The Man Who Ate Everything (37 page)

Marcella Kazan tells me that nibbling is not Italian, and she is the reason I traveled to Venice. I had yearned to meet Marcella ever since feasting my way through her
Classic Italian Cookbook
in 1973 and
More Classic Italian Cooking
in 1978. (I am still working on
Marcella’s Italian Kitchen,
from 1986.) It was Marcella who gave us the very first detailed instructions in English for making fresh pasta and our first generous helping of northern Italian home cooking. Along with a handful of others, she inspired the flowering of Italian cuisine that has transformed American eating. Do you remember what most Italian restaurants were like in 1973? Do you remember spaghetti and meatballs?

When the opportunity to meet Marcella arose last January, I hurried over to the Hazans’ New York City apartment. Our conversation turned to Venice, where Marcella and her husband, Victor, now live most of the year and where Marcella conducts her classes from April through October. They told tales of the remarkable creatures that dwell in the Venetian Lagoon and the Adriatic beyond: of clams the size of quarters and shrimp so small that four could fit inside each clam; of sea dates that burrow into underwater rocks, and fishermen who drag the rocks to shore and crack them open to harvest the little mollusks; of
sea truffles eaten cold and raw, and soft-shell crabs two inches across and exquisitely sweet; of eel grilled slowly over charcoal until its fat renders crisp and its skin crackles. Marcella offered to teach me all about Adriatic seafood if I met her in Venice. Her lesson plan would have three parts: buying it, cooking it, and eating it.

Three months later Marcella, Victor, and I strolled across the Rialto Bridge and down into the bustle of the marketplace. The Rialto market is bordered on two sides by water, and in the early morning small boats piled high with seafood and vegetables float down the Grand Canal and converge on the market. The Pescheria itself spills out from under an open, colonnaded Venetian Gothic structure built in 1907 on eighteen thousand larch-wood piles. By nine o’clock, thirty or forty fish sellers have spread their offerings on long tables for both housewives and restaurateurs to inspect. There are few fish stores in Venice, because everyone shops at the Rialto; it is among the best places to buy seafood in all the world. Though some critics consider the market hall entirely without architectural charm, it is for me “the building which occupies the center of the picture Venice leaves in the mind,” as Bernard Berenson mistakenly wrote about the church of Santa Maria della Salute.

I scribbled furiously as Marcella and Victor called out the names of every fish in sight, about fifty in all: iridescent sardines and anchovies flashing silver and turquoise, flying fish with pointed beaks and snails creeping nowhere in their glossy spotted shells, tiny gray shrimp jumping like crickets and huge blue shrimp too stately to move, clams with shells bearing Navajo designs and scallops as small as aspirins, delicate flatfish for grilling or frying and bony striped fish for soup or risotto, diamond-shaped turbot and broad fans of skate, ink-stained cuttlefish, octopus, squid. We watched a fishmonger gut and bone a pile of sardines with his hands, while another butchered a monk-fish to sell the tail as
coda di rospo,
the cheeks for pasta sauce, and the grotesque head for soup. Nearby a boy played with an eel
slithering in its tank while his father watched the fishman flay another as it wriggled. The Italians believe that eels must be kept alive until minutes before cooking, the way we behave toward lobsters.

Leaving the Pescheria, we walked past a long line of vegetable sellers. Marcella admired the baskets of peas, pointing to the stems and leaves still attached to the pods; the leaves wither quickly after the peas are picked and are a sensitive barometer of freshness. For the same reason, artichokes in Italy are sold with their stems and outer leaves, tomatoes are still attached to their vines, and zucchini are displayed with their flowers intact. (These are usually removed before cooking. Large squash blossoms for stuffing and frying are grown separately.) Chickens are hung in shop windows with their feet and heads still on—the feet darken with time, and the head tells you whether it is a rooster or a hen.

