The United States of Arugula (35 page)

The Italian food manufacturers, long accustomed to being second-class citizens to the French in the eyes of American gourmets, were so delighted with their newfound chic that DeLuca found himself being stuffed like a foie gras goose whenever he visited Italy on one of his tasting tours; everyone wanted to be the next Monari Federzoni, Antinori, or Badia a Coltibuono, another winemaker whose extra-virgin olive oil DeLuca was importing. “You’d need two assholes to keep up with how much they were feeding us for lunch, two alimentary canals,” he says. “Before lunch was over, they were talking about dinner.”

While in Milan, DeLuca came across some olives he liked that came in an attractive tin. Excited, he asked to be put in touch with the producer right away, so that he might secure a distribution exclusive for his importing company. A phone call was placed, and the olives’ producer, Livio Crespi, agreed to meet with DeLuca as soon as he could make it to Crespi’s farm, north of San Remo. That it was beginning to rain, and that the farm was reachable only via a winding, perilous drive through the mountains above the Italian Riviera, didn’t deter DeLuca—he hopped into a car, drove for hours in lashing rain in the dark, and, at midnight, found Crespi standing atop a hill under an umbrella, waiting with a flashlight.

“He was this earnest man, more monkish than entrepreneur,” DeLuca says. “We start to talk olives, and he says, ‘I got
la bomba.
Taste these: sundried tomatoes.’ He was using his olive oil to help cure and preserve them.”

DeLuca, despite his Italian American background, had never heard of sun-dried tomatoes.
Pomodori secchi
, as they were known in Italy, had been around for centuries, a vestige of the days before modern canning and refrigeration, when farmers and gardeners (mostly in the south, not in Crespi’s native Liguria), anticipating the winter months, would slit fresh tomatoes, dry them on roof tiles, and pack them in olive oil for later use. DeLuca was
so bowled over by the flavor of the tomatoes that he made a deal with Crespi on the spot to import and distribute them in the United States.

“Giorgio brought back those San Remo sun-dried tomatoes, and Felipe Rojas-Lombardi said, ‘Oh, I know those tomatoes, I had them in Italy and they’re disgusting,’” says Ceglic. “But he tried Giorgio’s and thought they were fabulous.” The shriveled, concentrated little slices, sweet and chewy like dried fruit but with a coppery saline zing, proved to be as big a sensation in New York as balsamic vinegar. In the imitative world of food retail, it wasn’t long before other stores had set up their own deals to carry particular brands of sun-dried tomatoes, balsamic vinegars, extra-virgin olive oils, and imported cheeses—and not only in New York, where Balducci’s, Zabar’s, and the department stores started carrying product lines similar to Dean & DeLuca’s. (For a short time, Hazan had her own boutique in the Bloomingdale’s food hall called Marcella Hazan’s Italian Kitchen.)

In Akron, Ohio, Russ Vernon, a bespectacled, Orville Redenbacherish homespun second-generation grocer, reinvented the city’s West Point Market—which had been founded in 1936 by his father, Slim, and two partners—as a specialty-foods wonderland. He kept a close eye on what the fancy-food shops in New York were doing, and often went beyond them in showmanship, establishing, for example, what was surely Ohio’s first-ever olive-oil tasting station. In Napa Valley, the winemaker Joseph Phelps purchased the Oakville Grocery, a general store nearly a hundred years old, and made it over as a West Coast answer to Dean & DeLuca, with a similar line of imported goods to complement its local wines and cheeses.

Just as Whole Foods provided an evolutionary model for hippie food stores looking for a footing in the future, so did Dean & DeLuca and the Oakville Grocery show a way forward for outmoded greengrocers, delis, and supermarkets. Even stores whose launches postdated Dean & DeLuca—like Zingerman’s, a hip Jewish deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that opened in 1982—essentially morphed into variations on Dean & DeLuca as they grew, with the requisite signature roast coffee, strung-up prosciuttos and Parma hams, bakery shelves groaning with artisanal breads, expansive lines of top-quality
olive oils and balsamic vinegars, and super-duper cheese counters presided over by curatorial cheesemongers who wrote up fulsome descriptions of each cheese on pronged signs that were stuck directly into the cheeses displayed.

