Man with a Pan

by John Donohue

  MARIO BATALI

  If It’s Tuesday, It Must Be Cardoons

  Mario Batali and his business partner Joe Bastianich own fifteen restaurants across the country, including their flagship New York City restaurant, Babbo. He is the author of eight cookbooks and the host of television shows. He started the Mario Batali Foundation in May 2008 to feed, protect, educate, and empower children. Along with his wife and their two sons, he splits his time between New York City and northern Michigan.

  If you ask my son Leo what his favorite thing to eat is, his flat-out response is, “Duck testicles.” He’s eleven, and in fact, I think he’s only eaten them maybe four times. But he was fascinated by the idea that we were eating duck testicles. Benno, my thirteen-year-old, says his favorite thing is pasta, but Leo says duck testicles. He may say it for the shock value and the provocation, but he knows how he likes them: in a dish called cibreo, which is made with all of what they call “the gifts of a chicken.” It has the cockscomb, the wattle, unborn eggs, gizzards, kidneys, and, of course, the testicles.

  I have dinner with my family every night, no matter what I’m doing at work, unless I’m not in town. Maybe I won’t eat because I’m going out somewhere later on, but I sit down with my wife and sons, and I’ll have a little bit of salad or something. We always sit down and talk every night. And that is a crucial component. It’s not necessarily the food that’s the most important thing: it’s the family time, the undirected family time with no computer, no TV, no text messages, no phone. Nothing is allowed during dinner.

  When I was growing up—I must have been about eleven—my mom went back to work and my ten-year-old brother, eight-year-old sister, and I started helping out around the kitchen. We each cooked dinner once a week for five people. We could do anything we wanted, but we had to do it. It could have been as easy as buying frozen Banquet fried chicken, or a TV dinner, and just heating it up. We got involved, making soup and interesting kinds of stews. It was our little job. We had dinner every night at six o’clock. There was no concept that we might not have dinner together. No matter how busy you were, you had to sit down. That was it.

  When our kids were born, my wife and I didn’t really cook much. We took them to the restaurants. A common myth among young parents is that their babies are very breakable in the first two years. In fact, it’s the opposite. That’s when you have freedom. It’s almost the end of it. So take them with you. In three years it’s going to be a different thing. We took them to the restaurants all the time, because we wanted everyone to see them. We wanted the kids to feel comfortable in the restaurant environment.

  When they reached five or six, we started to do a little more cooking. There were big issues. My kids would eat anything green, but nothing with flecks of green, like parsley or chives or scallions, or anything that I find delicious. I found that the easiest way to get kids to try something new is to have the child assist in the production. Because once they’re invested and have actually made it—even something that they don’t, or might not normally, eat—if you get them to make it with you, by the time you’re done, they feel like they have to eat it. Not because you’re telling them to do so, but because they’re interested. They’ve been playing all along. They’re not grossed out by it suddenly.

  The first problem for our guys was pesto. I remember thinking that pesto was the greatest thing in the world, and they thought it was the most disgusting thing, until we cleaned a whole bunch of basil, put it in the blender with a little olive oil, garlic, pine nuts. We made it together, and we’ve been eating it ever since.

  Another great way to keep children involved in food and keep it from becoming weird or a stigma is to watch how you introduce new things. Anytime you have a new ingredient, don’t talk it up. Just put it on the table. Here it is. “What is that?” “Those are cardoons.” “Oh, great, I love them.” Don’t make like, “Today we’re going to try cardoons, everybody. Let’s get worried.”

  A cardoon, by the way, is a member of the thistle family, Cynara cardunculus, a vague cousin of the artichoke. It looks like a big, tall, silvery celery. And it kind of looks like an artichoke plant. You peel it and then you blanch it. And then you can sauté it. My grandpa used to bread them in crumbs and fry them. I really like them after you blanch them the first time, put them in a gratin dish with a little béchamel and a little fontina, and bake it. Man, they are good. Cardoon gratinato for supper on a Tuesday night.

  My wife never makes anything, because when we come home from the grocery store, by the time the groceries are out of the bag, I’m halfway done making dinner.

