2. In a small saucepan over moderate heat, bring the liquid to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer until reduced by half. Finely chop the softened mushrooms and set aside. (This can be done in the food processor, but do not pulverize them.)
3. In a medium stockpot over moderately high heat, heat the olive oil until hot but not smoking. (A drop of water should sizzle immediately upon contact when dropped in the oil.) Add the cremini mushrooms and cook until golden brown, stirring occasionally, 5 to 7 minutes. Lower the heat, sprinkle with salt, pepper, rosemary, and garlic; and cook for another 2 minutes, stirring frequently.
4. Add the chopped dried mushrooms and the mushroom broth, stirring as the liquids simmer to scrape up any browned bits from the bottom of the pot. Cook until slightly reduced, stirring frequently, about 2 minutes. Stir in the tomatoes with their juice, add the sugar, and simmer over low heat until thickened, about 25 minutes. Serve with the pasta.
QUICK PAPPARDELLE WITH PANCETTA AND CHESTNUTS
• SERVES 4
1 pound pappardelle
1 cup diced pancetta
1 cup chopped roasted chestnuts
1½ cups heavy cream
2 fresh sage leaves
Freshly ground black pepper
Freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
1. Cook pappardelle according to package directions in abundantly salted water.
2. Brown the pancetta in a medium skillet. Remove and reserve. Heat the chopped chestnuts in the cooking fat. Add the heavy cream and the fresh sage leaves. Reduce slightly before returning the pancetta to the pan. Add black pepper to taste.
3. Drain the pasta and add to the skillet, stirring gently to coat the noodles. Transfer to a warm plate and sprinkle with Parmigiano-Reggiano.
QUICK PAPPARDELLE WITH BLACK TRUFFLE SAUCE
• SERVES 4
1 pound pappardelle
8 tablespoons (1 stick) unsalted butter
1 cup (4 ounces) mascarpone
1 medium fresh black truffle
1 cup freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, plus additional
1. Cook pappardelle according to package directions in abundantly salted water.
2. Melt the butter and mascarpone together in a medium skillet over low heat. Shave the truffle into the butter mixture, giving it a minute to perfume the sauce, and sprinkle in the Parmigiano-Reggiano, gently shaking the pan to incorporate.
3. Drain the pasta and add to the skillet, stirring gently to coat the noodles. Transfer to a warm plate and sprinkle with additional Parmigiano-Reggiano.
SUGARED BLOOD ORANGES
Slice the blood oranges as thinly as possible and spread out on a platter. Sprinkle them with raw, or turbinado, sugar and let them sit at room temperature until the sugar dissolves. Serve with biscotti and gelato.
The skin on real Italian blood oranges is typically very fragile and therefore difficult to peel without damaging the fruit. Leaving the skin on the orange makes it easier to pick up the slices with your fingers or a fork.
The irresistible desire to travel is known in my family as being “Jasper-blooded.” The idea of voyage, of breaking out into the unknown, of those unappeasable dreams of the road, is central to the identity of my family, but is also nonetheless profoundly troubling and distrusted. There are those among us who live in the South our whole lives and rarely venture very far from the places we were born. Then there are the others, like me, who are Jasper-blooded.
My grandfather Jasper Catlett Peek was a restless, godstruck man who roamed around the small towns of the South selling Bibles and cutting hair. It was said he could not bear to stay in a place for more than three months at a time. “Jasper could never stay put,” my grandmother once told me. “But he never had much imagination about traveling; he only traveled the South.” But if any of us move away from our hometowns, take a job in a distant city, or marry boys and girls from “away,” it is always blamed on Jasper. He was the first holy man of the open road our family produced, and he looked forward to the journey more than the arrival. Such figures define families.
My grandmother did not lack imagination and she never sold a Bible in her life. Margaret Nolen Stanton, Jasper’s wife, circumnavigated the globe three times by ship, sending back commemorative postcards from Madagascar, Hong Kong, Egypt, India—from everywhere. As a boy, these postcards were the first travel literature I ever read. Her handwriting, unintelligible as Arabic, seemed congruent with the exotica she described. She posted them with exotic stamps, as strange and luminous as the cities she celebrated in the hurried prose-poems she wrote from along the shipping lanes of the world. My grandmother traveled to be amazed, transformed, and to build up a reserve and bright ordnance of memories for her old age. She was the first philosopher of travel our family produced, and I became an acolyte of that philosophy.
