Anchovy

I think the heart and soul of Italian cooking is coaxing the true flavor out of raw ingredients, and that’s what we do with these beans. Stracotto means “long cooked,” and for this recipe, yellow wax beans, a summer vegetable usually prepared al dente, are simmered long and slow with our deeply caramelized soffritto. You’ll want to make this dish only if you already have soffritto in your refrigerator and when yellow wax beans are in season. You could also use yellow Romano beans.

This recipe makes twice what you need for the Yellow Wax Beans Stracotto in Soffritto, but it is one of those things that is difficult to make in smaller quantity. Spoon what you have left over on grilled fish, vegetables, or chicken.

The red, green, and white tricolore salad, traditionally composed of radicchio, frisée, and endive, is just one of the many ways that Italians celebrate their flag. I like tricolore salads, but this version, which is tossed in an anchovy-enhanced dressing with lots of grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, was my way of sneaking the flavors of a Caesar salad onto the Pizzeria menu without calling it a Caesar. In the rare instance that a Caesar salad is done well, it is one of my favorite salads, but Caesar salad is such a cliché on Italian-American menus—and it’s not even Italian; it was invented in Tijuana—I could never have put it on my menu as such.

When I opened the Osteria, Joe Bastianich told me that one of his favorite combinations was fried mozzarella stuffed with anchovies—while I certainly trusted the guy and know he has great taste—let’s just say that the combination sounded less than delicious to me. But since Joe said so, I tried it—and I loved it. What I didn’t know is that bufala and anchovies are actually a classic pairing. Here, the anchovies are in the bagna cauda, a delicious sauce from the Piedmont region and whose name translates “warm bath.” In addition to anchovies, garlic, and olive oil, my version contains lemon and butter. Bottarga, a delicacy of Sicily and Sardinia, is cured pressed fish roe (usually from mullet or tuna) that has a pungent, fishy taste and is used sparingly, finely grated or very thinly sliced over dishes. You can purchase bottarga from specialty food stores and online food sources. This recipe for bagna cauda makes 1 cup—more than you will need. Spoon the leftovers over grilled fish or vegetables.

This is a classic olive tapenade spruced up with the zest of oranges and lemons, and I have to say that it’s the best version I’ve ever had. Note when buying olive purée to look for a product that has just olives or olives and olive oil, such as the olive pâté made by Rustichella d’Abruzzo.

Traditionally, lamb shanks such as those in this recipe would be braised and served in all their glory, and subsequently, making lamb ragù would be a way to turn a relatively small amount of leftover meat into tomorrow night’s pasta dinner. We braise the lamb just so that we can pull it apart and turn it into ragù. It’s a decadent thing to do, and results in a luxurious and delicious pasta. Enjoy.

Set out a dish of peppery extra-virgin olive oil with a dash of aged balsamic vinegar, Vincotto (sweet Italian vinegar), or verjus for dipping.

You can substitute 1 pound large shrimp with shells for the prawns.

Soaking the anchovies in red-wine vinegar gives them a wonderful pickled flavor.

Allow this robust dip to mellow overnight in the refrigerator. Before serving, bring it to room temperature, or reheat it gently in a saucepan.

Of all main-course salads, the Niçoise is my all-time favorite, with its fresh butter-lettuce foundation; its carefully cooked, beautifully green green beans; its colorful contrast of halved hard-boiled eggs, ripe red tomatoes, and black olives; all fortified by chunks of tunafish and freshly opened anchovies. It’s a perfect luncheon dish, to my mind, winter, summer, spring, and fall—an inspired combination that pleases everyone.

Harvests from the great, silent fields of sun-bronzed wheat result in more bread than pasta for la tavola siciliana, yet there is a trio of pasta dishes that is cooked throughout the island. One of them dresses pasta in eggplant and tomatoes perfumed with wild mint and basil, the whole dusted with grated, salted ewe’s milk ricotta. Called often pasta alla Norma in celebration of Catanian son Vincenzo Bellini it can be a gorgeous dish. Then there is pasta chi vrocculi arriminati—dialect for a dish that calls for a paste of cauliflower and salt anchovies studded with raisins and pine nuts. Although it is luscious, it cannot compete with the glories of the island’s pasta con le sarde. A dish full of extravagant Arab timbres, it employs fresh, sweet sardines, salt anchovies, wild fennel, and a splash of saffroned tomato. One presents the pasta cool, as though heat would be violence against its sensuousness. Wild fennel grows abundantly on the lower shanks of Sicily’s mountains and, too, along the craggy paths of some of her islands. I used to collect wild fennel along the banks of the Sacramento River and I’ve heard tell of great clumps of its yellow lace heads bobbing along country roads in America’s Northeast. Now I find it a few kilometers from our home in thickets against the pasture fences along the Via Cassia on the road to Rome. Though the scent and the savor of cultivated fennel is sweeter, it behaves well in collaboration with these other elements and yields a still-sumptuous dish.

Unlike the ricotta forte of Puglia, prepared laboriously, asking that the fresh cheese be left to drain off its opaline waters and to acidify, the dry cheese to then be kneaded, worked each third or fourth day for at least two months until it takes on a burnt ivory sort of color and its perfumes come up stinging, pungent, this version is prepared in moments. Yielding a condiment less punishing in its aromas, the Calabrian ricotta forte is still of an assertive and keen savor, which when smoothed over warm, crusty bread, glorifies the richness of spiced sausages and salame presented as antipasto. A few dollops of it, thinned with drops of pasta cooking water and tossed with bucatini or spaghetti, make a fine dish. Tucked away in a crock in the refrigerator for a week or so, the vigor of ricotta forte ripens and intensifies.

...Anchovies, and Black Olives) Brindisi, the ancient Brundisium of the Romans, is a sort of rough, emotionally bankrupt port city. Still, we like to walk and sit, sometimes, on the edges of its rickety old wharfs early of a morning to inhale the bright, briny tableau of the place. And round about eight-thirty—high noon for the fishermen, who rise before the sun—we wait to see the baker’s boy running down the docks, toting a great basket of puddica—traditional Brindisino flatbreads—just born and sending up great hungering perfumes for the fishermen’s lunch. It seemed to us the highest form of ceremony left in the dour old place.