Sarasota Soundings

I‘ve been jonesing for Sugo Finto, literally, fake sauce, since I read the most recent menu of Mario Batali’s flagship restaurant, Babbo. Apparently Mario’s latest Tasting Menu features transcendent Duck Tortelli with Sugo Finto.

Duck is an iffy proposition at the mega-stores here on the Sun Coast of Florida, but the ingredients for Sugo Finto are available everywhere. Besides, Sugo Finto also tastes pretty good on pasta gnudi, plain pasta.

The common translation for Sugo Finto is ‘meatless ragù,’ probably derived from the fact that it’s a tomato sauce cooked for nearly as long as a traditional meat sauce. Sugo Finto begins with a batutto of garlic, carrot, celery, onion, and parsley. But unlike traditional batutto, this mixture is cooked to the point at which it caramelizes. The pot then gets deglazed with red wine and tomatoes. Herbs go in, and the sauce simmers gently for approximately an hour. The result is rich, intense, and could easily hold its own in the presence of a duck. But as I said, it’s pretty good on plain pasta, too.

Pasta al Sugo Finto
Pasta with ‘meatless’ meat sauce

Ingredients:

For the Batutto

2 – 4 Cloves garlic, peeled
1 Medium carrot, peeled and roughly chopped
1 Medium stalk celery, roughly chopped
1 Medium onion, peeled and quartered
1/2 Cup flat-leaf Italian parsley, leaves and stems

For the Sauce

Extra-virgin olive oil
1 Cup dry red wine
2 28 Oz. cans Italian plum tomatoes, preferably San Marzano
Approximately 1 cup loosely packed chopped herbs: parsley, basil, rosemary, sage, thyme, nepitella, etc.
Salt & freshly ground black pepper
1 Lb. Spaghetti
4 Tbs. Flat-leaf Italian parsley, finely chopped
Freshly grated Parmigiano

Preparation:

Place the garlic, carrot, celery, onion, and parsley in the bowl of a food processor. Pulse approximately ten times at one second per pulse. Scrape down the sides of the bowl if necessary, and pulse once or twice more.

Heat a 4 quart pot over medium-high heat, then add enough olive oil to lightly the bottom. Add the batutto and stir to distribute evenly in the pot. Lower the heat to medium, and cook, stirring occasionally, until the mixture begins to caramelize.

Raise the heat to high, and add the wine. Cook for three or four minutes over high heat to evaporate the alcohol and to reduce the wine by approximately twenty percent.

Lower the heat to medium-low, then add the tomatoes, breaking them up with the back of a fork as they go in. Add half the herbs, season with salt and pepper, and allow the sauce to simmer gently for approximately an hour. Stir in the remaining herbs, and remove from the heat.

In the meantime, as the sauce nears completion, bring a large pot of water—at least six quarts—to the boil. Add the spaghetti, and cook just to the al dente state. Remove from the stove and drain in a colander.

To Serve:

Serve family style by pouring the pasta on a platter, ladle sauce over the top, and garnish with the parsley. To serve individually, divide the pasta equally among four plates, ladle a dollop of sauce on top, and garnish with the parsley.

Pass the Parmigiano separately at the table.

Our celebration of Columbus Day took place at home rather than at the mall. No big-box stores or car dealerships. No “On Sale! 50% off!” for us. We paid tribute to the Genoese origins of that “big Italian fellow,” as Calvin Trillin has called him. For dinner last night we made Linguine al Pesto.

Cheap local ingredients—foraged pine-nuts, and what might have been one’s own cheese, olive oil and garden basil—gave the cooks of Genoa all they needed to make Pesto alla Genovese, the sauce for their signature dish, Linguine al Pesto con Patate e Fagiolini. Note the inclusion of boiled potatoes and string beans…

Potatoes were not there in Columbus’s time, and indeed, did not really make it into mainstream Italian cooking until the 19th century. When they did spread, from the Peruvian Andes to the botanical gardens of Mediterranean aristocrats and finally out into wider cultivation, they were looked upon more as a vegetable to serve with pasta than as a starch to replace it. But one might argue that without Columbus, the potatoes might never have been there at all, so the dish is a subtle nod to some fortuitous fusion—a once-exotic New World vegetable meeting up with Old World frugality.

As for the delicate young string beans? Hard to pin down dates for that; beans were found in both hemispheres long before the Age of Exploration. Regardless of how this particular dish evolved, the combination of those beans with new potatoes, basil pesto and pasta is sublime.

Myriad permutations are to be found—pumpkin seed pesto, arugula pesto, cilantro and citrus pesto… pesto soy burgers… But none surpass the Ligurian original. (By now, you may be wondering why we’re posting this pesto article here on Sarasota Soundings and not on our blog devoted to Italian-American food. The reason is that the recipe which follows is not Almost Italian, but really is Italian.)

Here in America the ingredients for the classic pesto are no longer cheap, but you’ll find that a little pesto goes a long way.

Linguine al Pesto con Patate e Fagiolini
Linguine with Pesto, Potatoes, and Young Green Beans

Ingredients:

4 Medium thin-skinned potatoes (such as Red Bliss )
1/2 Lb. Fresh string beans (as small as possible)
1 Lb. Linguine
3 Cups large basil leaves, loosely packed
2 Cloves garlic, peeled
2/3 Cup pignoli (pine nuts), plus 3 Tbs. for the final garnish
1/2 Cup freshly grated Parmigiano
3/4 – 1 Cup extra virgin olive oil

Preparation:

Bring a large pot of salted water to the boil. Add the potatoes and green beans, and cook until all are tender. Note: the beans will be done in only a few minutes, so remove them with tongs or a slotted spoon when they are done to your taste. Refresh beans under cold water (so they will retain their vivid green hue) and set them aside. When the potatoes can be easily pierced with a sharp knife, remove them and reserve.

