The Local Food Report: Carafoli's Sagamore

On September 15th, 1880, 500 Italians arrived in Sagamore to start digging the Cape Cod Canal. The work was short-lived—funding ran out four months later—but the community was not. More Italian immigrants came over in the early 1900s when work started again and slowly, in Sagamore Village, an Italian community was formed.

That's John Carafoli. His grandparents were amongst those who came to Sagamore looking for work, and he's one of the few who still remembers Italian Sagamore. His mother passed away when he was eleven, and as a way of trying to hold onto her, he started hanging out in the kitchens of the neighborhood women, watching them cook and bring in squash and grapes and tomatoes from the garden and getting their techniques down. Then he'd go home and try to recreate the dishes for his father and aunt and brother—lasagnas and jams and breads and sweet pastas.

By the time he left Sagamore and went out into the world, he had a whole childhood of recipes to draw from. He started working with food—these days, he's a world-reknowned food stylist and recipe developer—and the recipes acted like a sort of bridge. They took him back to Italy to trace particular pastas and breads and back to his grandparents' city of Bologna to learn about their language and culture. The recipes kept him connected him not just with his mother, but also with his Italian heritage and the Sagamore Village of his past.


There's one Sagamore woman in particular who John talks about a lot. Her name was Mafalada Maiolini, but in the kitchen, he called her Muffy. She taught him to make brassadella, a sweet, dry coffee cake from Verona that involves a top roll and a bottom roll and lots of hole poking in between, and savor, a sweet, dark jam made with leftover fruit at the end of the harvest season. When I talked with John a few weeks ago Muffy was still alive, but she passed away last Sunday, at the age of 96. In her obituary, it says that her kitchen was a gathering place for many friends—a nice way to be remembered, I think.

In Muffy's honor, John gave me this savor recipe to share. It's his—adapted from hers—honed by observation and friendship and the practice of years.

SAVOR

This is a time-consuming jam at first glance, but most of the work is in the simmering. If you can set aside two 6-hour chunks over two days to be around, you've done the hard part. This jam is traditionally made in the fall, with any leftover fruit from the harvest. Carafoli has planted his own orchard of pears, apples, figs, apricots, and peaches, and he's hoping to make savor from his own fruit next year.

6 large ripe pears
6 large ripe apples
6 large ripe peaches
1 pound Italian prune-plums or other plums
1 pound seedless red grapes
12 ounces fresh cranberries
12 pitted prunes
12 ounces pitted dried apricots
12 ounces dark raisins
zest of 2 oranges, removed in strips and minced
1 bottle red wine or saba
1 quart red grape juice
1 quart cranberry juice
1 cup cooked peeled chestnuts

Peel and core pears and apples; peel and pit peaches and plums. Cut into coarse 1-inch dice, and place in a nonreactive (like stainless steel) heavy-bottomed 8-quart pot. Add grapes, cranberries, prunes, apricots, raisins, and orange zest. Add wine or saba, grape juice, and cranberry juice and mix well.

Place pot over high heat and bring to a boil. Immediately reduce heat to its lowest possible setting, and simmer, uncovered, for 6 hours. Remove from heat and allow to sit, loosely covered, at room temperature overnight. (Sugar and acid in mixture will keep it from spoiling.)

The next day, uncover the pot and again bring to a boil. Reduce heat to lowest possible setting, and simmer for 6 more hours. Toward the end of cooking, stir frequently to prevent scorching.

Remove pot from heat; mixture will be very dark and thick. Place chestnuts in a food processor and process to make a mealy puree. Stir into cooked mixture. While mixture is still hot, pour into sterile jars and seal according to manufacturers' directions. Savor may also be covered and refrigerated for up to 4 months, or frozen in a tightly sealed container for up to 6 months.

Yield: 11 pints

Most fantastically orange

You know the way Kraft dinner macaroni and cheese tastes on a camping trip? Well, I think I've figured out how to recreate it. It feels sort of like it did when I was fourteen and spent six days paddling the Petawawa, only without all the mosquitoes and the wet sleeping bag. Oh, and we've been eating with my grandmother's silver.

And while generally, as a rule, KD macaroni and cheese tastes better off of bent stainless steel sporks and tin plates, so far, we haven't let that get our spirits down. We also haven't been deterred by the fact that it isn't raining, that we don't have any sandwich bags full of wet, clumpy lemon pepper to sprinkle on top, and that we no longer spend our summers at Camp Northway Lodge. Which, in case you are wondering, is in Algonquin Park, Ontario and is North America's oldest wilderness camp for girls. It was founded by Fannie L. Case in 1906, and there is no electricity or running water, and to this day, every meal is cooked over a big, pot-bellied woodstove.

