Tag: Mara L.

I’m about to board a plane and get back to Manhattan, so this is my last entry to Jens’ blog from the lovely Mediterranean coast of Amalfi. I’ve been renting a little house here – that is, the island I mentioned last time, Procida. I’ve been rather immersed into one of my architecture projects for a while now. The culinary result of working hard *and* being in this house is: lots of tramezzini. For of course, even the most minimal kitchen equipment of a relatively inexpensive holiday rental down here is luxurious if viewed from the perspective of my starving life in Manhattan. You walk in, and the first thing you notice, with a heartwarming sensation that tells you you shall never go back to Manhattan, is a tramezzini grill.

I asked a couple of my Manhattan friends, gourmets of the New York type (by which I mean: extremely well versed in the names and looks of all kinds of foreign food, if not always in how I think it should taste). They didn’t even know the word ‘tramezzini’! So what are tramezzini? It’s two pieces of tramezzini-toast, a variety of toast that doesn’t have the regular ‘rim’ that toast in the US has. In between you can put all kinds of things, such as arugula with parmigiano, or tomato, basil, and mozzarella, or whatever you like, and then it’s put into a tramezzini grill. Super simple. But with the bread and the cheese and the grill being perfect, the nicest computer lunch ever.

I spent about a month of my first stay in New York trying (a) to find a bar that serves tramezzini (forget it!), (b) an importer of tramezzini grills (forget it!). The disappointment that went along with these searches was mixed with disbelief – tramezzini seem like *the* Manhattan food to me, everybody would love them!

So I am asking all of you out there: Why are there no tramezzini in Manhattan?

With only a few weeks left of my summer in Europe, I’m back in the south. To be precise, in Procida, a tiny island near Naples. Ischia is for the old and frail, Capri for the rich and famous, and Procida is just right for me. Small and lovely, and entirely undiscovered by the old and frail and rich and famous. It is just the right mix – totally authentic, with perfect little cakes in old-fashioned bakeries (more Retro Food!) and small trattorie where the boss tells his chef ‘batta la pasta!’ (‘throw the pasta into the pot!’) when you tell him that you’re in a hurry. And where he is proud enough to appreciate a client who leaves it up to him what else he is going to throw into il spaghetto, that is, the spaghetti dish that he puts together for you. Since it’s always a mind-bashing mix of small tomatoes, cooked in whole, super fresh fish, and parsley, there’s no danger involved.

Anyway, a different way to describe where I am (rather than the slightly banal reference to all-too-famous islands) is to say that I am in Odysseus country. As we down here like to think, it is here that Odysseus had to face Scylla and Charybdis, horrific monsters of the sea. But the terrible confusion in my head is this: Really, my own Scylla and Charybdis are the many coffee-to-go shops through which I steer on my trips through Manhattan. And I have not steered around them, no, I have gone in and bought so-called Latte. And now I am in my very homeland and miss coffee to go!

And now that I think about it, I genuinely suffer the fate of Odysseus and his companions. For nothing is more prominent on their trips (at least not to the food-conscious reader) than the fact that (a) every people they meet is characterized by what they eat, (b) everytime there is a warning that they should not taste the foreign food, because otherwise they are magically forced to stay, and (c) everytime they fail, and eat strange delicacies.

So here’s my coffee dilemma: When I’m in Manhattan, I miss Italian bars with their wonderful espresso and latte macchiato. Like Odysseus, missing Penelope even when he’s with some foreign godess. And when I’m in Italy, I realize that I am lost – I miss the miserable coffee to go of the “land of peace and truth”!

A couple of days ago I met up with Jens! We are both touring Europe, so to speak. He is shooting photos, and I am doing some small freelance architecture projects, hanging out with friends and researching the niceties of Mediterranean cuisine. By the way, I should note that writing this “Surviving In New York” series for Jens’ blog gives me an added interest in food, which seems hardly possible, given the intense interest I had all along. But it gives me the sense that I have a *professional* interest in it, and that somehow makes it seem more legitimate for me to spend entire days with the wonderful sequence of: coffee in the morning, then some work, a long bath before lunch, finding the best food market wherever I happen to be, a lunch snack right there, followed by more coffee, coming home with all my new supplies, resting a little in the sun, and then planning and cooking dinner. This is life!

It was precisely on a day like this when Jens came by. He had emailed me in advance (he doesn’t like the phone), saying – in response to my question ‘what would you like to eat?’ – that, given that we were going to meet in Salzburg, he wanted an element of dumplings in the menu. But then he mentioned his all-consuming love for gnocchi. So there also needed to be some home-made gnocchi. Oh dear! If there’s one pasta dish in the whole world which I don’t like, it’s gnocchi. I don’t know of any woman who likes it – it’s simply too heavy, and if you get the standard variety, especially in Manhattan, a plate of gnocchi can feel like a heap of stones in your stomach. However, how could I deny a wish to the one who lets me write on Notes From Nowhere? (But did you note that his two favorite dishes are basically the same? *Every* man on the planet likes *every* variety of soft, round, heavy, and sauce-absorbing piece of cooking. Should I become a psychoanalyst? – He is already ‘seeing’ one, as you might have noted. A little upsetting for the likes of me, who think that food is the heal-all, the one thing which makes life go well. Who needs a talking-cure if there’s pasta, I ask you?)

Anyway, the evening before, I made some bread-dumplings. That’s an Austrian variety, made from cut-up stale rolls (of a certain kind), parsley, an egg, and some milk (full fat, otherwise things are not going to stick!). I wanted to upset Jens a little bit. Yes, he was going to get dumplings, but not the round and soft variety. For there’s a slightly new-modish, but really very delicious thing you can do with bread-dumplings: Let them dry, cut them up, and serve them with a Balsamico and olive oil dressing, with a tiny bit of arugula and tomato on top. A perfect appetizer!

But then, the gnocchi. I won’t bore you with my own way of preparing the batter. It involves rolling them around in flour at the end, to give a beautiful finish, which you don’t find in Manhattan. And for a stuffy summer evening, I can’t bring myself to making a true, heavy-sticky gnocchi sauce. Thus I plundered my aunt’s garden for lots of basil, and cooked a very light tomato sauce. Here’s what you do: Olive oil in a pan, low heat, add the gnocchi with lots of basil. Put tomato sauce of the plate, and then your basil-covered, lightly browned gnocchi on top. Prepared like this, even I could eat it. But I keep worrying about the psychological side of it all.

Coming up – No Coffee To Go: My Stay With The Lotus Eaters