A perfect example of this brief moment between seasons: Bruscandoli (wild hops) in the basket (spring!) and the cardi on the right (a winter relative of the artichoke that soon will be on its way out). Speaking of artichokes, do not be lured by the little sign saying “castraure.” The implication, I think, is that they are the first flower off the extraordinary local plant, the “violet artichoke of Sant’ Erasmo.” If these are castraure (cas-trah-OO-reh) they are most certainly not from Sant’ Erasmo. Supposing these morsels came from Sant’ Erasmo (which they haven’t), they would be botoi (BOH-toh-ee), which are good, but are the second-growing edible flower on the artichoke plant. True castraure of the violet artichoke are tiny, much smaller than these robust characters. Also: It’s far too early for artichokes here anyway — what is on sale comes from hothouses elsewhere. Some vendors label them correctly as botoi, but people have somehow become obsessed by castraure. Eat whatever they’re called these days, by all means, but imagining a true castraura in Venice at the end of March is to imagine the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.This is a castraura. When it is cut, the plant will produce a number of botoi, the somewhat larger artichokes on sale in the market in the photo above. Here you can just barely make out the baby botolo beneath the castraura.Simple design to show what the artichoke plant brings forth (taken from a little book written by a farmer on Sant’ Erasmo). “Botoi” is the plural of “botolo.” To look at the abundance of “castraure” on sale during the season, there would have to be fields here the size of Nebraska. Or one Nebraska and two Leichtensteins.If all goes well, the “violet artichoke of Sant’ Erasmo” begins to appear in May. Grab them while you can. Watch out for the stabby pointy bit at the tip of each leaf.Another grinding of culinary gears: Asparagus and melons. The local asparagus has just begun to arrive, but the melons are coming from somewhere probably not in Italy. Their moment in northern Italy, and Venice, is July/August. Note that many labels say “Italia,” but don’t name any more particular location. My main question is not where it comes from, but why you would want to eat a melon in April? Not being sarcastic. Your winter mouth wants pears and oranges. Don’t confuse it.
People sometimes ask us where you can eat well and not pay a fortune. To which Lino always replies: “Your house.”
It’s not as much of a pleasantry as it might seem. Unhappily, I am always struck by how routine, predictable, unimaginative, so many of the restaurant offerings are here. Also expensive, especially when you’re looking at the price/value index. Hence Lino’s risposte.
I am sorry that this situation persists, because anyone who has access to a kitchen and the Rialto market can eat like freaking kings. There are so many delectable, unsung, seasonal products on sale that although I realize you do not intend to spend your priceless Venetian vacation toiling in the kitchen, you really ought to be able to try some of these things somehow. And your kitchen seems to be the only option.
Just now is a wonderfully delicate moment in the vegetable realm. We are balanced perfectly between the old winter-long standbys (looking at you, cauliflower), and the glittering spring offerings. This moment of culinary equipoise is even lovelier because, like spring flowers, you know you don’t have much time to enjoy them. I’m forced to say that seasonal food is being elbowed to one side by an ever-increasing number of out-of-season comestibles, which I ignore. Cherries in January? Nope. Melons in March? WHY?