When I was thirteen, my grandmother took me aside and announced to me that she had studied me carefully and that I was destined to be the real traveler among her grandchildren. She then described the most wonderful thing she had ever seen in her journeys around the world. In the Atlantic, off the coast of Africa, at dusk, a sea monster had surfaced near her ship. She told me the rest of our family had laughed at her when she described this miraculous experience, but she knew I would not. She proceeded to describe her monster with such precision, vitality, and even affection that, to this day, I believe in the existence of the fabulous unnamed creatures navigating the darkest streams and currents of the oceans. And I believe they appear to special people who find the proof of God and the reason for travel in the wildest ecstasies of the sacred imagination.
As an advocate of my grandmother’s philosophy, I have traveled to twenty-five countries and have plans to visit fifty more. She passed her inextinguishable curiosity on to me, and I am a changeling because of the urgency of her love affair with the world. My ex-wife Lenore and I once rented an exquisite house in the center of Rome. Our terrace overlooked Capitoline Hill, the Campidoglio, and the northern section of the Roman Forum. I would have liked to bring my grandmother there and shown her the view from that terrace.
I would have shown her this: in the summer, in the opaline light of late afternoon, the city is the color of pale bruises and softly spoiled fruit. The history of the Western world rises up in the wordless articulation of ruins. I have watched friends grow mute as the light dispersed behind the palms and cedars, and the cats began to move out of the caverns that led to the buried city beneath Rome. In Rome, I learned that with every step I took, I was walking on the remains of empire. The proper study of Europe is impermanence; dust and stone are the true vassals of time. There is such a thing as too much beauty and too much history. There is even such a thing as too much travel, and thus I will add to my grandmother’s philosophy. But first, I must explain why to her. She is part of the change.
Several decades ago, in the Villa la Massa outside of Florence, Lenore and I decided we would not live in Rome for more than two years. The decision was a complicated and painful one, and we needed the ambience of the Massa, our favorite hotel, to make that decision.
On the appointed day we walked through the Uffizi Gallery looking at Renaissance art. Lenore’s face was like that of one of those mysterious, sensual women who stood in radiant attendance to those leaf-crowned goddesses in Botticelli’s paintings. Later, at the perfect hotel, which had a view of the water, Lenore and I watched the fishermen on the Arno casting for trout as we dressed for dinner.
We then went down to the bar for a glass of wine. At the Massa, they know that there must be private, well-lit places to write letters and to observe other guests. There must be places to talk about how you want to live the rest of your life. The bar is an elegant room on the river side of the hotel, intimate and charming, where the gold-leaf wallpaper and candlelight turned Lenore’s face into something less than gold and something more. The bar itself is centrally recessed, the Arno like a side altar in an unpraised cathedral. It gleams with marble and the bold, glossy imag
es of heraldry. The bartender worked on a crossword puzzle between fixing drinks for the guests. Elegantly, he presided over his well-appointed fiefdom, and there was no drink he couldn’t make. He was never rushed because the Villa la Massa inspired a wish that time would come to a complete stop and a moment of grace would last forever.
Our wine was there. It was there at that moment. It was white and cold, a pale Chianti from the hills above Siena. The bottle sat beside pink roses, arranged in a crystal vase. When the wine was finished, my wife’s lipstick was on the glass, and thirty minutes of our lives were over. My mother was very ill, my grandmother had had a stroke, and Lenore and I had decided that there was too much of America in us to become permanent expatriates.