For my first eating lesson, we walked to Da Fiore, probably the best seafood restaurant in Venice. The cooking is simple and austere, the ingredients are of incomparable quality, and the fish is not even washed until you order it.

Plates of
gamberetti
appeared almost instantly—crunchy three-quarter-inch shrimp fried whole in the shell with just a dusting of flour—and when I mechanically reached for a wedge of lemon, Marcella proposed that I try it both ways and compare. Her point was that lemon can overwhelm the delicacy of impeccable seafood, and without any doubt she was correct; some restaurants even refuse your request for lemon.

My first taste of
cannocchie
came next—pink-gray crustaceans found only in the Adriatic and Japan, about two inches wide, eight inches long, and flat as a ribbon, with false eyes on their tails and the sweetest flesh you can eat. They are arranged in one layer in a pan with just a little water, covered closely with a wet kitchen towel and a tight lid to trap the vapor, and briefly steamed. Half the shell is snipped off in the kitchen, and you pry up the white meat from the other half as you eat it.

“Poppa,”
I said proudly when the warm young octopi were brought out, demonstrating that I had learned some Italian in the market that morning.
“Poppa
is the breast of a woman,” Marcella corrected, and looked around to make sure that nobody had heard me.
“Polpo
is octopus. Young ones are
folpeti.”
When the Hazans were courting, octopus was sold on the street and eaten right out of the pot, doused with oil and a little vinegar.

Bowls of little clams were placed before us,
vongole veraci—
oblong and slightly pink, only an inch across, sweet and peppery and impossibly tender. Like everything else, they were cooked very simply: garlic is lightly colored in a little oil, chopped parsley is added, and then the clams; the pan is covered, the heat is turned high, and within a minute or two the
vongole veraci
have opened, surrendering their juice to the oil and garlic, composing a sauce. No salt or pepper is added, no wine or broth, no herbs. “We have a saying in Italy,” Marcella told me, “that what you leave out is as important as what you put in.”

Our lesson continued with cuttlefish risotto bright with peas and dark with ink, plates of shredded
granzeola
(the local spider crab), and grilled eel. From these I learned that cuttlefish ink is milder and sweeter than squid ink, that lemon is also too assertive for perfectly fresh crab, but that a little olive oil is ideal, and that everybody in the United States should grill eels on their barbecues this summer.

Mere hours after it had begun, the eating lesson at Da Fiore was over, and we made plans for my cooking lesson at ten the next morning.

The Hazans’ apartment occupies the top floor of a small palazzo built in 1520 by a branch of the Contarini family, whose Ca’ d’Oro on the Grand Canal, begun in 1424, was the finest house in Venice. Marcella’s kitchen is white, with sloping dark Wood beams and polished gray granite countertops, just the right size for her classes of six students but, as Marcella pointed out when I made a far-reaching mess later that morning, slightly too small for one of me.

Our menu was fried sardines and anchovies, grilled
cannocchie,
spaghettini with
vongole,
monkfish with red wine and vegetables, green tomato salad, and lemon gelato. My first duty was to zest two firm lemons with a vegetable peeler. Before long I had zested my thumb and gouged out deep chunks of lemon peel with the bitter white pith attached, about my average performance at this task. Marcella showed me how the zest comes right off if you move the peeler back and forth in a sawing motion. (One of Marcella’s students told her this trick alone was worth the trip to Venice; I would agree if you throw in a
fritto misto di pesce
or two.)

Marcella’s teaching is not about kitchen tricks, but you pick up lots of them working alongside her. When sauteing onions or garlic, Marcella does not wait for the butter and oil to stop foaming before adding the vegetables, as we are usually taught to do, and she can think of no reason why anyone would; once
the butter stops sizzling, it is so hot that the garlic instantly burns. After steaming mussels or clams, Marcella does not discard the ones that refuse to open. If this were an infallible test, how could anyone eat raw clams pried open with a knife? she asks. When she parboils zucchini, Marcella cuts off only the rounded end; if you remove the stem end too, the vegetable will take on too much water. When cooking a pasta sauce containing olive oil, Marcella adds a little uncooked oil at the end to freshen the taste of the dish; for sauces cooked with butter, she adds a little butter.

