PART 1: BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION
I come from America.
It is a land of many wonders, but identifiable culinary tradition is not one of them. Sure, you got your New Orleans and California cuisines. But they are bastardizations. Riffs at best. No, like millions before me, I was raised in the great American culinary blandscape. My mom did her level best with tuna casserole and Chicken Every Way You Can Imagine. We were Jewish, so throw in brisket and gefilte fish. These do not a tradition make. If anything, they raise more questions. Questions like: Just how persecuted were Jews to still feel the need to punish themselves like this?
Nevertheless, from a relatively early age I had a taste for interesting food. I had no hang-ups and even took an unchildlike relish in eating freaky gross things like gorgle.1 As a reward for good grades in junior high, I asked my parents to take me to the restaurant of my choice. I chose a Korean restaurant that specialized in seafood. I insisted on trying shark fin soup and octopus and squid—common enough now, but in early eighties suburbia virtually unheard of. This was the time before sushi. It was the time all things exotic fell under the command of one General Tso.2
My parents’ divorce resulted in me living with my dad, who did not cook. This forced me to get comfortable working solo in the kitchen at age fifteen. Early forays included:
Over time I became a limited but competent cook. My father usually came home too late for dinner, so more often than not I was cooking for one. This worked out great in the event of disaster, because I was the sole victim. But in the event of triumph, it also meant I was the sole victor. For some reason, this tasted bittersweet. I cooked out of necessity. What I wanted was inspiration.
PART 2: AN INTERLUDE TO THE CONTINENT
In the fall of my junior year of college I studied abroad in Florence, Italy, where the foreign exchange student population outnumbers bona fide Italians fifty to one. Still, it was Italy, where lunch means an entire nation shuts down from one until four-thirty. There I ate my first real tomato.4 In Italy I discovered there were more than three kinds of cheese.5 I learned the word “tripe” is not necessarily pejorative. And in Italy I was taught the secret of salsa rosa.
Though it sounds Mexican, salsa rosa is very much Italian. Its origin: the grandmother of one of my fellow students in Florence. He was Italian-American. He had a name like Dante and undoubtedly came from southern Italian stock. It was a simple dish, really. Garlic, olive oil, thin-sliced zucchini. A mix of Roma tomatoes—fresh and the Pomi kind that come in the cardboard container. From there, you add insane, heart-stopping amounts of butter, parmigiano, and a glorious chunk of fat known as panna. Panna is semi-solid cream. Think about heavy cream. Then imagine someone saying, “Not heavy enough.” This was cream that made crème fraîche seem “runny.” You squeezed it out of a juice box—and you really had to squeeze. No pouring, for it was not liquid. As you added the cream and the butter and cheese to the tomato base, the sauce would unmysteriously turn pink—hence salsa rosa. Pink sauce. Generously ladled over pasta—spaghettini or cappellini, mainly—salsa rosa induced an eyes-rolling-to-the-back-of-the-head type of ecstasy.
One night, in one of our cheap, cold student flats, we organized a dinner for our Italian language class. Four or five of us took on cooking duties. This consisted of going shopping together, arriving at the apartment early, smoking massive amounts of hash using the famed “hot butter knife/cardboard toilet paper roll” method, and getting down to some brass fucking tacks cooking. Dante served as chef de cuisine, he being in command of the recipe. The response from our fellow students was pure rapture. As for our Italian teacher, Elisabetta, she either enjoyed salsa rosa or was too polite to say otherwise. She had the annoying habit of speaking exclusively Italian. Since it was early in the semester, we were picking up only about 30 percent of what she said anyway. I left that evening, drunk on the power of good cooking, and, of course, drunk on wine.
Here, a lesser writer might surrender to cheap hyperbole, and say something like, “Salsa rosa changed the very course of my life.”
Salsa rosa changed the very course of my life.
I knew, however, that to deliver the goods on my own, I would have to practice. Cue the training montage.
I shopped alone at Florence’s famed Mercato Centrale, becoming fast friends with Tomato Woman, Fresh Pasta Lady, and Angry Man Who Sells Zucchini. I had already established a rapport with Sexy Baker Sisters and Impossibly Beautiful Daughter of Wine Seller. My boyish enthusiasm and game attempts to communicate in their language either charmed or numbed them into submission. Either way, they came to smile when I entered their world and they tried their best to advise me.