Before we leave winter behind, here are a few delights that are not cauliflower:
If you like slightly bitter radicchio, reach for these little blossoms. They’re generally called “field radicchio,” but these are cultivated, not wild. In any case they are wonderful.The little green tufts are definitely cultivated, and are also sold independently of their red cousins. They are a special item that are famously grown in the fields near Roncade (a few miles from Treviso). They are known as the ‘verdon di Roncade” (the big green from Roncade). They have a sort of generic lettuce-y flavor, and the leaves are slightly thick. Not so much crunchy as chewy. Really good if you’ve had enough cabbage by now.This shows up briefly in February. The “cavolo” is not literally a cabbage; its more correct name is “broccolo fiolaro” because you eat the tender parts of the plant they call “fioi” (children) in Venetian. Creazzo is in the province of Vicenza. Nothing against spinach, but this is better. Toothier.This mass of greenery appears briefly now. They didn’t even bother to write its name — “rosolina” — perhaps because its stay is so brief. I was told that this is the poppy plant before it flowers. My source said that when the blooms begin to appear May-ish), the leaves become too bitter to eat. Meanwhile, they have a charming little nutty undertone. Note to purists: There is a plant known as rosolina, defined as an “evergreen shrub with white flowers.” That’s somebody else’s rosolina. I could have devoted quite a lot of time to researching this, but have stopped for now.I suppose anyone who has been to Venice in the winter knows the “late” (tardivo) radicchio from Treviso. Delicately bitter, it makes a divine risotto (among other things). In January we went to the Festival of Radicchio in Mirano, near Venice, where the students at the agricultural school “8 Marzo Konrad Lorenz” showed us each step of the production process. I thought it just came out of the ground like this. So very wrong….The plant grows in the field till harvest time, then is brought to the school to be prepared for sale. The water has to be changed several times while the boxes are waiting for the next step. Yes, it looks like this, a mass of botanical clumps run amok. But hidden inside is the radicchio we want.You see the delicate white and red leaves inside the other leaves.The crates are brought indoors where the students demonstrated essentially how you butcher them.At this point they still look pretty grotty.Just slice all that rootage away and trim the stem.A good rinse and they’re just about ready to be boxed and sent to your trusty vegetable vendor. Whatever the price may be, I’d say it’s justifiable.
There are always a few pushy items that want to be considered spring treats, but have anticipated their cue by several acts. They aren’t local, obviously.
I have no idea where these radishes came from, but while they are trying to impress me with their multicolored marvelousness, they’re still here too early.Even the normal red radishes are upstarts, as are the peas in the crate next to them. We’ll be seeing local peas in May, when we will gorge on that trusty Venetian standby, “risi e bisi” (rice and peas).This is the first time I have ever seen morel mushrooms here in Venice. They are known as a spring mushroom, I discover, unlike the others that come out in the fall. They can be cultivated, but I can’t say that’s the case here. A minor mystery which I will not pursue much.
And the dependable heralds of spring:
Not a plant, but I couldn’t resist adding this. An April Fool’s Day prank here is called “pesce d’aprile”,” or April fish. I will get to the bottom of this expression some other time, but meanwhile, the wags at the pasticceria Rosa Salva in Calle Fiubera (San Marco) have created just the sort of fish everybody can enjoy. No bones. Too bad they’re not made all year. A tiny note that makes me smile: They bothered putting on eyes. And white eyes. Which technically ought to mean that they’re cooked, because when you boil or grill a fish, you know it’s done when the eyes turn white. Well, I thought it was funny, anyway.Bruscandoli (wild hops) on the left, and carletti on the right.Carletti (Silene rigonfia or Silene vulgaris) are the leaves of a pinkish-whiteish flower that doesn’t take long to appear. These have an almost imperceptible flavor (I’m going to delete “almost”). Lino used to go out and collect them along the Lido shoreline, then throw them into a risotto. I’m all for eating wild but unless they contain some fabulous antioxidant properties I can’t see the point of bothering. Still, man does not live by radicchio alone.Chives, or “barba del frate” (friar’s beard) are usually the first to show up. It used also to be called “sultan’s beard,” but that reference evidently has been retired.This work of culinary art was in the window of the pastificio Serenissima on the Salizzada dei Greci. Fresh pasta is always a delight, and there are fewer and fewer shops making it. They recently were making truffle tagliatelle. We had to imprison the pasta in a covered glass container on the windowsill, otherwise the entire refrigerator would have reeked of truffle. Truffle milk? Why has nobody thought of this?
While everyone else is carbo-loading with frittelle and galani, Lino has taken our modest domestic feedbin in another direction: the classic-Venetian-fish-dishes direction. If you stay on that road, it won’t be long before you find yourself in the suburbs of heaven.
These specialties have no relation to Carnival — it’s mere happenstance that we’ve eaten them now, in the interval in which everything is famously permitted, including frying in lard. (Not made up; our butcher at the Rialto was selling plastic bags of white, waxy-looking rendered pig fat which makes pastry the food of the freaking gods).
