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Bucatini Fluttuanti per una Notte d’Inverno di Calvino (98 anni)

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Lettore, alzati e vai in cucina. Guardi fuori dalla finestra. Fa freddo, non ti pare? Meno male che sei qui dentro al caldo. Giri verso l’interno e vai a mettere il tuo grembiule. Sicuramente non vorresti sporcare i vestiti. Stasera ci saranno degli ospiti e un po’ d’eleganza non guasta. Ora rilassati, appoggi questo libro – aperto sulla ricetta di Calvino – accanto al lavandino. Stai per preparare i Bucatini Fluttuanti di Calvino. E ‘una buona ricetta e richiede la tua attenzione. Percio’ spegni il telefonino – non vorresti essere disturbato da eventuali chiamate di lavoro o altro – poi afferri un buon coltello. Si inizia il piatto con la pulizia dei fiori di zucca, e affettando il lardo…

Wednesday Will: Mercutio’s Fois Gras

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Before opening his now world-renowned restaurant The Mab, Mercutio worked alongside Romeo and Juliet in Verona. He and Romeo were best friends, so much so that Mercutio decided to work for a short spell at The Globe not long after the young couple emigrated from Italy. There, his brilliant juxtapositions of textures and flavors were quickly noticed, prompting local chef and food critic Dryden to note that Shakespeare’s kitchen “show’d the best of its skill in Mercutio.” However, unable to compromise his inventive nature into The Globe’s more structured kitchen, William was forced to dismiss him.

literary recipe (pasta noir): F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Summer Pasta Chicken Salad (125 years this month)

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Only an essential, clean sauce can complete an elegant pasta dish as a purple-hued cloud can complete a glorious summer sunset. Not a vulgar sauce like, say, one made with Italian meatballs, those shiny, dirty round mounds of grease that sit glistening on the top of Little Italy restaurant displays calling out to passing Midwestern travelers like sirens to Odysseus’ crew. This dish is closer to the essence of pasta and for that reason I recommend you use only the finest ingredients, Martelli butterfly noodles, the most virgin of Tuscan olive oils, and free–range Connecticut chicken. (Avoid those of New Jersey, as they are often unclean. I know Hemingway thinks such differences are pretentious and without significance but he puts ketchup on his hotdogs. Ketchup. Hotdogs. ‘Nough said.)

Big Flavor, Small Price meals: Cous Cous with Mackerel, Glazed Carrots and Spring Onion

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Once the sugar (or honey) starts to melt, in go the carrots peices, toss until well coated, maybe add a pinch or two of cinnamon, toss again, then a tiny bit of water, a tablespoon or 3, and toss until the fluid evapoates and carrots glaze-caramlize. You’ll have to use your nose here – don’t burn them but don’t leave them whimpy either. Just before mixing it all together, into the main bowl.

Julia Child’s Discourse on Post-Modernism and Pumpkin Ravioli – with Butter and Sage (her 109th birthday anniversary)

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I am speaking of the modernists, of course, from Pirandello to Joyce. But the modernists still had a sense of something beneath them, even if they sensed that solidity below might be illusory. Because of that, their relativism was contained, in a way, by the real world. Post-modernists instead had to deal with a present void, the horrors of what had happened, a nothingness beneath that threatened to devour our precarious existence above. So lightness, ‘leggerezza’, as the Italians say, became an important theme in post-modernism, in contrast to ‘heavy’, certain characters and contexts. If the world itself could disappear, what is it we live in?

Milton Friedman’s (109years) Laissez-Libre Spaghetti Frittata (The Pasta Papers vl. 2)

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Since no lunch is free, well, unless you’re senior management, where breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, coffee, drinks, brunches, Christmas gifts, transportation, art collections, housing, computers, cell-phones, subscription services, healthcare and pretty much everything else IS free – try a simple dish great for the 99 percent of us on a trickle-down budget. The day after you’ve made a spaghetti and made too much to finish, don’t just take it out of the fridge and plop in the microwave. Instead, place the cold spaghetti on a big enough cutting board and chop into three or four to shorten the noodles.

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