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rushthatspeaksWhich is entirely about food:
I mean the day, itself, was entirely about food, because we got up in the morning and went over to the Mercato Centrale. There are two large markets in Florence, Centrale and San Ambrogio, and each is open mornings except Sundays and surrounded by a forest of fly-by-night stalls and hucksters. Centrale is a playground of food, an overdose of sensory detail. Butcher shops: tripe in white, honeycombed piles, since tripa alla Fiorentina is one of the local specialties and you can get tripe at every street cart in the city-- there's a tripe cart down our street that has lines around the block, although I haven't dared try it yet. Pig's heads, pig's trotters, calves' heads, whole suckling pigs for roasting, infinite sausages, liver and lights wrapped in white caul fat and glistening that dark red that only comes from blood too chilled to be clotted. The cured meats, lardo which isn't lard but rather like a ham version of bacon; mortadella, like a ham version of butter; prosciutto like nothing else in the world, and spiced pancetta dripping black pepper. Cheese shops, mostly local cheeses, the truffle cheese that is this area's major export in the cheese direction and the mozzarellas and ricottas that are too delicate and perishable to be exported (pity the rest of the world). Vegetable shops, piled with the young Italian zucchini that is harvested weeks earlier than anyone in the U.S. seems to get around to picking theirs and is, consequently and alone of the world's zucchini, more than edible; with the radicchio Trevisiano that I had to ask about because it is, literally, purple and white tentacles and looks like a small octopus or squid with roots at one end of it, and it turned out to be radicchio; with early oranges and chestnuts and clementines, with the very last of the figs and redcurrants. Fish stalls, full of rays and the black tiger shrimp of the Mediterranean and piles of baccalà, that salted cod that has to be soaked in water for forty-eight hours before it is survivable as a foodstuff. Oil stores, pastry shops, honey stores, pasta shops, you name it. It's an arched and cavernous building, intentionally colder than the air outside to keep everything nice and crisp and fresh, which means that on a not-too-warm November day you cannot, quite, see your breath in there.
Which really only sinks in when you sit down to eat lunch, because casing the joint is one thing but shopping while hungry is stupid. The restaurant in Mercato Centrale that is the good one is called Pork's, and it looks like nothing at all. It has a couple of chairs, with no kitchen in sight from them, a lot of Halloween decorations and old Christmas lights strung up in a desultory way around the chairs, and a couple of signs with a smiling cartoon pig. It also has an almost totally unhelpful space heater, and an adorable and friendly waitress who does not speak any English. If you are fortunate enough to realize that it is a restaurant and sit down, you will find a menu of assorted intensely delicious and cheap pastas and the best porchetta sandwich in the city. Porchetta is a local specialty I can basically summarize as sandwich of roast suckling pig. They have a pig over there, and they cut little bits off from all over it and shove them in a panino, so you get a whole bunch of different cuts and if you're lucky some of the basting liquid, hot, spiced, and soaking into the bread. The fiori di zucca (zucchini flower) pasta is not on the menu because it takes them so much work to make, but they do have it, and it's symphonic, cream and flower and slight sweet basil and pasta hand-tossed in the morning. Prosciutto served wrapped around tagliatelle stuffed with sheep ricotta, two competing shades of salty melting. Rice fritters called arranzino, little oranges, which are rice balls shaped around house sausage, peas, and soup broth, breaded and fried: warm in the hands and an ever-changing array of textures.
Thrud started coming to Pork's when she was working at the Biblioteca Laurenziana, which is basically next door, and there was no reason for her not to eat there every day. As a result, she and the waitress are on very friendly terms, and one spends much of a meal eaten at Pork's with Thrud in being helpful by talking in English and French and bad what-have-you to passers-by who do not speak Italian and are wandering along cross and hungry and unaware that there is, two feet to the right of them, a very good restaurant. If they sit down they always come and thank you after they taste the food.
But Pork's does not do dessert, so we split an orange-peel muffin from the pastry stall before doing our shopping.