The sudden popularity of balsamic vinegar and sun-dried tomatoes in America caused a wrinkle in the cultural space-time continuum, surprising and taking aback the Italians, to whom these products were small-batch regional delicacies, not widely known even within Italy. It had never occurred to Italian people to top their pizzas with sun-dried tomatoes, or to put slivers of them in chicken-basil sausage. Authentic balsamic vinegar was used sparingly and ceremonially, not splashed indiscriminately on salads like something from a Good Seasons carafe, or used as a glazing agent on chicken and fish. The vinegar, made for centuries by wealthy families in the towns of Modena and Reggio, in the Emilia-Romagna region, was painstakingly refined and aged in a series of progressively smaller barrels, until it reached a viscous, syrupy consistency. Kept in small vials,
aceto balsamico
was doled out in eyedropper amounts, as a condiment or seasoning.
*

DeLuca’s balsamic vinegar from Monari Federzoni wasn’t the longaged, rarefied stuff of Modenese lore (which the company did offer at a much higher price), but it was still the real thing, aged in wood and made from trebbiano grapes. But the trendiness of balsamic vinegar in America upended the balsamic-vinegar industry in Italy, to the point where Gianni Federzoni—whose grandmother, Elena Monari Federzoni, had first started selling vinegar made according to the family’s secret formula in 1912—responded to demand by building a factory in the early eighties to produce balsamic vinegar in industrial quantities, using new technologies to accelerate the process.

Other Italian companies were less scrupulous in their drive to meet consumer demand. “If you go to a restaurant now and ask for olive oil and
balsamic vinegar for your salad, what they give you is not balsamic vinegar,” says Hazan. “It’s vinegar that they make with red-wine vinegar plus caramel. Balsamic vinegar, you need at least thirty, forty years to make. In Italy, only a small part of Emilia-Romagna, something like less than thirty kilometers, or twenty miles radius, knew about
aceto balsamico.
The rest of Italy didn’t know. But because the Italians like to copy Americans very much, now they put it in the salads, too.”

Even Hazan wasn’t purist enough for Claiborne and Franey’s friend Ed Giobbi, the artist and virtuoso amateur Italian cook, who cringed at her use of extra-virgin olive oil in recipes for meatballs and pan-fried steaks in her later books. “Marcella doesn’t come from an olive-oil tradition,” he says. “She comes from Emilia-Romagna, which is known for using lard, pork fat, butter. You shouldn’t cook with the extra-virgin because it’s expensive, it’s too intense and fruity for sautéing, and when you heat it, it begins to deteriorate. You should use it raw, to garnish vegetables and
bollito misto
, the mixed boiled meats.”

Giobbi and Claiborne had enjoyed extra-virgin olive oil in precisely this fashion when they were served a special meal of
bollito misto
at Le Cirque, the restaurant opened in 1974 by Sirio Maccioni, the former maître d’ at the Colony. Maccioni had recently traveled to his native Tuscany and brought back some extra-virgin olive oil whose color Giobbi remembers as a “poisonous, beautiful green. You could see the color came just from the skin. They’d barely squeezed it.” At Giobbi and Maccioni’s urging, Claiborne drizzled the oil on the boiled meats in lieu of sauce, adding a little salt and pepper. “It was just divine, and Craig got it,” says Giobbi.

The son of immigrants from the Marche region of Italy, on the Adriatic coast, Giobbi had grown up eating an appetizer called
pinzimonio
, which his mother prepared by simply serving raw fennel and celery stalks to be dipped in extra-virgin olive oil, salt, and ground pepper. “It was country-style eating,” he says. “So was the idea of dipping bread in olive oil. When I came home from school, my mother gave me a piece of bread in olive oil. They did it that way in Italy, too, but never in restaurants.” Maccioni, causing
another wrinkle in the Italian culinary tradition, repurposed extra-virgin olive oil as a part of the theater of fine dining, brought out in a handsome bottle and drizzled into a shallow dish—at first only for the delectation of his favorite customers, but later as a part of every customer’s dining experience. With his Tuscan connections, Maccioni always had the best oil, but, between Le Cirque and shops like Dean & DeLuca, the phrase “extra-virgin olive oil” acquired a name-drop cachet that led to the same kind of labeling abuses that bedeviled balsamic vinegar; sleazy companies started selling inferior olive oil, sometimes even blended with other vegetable oils, as “extra-virgin.”

If Giobbi is especially sensitive to issues of purism and authenticity where Italian cuisine is concerned, it’s because he was a central player in the pasta primavera craze that began to spread through the United States in the late seventies. “Pasta primavera, I don’t know what it is anymore,” he says, shaking his head in disgust. “It’s junk food in this country.”

Giobbi’s initial connection to Maccioni was Le Cirque’s original chef, Jean Vergnes—like Maccioni, a graduate of the Colony—who the artist had gotten to know from their frequent marathon cooking sessions with Franey, Jacques Pépin, and Roger Fessaguet at Claiborne’s East Hampton house. Vergnes, a middle-aged Frenchman of the old school, and Maccioni, suaver, younger, slicker, and
molto Italiano
, were poorly matched partners from the get-go. One of the issues that they fought over was Maccioni’s insistence that there be a pasta dish on Le Cirque’s otherwise Francocentric menu. As Giobbi tells the story, Vergnes and Maccioni paid a visit to his rustic kitchen in a rural section of Katonah, New York, to feel him out on ideas for a pasta recipe that would work at Le Cirque.