The bartender was half-finished with the crossword puzzle when we approached the bar. He was stuck on three or four words as we departed. You left the bar and the roses and hoped the bartender completed the puzzle, because you had just sat and thought about the puzzle of time passing, of mortality, of human choice, and you wished you were smart enough to invent some explanation or to write a perfect poem that ended with the print of Lenore’s lips on the wineglass. Our lives are longer but as fragile as roses. There are always three or four words in our lives we can never articulate. They are always the three or four words that would solve the puzzle. But on that night, Lenore and I solved part of it: we were going home, we said. My grandmother had left out an important part of her philosophy. I knew she would always travel, but I never thought she might leave me.
On the terrace overlooking the Forum, I tried to write my grandmother a love letter. I tried to give her a summing-up, a bedazzled inventory of all I had seen and learned while living in Europe. She was recovering from her stroke in a nursing home in Jacksonville, Florida, and I wanted my letter to be perfect.
I told her about the previous summer, about renting an old farmhouse in France, in the town of Meyrals in the Dordogne Valley, and about taking her great-grandchildren into the prehistoric caves of Font-de-Gaume. I had bored my older daughters senseless by force-marching them through the major museums of Europe. But standing in half-light before the paintings and carvings thirty thousand years old, I watched the eyes of my daughters change as they studied the delicate etchings of mammoth and deer. In the cold and darkness of those caverns, we watched the movement of the silent, immemorial herds of bison that in their passage across the stone express something ineffable and fine about the human spirit. I had taken my children to the dawn of creation and shown them the first immaculate urge toward godhead and art. In the intimacy of those caves, I heard the breathing of my children, the soft voices of their astonishment, and I knew I had changed their lives forever.
But those images reminded me of something else, and it took me a while to make the connection. They conjured up images of those postcards my grandmother had sent me from around the world that I would study in the privacy of my room: the lionesses of Kenya, the elephants of Tanganyika, the cobras of Bengal. Those postcards, faded and yellow now, were my introduction into the bright world of travel, fantasy, and art. In this perfect letter I would tell my grandmother this.
But no. No, sweet Margaret Stanton, there are no perfect letters to frail and wonderful grandmothers. The gratitude is in the emulation; the joy is always in the voyage, the setting out. You and my grandfather presented me with the wanderer’s gift. I have been true to it; I have not abused it.
And something else: it came to me like a postcard or a painting on a cavern wall. When I heard of your stroke, I thought about living in the world without you and I felt the air grow still and the light change. Then I saw him for the first time and understood at last. I saw your sea monster, kindly and serene, mythic and loving, rise out of the Gulf Stream and swim casually toward the shores of Jacksonville, toward his old friend and traveler. I hope that when he comes, you will be ready with all your bags packed. I hope for you that this last voyage through dreams and seas is the best of all.
When it is my turn, old traveler, after I have directed my grandchildren to some of the fabulous places of the earth that you urged me to visit, send him softly to me. I’ll be easy for any well-traveled beast to recognize.
I’m your grandson.
The grateful one.
The Jasper-blooded one.
RIBOLLITA A Tuscan reboiled minestrone soup that is thickened with bread and made the day before it is to be served. • SERVES 6
8 ounces dried cannellini beans or Great Northern beans
1 slice (about 2 ounces) pancetta or prosciutto
½ cup olive oil
1 large red onion, thinly sliced
2 carrots, scraped and diced
3 celery stalks, diced
1 medium potato, peeled and diced
½ small head savoy cabbage, shredded
1 small bunch Swiss chard, cleaned, trimmed, and roughly chopped
1 cup canned whole tomatoes, preferably San Marzano, broken up into pieces, with their juice
Rind from 1-pound piece Parmigiano-Reggiano, scraped clean, plus freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
6 cups Beef Stock (page 13) or Chicken Stock (page 11)
Coarse or kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
12 thick slices day-old Tuscan bread
1. Soak the dried beans overnight in a bowl of cold water. The next day, drain the beans, transfer them to a large saucepan, and cover with cold water (the level of the water should rise 2 inches above the beans). Add the pancetta and bring the beans to a boil to partially cook them, about 15 minutes.
2. In a stockpot large enough to hold all the ingredients, heat the olive oil over medium-low heat and cook the onion until pale but not browned. Add the carrots, celery, and potato, stirring a few times and cooking the vegetable mixture until slightly softened, about 15 minutes. Add the cabbage, chard, and tomatoes.
