Author: Mara L.

About a year ago, I found some European instant yeast in a New York supermarket. I bought it, almost instinctively. But I never did anything with it, until a few weeks ago.

This summer, I didn’t have time for extensive stays in Italy. So I decided that I needed to make some truly rustic cake that feels like being at home. I bought Italian flour, the brand (here) I use when I’m in Procida. I also researched the web regarding the disputed and presumably unseemly matter of using instant yeast. I found two blogs that I really liked, here and here.

Anyway, here is my super-simple recipe, for the kind of dumplings you eat when skiing in the Italian Alps (it’s called something like “oven pasta”). They are served with lots of sugar and some people like to add butter. But I’m a purist here, and think this is not the kind of cake that is supposed to taste particularly sweet. Rather, it’s a mix of cake and bread, a kind of bread filled with fruit.

You mix a pound (that is, a European pound, which is a bit more than a US pound) of flour with a little envelope of instant yeast. Two glasses of milk on the stove, with a bit of butter and two table spoons of sugar. Mix with the flour-yeast-mix (don’t forget, as always, a tiny bit of salt), plus two eggs. Once it’s all nicely blended together, it has to rise, which takes about an hour in a warm place, protected from any draft.

In the meantime, you’ll need to prepare some fruit. Most fruits are fine, but it’s good if they have some acid. Plums and apricots are the best. Cut it up, add some lemon and a bit of sugar. Once the dough is ready, you make tiny dumplings, filled with fruit, and place them next to each other. Add as much fruit in between the dumplings as you can fit in. While you do it, it feels as if it will be too much. But when you eat it, you’ll love the sweet taste of the fruit. Cover it with a thin layer of sugar, and off into the oven. It takes about an hour, or a little less, at 395 degrees Fahrenheit.

The more I get to know it, the more I love Harlem. Last Sunday morning, I met up with friends for a little bike tour in Riverside Park. On coming back, we had breakfast at Pisticci, a small Italian restaurant on La Salle street, not far from the Broadway/125th Street subway stop. There were tables outside, with cheerful tablecloths, reminding me of the omnipresent 1950ies design back home in Italy.

Pisticci is, without doubt, a little gem. Even though the food is Italian, it’s the kind of restaurant you’ll most often find in Paris. It feels as if it’s run by a group of friends, young people who are cool and lovely at the some time. The offerings are targeted towards not-too-rich food lovers who eat out a lot and who don’t care for long menus, rather eating what a trustworthy chef recommends that day. Apart from the daily specials, they have some excellent staples, for example, Penne Pisticci: penne with fresh tomato and cold bits of mozzarella on top. That’s how you eat pasta in the Maremma, far away from the parmigiano of Nothern Italy, but not yet far enough in the South for cheese to entirely give way to olive oil. But it’s not a restaurant with any real regional commitments. Rather, they seem committed to cooking with a mix of imagination and realism. Nothing too fancy, but not boring either. And always fresh, crisp, and genuinely well made.

Now back to my impressions last Sunday, early enough in the morning for the streets to be empty, and a seat in the shade to be really quite cool. If you ever thought that you couldn’t be at ease in Manhattan – that it would all be exciting, but not as relaxing as sitting in a small café in Italy – you should reconsider. There was something distinctively out-of-town about the atmosphere on Pisticci’s little terrace, but not of the suburbia kind. More of the distinguished beach café kind. And isn’t that what summer should be like? It felt like a great luxury to be sitting there, rather than fighting for a table in some trendy weekend brunch place downtown. Pisticci gets my highest ranking, five stars *****.

I rarely write about architecture on Notes From Nowhere, even though this is what I’m trained to do – not, of course, to write about it, but to plan it, design it, and so on. I guess I’m like Jens, I find the gap between the world of creating something and the world of criticism rather wide.

Anyway, I read an artnet-article this morning (“Three Dealers” by Charlie Finch, here, via here) that I didn’t quite like, even though much of what it says seems true. It’s about the collapsing art gallery scene in Chelsea. The market is down, we all know that. But the author argues that, worse than that, the High Line, Manhattan’s new elevated park on the West Side, will bring hordes of tourists to Chelsea and thus destroy the serenity of the place. It’s the beginning of the next Soho as we know it today, with tourists everywhere, retail outlets all over, high school kids on their trip to New York getting drunk at night. And so on. We who look for quiet places where the contemplation of art is psychologically and economically possible are out.

That may all be true, but it’s only part of the truth. And more than anything, it reminds me of my favorite Monk quote. His psychotherapist says, “I know, change is difficult.” And Monk replies: “No, change is impossible.”

Of course the High Line will bring developers and tourists, and of course it will change the face of Chelsea. But here’s a thought: Doesn’t the art world have to reinvent itself every couple of years regardless, or otherwise it will become stale? Shouldn’t we feel, next to the pains of financial worries, the pleasures of curiosity, adventure and excitement when we ask ourselves “what’s next?” And, most of all, shouldn’t we (artists, gallery owners, and critics) also be engaged citizens, who support the first baby steps of Manhattan toward a greener way of life? Developers start to put plants on our rooftops to help lower the temperature in big cities, insulate houses to reduce the energy footprint and improve the quality of the air, and so on. Most of this is still in the future. But the High Line is part of a new way of thinking. People come to recognize that life in cities shall have to change if we don’t want people and the planet to get more and more affected by ailments of all kinds.

As an architect, I see myself as part of a group of younger people who think about conservation, recycled materials, and so on, and I’m quite certain that this is where my field will have to be most innovative in the next couple of years. I don’t quite like the idea that my fellow-artists, those from the ‘fine arts,’ are not on board here.

For a more humane approach to the High Line, see this entry on Diane Pernet’s blog. And let me submit this: Some of us are just normal people who don’t have houses at the beach, but would like to sit in the sun once in a while…