Caçolet Paisan

Cousin Sasha is in town and to take advantage of the beautiful weekend weather we visited a certain public park on the bank of the Potomac to have ourselves un asado tipico Argentino. Only, this being Gringolandia, we grilled pork ribs along with our morcilla.

Ms Vidal and I made a careful study of Argentine barbecue during our residence in Buenos Aires. The principal differences between ours and theirs are these:

1. Argentina is a superlatively carnivorous society. During a recent government-mandated increase in beef prices one woman lamented to the press, "My 31 year old son Rodrigo lives with me. I fear that he will starve. What am I supposed to feed him, chicken?" Truly, chicken, pork, fish and anything else that doesn't have magenta colored flesh are all considered a separate class of flowering plants. The reason for this is simple: Argentina's vast, unpopulated countryside is home to the world's largest migratory population of prime-grade free-range beef, though rampant soy-speculation and an unprecedented drought have severally denigrated the living conditions of the bos felix argentinus. Despite this, Argentines still cling tightly to their traditional bovicentric way of life. Although prices fluctuate, the value of Argentine beef as measured in quality/cost remains among the very highest in the world. What would be sold in Chicago as extraordinarily fine prime-grade sirloin is a relatively common piece of meat to Argentines. Argentine beef cuts vary enormously from those practiced by American or British butchers, and contrary to the Northern predilection for aged beef, the Argentines try to keep the time between slaughter and grill to a minimum.

2. While Ms Vidal and I cherish the regional and even county-to-county varieties of American barbecue, which Lo Paisan considers to be the first, if not finest, American culinary invention, the parameters of our consciences were shattered by the revolutionary aspect of Argentine barbecue. The asado is typically a private affair, done on a (relatively) small scale in parks, back yards, campgrounds, or the grassy median between directions of traffic on the highway. The method requires absolute simplicity. Meat, salt and wood are the only requirements. Wood is burned into coals in a separate fire and a few, small, smoking embers are arranged beneath the grill. The meat, often accompanied by a variety of sausages and offal, is adorned with nothing more than coarse salt, if salt is used at all. The fire is kept going and new embers are continually added as the old ones grow cold, until the flesh, self-basted in its own slowly rendered fat, reaches a tender, smoky medium rare. It is a method dependent on time, which necessitates time together, which necessitates close and amiable relationships built on patience, trust, and a love of food. Perhaps in a country with as unstable a political history as Argentina's the asado has become so deeply embedded in society because it produces clans -- groups of trusted friends outside the sweep of politics, like moonshiners or fishing buddies -- unified over the shared consumption of blood, smoke and salt.

Sasha and I stopped at Eastern Market for a slab of pork ribs, bought at around $2.00 a pound from the geniuses at Union Meat Company, a couple of morcillas from Canales Quality Meats, and a baguette. With a magnum of Georges Duboeuf's cuvée rouge safely stowed in the bota bag, a jar of kosher salt and a bundle of split pine, we made our merry way to our paradisaical riverine asado. The ribs turned out wonderfully. The morcipan, the first I've had in nearly two years, were delicious, but had a tangy, tannin-like, granulated taste like no morci I ever et in Argentina. Sated, we returned with several smoky flame-browned ribs.

The following night, unsure what to prepare for a starving Ms Vidal, I decided to try my hand at caçolet paisan -- the left over ribs stewed in white beans. I fried two minced onions and two minced carrots in the cast iron while the great northern beans came to boil, then added the ribs to the skillet with the penultimate tablespoons of the fresh garden thyme that came in the mail last Christmas, along with some whole peppercorns. I let these cook slowly while the beans, once at a boil, rested with the burner off their proscribed thirty minutes. Once that time had passed, I scooped the contents of the skillet into the beans, along with some ketchup, mustard and red wine vinegar and brought the lot back to a boil. An hour later Ms Vidal's hunger had overcome her patience so, the beans being just tender enough to be palatable, we ate a nice pork and white bean soup. I continued to cook the remaining beans, however, as I wanted to carry my experiment in caçolet paisan to its enviable conclusion.

The following evening, I removed the rib bones and stray pieces of cartilage from the beans and poured the still soupy mixture into the cast iron skillet, brought it to a boil over a flame, then coated the top with a generous application of paprika and olive oil, and put the skillet in the broiler. Four times I let the surface brown and develop a membranous, paprika flavored crust. Four times I broke the crust with gentle admonitions of a wooden spoon, gently separating the beans from the sides of the skillet, until, after the fifth browning, the beans possessed a lovely brown crust under which the beans still sopped in the concentrated juices of the soup.