  When I’m cooking at home, I don’t deliberately turn it down or turn it up. If I’m making fish, I don’t generally put a sauce on it. I have a little extra really nice balsamic vinegar and we drizzle it on. So it’s tuned up, but only to the level that the ingredients require. It doesn’t take a lot of technique to extract that intensity. Like when you cook fish, if you cook it 80 percent on the first side and then just turn it over and then take it out of the pan, it gets that really nice caramelized crust—and it’s delicious. But most people don’t know that because they see it on TV, and they want to move it around. Like you put a scallop in a pan and you don’t move it, it gets perfect. But if you move it around, all the liquid comes out and it poaches it.

  Both the boys love monkfish liver. We treat it like foie gras, just sauté it really quickly. We had tripe a couple of days ago. I did it two ways because it was a challenge. The smooshy part is challenging. If you blanch it twice with a little bit of vinegar and a touch of vanilla in the second blanching liquid, by the time it comes out it tastes a little less uric and a little bit more like clean meat. Then we slice it quite thin and serve it in a salad. In my family, if you dress something properly with really good extra-virgin olive oil and a nice, bright acidic vinegar, a little salt and pepper, and maybe some shaved onions or scallions, just about anything could taste good.

  Every day I do breakfast. Often we’ll have what we call a Batali McMuffin, which is a whole wheat English muffin with a greenmarket egg, a slice of ham, and cheese. The other morning, because it was white truffle season, we had scrambled eggs, bacon, and white truffles. A lot of times we’ll do egg tacos. Once every seven or ten days we’ll have crepes. Generally I make them with chestnut flour. And we put ricotta or jam on, or both, or just cinnamon and sugar. Breakfast is pretty simple and straightforward.

  For dinner, at least once a week I will always make just sautéed fish. I’ll go to Citarella and pick up the protein of choice that day, which is anything from grouper to wild salmon. It’s always sustainable. It’s generally line caught. It’s always at least twenty dollars a pound. It’s expensive over there, but it is remarkably good. We’ll just sauté it in a nonstick pan or put it under the broiler with a little glaze of some kind and serve it with our family’s chopped salad, which is romaine, shredded carrots, pitted olives, feta cheese, and red wine vinaigrette.

  But when it comes to food, you don’t have to spend a lot to instill good values. Take pickling and canning. You go to the greenmarket, you pick up five or ten pounds of cucumbers. You come home, you talk about them, you prep them, you get all the brine ready. You follow the instructions in the book. You get the Mason or the Ball jar. You put it all together. And in six weeks you have something that says something about your point of view. And the kids love to get involved with that; they love to participate in it. It’s a project, but it’s an afternoon for a couple of hours.

  Doing something like that once a month, whether making strawberry jam or pickles, or an antipasto, or any kind of little pickled acidic thing—that in itself speaks volumes about a family’s potential. When you can do that together with your kids as a project, that puts them in the kitchen during leisure time, which makes the kitchen less a weird place, or a sacred place, or an odd place. It makes it more of a social place. All of the places that I live, particularly my house in Michigan, our entire world is the kitchen. We do our homework on
the kitchen counter. Everything is in the kitchen, so we’re always there—that’s where we live.

  And when dads realize how quickly they can make their whole family really happy after an hour of work at the max, they’ll want to do it. The best reason to cook, besides its being delicious and good for you, is that it will automatically make you look good. You’ll look like a hero every day.

  “Dad, here’s that update on my childhood you requested.”

  Recipe File

  Linguine with Cacio e Pepe

  Serves 6

  This recipe is courtesy of Molto Gusto.

  Kosher salt

  ¼ cup coarsely ground black pepper

  6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

  6 tablespoons unsalted butter

  1 pound dried linguine

  ¼ cup freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, plus extra for serving

  ¼ cup grated Pecorino Romano

  Bring 6 quarts of water to a boil in a large pot and add 3 tablespoons kosher salt.

  Meanwhile, set another large pot over medium heat, add the pepper, and toast, stirring, until fragrant, about 20 seconds. Add the oil and butter and stir occasionally until the butter has melted. Remove from the heat.