Let’s proceed in non-alphabetical order. First, the schie.
A schia is the gray creature. The pink cousin is some other kind of shrimp. They’re both good, but only one of them is, in fact, a schia. The pink shrimplet was unaccountably lurking amid his grey-hued relations. Possibly a case of a doomed infatuation which impelled him to follow his beloved into the fisherman’s net, then when he found himself buried among a thousand others just like her, he couldn’t find her again. Except maybe — could it be? — on my plate.
Schie (SKEE-eh) (Crangon crangon) are a variety of tiny gray shrimp found in the lagoon and elsewhere. They were once a reliable standby of people who were tending toward poor, such as lagoon fishermen, or large families on small budgets, which is redundant.
Lately, though, its distant relations, or even impostors, have begun to show up in restaurants and bars.
A noticeable number of trattorias, keen to entice tourists with traditional dishes, have begun to offer what they call polenta with schie. They correctly promote it as a great Venetian specialty, and if you mention this combination to older Venetians, at least some will respond with an appreciative “Ie, ie, ie, polenta co le schie” (EE-yeh, EE-yeh, poenta co eh skee-eh). This is the kind of phrase that they must have found entertaining when they were children. It’s a tasty combination, and filling, and cheap, or at least it was once. The perfect makings of a classic.
Now that the price of schie can go up to 40 euros per kilo at the Rialto market ($27 per pound), regular people — like us — don’t buy it anymore, and tourists eating out aren’t likely to know that what purports to be polenta and schie is only an approximation of the aforementioned dish.
This is what you would usually get in a restaurant as “polenta and schie,” and it is billed as such even on www.passionegourmet.it. You could eat this every day for a year in Venice and that still wouldn’t make it Venetian. While it’s no surprise by now to see this polentaoid material and the so-called schie, the pool of olive oil is an innovation that I’ve never had to face, thank God.When Lino was a boy, his mother bought olive oil by the ounce; that is to say, it was hardly the fluid we lavish so freely today. And anyway, if you crave fat, polenta goes better with butter (see below).
Nowadays what the cook usually presents as polenta is infant’s gruel, a wide soft expanse of a golden substance I think of as Cream of Polenta. Real Venetian polenta (always yellow, never white — white is what they eat in the islands, or Pellestrina, or Chioggia, or Cape Town or Vladivostok) is firm, almost solid, and is to be eaten in slabs. Or at least in hefty chunks.
As for the schie, the little shrimpy morsels strewn atop the yellow mush in the restaurants are virtually always pink shrimp, perhaps from far away, who almost certainly have broken their journey in a freezer somewhere.
But the other day, on our way home, we passed Nardo, the local fisherman, and he offered us a half-kilo bag of schie for a paltry 10 euros ($13). Lino pounced. And cooked. And then we ate.
Here is the old Venetian way of cooking (and eating) these critters, as performed by Lino, who alone, pretty much, of all his race still has the patience and desire to put in the time and effort to prepare them. Note: The time involved in preparing schie isn’t noticeably great, but the other recipes require practically a solemn vow that you’ll persevere to the end.
SCHIE:
Rinse them.
Put them in a saucepan, fill with cold water, and some salt.
Bring to a boil.
Meanwhile, take something made of metal — we sacrificed an old stainless steel dinner knife — and pass it through the gas flame till it’s red-hot.
When foam covers the surface of the water in the pan, turn off the gas (fire, heat) and plunge the redhot knife into the schie-laden water and swirl it around. I have yet to discover the reason for this, but just do it. It will make you feel like Siegfried wielding the Wotan sword.
Pour the cooked schie into the pasta colander to drain off the boiling water.
In a bowl, pour some extravirgin olive oil, lots of sliced garlic, some pepper, and a tiny bit of salt.
Put the drained schie in the bowl with the oil and garlic, mix thoroughly, and eat.
