Venetian-ness | Venice: I am not making this up

Sant’ Erasmo, where vegetables go to heaven when they die

You may never have given much thought to St. Erasmus, but if you wander past any vegetable vendor in any season here — especially in the spring — you will see him referred to constantly. Not because he was so holy, though undoubtedly he was; the reference is very specifically to the nearby island which is named for him: Sant’ Erasmo.

What’s on Sant’ Erasmo are fields and fields of market gardens. On a summer evening, strolling along the verdant lanes that glimmer with fireflies, flailing at billows of insatiable mosquitoes, it’s like having been transported back to somewhere in the heart of darkest Indiana.

In Venice, any mention of the largest island in the lagoon, particularly if it’s scribbled on a sign in the market, is synonymous with the best local produce. Peas, asparagus, artichokes; by June, they have all come and are mostly gone, though the last flourishes are on sale at the annual Venetian rowing race marking the good saint’s feast day (June 2, as all the world knows).

Sant’ Erasmo is known, not only by its celestial verdure, but its few hardy and well-entrenched families. If I were to tell you that there are only a few last names here, which have been continually reshuffled as the generations have gone on, I will have told you just about everything you need to know about the place. I’m not implying children with six fingers, just that it’s a little planet orbiting Venice, near but extremely far, if you follow me. Anybody with the surname Vignotto, Zanella, Smerghetto, or Bubacco can only be from here, and you would pick them out immediately even if you were to meet them racing yachts at Cowes, on their way to pick up their Nobel Prize.

A few Sunday mornings ago, our usual group gathered at the boat club, ready to head out somewhere in the gondolone, the big gondola. We’d heard there was going to be some local farmers’ fiesta on the island, the “Festa of the Violet Artichoke of Sant’ Erasmo,” so we rowed over there. We needed a new destination for our Sunday excursion, and it took less than an hour. We drew the boat up on the sandy beach (look at the map for the little stretch of shore along the southwestern edge) and wandered ashore to see what the islanders had organized.

Naturally we were there too early. We should have known. The farmers don’t have cows, but they know that they’ll be milking tourists later, so there’s no need to bust a gusset setting up their stands. Still, some enterprising souls had begun unloading crates of artichokes from their assorted vehicles, and the sight was Extremely Tempting.

The Violet Artichoke growers’ lobby has recently succeeded in having their product officially designated as a protected brand, akin to a denomination controlee’. This little thistle deserves all the fanfare it can get: Stripped down to its tender inner leaves and slowly sauted over a low flame in olive oil and garlic, it has a very particular bitterness which is transmuted in your mouth into a flavor tending mysteriously towards sweetness. I think they must contain some narcotic substance; once you start, you must have more.

Everyone maintains that part (or all) of the secret of these little morsels is the saline environment. You’ll be glad to know I haven’t made a study of the soil, but it seems logical that there would be some salty component to their habitat. The artichokes of Malamocco were equally celebrated, back before houses took over the fields there. Meanwhile, the artichoke consortium oversees the production of them at various limited sites around the lagoon.

So: Did we buy any, or not? Yes, we did. But not from the festa. The canny farmers with their snazzy labels and tents were charging one euro ($1.38) apiece. I wish I could say I’d made that up.

Therefore we walked across the road to the large shady fig tree, under which a lone farmer was selling the artichokes he had just cut from their stalks in the adjoining plot. We took home a large sack of them — in fact, he went back and cut some more for us — for .29 euro cents each.

He could undoubtedly have asked a higher price if he’d been selling them as “castraure” (kas-tra-OO-reh). This is one of those legendary food items that is much rarer than you’d think, considering how many vegetable vendors claim to be selling them. The castraure are the first, topmost little artichoke on each plant; they are cut off (yes, the plant is castrated…) in order to encourage the rest of the plant to flourish. This flourishing is in the form of the little artichokes we bought, which are called “botoli.”

It makes me happy to remember all this, because they’re gone from my life for another year. I probably won’t make it back to Sant’ Erasmo before the race in June, and by the time I get there all the good stuff will have been sold. Of course, I could eat artichokes virtually all year from hothouses all over Italy, but now that I’ve tasted these I think I’ll just wait.

The voyage of the seppia

This morning we were walking along the fondamenta across the canal from our hovel, and my eye fell upon one of the boats tied up alongside.

It takes no time at all to reconstruct the scene: A seagull nabbed a seppia, or cuttlefish, and a battle ensued, which the seppia lost. You can tell by the splashings of desperate black ink. Another clue is the cuttlebone, which if I had a parakeet or Andean condor I would immediately have taken.

