The United States of Arugula (36 page)

Claiborne and Franey’s column might well have been conceived in riposte to Sheraton’s review. “Craig hated Mimi Sheraton, and she hated him,” says Gelb. “There was constant friction. I had my hands full trying to work out the animosities between them.”

Giobbi, for his part, was more miffed than anything that Sheraton would presume to be an authority on spaghetti primavera. “Mimi Sheraton was physically very unattractive, and Sirio was this handsome, elegant man, and she just had it in for him and Le Cirque,” he says. “Sirio told me, ’She was leaving the restaurant Monday, she had pasta primavera, and as she walked out she said, “You didn’t put enough cream in the pasta primavera sauce.” ’Like she knew what the original recipe was supposed to be!”

“There was another incident,” Giobbi says, “where Jane Brody wrote a book where she had pasta primavera. She told a story about how she went home from work and didn’t know what to cook, so she opened up the vegetable bin in her refrigerator and found all the different vegetables—a little bit of cabbage, a little bit of this—and made the best pasta primavera sauce she ever tasted. The point is, these people didn’t do their homework. I think it’s fine to be inventive with a recipe, but I hate it when they don’t take the trouble to find out what the original recipe is.”

STILL, THE VERY FACT
that a pasta dish could get attention at a French restaurant, and that Americans were willing to veer away from their old red-sauce preconceptions of spaghetti, augured well for Italian cooking in the United States. For too long, non-Italians had been constricted by the misperception of “Italian food” as an oversauced bowl of spaghetti with a giant meatball on top. This, in fact, was not Italian food but Sicilian immigrant food, concocted on American shores. It wasn’t even representative of the best kitchens in Sicily; whereas a great many Frenchmen immigrated to New York for the express purpose of working in restaurant kitchens, the Sicilians who came over to New York in large numbers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were by and large poor laborers and tradesmen who were making do with the cheap ingredients available to them.

“It wasn’t all bad, pizzas and macaroni and eggplant Parmesan,” says Giorgio DeLuca, “but Americans didn’t know about the aristocratic jewels of Italian cuisine, like fine balsamic vinegar, white truffles, porcini mush-rooms.
We were helping people realize the potential of Italian food.” Le Cirque further contributed to this cause by introducing New York to radicchio, a beautiful, carefully cultivated variety of chicory with wine-red leaves and white veins. Maccioni started importing radicchio from Treviso, in the northeastern region of Italy called Veneto, in the mid-seventies. He was so pleased with his first batch that he took to displaying the red bunches of leaves, still in their shipping crates, in the dining room. “Within six months,” says Giobbi, “every three- and four-star restaurant in New York had radicchio on the menu.”

Within a few years, radicchio was making its way down and across the interstates. “I think the most impressed I ever was by the filtering-down effect was when I went to Atlantic City, because they always had the worst food there,” said Dean. “I went to this hotel restaurant about five years after we opened, and they had radicchio in their salad. I was like,
‘Jesus Christ!
I don’t believe it!’”

With its slightly bitter taste and brilliant color, radicchio was excellent simply grilled and anointed with a drop of
aceto balsamico.
It was also wonderful raw in a salad, especially as a complement and counterpoint to another leafy vegetable popular in Italy,
ruchetta
, a peppery-tasting green with small, rounded leaves.
Ruchetta
was familiar to the surprisingly salad-forward English as rocket, but in the United States, where bland iceberg lettuce had long held sway, the green was variously described by excited seventies food writers as rucola, roquette, and rugola before a consensus emerged that “arugula” would be the standard designation. Arugula was a labor-intensive green, grown in loamy, gritty soil that took several washings to get off its leaves, but American chefs fell in love with its piquancy. It soon became de rigueur for any Italian restaurant with serious aspirations to offer a “tricolore salad” that, in homage to the flag of Italy, mixed arugula not only with radicchio, but with white spears of Belgian endive.

As the popularity of such exotic produce as Treviso radicchio and French mâche boomed, it dawned on Dean, DeLuca, and Ceglic that they could probably save a lot of money, and make a lot of money, by cultivating
these greens in the United States. “We smuggled in some radicchio seeds from Italy and gave ’em to this farmer in Pennsylvania,” said Dean. “And it all came up green.” The Dean & DeLuca farming operation didn’t work out, but other Europhile seed smugglers, from Deborah Madison to Ed Giobbi (who had been growing radicchio for his own personal use since the sixties), were cultivating these plants with success. “Radicchio
does
come up tall and green the first time you plant it, and the leaves are quite bitter once they’re big,” Giobbi explains. “But then a second growth comes up in late February. See, you have to give the plant a chance to establish a tap root. Then, after the root is set up the first year, it produces the bud, and you harvest the bud before it opens. Every year, I clear away the snow in late winter to find that all these beautiful purple buds have come up. Unfortunately, the damned woodchucks ate all of it last year.”