But in my small, poorly equipped kitchen I did not enjoy their counsel. My uninterested roommates—an obsessed cyclist, an artist just coming out of the closet, and a third dude of such unremarkable bearing, I can remember not a single detail about him, not even a name—were rarely home.6
Alone, I tried to replicate the sauce as we’d made it that first night. With nothing written down, I needed to re-create the process by memory and feel. The hardest task was dialing down the portions, since I was going from cooking for twenty to cooking for uno.7 Was one zucchini too many? Just how many tomatoes could a single person eat? What about garlic—when are you officially offending others with its smell? And then there’s the butter, cream, and cheese. Was it possible to give yourself a heart attack with one meal, or was that something that could only happen over time?
My first attempts were frustrating. The sauce looked weak and watery, then overwhelming, then not salty enough, then poorly balanced. I began to worry. What if, on that magic evening with the Italian class, it wasn’t the sauce that was good, but the hash? Would I now have to smoke before every meal? Would I become some tragic Billy Hayes–like character busted at Milan Malpensa with fifteen bricks taped to my chest all because the secret ingredient to a pink sauce was Khandahar Super Gold? 8
By the fifth or sixth time, with a kitchen now given over to the smell of burnt garlic, I found the salsa rosa groove. It worked in the lab. Now I wanted to see if it would work in the market. My chance came in a matter of days, when some college friends who were studying abroad in Sevilla visited me while passing through Italy. I sent them to the Uffizi to get their art on while I prepared. A few hours later, they were back, sitting, eating, growing more impressed with each bite. It was like I had absorbed some part of Italy by osmosis, while all they had to show for their time in Spain were sangria stains on their pants.
A week later, I made it again, this time for a girl I had been (lamely) wooing. Two months later we were doing it on a train in the Austrian countryside. Thanks, salsa rosa!
The last time I made salsa rosa in Italy was for a good-bye dinner for a small group after our program ended. I robotically sliced zucchini in my kitchen, thinking about all the times I had made the dish. I thought about how much better it was now. I thought about my experiments and my experience and why the sauce improved each time I made it. It was a brutal but important lesson for someone who, up to this point, had done far more cooking for himself than for anyone else. I realized the secret ingredient in most great cooking is the confidence of others—the look in their eyes, the nods of encouragement and amazement that what they are eating is so good and you were responsible for it. For me, the proof did not come in the pudding, but in being surrounded by pudding lovers.
PART 3: REVENGE OF THE SITH, AKA A HERO RISES, AKA AND YOU SHALL KNOW ME BY THE TRAIL OF THE SATISFIED
I returned for my senior year in college armed with no discernible plan for the future but in command of a delicious recipe for sauce. I shared an apartment with my two best friends, neither of whom had use for a kitchen, having mastered only ramen noodles and a curious combination of frozen corn, onions, and melted cheese best consumed before passing out with all your clothes on. I was not much better. Turns out, cooking for yourself in Wisconsin isn’t nearly as romantic as cooking for yourself in Florence. Not to mention, I had to go back to eating faux-matoes. Our oven lay dormant for long weeks. Perhaps I had just had a passing love affair with cooking. I was in Italy, young, impressionable, with not nearly as many friends as I had hoped for.
About a month into the semester, I decided to try and hustle my way out of the slump. It was early fall in the Midwest—harvest time. The spectacular farmers’ market was at its most beautiful, thick with farmers and kind, smelly hippies selling flourless vegan cookies that tasted like potting soil. Though a plucky exporter had yet to realize the genius of bringing panna to Madison, Wisconsin, I managed to replicate the recipe adequately enough. I made it first for me, then for others, but I no longer needed to cook for people to appreciate the food. I am not embarrassed to admit that it was during this period I started garnishing the plate even though I was the only person eating.
A few years later, an opportunity arose to go back to Italy. My friend Jeff, a musician, was living in Padua, to the north. He and another American, Jason, had hooked up with a guy named Marco. Together with a drummer named Ugo, they formed a band. I argued the band had to be called Ugo, because it was, to that point, the greatest name I had ever heard. These were rich kids. Not obscenely wealthy, but wealthy enough to be twenty-five and playing in a band that made no money and not have to sweat it. Their days were filled with dizzying amounts of nothing in particular. I would later learn these types of young Italian men were called i vitteloni. Fellini made a movie about them. Barry Levinson’s Diner ripped it off. Or paid homage. Depends who you ask.