While a proper cassoulet, containing at least one duck, several pounds of meat and various sausages, is indubitably superior to caçolet paisan, yesteray's version, prepared off the cuff with leftover ribs, two onions, two carrots and a bag of beans, made for a delicious and satisfying meal.

King Carbonara

Long a perpetrator of bad carbonara, last night I finally realized my recent carbonara epiphany and made CARBONARA AS GOD INTENDED.

In these lean times, Ms Vidal and I have learned to make do on the barest of staples. As vegetables cost more than pork here in DC, even during the winter months when said vegetables are little other than limp, pale fibers cleverly assembled into the simulacra of vegetables, bacon makes up a crucial part of our daily life.

Luckily for us, the geniuses over at Union Meat Company at Eastern Market sell thick-cut skin-on bacon for $3.50 / lb. Compare this to the packed detritus selling at our local chino for $4.99 / lb and stand in awe at the altar of usury.

Union Meat's bacon is so thick it comes off the skillet like fried ham, with a crisp run of pork rind along the edge. Not exactly lean, it still packs enough meat on the slice to amount to more than just the ashen grease you get from most bacon.

Times being lean, I pour off all bacon fat into a mug I keep in the fridge. Nevermind the trouble of filtering the stuff. If you're subsisting on bacon, grit (and cancer) are the least of your worries.

After months of sadly gnawing the ersatz produce foisted on we the peasantry by the agents of simulacra, I've come to regard Union Meat's bacon as fruit of the pig. It sits side by side with Ken's Kash's bacon in heaven.

Carbonara has long floated about the periphery of my scant, bastard knowledge of Italian food. While never a workhorse in my stable, I always admired the application of a raw egg to recently cooked noodles, as that simple gesture struck me as a ray of unrepentant peasant sunshine shining through the codified and twice-inspected tedium of bullshit that reigns over the earth. But I never grasped the idea of the dish, I never got carbonara until earlier this week, when I was once again making it badly and had what I can only describe as a vision.

Previously, I had always thought of the dish as essentially fettucini alfredo with a raw egg tossed in for sport. I very rarely make the stuff, as alfredo sauce always reminds me of a story I once heard about a girl who got herpes on her face after eating fettucine alfredo at Olive Garden. Besides, white sauces always struck me as as the kind of Italian food mediocre French chefs serve to tourists in the Piémont. But the crucial error, the central carbonara error, lies not in the relative whiteness of the sauce, but in thinking of it as a sauce at all.

Apart from the cool trick of throwing a raw egg into everyone's dinner, carbonara always appealed to me because of its curious name. Because I am stupid and rush to judgment and always think I'm right and know positively jack shit about Italian, I long assumed carbonara referred to gli carabinieri who fought in World War One, as in pasta agli carabonieri, or some such pidgin nonsense. I'm sure attributing carbonara to desperately inventive soldiers scavenging in the ruins of North Italy is the fault of reading too much Hemingway.

Turns out the origin of the term is a mystery. The root of the term, "carbon", means exactly that -- carbon, as in carbon scoring, as in charcoal, as in coal. Is it coal miner's pasta, hearty enough to propel an Italian laborer through a grueling day's work in the tunnels? Does carbon refer to the copious amounts of black pepper flecked like bits of coal, or char, throughout the dish? Judgment is still out, but one thing for certain is that carbon does not a carabin be.

According to wikipedia, however, the dish did not become widely popular until after WW2, when the Italian citizenry subsisted on rations handed out by occupying American forces. In those rations? Bacon and eggs.

The fundamental principal at the heart of Lo Paisan philosophy is that good food is always a product of inspired improvisation using ingredients at hand. While you will never see Ms Vidal or me turning up our noses at ossetra caviar and chilled champagne, the fact remains that, even for the wealthy, cooking is nearly always done with ingredients at hand.

We the peasantry, who live in a post-industrial culinary wasteland where one in three Americans contracts diabetes from the corn syrup and gristle slopped in our troughs by global conglomerates, will seldom if ever have access to luxury ingredients. But we can take solace in the thought that all peasantry, throughout history, have been presented with the same dilemma -- making food with what there is. This dilemma, a daily issue for most of the people who ever lived, is the catalyst for inspiration and innovation. Who would have thought at the time that Grandma Samangiare's improvised paste of mashed basil leaves, olive oil, pine nuts and garlic would turn out the way it did?