  Drop the pasta into boiling water and cook until just al dente. Drain, reserving about ½ cup of the pasta water.

  Add ¼ cup of the reserved pasta water to the oil and butter mixture, then add the pasta and stir and toss over medium heat until the pasta is well coated. Stir in the cheeses (add a splash or two more of the reserved pasta water if necessary to loosen the sauce) and serve immediately, with additional grated Parmigiano on the side.

  Bucatini all’Amatriciana

  Serves 4

  This recipe is from The Babbo Cookbook.

  ¾ pound guanciale or pancetta, thinly sliced

  3 garlic cloves

  1 red onion, halved and sliced ½ inch thick

  1½ teaspoons hot red pepper flakes

  Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

  1½ cups basic tomato sauce

  1 pound bucatini

  1 bunch of flat-leaf parsley, leaves only

  Pecorino Romano, for grating

  Bring 6 quarts of water to a boil and add 2 tablespoons of salt.

  Place the guanciale slices in a 12- to 14-inch sauté pan in a single layer and cook over medium-low heat until most of the fat has been rendered from the meat, turning occasionally. Remove the meat to a plate lined with paper towels and discard half the fat, leaving enough to coat the garlic, onion, and red pepper flakes. Return the guanciale to the pan with the vegetables and cook over medium-high heat for 5 minutes, or until the onions, garlic, and guanciale are light golden brown. Season with salt and pepper, add the tomato sauce, reduce the heat, and simmer for 10 minutes.

  Cook the bucatini in the boiling water according to the package directions, until al dente. Drain the pasta and add it to the simmering sauce. Add the parsley leaves, increase the heat to high, and toss to coat. Divide the pasta among four warmed pasta bowls. Top with freshly grated Pecorino cheese and serve immediately.

  On the Shelf

  The Splendid Table, Lynne Rossetto Kasper.

  Just Before Dark, Jim Harrison.

  An Omelette and a Glass of Wine, Elizabeth David.

  And anything and everything by Paula Wolfert.

  PETER KAMINSKY

  Learning to Cook for Two Daughters

  Peter Kaminsky has written many books about food and cooking, including Pig Perfect: Encounters with Remarkable Swine and Some Great Ways to Cook Them and Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way (with Francis Mallmann). He was the managing editor of National Lampoon in the late seventies. His forthcoming book, Culinary Intelligence, will be published by Knopf in 2011.

  I did not come from a religious home, unless you count Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth as a sacred text. The concept of sin—original or otherwise—was not part of my upbringing. The exception was any form of racial prejudice. Use of the N word (for African Americans), the W word (for those of Italian background), the M word (for Irishmen), or the C word, (for any Asian, Chinese or not) was the surest way to earn a parental rebuke, if not an outright smack.

  We Kaminskys prided ourselves on being free of the taint of racism. It was only after the birth of our first daughter, Lucy, that there awakened a deep-seated and unshakable prejudice in my soul. Of all the kinds of people on the earth, it became clear to me, there was one group that I simply could not abide: two year olds.

  Having but recently mastered the art of walking upright and the rudimentary use of language, they are the most uncontrollable, willful, demanding creatures imaginable. “No” is their favorite word; instant gratification, their inalienable right.

  Such was the case with young Lucy Kaminsky one February morning in 1988. My wife, Melinda, is a woman of great patience (which you have to be if, like her, you are a second-grade teacher), but she was fed up with Lucy, who had just hurled her scrambled eggs on the floor and was wailing like a mourner at a Bedouin funeral.

  “I will never have another child,” Mel vowed (this was two years before the birth of daughter number two, Lily).

  Like generations of concerned fathers before me, my helpful response to this crisis was to grab my coat and leave.

  “I’m going to see the Russians,” I said, referring to the Saturday market at the smoked-fish factory in Red Hook. Once a week, a local wholesaler, Gold Star Smoked Fish, opened its warehouse to the public and set out boxes of smoked salmon, whitefish, carp, mackerel, and the oily and redolent kapchanka. I never did get a positive ID on it, which probably doesn’t matter, since to my knowledge no non-Russian ever eats it more than once. Gold Star’s employees, mostly recent émigrés from Russia, had not yet adjusted to life in the land of plenty. According to the custom of Soviet-era peddlers, they took any selling opportunity as a chance to unload everything in their possession that might find a buyer. So in addition to smoked fish, you could also buy car batteries, wooden hangers, Polish chocolates, Hungarian jam, pocket calculators, and knockoffs of the polyester tracksuits worn by Russian Olympians.

