joearay@gmail.com / +1 206 446 2425


imageimage

Sunday, April 08, 2007

Giuseppe & Giuseppe

Once a week, the bar downstairs from my flat does little tapas-style appetizers. If you show up at about eight, you can make a meal out of it, paying only for what you drink. It’s not high gastronomy, but good, traditional stuff, and makes for a full house.

Giuseppe, who works at the bar and comes from Trapani (Sicily’s western tip), does all of the cooking. I’m sure he’s paid for his time, but it’s his initiative and he certainly does it more for fun than money.

On Thursday, I gave him a hand in the kitchen, doing everything from rolling out and baking little brioches from dough he made the day before to putting together two pasta dishes. He even made tiny versions of arancini – literally “little oranges” that are classic Sicilian street food - cooked rice balls with any combination of ground beef, tomato sauce, peas, eggs, ham and cheese, the whole thing rolled in fine breadcrumbs and quickly fried.

As most Sicilians who cook still tend to be women, it’s a funny thing for a twenty-something guy to do for fun, but for Giuseppe, that’s part of the connection.

“This is the cooking that my mother and grandmother did,” he says, and clearly he was paying attention as he grew up. For one pasta dish, he’s got tomatoes that have been briefly boiled to loosen their skin, yet he makes the whole sauce separately, cooking button mushrooms, basil, zucchini, red onion, a healthy glug of olive oil, salt, pepper and nutmeg. Only when everything else is cooked does he dice the tomatoes directly into the pot.

“If you cook the tomatoes in the sauce, they lose their flavor,” he says.

He gives the whole thing a stir and sticks his nose in the pot and breathes in deep. “Que odore!” he exclaims in our multi-language mix.

Later, he gets ready to fry the arancini he’s prepped the day before. He’s got a pot on the stove with a couple of inches of oil inside clinking away as it heats up and there’s not a thermometer in sight.

“How do you know when it’s hot enough?” I ask.

“I know.”

“Ah.”

And why cook something so typical at a trendy neighborhood bar?

“Because it’s pleasing. It’s good.” he says, clearly at a bit of a loss for why I’d wonder such a thing. “Why do you eat hot dogs in America? Because they’re good.”

Later, he pulls out a jar of tiny, round red peppers he’s brought for a little work-time snack. They’re stuffed with a mix of classic Sicilian ingredients – capers, tuna and parsley – all soaking in olive oil.

I pop one into my mouth and it dissolves, pushing the corners of my mouth upward in a big, quiet grin.

“They cost a fortune,” he says, “about 12 euros (about $15) for a little pot, but they’re a classic, and they’re orgasmic.”

It looks like the classics will last for at least one more generation.

This is Joe Ray reporting from the Motherland.



Twitter Facebook Delicious Digg | More