THE BREADTH AND VARIETY
of the Italian foodstuffs that Americans were getting excited about gave lie to the very idea of “Italian food,” which turned out to be something of a phony construct. Italy, in truth, was a country predicated more on regional identities than a national one—people, and cuisines, were Bolognese, or Tuscan, or Neapolitan. It was a credit to Marcella Hazan that her book
The Classic Italian Cook Book
and its 1978 sequel,
More Classic Italian Cooking
, managed not only to expose Americans to a world beyond spaghetti and meatballs and Mama Leone’s–style tourist-trap restaurants (“I hate when they say
‘Mangia, mangia!’”
Hazan says) but also to assimilate these regional cuisines into a coherent, user-friendly body of work.

As the “Julia Child of Italian cooking,” Hazan became quite friendly with the real Julia, who, with Paul Child, visited Hazan and her husband, Victor, at the cooking school the Hazans operated for part of the year in Bologna, servicing a mostly American clientele. But Hazan maintains that Child was uneasy with the new reverence for Italian cooking, considering it simply not as worthy of respect as France’s. “I heard Julia say, ‘That is enough to read about pasta,’” Hazan says, alluding to Child’s response to her books.

But then, Hazan is every bit as prejudiced in favor of Italian food, especially where adaptability to American tastes is concerned. “I think the Italian food is not so complicated, like the French is,” she says. “I remember, once I did a [French] recipe with Julia, some kind of lamb. It took me all morning—’Add this and this and this.’ The Italians, we don’t have many recipes like this. You can make a meal in half an hour if you want to. And it’s food that you eat with pleasure, without thinking too much. You don’t have to analyze it, you just enjoy that it’s so. It’s
easy.”

IN A SLOW NEWS PERIOD IN THE SUMMER OF 1975,
NEWSWEEK
DECIDED TO TAKE
stock of all the fun and ferment in the American food world with a cover story entitled “Food: The New Wave.” A prime example of the burgeoning “lifestyle” genre of journalism—indeed, the magazine ran the story under the rubric “Life/Style”—the article declared, “In a burst of new interest in food, U.S. chefs and home cooks are grappling with today’s mounting concern for health, lower calories, and higher nutrition. Americans are demanding—and paying for—the freshest and least chemically treated products available. The new gusto for experimenting with food … stretches from the back-to-basics passion for organically grown vegetables to a boom in arcane $190 food processors, from a surge in restaurants stressing regional Yankee cookery to cooking schools of every conceivable ethnic persuasion.”

The article noted that the Culinary Institute of America, which had relocated in 1972 from New Haven, Connecticut, to Hyde Park, New York, had seen a dramatic upsurge in enrollment, with 3,430 students in 1975, compared to just 1,590 students five years earlier. Also mentioned was a fast-growing kitchenwares and home-furnishings chain in the Chicago area called Crate and Barrel, whose owner, Gordon Segal, sensed an “increased seriousness about food” among his customers, and a bustling midtown Manhattan restaurant called La Potagerie that was devoted exclusively to soups—
though
Newsweek
didn’t note that La Potagerie’s chef-owner was Jacques Pépin,
*
who had emerged from Pierre Franey’s shadow to become one of America’s most in-demand cooking teachers; nor was the magazine aware of the imminent publication of Pépin’s
La Technique
, a groundbreaking, photoillustrated book in which the author taught his readers the fundamentals of professional kitchen methodology, from how to hold a chopping knife to how to tie a roast.

As for those “arcane” food processors, they were anything but. Earlier that year, in
The New York Times Magazine
, Craig Claiborne and Pierre Franey had hailed the advent of the Cuisinart, the brand name by which these machines went, as an invention that, “in the minds of serious cooks, ranks with that of the printing press, cotton gin, steamboat, paper clips, Kleenex, wastebaskets, contour sheets, and disposable diapers.” Though its price was steep, the Cuisinart caused elbows-out battles among customers in the first two shops that carried it, Bloomingdale’s in New York and Williams-Sonoma in San Francisco. Chuck Williams admits that he didn’t initially realize the food processor’s potential as a home appliance. At a European kitchenwares expo in the early seventies, he’d seen a sophisticated industrial blender called Le Magimix that could slice and puree vegetables with dispatch. “It would’ve needed a whole new electrical underwiring system to work in this country, and a whole new motor, too, so I never thought there was anything we could do about it,” he says. However, a retired, MIT-educated engineer and cooking enthusiast named Carl Sontheimer was at the same expo. An inveterate tinkerer, he purchased a Magimix, took it back to his Connecticut home, and made precisely the adjustments that Williams describes. He obtained a license from the machine’s manufacturer, a French company called Robot Coupe, to sell the modified machines under the name Cuisinart.