After an afternoon spent at home quietly knitting except for the part where we nipped out for some gelato and hot chocolate-- museums are mostly closed Saturday afternoons and we were both tired-- oh! I forgot to mention the tragedy! Per che non has closed for vacation until December seventh, when I shall not be in town any longer, so I have had the last of their fruiti di bosco for this trip and I wish they'd given me some warning. But it doesn't work like that in Italy. So we have to walk down the Corso to RivaReno for gelato now, a ten-minute walk instead of a two-minute one. (Grom, which is famous, is closer but not quite as good.) RivaReno is very new and does not have many flavors, but the ones they have are stellar: chestnut glacée (the chestnut here functions the way the peanut does in the U.S. and I approve of that), almond and hazelnut with amaretto and candied nut crunch, crema with balsamic vinegar poured over it, amaretto-soaked cherries chopped over fiore di panna ('flower of cream', which is distinct from crema, although both are, technically, cream-flavored gelato; the difference is that crema has eggs and is trying to taste like the platonic ideal of plain gelato, whereas fiore di panna has no eggs and is trying to taste like the platonic ideal of new heavy cream, an ambition which produces major differences in the results). We found out today that they'll pour hot fudge into the bottom of your cone before giving it to you. Also, and this is very dangerous on a cold day when you've just had ice cream, they are within sight of Vestri, and Vestri sells a demi of sixty-five percent drinking chocolate for one. frickin'. euro. I have no idea how they can do that but they do.
While walking home drinking chocolate we encountered one of Florence's numerous religious processions. I have never seen Hare Krishnas accompanying themselves on the accordion before. Kind of a jazz beat thing going. Painted faces and their robes accessorized by fingerless gloves and warm earmuffs. A smiling young lady gave me a devotional sweet. I have no idea what it was besides fairly tasty and with coconut on top of it. (The guys behind the counters of the shops were eating them and seemed to know the Hare Krishnas, so I figured this probably happens a lot, and Thrud says she's seen them before.) Straight down the Corso they went dancing until we turned off and heard their cymbals fade into the distance.
Then it was time to cook dinner, from the things we had bought at the market.
It is porcini season. This means fresh porcini mushrooms. Not dried. Not vacuum-packed, not freeze-dried. Picked this morning in the woods somewhere, damp with dirt still on them, since you cannot farm porcini. At twenty-five euros the kilo, one mushroom per person is still under five euros, and they are large mushrooms, at least six inches long with stem and four or five in cap diameter. We wiped them off gently with damp paper to preserve the delicate gills, quartered them, and fried them with olive oil and a quantity of salt. That was our primi. The stems are sweet, and have a texture, well, imagine if boiled asparagus were pleasant. The caps are earthy, with notes of basil, and are so meaty that it's hard to imagine they have no associated meat. They'd picked up a crunchy charred crust which gave a little snap to them. The gills are jelly-like, dissolving in the mouth. There's no reason not to do this every evening.
Secondi: that young zucchini, sliced very very thinly and fried in olive oil with garlic until half of it was crunchy and half had pretty much dissolved into shreds; burger patties from the market. One pork with artichoke, one pork with porcini essence, one speck with sheep's cheese. As I have mentioned, speck is like bacon, only ham. A speck/ground pork burger with spots of melted cheese, over the universe's only good zucchini-- Thrud put it in her mouth and said “It's unicorn meat. It's magical. You can tell.” Yes. You can.
Then she went and got the new I Tatti olive oil and we had it over ricotta of almost the quality of the stuff in that restaurant the other day, because apparently the meal was not ridiculous enough or something.
Dessert: one custard bun or something like it, anyhow custard and pastry, bought at the market; one slice panforte, ditto; two kaki. The custard bun was a custard bun and they are the same anywhere. Panforte is the bastard child of gingerbread, fudge, and fruitcake. Imagine the spicy richness of a medium-strength gingerbread, mixed thoroughly with dried/candied fruit, nuts, and whatever else happens to be around (marshmallows, you get, chocolate chunks, peppermint rock), made the consistency of fudge so that it melts in your mouth when you eat it and given a strong taste of caramelized brown sugar. It keeps forever, too, so I am hauling a whole bunch home with me, as I am told Vestri makes a chocolate version.