  But on that particular morning, what caught my eye was a hand-lettered sign. CAVIAR, it proclaimed, in an unsteady marriage of the Cyrillic and roman alphabets. Melinda loves caviar. I took the chance that here, on offer, was fine Caspian sevruga that some Russian sailor had waltzed off a cargo ship. I think twenty dollars got me four ounces.

  I returned home as an unrepentant Lucy dumped all of her toys on the living room floor. I was relieved to find that the jackhammer I thought was tearing up my apartment was only Lucy beating an aluminum potlid with a wooden spoon.

  “Ooh, look, Lucy, caviar!” I said, as if I had just presented her with a special birthday present, hoping that my tone of voice would change her mood.

  Melinda, joyful at the prospect of her favorite food, tuned out our child’s cacophony and popped some thin slices of white bread in the toaster.

  The demon-in-training must have wondered, What could possibly have distracted Mom and Dad from a well-orchestrated temper tantrum? She put down her potlid in midclang and approached the fish eggs.

  “Here, Lucy,” her mom said, happy at the drop in decibels. Lucy tasted, tentatively at first, and then with such gusto that all thoughts of caviar on toast went by the boards as mother and daughter went spoon-to-spoon in a race to devour a whole generation of sturgeon.

  And so, a gourmet was born: Lucy, an adventuresome eater from the get-go and a lifelong helper in the kitchen. She’d eat anything, like the risotto I made for her eleventh birthday, showered with a shaved white truffle as pungent as gym socks. Or the plump mopane worms—big as jumbo shrimp—that Matabele tribesmen offered us at a campfire in Zimbabwe, or the purloined ortolans that the chef at the Waldorf brought to our house one Sunday afternoon.

  Some families have a mantelpiece crammed with framed photos of European vacations, horseback-riding exploits, graduations, be
achy afternoons. My mantel is mental. My snapshots, like that of Lucy’s introduction to caviar, are often memories of family meals (or of fishing, but that, too, often ended in meals): shopping for them, preparing them, eating them. Next to Lucy in the family display is a photo of a picky eater, a pretty strawberry blonde child with a big smile, her younger sister, Lily.

  Lucy may have been game to try everything, but the problem that presented itself with Lily was more often, would she eat anything? Or to make that question more accurate, would she eat anything apart from scrambled eggs, macaroni and cheese, and cheeseburgers? This wasn’t all bad. When I became a father, I rediscovered that macaroni and cheese—which I had not eaten for twenty years or more—is one of food-dom’s most satisfying pleasures, and a skillfully doled-out child’s helping of it always produces a few leftover bites for the cook-parent. As for burgers, had Lily not ordered one, I might never have tried the supernal one made at Union Square Cafe, where I ate at least three times a week all through the late eighties and early nineties.

  The situation was not cut-and-dried; Lily would, on occasion, indulge in things besides the Holy Trinity of eggs, mac and cheese, and burgers. When we ate at restaurants, particularly ones with French words on the menu, she was intrepid. Daniel Boulud’s frog’s legs delighted her. Sottha Kuhn’s oysters with lemongrass cream at Le Cirque were slurped up with brio. Likewise, Francis Mallmann’s crispy sweet-breads (in this case we emphasized the descriptors “sweet” and “bread” rather than the more off-putting “grilled calf thymus”). Then there was all the weird and wonderful food in Oaxaca, Mexico, where we spent a month one summer. Although, come to think of it, Lily’s willingness to try new foods in Mexico may have been explained, in part, by the two sips of margarita that we offered her every evening as we sat on the zocalo listening to marimba bands. I think my former colleague at National Lampoon, the playwright John Weidman, had it right when he mused that many tests of will between mother and child could be resolved by serving the kid a stiff after-school martini.