One night, feeling bold, I offered to cook for i vitteloni. The menu was never in question. It was only a matter of finding the panna.9
Unless they are apprenticing to be chefs, young Italian men do not cook. They can make themselves a simple pasta with cheese and butter. That is all. They stay nestled in their protective pouch suckling at the teat of mama’s cooking until a replacement nipple in the form of a wife comes along. My dinner party would be a one-man operation. By now, that was the way I liked it.
We toasted to being young and trouble-free and then we ate. And it was good. Seconds and thirds were had. Bread was used to wipe away any stray sauce clinging to the bowls. Italian superlatives were tossed around—words like buonissimo and fantastico and bravo and some others that are technically vulgar, but in this context were complimentary.10 I was overcome with the feeling I imagine actual chefs get from time to time—undoubtedly more at the beginning of their careers, before the jading sets in. You know you have brought great pleasure through the work of your hands and mind. You are a giver of joy. You are a god.11
But this feeling was a minor peak, not the summit, for during cleanup I would be paid the highest compliment of my life. Ugo, the drummer, who was rakish with floppy hair, threw his arm around me, and asked me a question that under less manly circumstances would have brought tears to my eyes.
“Ben,” he said, “I must ask you, can you teach this recipe to my mother?”
“Yes, yes,” the others chimed in. “You must teach our mothers how to make this.”
I said, “Yes.”
I think. My Italian not being what it once was.
EPILOGUE
I am older now. I happen to be married to an Italian woman. She knows how to cook. She learned from her mother, who learned from her mother, who undoubtedly learned from her mother. I imagine this goes back some time, probably to when they were not Italians but Etruscans. In any case, I’m fairly sure she is directly related to either Romulus or Remus. Once, before we were married, when I was still trying everything in my arsenal to impress her, I told her about salsa rosa. I told her with my chest puffed out.
“So good, it was, they asked me to teach it to their mothers.”12
She laughed, and in her lilting Mediterranean accent brought me low. “That’s not even an Italian dish,” she said.
“It’s from the south,” I answered, first words confident, last words not so much.
She looked at me and shook her head. “No, it definitely is not.”
“Okay,” I said wanly, voice trailing, more like a question. “But it’s still really good?”
I didn’t even convince myself. Like that, the legend was gone.
Now I no longer make the salsa rosa, not even for myself. It is retired, like Secretariat was before he died, of what I like to think were natural causes.
Salsa Rosa for One
MULTIPLY INGREDIENTS BY TWENTY FOR GROUP PREPARATION
3 tablespoons olive oil
5 cloves of garlic, sliced thin
1 small zucchini, sliced (optional)
3 roma tomatoes, chopped
1 box Pomi diced tomatoes, around 20 ounces
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
? cup parmigiano cheese, grated
1 box panna (cooking cream), about 6 ounces, or half pint heavy cream
? pound dry pasta (spaghettini, cappellini, or any long thin noodle. Do not try with fusilli, penne, or farfalle or you will seriously be fucked)
Salt and pepper, to taste
Heat the olive oil in a medium saucepan over medium heat.
Add the garlic and cook, stirring, until it just turns brown.
Add the zucchini and cook, stirring, until it has a yellowish sheen.
Add the fresh and boxed tomatoes. (Canned whole tomatoes will work too—just make sure there are some fresh ones in there.)
Lower the heat a bit and cook until all the tomatoes start breaking down and forming a sugo (sauce).
Now add the butter, cheese, and cream, but don’t add it in all at once.
Mix it in, so the sauce continues to cook and reduce down. You want to do at least three or four waves.
Once it’s all in, set the heat to low and cover.
Boil your water and cook your pasta al dente. Remember, it will finish cooking once it’s out of the boiling water, so don’t leave it in too long.
After you strain the pasta, throw it back into the pot with a nice pour of extra-virgin olive oil.
Add some salt and pepper, then pour the salsa rosa over the pasta.
Mix, but not too roughly, just so it gets slithery with sauce.
Eat it.
Run a marathon the next day.