Your cuttlefish are no match for a seagull’s beak, as you see, but don’t underestimate them. If you were a small marine creature you’d want to do everything possible to avoid any passing seppia (plural: seppie; in Venetian sepa/sepe). Soft and squidgy they may be (although technically a mollusc), but they too have a sort of beak, and it’s tiny and hooked and sharp. They look so innocuous, sort of like Mister Magoo, as they drift fecklessly along, but just remember that they have that mouth. Not much use in land combat, though. I could tell you some stories about that sharp little beak, and I probably will, at some point, but I don’t want to ruin your enjoyment at thinking of how delectable they are, so I’ll stop. The little ones are wonderful grilled. They are a classic Venetian snack, or cicheto (chih-KEH-to). The bigger ones are chopped up and simmered in water and tomato paste, and their ink. Some people omit the ink, which is heathen.

While we’re talking about their being eaten, by whatever sort of life form, make a note that seppie (on spaghetti or in risotto) are the only fish on which you are allowed to put grated parmesan cheese. To see someone put cheese on any other fish dish makes Venetians shudder. But it is, in fact, required on seppia. If you don’t try this, you won’t know what I mean. Trust me. If your waiter tells you not to do it, ask him where he’s from. Or just smile and go ahead anyway. Or skip the smile.

Another seppia clue: If you walk along the fondamentas edging major channels — say, along the Riva dei Sette Martiri in Castello, or the Zattere in Dorsoduro, or the opposite side of the Giudecca Canal, on the Giudecca — you will certainly see stains like these on the stones. Now you know they’re not paint. Many of them indicate epic battles, all futile.

There are two seppia seasons: Spring, which is when they come into the lagoon from winter quarters somewhere in the Adriatic in order to spawn, and anytime after the festa del Redentore (third Sunday in July), when the fraima (fra-EE-ma) begins, the general ichthyous exodus from the lagoon out to sea. This second period is, obviously, the time when you are aiming for the little ones — I hate calling them babies, but that’s what they are. In both of these periods the deepest lagoon channels are strewn with temporarily anchored boats from which men, and often their wives, too, are fishing for seppie. These boats refuse to move for any passing craft, from the vaporettos to the cruise ships. It drives the captains to the verge of crazy.

And speaking of decoding cuttlefish, I saw my first seppia this year on March 6. It wasn’t the little cephalopod itself, but its remains, floating in with the tide in the canal outside our hovel. It made me so happy I took a picture of it — it was like seeing the first [crocus, sandhill crane, or add your favorite seasonal thing here].

Then the fondamentas begin to fill up, lined with amateur fishermen, some of whom take their catch home, and some who sell it. They often go out at night, too, depending on the tides, rigging up a strong light to attract the animals. Or they use a fish-like lure. Lino once slew a vast number of them by hooking a medium-length remnant of a white plastic bag to his line and pulling it slowly through the water; despite the fact that seppie have some of the most developed eyes in the animal kingdom, it somehow looked irresistibly like another seppia. They don’t eat only crabs, shrimp, worms, or whatever — they snack on each other, as well. Too much information?

But we’ve caught seppie without even trying, when we’ve been out rowing, minding our own business. There one will be, just floating along; if it’s close enough to the surface you can pick it up with your hands. It’s better, though, to have a volega (VOH-ehga), the net on the long pole, because you can go deeper. If you can see it, you can probably catch it. I used to feel sorry for them; Lino’d be all excited and I’d be shouting, “Dive, little seppia, dive!” He thought I’d lost my mind. Now that I know how good they are, I’ve quit that. There will always be more. It’s not like they have names.

Last tidbit for the day: In the fish market, they used to use seppia ink to write the prices on pieces of paper. (Hence the color tone called “sepia,” which is more brown than black, really, but which came from the cuttlefish’s ink.) There must have been generations of fishmongers with permanently black hands. Just as soon as the Sharpie and Magic Marker were born, and tourists began to pay good money to eat spaghetti with cuttlefish ink, you can believe that stopped.

One more thing: It may not be very likely that you’ll be buying seppie in the fishmarket, but if you are looking at them for whatever reason, you should know that the whiter they are (it’s more like a ghastly gray mortuary pallor), and the more smeared with sticky black ink, the older they are. Lots of ink is a Bad Sign.

The super-fresh ones, as shown here, have very little ink on them, are a lovely brown with faint pale stripes, and display the most amazing iridescent stripe along their bodies, which is another guaranteed way to confirm their freshness. This stripe is made up of iridophores, which reflect the color of the seppia’s immediate surroundings and hence are part of its system of camouflage. I did not make that up.