3. Drain the beans and transfer to the stockpot. Add the Parmigiano-Reggiano rind and enough stock to cover the vegetables by about 3 inches. Slowly simmer until the vegetables are soft and the flavors marry about 1 hour. Taste for salt and pepper.
4. Tear large chunks from the bread slices and place in the soup. Bring the soup to a boil for about 1 minute, using a wooden spoon to stir the soup and break up the bread. Cool to room temperature, transfer to a storage container, and refrigerate overnight. (The soup will thicken.)
5. Reheat the soup and ladle into bowls. Sprinkle with grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, passing extra cheese on the side.
BEEFSTEAK FLORENTINE FOR TWO If you are ever lucky enough to find yourself in Tuscany, make sure you order a bistecca alla florentina. The Tuscans raise a breed of cattle called the Chianina that tastes more flavorful than any cow with a Texas accent. At the Villa la Massa outside of Florence, I ordered the bistecca alla florentina while I watched the sunset over the Arno River as a fly fisherman made the sun light lash about on the river. It was a perfect scene and a perfect meal, and eaten with complete joy in a perfect country. • SERVES 2
2 teaspoons coarse or kosher salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 teaspoon granulated garlic
Olive oil (only enough to moisten the spices)
T-bone or porterhouse steak, approximately 2½ pounds and 2½inches thick
Lemon wedges or balsamic vinegar
1. Mix the spices together and add the olive oil drop by drop until a paste forms. Rub the paste on both sides of the steak. (Use sparingly; excess paste will sit on the surface and make the meat mushy.) Wrap in plastic and refrigerate for at least 2 hours.
2. Light a hot fire in a charcoal grill or preheat a gas grill to medium-high. Place the steak on the grill, cover, and cook until done: 6 to 8 minutes per side for rare, 7 to 9 per side for medium rare.
3. Transfer the steak to a cutting board and let it rest for about 10 minutes to let the natural juices redistribute. Using a knife with a thin sharp blade, cut the meat away from the bone. Carve each section of the steak into thick slices and
reassemble around the bone on a serving platter. Serve with lemon wedges or balsamic vinegar for drizzling.
PIZZA BIANCA If the wind was coming off the Campo de’ Fiori when you woke up in Rome, you could smell the pizza bianca coming from the ovens of the bakery at the far side of the Campo, where the flower ladies were arranging lilies and the olive man was moving his cart into position. At the other end of the Campo, the fish were being laid out like playing cards on shaved ice and the garlic man was yelling at an early-bird turista that he was not open for business until he had his caffe and his pizza bianca. The pizza bianca came out of those ovens hot to the touch and you bought it when it could still warm your hands on a cold day. It had no mozzarella on it, no garlic, and no basil. What I remember, though, is salt, and never has salt and dough and yeast tasted better than when I walked down an obscure alleyway near the Campo and partook of that simple Roman pleasure. In Rome the simplest things were always the best. We jazz our recipe up with mozzarella and basil, making it more Neapolitan than Roman. Both are divine.
• MAKES ONE 12-INCH PIZZA
1 package (¼ ounce) dry yeast
½ cup plus ¼ cup warm water
1¾ cups plus 2 tablespoons unbleached all-purpose flour
¾ teaspoon coarse or kosher salt
Several garlic heads
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 pound fresh mozzarella, cut into thin slices
Several fresh basil, leaves torn into thin strips
1. Stir the yeast into the ¼ cup water and let stand for 10 minutes.
2. Mix the flour and salt together. Pour the ½ cup water into the yeast mixture. Add the flour and mix well with a wooden spoon, a food processor, or a standing mixer until the dough comes together and is smooth and elastic. Place the dough in a large bowl, cover with a damp dish towel, and put in a warm place away from drafts. Let the dough rise until doubled in size, about 2 hours. Punch the dough down by turning it out onto the counter and kneading it with the palm of your hand once or twice. Put the dough back in the same bowl and let it rise for another hour. The dough is now ready for shaping.