Pecorino

Clam pizza, a Connecticut tradition, is one of the specialties at Lombardi’s in New York City, and having my first clam pie there is one of my most memorable pizza-eating experiences. We use a combination of Parmigiano and pecorino to finish this pizza, but if you want to use only one, pick your favorite.

Little Gem lettuce, a smaller, sweeter, very crunchy variety of romaine, appeared recently in Los Angeles the way burrata did: one day nobody had heard of it and now it’s everywhere. Also like burrata, I love it so much that I have found multiple uses for it in my restaurants. The first time I saw Little Gem lettuce was at the Atelier of Joël Robuchon in Paris seven or eight years ago, when I took my daughter Vanessa there for her birthday. A large percentage of Robuchon’s perfectly simple, perfectly executed dishes came with a dressed quarter of this tiny oblong-shaped lettuce with a beautiful, pale green color; I fell in love with Little Gem at first bite.

This is a very simple Roman pasta dish made with nothing but black pepper and pecorino romano cheese. We believe in leaving traditional dishes alone, but we did make a couple of changes to this dish. We use bavette, in place of spaghetti, which is the shape traditionally used. And we cut the pecorino with Parmigiano because pecorino is so pungent that it can be overwhelming on its own. The pepper for this dish must be coarsely ground. I recommend you use Tellicherry peppercorns, a fragrant, flavorful variety from India. Coarsely grinding or cracking the pepper for this dish is the perfect excuse for breaking out the mortar and pestle.

We serve this rich, meaty ragù alternately with gnocchi (page 172) and pici (page 168). When the ragù is tossed with gnocchi, the flavor becomes like a rich and delicious meat-and-potatoes dish. It manages to be exotic and familiar at the same time. We use only duck legs and not the whole duck because the meat from the legs is more moist and lends itself better to long cooking. You will probably have to special-order the legs from your poultry purveyor, so when you do, make sure to ask for the livers, too. Alternatively, you can make this ragù with one whole duck, cut into pieces. Not only will this be easier to find but also you’re guaranteed to get the liver with it.

Serve this dish with arugula, tomatoes, blanched green beans, and crumbled Parmesan cheese tossed with extra-virgin olive oil and vinegar.

Broccoli, a cruciferous vegetable, contains significant amounts of vitamins A and C, as well as calcium, iron, and riboflavin.

This Italian classic typically showcases four cheeses (“quattro formaggi”) with different characteristics. For our rendition, we topped the crust with fontina (semifirm), mozzarella (soft and fresh), Gorgonzola (blue-veined), and Pecorino Romano (hard and aged).

If you can find it, use Zephyr squash, which is yellow with a pale-green tip. You can also use a mix of young green and yellow squashes.

The small inner leaves of romaine lettuce are tender and crisp, perfect for this salad. Use a vegetable peeler to shave the Pecorino Romano.

This colorful tart uses leftover cooked risotto for the crust, in this case risotto milanese, the classic that is infused with saffron. Any leftover risotto you have can be frozen and saved for this purpose. You can cube pancetta and roast in the oven until rendered of fat and slightly crisp, then add that to the filling of the tart. Smoked poultry such as chicken or duck is great as well.

This tart with a lattice top is a real showstopper. Your guests’ eyes will light up when it’s brought to the table. Known as a torta rustica in Italy, versions are served around Easter in celebration of the season. The filling is traditionally spinach, though I’ve incorporated other greens for more contrast in flavors. Other versions can have sausage, eggplant, and peppers as the filling.

This is a grown-up mac and cheese with lots of rich Italian flair. Using three flavorful Italian cheeses and incorporating pancetta makes this hearty dish the ultimate comfort food. You can use a different shape of dried pasta as long as it has a cavity to hold the creamy sauce. Try other cheeses, too.

Paula Wolfert and I revised this fabulous dish of hers for cooking in my wood-fired oven. The key is to cook it until the lamb is falling-apart tender. The recipe is adapted from Paula’s book, The Slow Mediterranean Kitchen. It comes from the southern Italian region of Apulia, where it is baked in a shallow terra-cotta dish called a tiella. You can make it entirely in the wood-fired oven, or cook the onions and brown the lamb on the stove top, then move it all to the oven to finish cooking.

This is not your basic antipasti. Serving a beautiful platter of wood-roasted seasonal vegetables, cured meats, hand-crafted cheeses, home-cured olives, and smoke-kissed crusty bread to family and friends as a prelude to dinner is an artful way to honor guests. This is just what chef Chris Bianco does at his restaurant, Pizzeria Bianco, in Phoenix, Arizona. Chris’s wood-fired pizzas are now legendary, but his wood-roasted antipasti platter sings. I hope you will enjoy my version, and create many versions of your own.