For the post-war Italians, American rations could have been a bone in the throat, an aberration against the purity of Italian culinary heritage, against its native nobility, but faced with hungry children and whining husbands Grandma Samangiare took to Uncle Sam's bacon and eggs with the same gusto she showed corn, the tomato, and the noodle before that.

In the course of our lifelong quest to live up to Grandma Samangiare's example, Ms Vidal and I have learned that there is no room for purity or native nobility in the hungry life of Lo Paisan. That is the second principal of Lo Paisan philosophy: in the beginning, there was hunger, the ingredients at hand and inspired improvisation; there are no ur-recipes.

So, CARBONARA AS GOD INTENDED is, essentially, bacon and eggs thrown on top of pasta. The central carbonara error is to view the bacon and eggs as ingredients in a sauce. Instead, think of carbonara as breakfast served with noodles in the place of bread or potatoes.

The raw egg tossed into the freshly drained, still steaming noodles is not an empty gesture. Stirred quickly into the naked noodles, the egg quickly develops into the delicate and delicious curds of slowly scrambled eggs.

The bacon, cooked apart, cut up into bits, and put into the noodles still hot and glazed with melted fat, stays crisp this way, as it should. When it is fried and then braised in an uninspired white sauce the finest bacon develops a chewy cat-gut sinuousness that takes all the bacon out of bacon.

Of course, Italians having their proclivities, fresh herbs and hard cheeses might be added, but not because Grandma Samangiare read about it in Gourmet Magazine, but because a hard wedge of pecorino tucked under the saddle blanket was to a post-war Italian peasant in the hills outside of Rome what a tube of Scrapple was to his contemporaneous Baltimorean brother-peasant, ie: ingredients at hand.

This carbonara epiphany led to one of the finest Italianate meals I've ever cooked; surpassed, if at all, only by MS VIDAL'S BIRTHDAY LASAGNA and AUGUST PESTO.

To whit:

CARBONARA AS GOD INTENDED

Make fresh pasta.*

I like to make a quadruple batch, as the kneeding is the hardest part, and kneeding is just as easy with a quadruple dose as a single. For CARBONARA AS GOD INTENDED I lifted a move from Batali I saw on Iron Chef America and sifted unsweetened cocoa into the flour. Batali says it was common during the Renaissance. A note on flour: I use regular all purpose flour, and I bet you 2000 lira that if Grandma Samangiare lived in DC today she would too. Cut the pasta into tagliatelle about 1/4 in wide. I use an old Amish rolling pin cum pasta cutter. Set water onto boil.

In a mortar and pestle combine herbs (I used a tablespoon of dried garden thyme and the leaves from one six inch stalk of fresh rosemary), a teaspoon of black pepper, five cloves of garlic, a dash of salt and olive oil. Mash into a pesto.

Fry up half a pound of thick-sliced bacon in a skillet. I used Union Meat Company's ridiculously good thick-sliced skin-on bacon. Set aside. Pour off most of the hot grease into a coffee mug and save for later. Add one chopped onion to hot skillet and stir, adding olive oil. Moderate the heat so that you kill the onions but do not blacken them. When the onions are very soft, stir in the pesto and remove from heat.

Add fresh pasta to boiling water. Fresh pasta cooks very quickly. Do not overcook it.

Add a few spoonfuls of pasta water to the onions/pesto in the skillet.

Add a dash of milk to onion/pesto mixture.

When the pasta is done, drain quickly and return to pot. Crack one egg into the noodles and stir quickly, but gently, until the egg forms solid curds.

Add onion/pesto mixture.

Cut the bacon into small pieces into the noodles. I used a pair of scissors.

Stir and serve in a large bowl.

In the event that you have a hard, sharp Italian cheese such as pecarino or parmesan by all means incorporate this into the dish. If, like Ms Vidal and I, you can't afford to pay 16$ a pound for anything, least of all cheese, do as the Italian peasants of yore did and sprinkle the carbonara with crumbs from stale white bread.

In the event you have a bottle of red wine around, but all means drink it with CARBONARA AS GOD INTENDED. If you do not, water is a delicious accompaniment.

*It is imperative to use fresh pasta with carbonara, as the interplay of textures between the crisp bacon and pillow-soft noodle is one of the dish's foremost qualities.