Marcella showed me how to butterfly fresh sardines with my thumb, as the fishmonger in the market did. (Here are the delectable details: You hold the sardine parallel to the table and snap off the head behind the gills with your other hand, pulling horizontally to extract the intestines. Then you slide your thumb between the backbone and one side of the flesh, scraping the end of your thumbnail against the bone all the way to the tail. You break off the bone at the tail and lift it carefully from the other side of the flesh. Finally, you open up the sardine and with a scissors snip off the fins and sharp edges all around and wash the fish under cold running water.) Then Marcella prepared the
cannocchie
for grilling by snipping away the meatless parts of the shell with kitchen shears and cutting the shell lengthwise along the top to aid in marinating and cooking. She turned the
cannocchie
in olive oil, bread crumbs, salt, and lots of pepper, and left them for an hour.

We gutted the anchovies together, and Marcella cooked the little clams for the spaghettini and the vegetables for the monk-fish, a savory recipe from her third book. Our preparation took the better part of two hours.

Marcella began to fry the sardines, holding each one by the tail, dipping it in flour, and immediately frying four or five in a quarter inch of hot vegetable oil in a skillet. They curled instantly because of their freshness. Soon a rhythm was established: when one sardine was done and lifted out to be drained, salted, and eaten with our hands, another was floured and laid in, perfectly
maintaining the temperature of the oil. Marcella is a most distinguished fryer.

Victor joined us to help eat the sardines. Then he went to work on the
cannocchie,
arranging them in a flat, hinged rack that would go over the glowing charcoal. We moved to the south terrace adjoining the kitchen, where the Hazans have a wonderful grill made by a company in Rimini called Bartolini that supplies many of the best fish restaurants on the Adriatic. As Victor labored, we sat in the sun drinking wine and gazing over the rooftops of Venice, and when the
cannocchie
were done, we took them inside to the dining table and ate them with our hands, marveling at their sweetness, the pungency of the pepper marinade, and the charred bitterness of the shell.

My next eating lesson was convoked the following day at the restaurant Barbicani, where the syllabus included small whole squid, crispy from the grill, black gnocchi under a profoundly pink sauce made from four fish and four herbs, and grilled sole with a sauce the waiter made at the table by mashing the head and skin of the fish with olive oil and a touch of garlic and then pressing everything in a strainer to extract the juices. Marcella points out that unlike the French, Italian cooks rarely make a separate sauce for anything but pasta. Instead, they allow the main ingredient to create its own. Marcella considers Adriatic sole the world’s finest flatfish, far superior to what passes for sole in the United States, which is really flounder. Her favorite Atlantic fish is striped bass because of its compact texture and delicate taste.

After leaving the Hazans, I practiced my eating lessons as often as possible, and I will mention two other fish restaurants of high quality: the famous Corte Sconta, where I ate, on newsprint mats,
uova diseppie
and a perfect mixed grill of fish, and Osteria al Ponte del Diavolo on the island of Torcello, fifty minutes by water bus from Venice and open only for lunch except on Saturday. When you have eaten like this for several days and then stumble into a place that boils its crab and
cannocchie
several hours ahead of time, the contrast is excruciating.

Speaking of excruciating contrasts: high over the Atlantic on the trip back to New York, I began to suffer from Adriatic-seafood-deprivation syndrome, the symptoms of which are too hideous to relate.

Minutes after depositing my bags at home, I hailed a cab and toured the major fish stores of Manhattan, widely known as a great place to buy seafood. Twenty dollars in taxi fares later, I headed back home, dejected and empty-handed—the selection was narrow, the shrimp were frozen, the sole was flounder, the clams were huge, the scallops were larger, and the eels were dead.