CROSS-toh-lee) and “chiacchiere” (KYAK-er-eh) all translate as “irresistible and addictive slices of fat and sugar.” Historically, you are allowed to begin eating these any time after Epiphany, right up to Ash Wednesday. Some culturally degraded but economically advanced vendors continue to sell them during Lent, but they must be related to the C.D. but E.A. vendors who sell Carnival masks and hats all year long. There is something odd about seeing teenagers wearing big plush multi-colored harlequin hats in August, but hey. It’s no odder than seeing people selling them. Venice must be the city where selling was invented.
As for the galani, I resist buying them. But it’s entirely possible that I will give in at some point and spend an afternoon making a batch of these crunchy morsels. I did it last year for the first time and boy, was that a mistake. We ate them all in two days. True, I could make just half a batch, but that seems unpleasantly intelligent. Why eat only three pieces of something that’s bad for you?
This version is being sold as "leaves of KAMUT," a relative newcomer to the grain bin which is the commercial name of khorasan wheat. This ancient variety is supposedly richer-tasting and infinitely better for you than more usual wheat. I don't know quite what the point would be in using a healthy ingredient in an item like this, but I'm certainly willing to try it.
Don’t answer that. It was a rhetorical question.
More crostoli.
And more.
Let's throw powdered sugar on them. That ought to obliterate any remaining traces of nutrition.
Can't decide? Buy them all.
Or wait for me to make some, she said modestly.
Venice salutes its Madonna
Posted by: | CommentsOf course you already know that “La Madonna della Salute” does not mean “Our Lady of the Salute.” She is Our Lady of Health, and every year on November 21 everyone in Venice who can walk, and even some who can’t, make the pilgrimage to her church to offer a candle and say however many prayers are filling their hearts.
Just as at the feast of the Redentore, a votive bridge is installed -- here spanning the Grand Canal. It is intended to carry the faithful piously over the water, but it's also an excellent vantage point for snapshots.
Yesterday was not a propitious day, meteorologically speaking. For two or three days the Gazzettino had been feverishly predicting acqua alta of 120 cm [four feet] that morning. (It didn’t happen.) There was plenty of water, however, in the form of a frigid rain. It wasn’t heavy, but it was determined, the kind of rain that isn’t thinking about anything else. And it got dark early.
Perhaps they look innocent enough to you. That's because you can't smell them.
There had also been an anxious sub-theme, which began circulating several days early, on the impending castradina famine. Castradina the basis of the traditional dish for this festival, a soup made of cabbage and a haunch of mutton which has been dried, smoked, aged, slathered in dark malodorous spices, and possibly even beaten with sticks and dead-blow hammers. It’s an impressive little piece of meat.
But this year, the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha, or Festival of Sacrifice, fell in the same period. Which meant that the general supply of castradina — which has never been huge, seeing as the tradition had fallen into general disuse — had suddenly shrunk to almost nothing. I have now learned that Muslims favor this foodstuff for their religious observance, and that they offered a better price to the few remaining wholesalers who carry it.
This is amusing, in a way (it takes so little to amuse me), because for years many people didn’t care about castradina. We’ve had Venetians over to dinner who had never eaten it. We’d see these hunks of black flesh hanging in the butcher shops and would wonder what they did with the ones they didn’t sell.
But in the past year or two, castradina has come back into fashion. So Venice, according to the Gazzettino, was pullulating with desperate people seeking castradina by any means, in any place, at any price. I can’t think of a credible substitute. You couldn’t fake it even with tofu.
Getting ready for the big day doesn't mean just cooking castradina. It means getting the area ready for every contingency.
Back to the weather. It was cold, dark, and wet. Just what I think of as perfect weather for this feast, though the women in the mink coats were thwarted by the rain. As you know, they come out in force on this day even in the driving sun. The need to show off their fur is just too strong. If you’re wearing beaver or seal, fine. But minks do not like rain any more than their humans do. I kind of missed seeing these self-contented matrons in their luscious garb. They do love it so. Lino calls this the feast of Our Lady of the Fur Coats.
And the delivery of several hundredweight of neatly boxed candles.
There are at least five stands and they all sell exactly the same thing. I don't get it.
This year, to my surprise, we got into the church without having to battle a rugby scrum, and we walked right up to the candle-lighting station and handed over our candles. This was an odd but very pleasant sensation. Last year there was such a crush of people that I honestly thought we’d be trapped there holding our candles till Christmas Eve.
Then, as usual, we joined the file of people who elected to walk past the high altar and venerate the little Madonna on the other side, crossing themselves and tossing some cash, and walking out through the sacristy. We found two seats in the heavy wooden choir stalls and sat down to watch people go by. Even though there weren’t massive crowds, the flow was steady. So far, so normal.