Aha: Eating them. You can’t be in a hurry. If you have to catch a train, forget eating schie because you have to shell every dratted little one, one by one, and it’s nothing like shelling big brawny Atlantic prawns. It’s like picking bits of white mohair fluff off your navy-blue wool peacoat. Lino seems to regard it more as entertainment than nourishment. I regard it as just another great excuse to eat oil and garlic.
This would be your lunch project. Remove the head, remove the shell, and eat its contents, which are roughly as big as a large kernel of corn. If you chew it twice, you’re probably trying too hard.This is what a plate of real polenta and schie looks like, immortalized by www.venezia.blogolandia.it. My hat is off to them. We didn’t make polenta the other day, otherwise this would have been a picture by me.The process is simple. You grasp the head and the tail. What you want is between them.You pull off the head (on the right of the picture) and suck it to remove whatever tidbit might have remained inside. ((I have spared you an image of this step.) Then, if you are Lino, you squeeze gently from the tail toward the center, pushing the little body of the schia out of its shell, where you can easily pop it into your mouth. I tried this clever maneuver about ten times but it never worked for me. Plan B: Just open the center of the creature’s shell like any other shrimp.And what you have at the end is a plate of little gray shrimp-shells. And a bowl of oil and garlic just waiting for you to take a slice of polenta and dip it in, trying not to let the oil run down your forearm. It’s pretty darn good. Ie, ie, ie, as the saying goes.
GRANSEOLA:
The European spider crab (Maja squinado) is a regular at tables in better restaurants, mainly as a toothsome antipasto, for a fairly toothsome price. Up the street, one menu offers this delicacy for 18 euros ($25) per person.
I like crab well enough, though I can’t say that my wildest dreams are dominated by crustaceans of the class Malacostrara. Then again, I’d never turn one down.
When we discovered some bouncing bonny crabs at the Rialto for 4 euros per kilo ($2.50 per pound), it seemed ridiculous to forego a few — even more ridiculous than paying 18 euros to eat one. Especially as Lino, as noted above, regards dismantling dwellers of the abyss as one of the few genuinely amusing activities around.
It takes about an hour to tease all the edible bits out of this animal; I think it’s something like meditation for him. We’ve never gotten around to acquiring fancy tools for this work. He uses a small screwdriver. I use a pocket-size dental pick. We sit there at the table together, surrounded by chips and splinters of crabshell, peering through glasses on noses, going pickpick scrapescrape and discussing subjects more disjointed than our little spiny victims.
We divided the spoils into two parts. We ate one half of the pulp arranged artfully in its shell just as they do in the restaurants, with a little pepper, olive oil and lemon.
The other half was transformed into an exceptional pasta sauce, composed of some saute’d onion, one tiny chili pepper, some tomato sauce, and half a glass of white wine.
A matched pair, one male, one female. I picked the one with the monster claws because it would be easier to get the meat out — I’d never seen one with arms like Popeye.This was most of the meat from the female. The red pieces are called “corallo,” for fairly obvious reasons, and are the roe. They have a pleasant texture and virtually no flavor. I sometimes feel bad about eating not only the mother, but all her offspring, but I usually manage to shut my mind to what I’m doing.
FRITTELLE DI BACCALA‘:
I have never seen this on any restaurant menu but it is often sold in bars as bacala’ impana’, or breaded fried baccala’. In the old days this substantial snack used to be baccala’, but considering that as the price and effort involved in preparing baccala’ is inversely proportional to the number of customers who would know what breaded baccala’ actually tastes like, the fish is often something else. Plaice is a common substitute. Hey: It’s white, it’s fish, it’s fried — what’s not to like? Nothing, unless you’re the type of person — such as your correspondent — who is also irked by men who row sandolos and offer their services by calling out “Gondola gondola,” or selling botoli and calling them castraure.
How would you know if it’s baccala’? Well, because the odds are almost 100% that it won’t be. But for the record, my experience is that the giveaway isn’t the taste, because by the time it reaches the being-fried stage, the sharpest edges of its particular flavor have been worn away, as explained below.