Kaki is Japanese persimmon. It looks, on the outside, like a large orange tomato, but you don't eat the outside. Inside there are, mixed together, a sweet orange-colored juice, a sweet-astringent reddish-orange goo comprising a liquidish pulp and the seeds, and chunks of fruit the consistency of Turkish Delight or a really good jelly-baby, which taste rather like orange-flower water. Kaki is a winter fruit which comes to full growth after its leaves fall, so the trees are black wood with giant red balls all over them, making their own winter ornaments. It's very good in Italy and you can get it everywhere; I had one in Texas last year and it was kind of disgusting.
And that was today, because really, as I said, it was entirely about food. That, and discovering that the Biblioteca Laurenziana has an exhibition on about Renaissance surgery, as we walked by it, so I mean to go to that later in the week when it's open. But mostly food.
I mean the day, itself, was entirely about food, because we got up in the morning and went over to the Mercato Centrale. There are two large markets in Florence, Centrale and San Ambrogio, and each is open mornings except Sundays and surrounded by a forest of fly-by-night stalls and hucksters. Centrale is a playground of food, an overdose of sensory detail. Butcher shops: tripe in white, honeycombed piles, since tripa alla Fiorentina is one of the local specialties and you can get tripe at every street cart in the city-- there's a tripe cart down our street that has lines around the block, although I haven't dared try it yet. Pig's heads, pig's trotters, calves' heads, whole suckling pigs for roasting, infinite sausages, liver and lights wrapped in white caul fat and glistening that dark red that only comes from blood too chilled to be clotted. The cured meats, lardo which isn't lard but rather like a ham version of bacon; mortadella, like a ham version of butter; prosciutto like nothing else in the world, and spiced pancetta dripping black pepper. Cheese shops, mostly local cheeses, the truffle cheese that is this area's major export in the cheese direction and the mozzarellas and ricottas that are too delicate and perishable to be exported (pity the rest of the world). Vegetable shops, piled with the young Italian zucchini that is harvested weeks earlier than anyone in the U.S. seems to get around to picking theirs and is, consequently and alone of the world's zucchini, more than edible; with the radicchio Trevisiano that I had to ask about because it is, literally, purple and white tentacles and looks like a small octopus or squid with roots at one end of it, and it turned out to be radicchio; with early oranges and chestnuts and clementines, with the very last of the figs and redcurrants. Fish stalls, full of rays and the black tiger shrimp of the Mediterranean and piles of baccalà, that salted cod that has to be soaked in water for forty-eight hours before it is survivable as a foodstuff. Oil stores, pastry shops, honey stores, pasta shops, you name it. It's an arched and cavernous building, intentionally colder than the air outside to keep everything nice and crisp and fresh, which means that on a not-too-warm November day you cannot, quite, see your breath in there.
Which really only sinks in when you sit down to eat lunch, because casing the joint is one thing but shopping while hungry is stupid. The restaurant in Mercato Centrale that is the good one is called Pork's, and it looks like nothing at all. It has a couple of chairs, with no kitchen in sight from them, a lot of Halloween decorations and old Christmas lights strung up in a desultory way around the chairs, and a couple of signs with a smiling cartoon pig. It also has an almost totally unhelpful space heater, and an adorable and friendly waitress who does not speak any English. If you are fortunate enough to realize that it is a restaurant and sit down, you will find a menu of assorted intensely delicious and cheap pastas and the best porchetta sandwich in the city. Porchetta is a local specialty I can basically summarize as sandwich of roast suckling pig. They have a pig over there, and they cut little bits off from all over it and shove them in a panino, so you get a whole bunch of different cuts and if you're lucky some of the basting liquid, hot, spiced, and soaking into the bread. The fiori di zucca (zucchini flower) pasta is not on the menu because it takes them so much work to make, but they do have it, and it's symphonic, cream and flower and slight sweet basil and pasta hand-tossed in the morning. Prosciutto served wrapped around tagliatelle stuffed with sheep ricotta, two competing shades of salty melting. Rice fritters called arranzino, little oranges, which are rice balls shaped around house sausage, peas, and soup broth, breaded and fried: warm in the hands and an ever-changing array of textures.