(Also, in case you're wondering, we has been referring to both me and Alex, and no, he did not attend. He has learned a few camp songs, though, and although he doesn't like to admit it, I'm pretty sure he secretly sometimes practices them on his own.)

At any rate, although neither Alex or I have done any class four rapids recently, and although we don't own a cedar strip canoe, and even though it is only about 18 degrees out and fairly prohibitive of camping activities in general, we have been enjoying quite a bit of macaroni and cheese. Not actual KD, mind you, or even traditional macaroni and cheese, but a pumpkin penne with spinach and goat cheese that will fool you so completely that you may never go back. It's hard to believe, I know, but if you sauté some red onions in a pat of butter, add some pumpkin puree and some milk and salt and a little dash of Sriracha sauce and throw it over penne, you get a big bowl of pasta that tastes alarmingly similar to the warmest, cheesiest, most fantastically orange macaroni and cheese you've ever had. It makes me feel cozy just to type all those adjectives up.

You can imagine how nice it is to actually dig in.

Happily, it's a snap to make. It's the kind of thing you can throw together in fifteen minutes for a working Monday lunch, or even a last minute dinner for company. The key is to have the squash—either a pie pumpkin or a butternut or something in that vein—already baked, so that all you have to do is boil water for pasta and sauté. Recently, we've been keeping a jar of pureed squash on hand at all times in the fridge, partially because some of the pie pumpkins in the basement have been getting soft spots, but also because of how quickly, now that we have this recipe, pureed squash disappears. I don't know about you, but there are only so many sweet squash pies and butternut soups I can eat. This opens up a whole new world, this putting pumpkin on penne.


Oh! and we've been putting crumbled up goat cheese on top, which has made things pretty new and exciting, too, and spinach from the greenhouse. Since we're not fourteen any more, I thought a little green might be nice.

I could go on and on, in case you can't tell, about the merits of what we've taken to calling Pumpkin Penne alla KD. I could also tell you a fair bit about rapids, and what it's like to tip over in them every day for six days in a row while it rains and your shorts and t-shirt and underwear are constantly wet, and even what it's like to resort to eating fried uncooked soggy pasta because it has turned back into dough, but I'm not sure any of that would be a good idea, for anyone.

So for your own good, I'm going to sign off, and let you get to your kitchen and your squash and your food processor, and let you start recreating your own camp memories lickety-split. Have fun, everyone.

PUMPKIN PENNE alla KD

For the original idea for this recipe, I have to thank Mr. Mark Bittman. As you probably know, he's into doing more with less, and he decided for his book The Best Recipes in the World to try and recreate the taste of Italian squash filled ravioli without having to actually do all the tiny finger work. He thought maybe it would have the same effect to just put the squash filling on the outside of the pasta, as a sauce for penne instead, and boy-oh-boy, it did. The only flaw I could find with the whole thing was that he spiked his sauce with sugar and nutmeg in a way that made it taste more like pumpkin pie filling and less like a savory dish. So instead, I went in a butter-milk-Sriracha-salt-spinach-goat cheese and sauteed red onion direction, and it came out absolutely perfectly—a lot less like pie, and a lot more, in the best way possible, like camp style KD.

2 tablespoons butter
1/2 red onion, chopped
1 cup pureed pie pumpkin or butternut squash
3/4 cup whole milk
1/2 teaspoon white pepper
a pinch of nutmeg
a dash of Sriracha or another spicy chili sauce
salt to taste
1/2 pound pasta—penne, macaroni, or any other bite size shape—cooked and drained
1/2 pound baby spinach, washed and dried
4 ounces goat cheese

Heat up the butter over medium-high heat in the bottom of a medium size, heavy-bottomed pot. Add the red onion and sauté for 8 to 10 minutes, or until it becomes soft and translucent. Turn the heat down to a simmer and spoon in the pureed squash, stirring constantly, along with about a third of the milk. Keep adding the milk in splashes (and keep stirring), until it has all been added and absorbed. Now season the sauce with the white pepper, nutmeg, Sriracha, and salt. Add the pasta to the pot and stir it into the sauce, until all of the pieces are completely coated. While the pasta and the sauce are still hot, stir in the spinach. It should wilt a little bit, and sort of melt into the mix. (If it doesn't seem to be shrinking down, try putting a lid on the pot and turning the heat back on low for a minute or so. The steam should do the trick.) Serve the pasta hot, with a few crumbles of goat cheese on top.