You can’t force pious thoughts. If you try, they just slide off your brain. So I sat there not thinking at all, somewhat lulled by the rosary recitation floating over from the other side. And then a thought came to me — more a realization than a thought. I realized that we were being faithful.
All those thousands of frantic, distraught Venetians had been watching people die of the plague all around them till all they had left to offer in exchange for their lives was to promise the Virgin that if she would intercede and save what was left of the city, they would build her a church and come to offer her candles and gratitude every November 21 forever. And after 380 years, people (us) who are so far away from the original promisers that their vow could be thought of as symbolic, or even meaningless, are still maintaining that vow.
Crumpled-up little old people, children of every shape and temper, families of various nationalities, teenage boys, an assortment of tourists — anybody who was there formed another link in the chain tying us to those helpless, despairing people who made a promise that they believed we would keep.
And we did. And we will.
Saint Martin strikes (Venice) again
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Classic weather for the feast of San Martino, probably designed to send you indoors to eat the classic roasted chestnuts.
As I may have said before, one of the many things I love about being here is the way life crosses the stream of the year by stepping on a series of metaphorical stones, which are the assorted holidays and feast days of some saints I hardly knew (that means “never knew”) existed. Now I know more about them than could ever be regarded as useful or even, dare I say it, interesting.
I used to think it was so exotic the way that people in the Middle Ages, according to assorted novels, would always be talking about events according to their nearest feast day: “We’ll plant the corn after St. Swithin’s Day,” “The marriage took place before Candlemas,” and so on. Now I’m doing it too.
For example, everybody knows that you don’t broach the new wine until St. Martin’s Day, which is today, November 11. The seppie begin to head out to sea after the Feast of the Redentore (third Sunday in July). I could go on, but St. Martin is getting restless.
The essential costume must include headgear, usually a crown. This item deftly connects the essential elements, which are San Martino, a sword, and a horse.
The festivities almost always take place on the eve of the official date of whatever the event may be. Therefore, yesterday via Garibaldi was strewn with small children in their “San Martin” garb — clever crowns, sometimes capes, often a bag for the candy they strongly urge people to give them — and carrying whatever bits of kitchenware such as pots and pans (or their covers) to bang and clang as they sing the vaguely threatening San Martino song. The gist of this ditty is that if you don’t give them candy, they will invoke a variety of unpleasant reprisals. Pimples on your butt is one of the favorites.
The essential elements for the traditional cookie are pastry dough and candies stuck on with icing. This is the minimalist version, reduced, simplified, symbolic. And small.
I like to think about all these people who stroll across the Venetian calendar. The Befana (Jan. 6), Santa Lucia (Dec. 13), the Madonna della Salute (Nov. 21), San Marco (April 25) and now San Martino (Nov. 11). Of course there are many more, when you add in every parish’s patron saint. Just imagine them all getting together at their annual convention: “International Marching and Chowder Society of Saints of the Venetian Year, this year meeting in Mobile, Alabama. Before registering, make sure you’ve paid your dues.” It’s just an expression. Saints, by definition, have long since paid them.
Where was I? Via Garibaldi. So yesterday afternoon hot chocolate and the crucial cookie called a “Samartin” (Sa-mar-TEEN) were distributed to the children by the good men of the Mutual Aid Society of the Caulkers and Carpenters. When they ran out of children they gave cookies to everyone else, mainly grandmothers and aged aunts who had been circling like buzzards.
Today, the late morning was clanked and clattered by groups of schoolchildren, manic little locusts in impromptu costumes swarming the shops and vendors. They were banging on their cookware and singing the San Martino song, or at least some of it.
The onslaught begins as the older children head for the next shop --which in this case will be a fruit and vegetable vendor.
It's nice to see the horse getting some recognition. All he did in the original story was stand there.
They had also prepared a series of posters depicting San Martino at his greatest moment, the encounter with the freezing beggar by the road and the division of his cloak with his sword.
A little tourist girl meets San Martino -- or more precisely, the beggar at his feet.
I believe he did a few other things in his life which had deeper and longer-lasting importance, but they don’t make anywhere near as good a story. Or poster.
Considering the ludicrous prices of the cookies on sale around town — a rough estimate tells me that regardless of size they cost 250% more than last year, when the prices were already too high — I think San Martino ought to cut the cookies in half.
Funny how in these pictures it's never winter. That sort of mitigates the whole freezing-to-death part of the story. But this is obviously prettier.
41 euros is $56. The size of this supposedly mega-cookie (#5) can easily be understood if you know the size of a Perugina "bacio" chocolate. (Hint: It contains one hazelnut.) I realize that 14 chocolates are not cheap. But if you're going to spend $56 on something, I wouldn't be thinking of chocolate but something more in the precious-metals line. Gad.