Thrud started coming to Pork's when she was working at the Biblioteca Laurenziana, which is basically next door, and there was no reason for her not to eat there every day. As a result, she and the waitress are on very friendly terms, and one spends much of a meal eaten at Pork's with Thrud in being helpful by talking in English and French and bad what-have-you to passers-by who do not speak Italian and are wandering along cross and hungry and unaware that there is, two feet to the right of them, a very good restaurant. If they sit down they always come and thank you after they taste the food.
But Pork's does not do dessert, so we split an orange-peel muffin from the pastry stall before doing our shopping.
After an afternoon spent at home quietly knitting except for the part where we nipped out for some gelato and hot chocolate-- museums are mostly closed Saturday afternoons and we were both tired-- oh! I forgot to mention the tragedy! Per che non has closed for vacation until December seventh, when I shall not be in town any longer, so I have had the last of their fruiti di bosco for this trip and I wish they'd given me some warning. But it doesn't work like that in Italy. So we have to walk down the Corso to RivaReno for gelato now, a ten-minute walk instead of a two-minute one. (Grom, which is famous, is closer but not quite as good.) RivaReno is very new and does not have many flavors, but the ones they have are stellar: chestnut glacée (the chestnut here functions the way the peanut does in the U.S. and I approve of that), almond and hazelnut with amaretto and candied nut crunch, crema with balsamic vinegar poured over it, amaretto-soaked cherries chopped over fiore di panna ('flower of cream', which is distinct from crema, although both are, technically, cream-flavored gelato; the difference is that crema has eggs and is trying to taste like the platonic ideal of plain gelato, whereas fiore di panna has no eggs and is trying to taste like the platonic ideal of new heavy cream, an ambition which produces major differences in the results). We found out today that they'll pour hot fudge into the bottom of your cone before giving it to you. Also, and this is very dangerous on a cold day when you've just had ice cream, they are within sight of Vestri, and Vestri sells a demi of sixty-five percent drinking chocolate for one. frickin'. euro. I have no idea how they can do that but they do.
While walking home drinking chocolate we encountered one of Florence's numerous religious processions. I have never seen Hare Krishnas accompanying themselves on the accordion before. Kind of a jazz beat thing going. Painted faces and their robes accessorized by fingerless gloves and warm earmuffs. A smiling young lady gave me a devotional sweet. I have no idea what it was besides fairly tasty and with coconut on top of it. (The guys behind the counters of the shops were eating them and seemed to know the Hare Krishnas, so I figured this probably happens a lot, and Thrud says she's seen them before.) Straight down the Corso they went dancing until we turned off and heard their cymbals fade into the distance.
Then it was time to cook dinner, from the things we had bought at the market.
It is porcini season. This means fresh porcini mushrooms. Not dried. Not vacuum-packed, not freeze-dried. Picked this morning in the woods somewhere, damp with dirt still on them, since you cannot farm porcini. At twenty-five euros the kilo, one mushroom per person is still under five euros, and they are large mushrooms, at least six inches long with stem and four or five in cap diameter. We wiped them off gently with damp paper to preserve the delicate gills, quartered them, and fried them with olive oil and a quantity of salt. That was our primi. The stems are sweet, and have a texture, well, imagine if boiled asparagus were pleasant. The caps are earthy, with notes of basil, and are so meaty that it's hard to imagine they have no associated meat. They'd picked up a crunchy charred crust which gave a little snap to them. The gills are jelly-like, dissolving in the mouth. There's no reason not to do this every evening.