But you can’t fake the texture. Plaice is tender and ingratiating, a mere whiff of white fish flesh. Baccala’, no matter how much you may soak or boil it, will always retain its sturdy Arctic character: chewy, slightly resistent, giving your teeth a little work to do, even though you will swallow it knowing you couldn’t completely soften it before sending it to its fate. It’s like certain cuts of inexpensive meat: You just decide when you’ve chewed enough and down it goes.
To make any dish involving baccala’, you start with a dried, shrink-wrapped carcass. You can buy it already soaked and ready to cook, but it costs more, obviously.
Although it’s stiff as a board, there is still skin and bone to deal with. Between them is the flesh, which you need to return to its native element (salted water) to cause it to expand. It’s not unlike those weird compressed sponges, except that it tastes better. And is more nutritious.
I warn you that baccala’ soaking emits an alarming smell. You may be appalled, which is understandable the first time. I just don’t want you to be surprised. You can cover the pan and put it in the oven, as we do, or otherwise enclose and conceal it. Don’t worry that the fish you finally eat will smell like that; when you pour off the water, the odor disappears.
HOW TO PREPARE A DRIED BACCALA’ FOR COOKING:
Ingredients: Baccala’, water, salt, a capacious pan, and at least three days.
Put baccala’ in capacious pan, cover with water.
Change water every 6 hours for 3 days.
Day #3:
Change water. add a little salt, and bring to a boil. Boil for 40 minutes.
Remove from water and set it out to cool.
When it reaches room temperature, cut it open like a book.
Remove all the bones and the skin, pull off the pulp into pieces however they come off.
HOW TO PREPARE THE FRITTELLE:
Batter:
Put flour in bowl.
Place 10 grams of yeast in a glass with tepid water, mix gently.
Pour the water with yeast into the flour, mix.
Add some salt and pepper.
Form frittelle:
Put the pieces of baccala in the batter.
Cover with dishtowel and leave in a tepid environment for one hour.
Fry:
Pour enough olive oil in pan for deep frying.
Heat the oil– take a toothpick and put it in the oil, and if tiny bubbles form around it, the oil is ready.
With a spoon, remove pieces of baccala from the batter (however they come; they don’t have to come out one by one).
Put in hot oil, fry till golden.
Place on paper towels to drain.
Best eaten hot, but they’re not bad the next day if you leave them out at room temperature.
This is what you’ve been working to achieve: lumpy, misshapen gobbets of hot fried fish. Not much like the polite, well-bred squares they sell in bars, either to look at or to taste. Only about a squillion times better.
If you have been farseeing and clever, you will have put aside at least some of that soaked baccala’ pulp, so now you can make another gastronomic wonder known in Venetian as bacala’ in tecia (bahk-ah-LA in TEH-cha). A tecia is a saucepan (“pentola” in Italian).
And if, for some reason, you didn’t see fit to make polenta to eat with the schie, this would be an excellent moment to stir up a cauldron. There is an instant version, but please don’t tell Lino if you decide to use it. He makes the time-honored version that requires 40 minutes of frequent stirring.
BACALA’ IN TECIA:
Take 3 sardines that have been kept in salt, rinse and bone them.
Take 10 capers that have been kept in salt, rinse.
Take the pieces of fish, in whatever size or form they may be.
In saucepan, saute’ some chopped onions in extravirgin olive oil.
Add the baccala’ to the oil and onions.
Add the boned, rinsed sardines.
Add the rinsed capers.
Add tomato sauce and water.
Slowly simmer till done. If necessary, add more water to continue simmering.
Bacala’ in tecia with a fragment of polenta. The fragment is the survivor of an onslaught some minutes earlier; see below.
BONUS DELICACY:
To me, this is the apotheosis of polenta, what it looks like when it reaches the empyrean. Fresh polenta (hot), a chunk of butter in a little crater, and grated fresh parmesan cheese. Lino has always eaten this, so to me that qualifies it as a classic, though you’d never see this in public. You cut off a piece of polenta, dab it in the expanding pool of melted butter, dab it into the pile of grated cheese, and eat. Three shades of yellow, a million shades of good.Not meaning to brag, but one reason the above constellation of flavors is so delectable is because we have butter from an Alpine dairy brought to us by a friend. It doesn’t make you sing “Edelweiss,” though it’s a very nice design all the same.