“I made about three or four different pasta recipes, and one was pasta primavera, which I used to eat in Florence when I was a student,” Giobbi says. “‘Primavera’ means ‘springtime.’ It was a strictly seasonal dish. You got it in May and June, when the first tomatoes came in in late spring. It was made with chopped raw tomatoes, chopped garlic, basil, and extra-virgin olive oil, served on spaghettini. That was it. I made it at home, but I pureed it and made it into a sauce. I served that to Sirio and Jean, and they loved
it.” Giobbi recalls that initially, Maccioni simply asked that pignoli, or pine nuts, be added to his recipe, and it became an off-menu special at Le Cirque. But pasta primavera mutated rapidly and caused great controversy in Vergnes’s French kitchen, which makes the truth about its origins difficult to divine. Vergnes confirms that he and Maccioni ventured out to Katonah to taste Giobbi’s recipe, but he remembers chunks of vegetables in the sauce, “asparagus and everything.”

“I tasted it and got to thinking, in Provence they have fresh vegetables in the spring, too,” he says. Working with his Franco-Italian sous-chef, Jean-Louis Todeschini, Vergnes recalls “putting in a bit of mushroom, a bit of peas, string beans, broccoli, and, for Sirio, the pignoli. And I called it not ‘pasta primavera’ but ‘spaghetti
au premier Provençal’
—
‘au premier’
meaning the first new vegetables of spring, in the style of Provence. Later, I started to put in a little bit of cream, but just a little, to make the texture much more smooth. And I put in a little bit of Gruyère, but not that much. And Sirio, he said, ‘No, no, no,
tsk, tsk, tsk
, no Gruyère—Parmesan cheese!’”

Maccioni, meanwhile, tells an elaborate story of a springtime trip to Canada in the mid-seventies that he took with his wife, Egidiana, and Vergnes, Claiborne, and the Franeys. The group was staying in a remote Nova Scotia estate borrowed from a rich Italian of Maccioni’s acquaintance. One cold day, Maccioni maintains, Egidiana threw together a pasta meal based on what was in the cupboards and the freezer, using frozen peas, mushrooms, garlic, a tomato, cream, and Parmesan, with no olive oil whatsoever. “When I came back to New York,” he writes in his memoir,
Sirio
, “we worked on the recipe a bit, but not very much, and we served it in the restaurant. It was not on the menu, but people liked it, and it took off.”

Maccioni maintains that Vergnes and the French chefs who followed him were so contemptuous of the idea of pasta in their kitchens that he prepared the dish himself, abetted by his waitstaff. “We put a pan of hot water in the corridor and cooked the pasta there and finished it in the dining room,” he says. The New York chef Geoffrey Zakarian, who worked at Le Cirque early in his career, lent some credibility to Maccioni’s version in an
interview for Maccioni’s memoir, recalling that Vergnes and his successor, Alain Sailhac, loathed pasta primavera, and that “We had to prep it in this dingy back part of that awful kitchen, and then it was all put together in the dining room.”

Whatever the truth was, “spaghetti primavera,” as it was then called, became Le Cirque’s most talked-about, widely imitated menu item. In October of 1977, Maccioni and Vergnes made nice for the benefit of Claiborne and Franey’s recipe column in
The New York Times Magazine
, preparing the dish together in Claiborne’s East Hampton kitchen and posing, all smiles, for the paper’s photographer. In his write-up, Claiborne described spaghetti primavera as “an inspired blend of pasta and crisp, tender vegetables, such as zucchini and mushrooms and broccoli and green beans, plus cheese, cream, and toasted pine nuts. These are tossed hot and crowned with a delicate fresh tomato sauce.” The recipe that followed called not only for these ingredients but also for chopped chilies, basil leaves, asparagus, and chicken broth.

Just a few weeks earlier, Mimi Sheraton had devastated Maccioni and Vergnes by subtracting one and a half stars from the two-and-a-half-star rating that John Canaday had given Le Cirque shortly after its opening. In her review, Sheraton cited spaghetti primavera confusion as one of the reasons for the demotion. “Spaghetti primavera, not on the menu, but one of the best house specials … is another dish that varies,” she wrote. “One night the spaghetti, though slightly undersalted, came with a satiny rich sauce of consommé, cream, and cheese that bound bits of vegetables such as zucchini, mushrooms, flowerets of broccoli, peas, string beans, and lightly sautéed diced tomatoes together, all with a few pignoli nuts included for a bit of crunch. But at lunch, we detected neither cream nor cheese—-just butter and consommé, although the management insisted the sauce was made as always.”