Secondi: that young zucchini, sliced very very thinly and fried in olive oil with garlic until half of it was crunchy and half had pretty much dissolved into shreds; burger patties from the market. One pork with artichoke, one pork with porcini essence, one speck with sheep's cheese. As I have mentioned, speck is like bacon, only ham. A speck/ground pork burger with spots of melted cheese, over the universe's only good zucchini-- Thrud put it in her mouth and said “It's unicorn meat. It's magical. You can tell.” Yes. You can.
Then she went and got the new I Tatti olive oil and we had it over ricotta of almost the quality of the stuff in that restaurant the other day, because apparently the meal was not ridiculous enough or something.
Dessert: one custard bun or something like it, anyhow custard and pastry, bought at the market; one slice panforte, ditto; two kaki. The custard bun was a custard bun and they are the same anywhere. Panforte is the bastard child of gingerbread, fudge, and fruitcake. Imagine the spicy richness of a medium-strength gingerbread, mixed thoroughly with dried/candied fruit, nuts, and whatever else happens to be around (marshmallows, you get, chocolate chunks, peppermint rock), made the consistency of fudge so that it melts in your mouth when you eat it and given a strong taste of caramelized brown sugar. It keeps forever, too, so I am hauling a whole bunch home with me, as I am told Vestri makes a chocolate version.
Kaki is Japanese persimmon. It looks, on the outside, like a large orange tomato, but you don't eat the outside. Inside there are, mixed together, a sweet orange-colored juice, a sweet-astringent reddish-orange goo comprising a liquidish pulp and the seeds, and chunks of fruit the consistency of Turkish Delight or a really good jelly-baby, which taste rather like orange-flower water. Kaki is a winter fruit which comes to full growth after its leaves fall, so the trees are black wood with giant red balls all over them, making their own winter ornaments. It's very good in Italy and you can get it everywhere; I had one in Texas last year and it was kind of disgusting.
And that was today, because really, as I said, it was entirely about food. That, and discovering that the Biblioteca Laurenziana has an exhibition on about Renaissance surgery, as we walked by it, so I mean to go to that later in the week when it's open. But mostly food.
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no subject
Date: 2011-12-07 07:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-07 10:52 pm (UTC)I didn't know you could get it on the West Coast, though it makes sense given the climate. Oh, man, if I ever live out there I am putting in a tree. The Italians seem to know when to pick them, but it's sounding as though U.S. people don't, which... would explain the one I had in Texas.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-07 11:12 pm (UTC)Logical; in general, when something is part of multiple East Asian cultures, if someone has heard of it at all, they know the Japanese word (kaki, here). Gam is Korean. :) I don't know it offhand in a Chinese language.
There's actually a word in Italian, which unfortunately I do not remember, which means 'that thing that underripe persimmon does to your mouth'.
That is awesome (that they've a word for it).
no subject
Date: 2011-12-08 05:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-10 01:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-07 11:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-10 01:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-10 06:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-11 07:07 am (UTC)I don't know the Italian word, but I'm reminded of this passage from Words in Context by Takao Suzuki:
no subject
Date: 2011-12-07 11:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-08 05:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-09 03:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-07 06:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-07 10:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-07 06:56 pm (UTC)After you finish your book of reviews, you could do a book of food. I imagine it would be very well-received, except by people who want to cook all the things now, dammit.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-07 11:01 pm (UTC)Dare. I dare you. Of course you must eat tripe.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-08 04:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-08 12:27 am (UTC)Buh?
no subject
Date: 2011-12-08 04:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-08 07:39 pm (UTC)Accordion, though ...
no subject
Date: 2011-12-08 06:46 am (UTC)Nine
no subject
Date: 2011-12-08 08:17 am (UTC)This is one of those simple lines that when it strikes a mind holding all that has just been read, strikes a bell.
I've marked Pork's (hey, they're porks.it) on the map I keep to remember places to go to at some time in my life.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-08 12:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-08 04:08 pm (UTC)Also, one mushroom per person is a more than adequate portion size and half would have been enough for a very happy-making appetizer.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-08 04:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-09 01:35 am (UTC)