In my last communique, Easter was tapping on the windows asking to be let in.
Now it has passed, leaving the usual signs — peace, joy, and crumbs. I have the feeling that the crumbs are going to last the longest.
The dove traditionally represents the Holy Spirit. Its edible version contains candied peel but no raisins, for which I find no Biblical explanation, but it works just fine. Naturally it would be best if it were all crust.
There are crumbs of a colomba, the Easter dove, the traditional spring stand-in for the Christmas panettone, in the general form of a bird and covered with almonds and bits of pearl sugar. Crumbs of the hollow chocolate Easter egg strewn among shards of its busted hulk, crumbs of a small chocolate-covered cake in the form of a bunny, with a fragment of an ear. There is still a small bin of chocolate eggs, and another whole colomba in the form of a flower frosted in pink. But you know what? I’m sugared out.
The best thing I’ve eaten since last Sunday’s feast of roast lamb and assorted sugar-bombs was set on the table last night — bought, transported, and prepared by the indefatigable Lino.
First, we had seppie in their ink, which we’d bought just-caught from the fisherman that morning, and which had passed the afternoon simmering in their black essence. We sploshed around in it with chunks of polenta, the old-fashioned kind Lino likes to make in his mother’s copper cauldron — it requires 40 minutes of almost constant stirring. These two items alone would have satisfied most mortals.
Mr. Finotello senior working in the artichoke bed. Some of his plants have just begun to evince their very first flower, a "castraura." You did know that artichokes are flowers, yes?There it is, just one per plant.
But best of all, we had something I had always heard of but never tasted: castraure (kahs-tra-OOR-eh). These are tiny artichokes, in this case being of the violetto di Sant’ Erasmo breed, but they are more than that: They are the very first artichoke, cut from the plant in order to allow its fellow ‘chokes to prosper.
You’d be right in guessing that “castraura” has something to do with castration. Linguistically, it does. Physiologically, it makes no sense, but let us not dwell on the details.
My impression is that they have become something of a minor culinary myth, in the sense of being apotheosized to the point where to meet the demand (or to justify the price), there are more castraure offered in the Rialto Market than the last reported total number of pieces of the True Cross. For there to be that many castraure, even assuming most of them come from hothouses all over Italy and not simply from local fields, there could scarcely be enough land left to grow a bouquet of begonias.
This is a sight that trumpets "spring" more melodiously than even the currently rampant wisteria. Which may also be good to eat, but I prefer these.
Castraure are small, as you might expect, but so are its subsequent siblings, which are called botoli (BAW-toh-lee). As far as I can tell, there’s no way to tell them apart, just by looking at them. If you have the chance, then, go buy them from the farmer, like Lino did. He saw the little morsels cut from the plant just for him, so no debates about their provenance.
You can eat them grilled, or saute’d in garlic and oil, or raw, sliced paper-thin with oil and salt and vinegar. Or raw, whole. Just make sure there isn’t any wildlife running around among the leaves. Trivia alert: Technically, they’re not leaves, and they’re not petals, either. They’re bracts. It’s a word which won’t get you very far in the kitchen, but at least now you know.
Or you can eat them breaded and fried, which is what Lino did. I’m not a huge fan of frying, since there seem to be more than 8,000 ways to do it wrong and only one way to do it right. Also, frying seems to blunt or distort the flavor of the object fried. But there was no bluntage last night.
Our little castraure were tender enough to eat whole, stem included, and best of all, they were bitter. It’s a purposeful flavor, stronger and more complex than the everyday artichokes I already love. Certainly stronger than the later-blooming botoli. If you don’t like bitter flavors, whether simple or complex, you should abandon your dream of the castraure because they will not compromise or ingratiate themselves, not even for you.
I admire that in a plant.
A few castraure. There was a crowd of confused ants concealed in the blossoms, running around saying "So this is Venice? Gosh, we thought it would be more Gothic or something."