If needed, add more water to the pot and bring it back to the boil. Add the linguine to the pot, stirring until the strands are submerged. Cook until it reaches the al dente state.

Meanwhile, place all the pesto ingredients, except the olive oil, in the bowl of a food processor. Pulse ten times for approximately one second each pulse, until the ingredients are finely minced. Scrape down the sides of the work bowl, then—with the machine running steadily—add the olive oil in a slow stream, pausing to scrape down the sides of the bowl if necessary.

Continue adding olive oil until the mixture develops the consistency of a thick sauce.

When the linguine is cooked, remove the pot from the burner and drain pasta in a colander.

To Serve:

Cut the potatoes into wedges. Add them along with the green beans, and approximately two tablespoons of the pesto, to a large bowl. Toss to coat the potatoes and beans. Add the pasta and the remainder of the pesto. Toss again to combine all. Using tongs, or two large forks, divide the mixture equally among four plates.

Garnish each serving with a sprinkling of the reserved pignoli.

Serves four.

Cristoforo Colombo

Some of my friends have been checking in today, to ask how I plan to celebrate Columbus Day. Certainly, one component of my observance will be to use this blog to dispel any misunderstandings about that tawdry business with Joe Columbo.

I can see how misunderstandings have arisen. The guy’s name was Columbo, and he got whacked in public on Columbus Circle in midtown Manhattan. But contrary to the most popular misunderstanding, it happened months before Columbus Day—on June 18, 1971. And Joe was leading a rally to celebrate a holiday he’d made up, one that had nothing to do with global exploration: Italian-American Unity Day. The purpose of the rally had more to do with gaining public sympathy for his own “family,” upon whom the FBI had been lavishing their attention, than in unifying Italian-Americans.

Christopher Columbus apparently had had enough problems of his own with the indigenous population of Hispanola without being associated with wise guys a few centuries into the future. I hope I’ve cleared this up.

Nevertheless, celebration is in order. To paraphrase Calvin Trillin, Columbus didn’t come all the way to America just to have a city in Ohio named for him. Nor did he sail west because he got a deal on accommodations for a long weekend in October… And if we are to believe historians, Queen Isabella’s admiral never actually made it to North America at all.

But on this holiday weekend, I’ll celebrate the fact that Christopher Columbus, one of Genoa’s native sons, is the man who brought linguine al pesto to the New World.

Of course, I’ll spend some time in sober reflection about the man and his accomplishments. After all, for my Columbus Day dinner, I’ll need only to combine fresh basil, Parmigiano, pignoli, garlic, and olive oil in the Cuisinart. In Columbus’s time, if I had wanted to go out for a dish of linguine al pesto, I would have risked falling off the edge of the earth.

In the introduction to her new cookbook, Chocolate & Zucchini, Clotilde Dusoulier, writes about her American gastronomic epiphany. The undisputed darling du jour among female food bloggers, she recalls her fascination with U.S. supermarkets, where she first saw entire, central aisles devoted to breakfast cereals.

Mlle. Dusoulier is not alone. We still marvel at the mega-market in Burlington, Vermont, where we paced off 50 feet of shelf space packed with salsas. We couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to the après ski staples, raclette and fondue. Since then, one of us has been harboring entrepreneurial dreams of launching ‘Tia Maria’s Catamount Salsa.’ He reasons that no salsa-dependent Vermonter could resist a product featuring a South-of-the-Border auntie and the official state feline.

Go into almost any North American supermarket and you’ll notice that the goods occupying most of the floor and shelf space are packaged—in paper, plastic, glass or metal. A lot of these goods, at the very heart of the merchandise space, are not even food: paper products, cleaning formulas, medications, cosmetics, stationery, books, magazines, even toys.

What we’ve come to realize is that we are not the customers for whom those central aisles are stocked. A friend (and marketing consultant for one of those center-aisle items) recently observed with some disdain: “You guys are peripheral shoppers.”

We’ve never willingly considered ourselves to be on the periphery of anything. Quite the contrary, we think of ourselves as pretty hip about lots of things—food shopping in particular. Our friend was referring to our modus operandi in a supermarket. And she’s right: no matter what supermarket we’re patronizing, almost everything we purchase is indeed from the perimeter of the store.

That’s because we do something that increasingly fewer Americans do: we cook from scratch. Furthermore, we don’t buy a lot of packaged food, and we get our non-comestibles elsewhere.

Think about it: fresh produce, breads, meat and fish, dairy products, cut flowers …

Sure, from time to time, we need the odd can of chickpeas, cannellini, or San Marzano tomatoes. We hit the pasta, rice, and olive oil when they’re a good buy. And we do need to turn down one of the aisles for the house wines we favor. But by and large, yes, we are peripheral shoppers—and completely unrepentant.

We’ve been thinking that peripheral shopping might actually have a certain amount of cachet. We can imagine a New Yorker cartoon featuring the familiar pair of Bowery bums sitting on a sidewalk. Leaning against a building, one says to the other, “I used to be a peripheral shopper until I got hooked on Chef Boyardee.”

We tested ourselves and found that our friend’s peripheral label sticks, even when we venture into the hallowed aisles of our local Whole Paycheck. Whether they’re organic or not, we give canned soups and “ready-in five-minutes” pad thai kits a miss as easily there as we do at our local supermarché ordinaire.

Somehow, you never hear the PA systems at K-Mart blast: “Attention Peripheral Shoppers…!” But if they ever do, they just might get our ear.

Technorati Tags: Peripheral Shopping, Supermarkets, Coooking from Scratch