The Local Food Report: something rare and expensive

I might not be fully capable of this, but just for a second, let's forget about the wedding, okay? Let's fast forward through Paris and Florence and Panicale and Perugia and jump straight into a muddy truck with no seat belts going 80km an hour down a windy road that leads out of Montepulciano and into the little Tuscan foothills of the town. Alex is in the front, with a guy named Moreno Mencarelli, and I'm in the back sitting with my two cameras, an extra pack of film, my recording gear, and three caged dogs. For the next hour, Mencarelli has agreed to let us tag along. He and the dogs will be looking for truffles, white truffles, underground.

I don't know if you've ever had a truffle, but if you haven't, hooey are you in for a treat. You find their essence a lot in nice American restaurants—truffle salt and truffle oil and truffle butter and sometimes even truffle cheese—but very rarely do you see the real deal. That's because truffles come from Europe, France and Italy mostly, and cost in the neighborhood of $1000 a pound. Where we stayed in Italy, in a region that sort of straddled the Umbria/Tuscany border, there were truffles in just about every restaurant. Some places made truffle cheese, or truffle polenta, or truffles in scrambled eggs. If they were really brilliant, they did things simply—fresh pasta sauced with a little bit of butter and the pasta water with truffles shaved over top.

At any rate, even there, where truffles are a dime a dozen, they commanded a lot of respect. We saw signs posted at the edges of the woods all over the place, warning people that stealing truffles was a crime. And at nice restaurants, a plate of that pasta-white truffle combo I liked so much cost about a hundred bucks. Which is all to say that it was very nice of Signor Mencarelli to let us in on the adventure.


The woods he took us into he rents—sort of like renting farm land, except for this particular farm is one square kilometer of oaks and poplars with a muddy stream ravine running down the middle. White truffles like this sort of spot—old forests with plenty of water and shade to keep the moisture and temperature more constant. They grow off of the roots of the trees, or actually off of the root hairs, and people say that which tree they grow on influences their particular scent. It's hard to say what exactly they smell like, except that they have a musky, fierce kind of scent, the kind that is at the same time alluring and a little much. (Mencarelli gave us a small, cherry-sized truffle to keep, and when we made the mistake of leaving it in our hotel room, the smell was so completely overpowering, even in a jar, that we could hardly breathe until we took it out to the balcony and locked the door.) Apparently female pigs are very attracted to the smell, which is almost the same as the male pigs' come-and-get-me pheromone, which is why they are sometimes used as truffle hunters as well. The only snafu is that they like the smell so much that they tend to eat the truffles before anyone else can get one. Mencarelli's dogs do that sometimes, too—Luna ate three in the course of about twenty minutes while we were out—but they usually only do it with the very small ones, and most of the time, they're content to step aside for a snack of bread.

It was absolutely amazing to watch them sniff the truffles out. When Luna or Bottone or Cosco got on the scent, they started digging at a mile a minute. Luna and Cosco, both Lagotto Romagnolos, an ancient Italian breed of water dog, look like small poodles, and they seemed to be better at catching a more general whiff. Then Bottone, a Braco pointer who looked sort of Beagle-esque, would do the pinpointing, flinging dirt at Mencarelli while he tried to push him aside and start carefully extracting the prize with a long, thin, spade-like shovel. The whole thing was pretty hilarious, actually, with Mencarelli yelling at Luna for eating the truffles and Cosco falling down a steep bank into a mud puddle and Bottone looking at us all sideways when he wasn't quite sure where to go.


But the payoff—the payoff was amazing. After an hour of traipsing through the woods and sliding down banks and even trying to choke down a cigarette to prove our worth, we walked away with one perfect little piece of gold. We still haven't used it yet—we've been waiting for the right weather or the right pasta or maybe just the right reason to celebrate, but one night soon, I think it will be time. Apparently, we don't have much more before the smell tapers off and the flavor runs out. At any rate, I've been hunting around for recipes, trying not to blow our only chance, and just in case you ever come into possession of a white truffle yourself, I wanted to share.

For starters of course there's this, Lynne Rossetto Kasper's version of my favorite dish, but I think if we did it we'd want the pasta to be homemade. Also, she doesn't use any of the pasta cooking water in the sauce, which every Italian chef said was critical to the whole thing. There's also everything over here, and that first tagliatelle in particular. Or, swoon, there's this. If only, people, if only.