A tiny place where once lived the paladins of Sardegna is Orgosolo. Only a decade or so ago did they think it prudent, finally, to wander about the steep, tortured alleyways of their mountain village unadorned with a rifle. Orgosolo is the historic lair of Sard banditismo—banditry. Perhaps the businesses of thieving and buccaneering seem more gainful in Calabria, for now, the only rapscallions left in Orgosolo are the political artists whose bullying, bitter-sermoned murals irritate walls, housefronts, mountain faces. Too, icons are chafed, gastronomically, in Orgosolo, as they are here in this dish, which asks for bottarga as well as pecorino, upsetting the proscription, for a moment, against the mingling of fish and cheese.

In the Sard dialect, the town of Villagrande is called Biddamanna. There, a vast parcel of Sard earth is su cumonale—owned by everyone of the community. Shepherds can pasture their sheep, townsfolk can collect wood for their fires, a family can cultivate a small orchard, a garden of vegetables. The Biddamannesi can walk kilometer after kilometer through forests, into the mountains, onto the moors, hunting, foraging, gathering, as they have done forever in this town with no walls, no fences. And, too, they cook for each other over great fires laid in the piazza near the village hall on feast days. Cauldrons of thick soups, mutton poached with wild grasses, and beautiful handmade pastas are offered with baskets of pane carasau and barrels of rough, purply cannonau. Though all Sards seem passionate about making packets of their food, these Biddamannesi seem more devoted, even, to the pursuit. They urge rough doughs into pouches and pillows plumped with all manner of savories and sweets, the bundles tumbled into gurgling oil or baked over wood embers or gently poached. Culingionis are raviolo-like pasta typically stuffed with bitter greens and an acidy, fresh ewe’s milk cheese or a paste of potatoes, nutmeg, cloves, wild mint, and pecorino. Though these are luscious, it is a half day’s ceremony to make them. Hence, I sometimes wrap the good potato paste in a crisp quilting of cheese pastry, a quickly done deed that gives up all the savor of the culingionis plus the prize of a gorgeous scent as the crostata bakes to crispness.

It is fitting that on a most divine jot of the Tyrrhenian coast, on a promontory between the limpid gulfs of Sant’ Eufemia and Goia Tauro, there would glint the small, golden precinct of Tropea. Fitting, too, that there in its rich, black fields would be raised up Italy’s sweetest onions, and that they be long and oval like great lavender pearls. One peels them and sets to, with knife and fork, a dish of sea salt, a pepper grinder, and a tiny jug of beautiful oil, a perfect lunch with bread and wine. Too, we saw the folk of Tropea simply fold back their papery skins and eat them raw, out of hand, layer by layer, like a magical violet fruit. Sometimes, one finds them all softened, smoothed into a delectable potion made of garlic and bay leaves and white wine. Evident in its resemblances to French cousins, the soup of Tropea, though, is a minestra strepitosa—a magnificent soup—say the Calabrian cooks, belittling the goodness of the French soup. Here follows a version that softens the garlic, caramelizing it into sweetness with the slow cooking of the onions, before the illumination of the soup with red wine and grappa and the finishing of it with pecorino and a heavy dusting of fresh pepper.

An inordinately rustic dish, it asks so little of the larder and the cook and gives up good, potent flavor. The Lucani are wont to add another crushed chile to the pasta at table or under a tree, as the case may be.

When Napoleon lifted up his brother-in-law Joachim Murat to the throne of Napoli in the early nineteenth century, he wittingly rubbed the gastronomic culture of the city to a high French polish. As the governor of Paris, Murat fixed for himself a popular reputation as gourmand, having conducted the business of his offices more often than not midst the ever-sumptuous, sometimes not-meant-to-be-eaten bas-relief of his banqueting tables. And trailing Murat to Napoli marched legions of French chefs. The great toques were an outlandish platoon, striding about the city’s marketplaces and food shops like so many swells among the rabble and answering only to the title monsieur. The irreverent Napoletani soon punished the word into monzù. But even without the genuflection of the masses, the French masters left rich, culinary impress. In the embrace of their hyperbole, there was nothing too spangled, their dishes mostly unredeemed paroxysms of the baroque in both component and construction. And one of their glory dishes was the timballo—the drum—recalling the high-sided round or oval forms in which the chefs built great, towering pies, as much for table architecture as for their eventual service as dinner. One version of the timballo asked for a deep mold upholstered in sweet short pastry, layered with pasta stuffed with veal sweetbreads, layered with the livers of game and whole fat, musky truffles, all of it robed in a salsa besciamella—béchamel—spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg and cloves. The timballo was roofed then in more pastry, painted with egg wash and baked golden as amber. Here follows a version less awkward to make, less fantastic, perhaps, but no less sublime for its relative restraint. When preparing any one of the cinque brasati di carne con pomodori (page 67), increase the amount so that some might be saved, then used to flavor the timballo.