3. On a lightly floured, clean, dry surface, roll the dough out into a rough circle. Rotate and turn the dough, adding flour if the dough sticks to the work surface. Roll the dough until it is about 12 inches in diameter. (If the dough becomes difficult to roll, let it rest for a few minutes before continuing.)
4. Preheat the oven to 300°F.
5. Separate the garlic cloves and toss them in the olive oil. Place the cloves in a roasting pan and bake until soft and aromatic, about 1 hour. Peel the cloves (the skins should easily slip off) and transfer to a mixing bowl. Smash the cloves with the back of a wooden spoon to make a paste. Set aside.
6. Adjust the oven temperature to 450°F.
7. Spread the roasted garlic paste over the prepared pizza dough. Cover with slices of fresh mozzarella. Bake in the lower third of the oven (or better still, on the oven floor) for 15 minutes, until the rim is golden and the cheese is lightly browned. Remove from the oven and garnish with strips of fresh basil. Serve hot.
SCOTTIGLIA In Siena, that most mysterious and storied city, with its mélange of oddly named and competitive wards that strive against one another during a horse race called the Palio (one of the wards is called Bruco, “the Caterpillar”), I first tasted the divine Scottiglia. I personally believe that Scottiglia made in Tuscany tastes better than it does anywhere else in the world, but that is only a personal belief.
• SERVES 4 TO 6
3 tablespoons olive oil
2½ pounds beef short ribs (about 5 ribs, cut flanken style)
½ pound pork shoulder, cut into 2-inch cubes
½ pound veal shoulder, cut into 2-inch cubes
One 2½-pound rabbit, cut by your butcher into 6 pieces: front legs, back legs, and split saddle
½ cup diced carrot
½ cup diced celery
3 shallots, coarsely chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 cups red wine
3 cups Chicken Stock (page 11)
1 tablespoon chopped fresh sage
1 tablespoon chopped fresh thyme
1 small dried red chile
1 cup canned whole tomatoes, preferably San Marzano, broken up into small pieces and drained
Coarse or kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
Grilled Tuscan bread, rubbed with cut garlic cloves
1. Preheat the oven to 375°F.
2. In a large Dutch oven over high heat, heat the oil until hot but not smoking. Brown, remove, and reserve meats separately, in the order listed. Add the carrot and celery to the pot and cook, stirring frequently, until they begin to color on the edges, about 3 minutes (adding more oil sparingly, if necessary). Remove and reserve with the browned rabbit (or whatever meat will be the last addition to the stew).
3. Add the shallots and garlic to the pot and quickly stir to wilt. Add the red wine and stir, letting the liquid bubble up and loosen any browned bits stuck to the bottom of the pot. Adjust the heat slightly lower and add the stock, sage, thyme, chile, and tomatoes. Let simmer for several minutes.
4. Add the beef short ribs, pork, and veal. When the cooking liquid returns to a simmer, cover and immediately transfer pot to the oven for 1 hour. Remove the pot from the oven to add the rabbit, carrot, and celery, then return the pot to the oven until the beef short rib meat is tender and falling off the bone and the rabbit is cooked through, about 45 minutes.
5. Season the stew with salt and pepper and serve over grilled bread.
Timing and cooking method in this Tuscan dish of mixed meat stew (also called cacciucco di carne) vary from kitchen to kitchen depending on the meat used, as well as on whether it is on or off the bone. (The more meat on the bone, the better the stew.)
Brown and reserve the meat separately and add to the stew in order of toughness to tenderness (cooking time required). In this particular version, the short ribs, pork, and veal go first, then the rabbit.
BAKED TOMATOES WITH RICE • SERVES 4
4 medium tomatoes, about ½ pound each
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 shallots, finely chopped
¼ cup finely chopped red bell pepper
2 cups rice cooked in chicken stock
2 tablespoons finely chopped flat-leaf parsley
Coarse or kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
1. Preheat the oven to 350°F.
2. Lightly oil a baking dish just large enough to hold the tomatoes snugly.
3. Cut off the “cap” (a thin slice) from the top of each tomato and spoon out the pulp (being careful not to tear the walls). Reserve ¾ cup of the pulp and discard remainder or save for another use. Invert the tomatoes on a paper towel–lined baking sheet to drain.
4. In a large skillet, heat the oil over moderate high heat. Add the shallots and red pepper, cooking quickly until the edges begin to color, 2 to 3 minutes. Add the reserved tomato pulp and reduce over medium heat until thickened, 4 to 6 minutes.
5. Stir in the rice and cook until the tomato is absorbed and the flavors marry, about 3 minutes. Sprinkle in the parsley, season with salt and pepper, and remove from the heat.
6. When the mixture has cooled slightly, spoon the rice into the hollowed-out tomatoes and place in prepared baking dish.
7. Bake until heated through, 12 to 15 minutes. Check frequently, as overcooking will cause the tomatoes to split and fall apart. Serve 1 tomato per person.
SPAGHETTI CARBONARA My landlord in Rome, Spiro Rascovic, told me of the widespread starvation throughout the city during World War II before the American army swept in from the south and liberated it. His brother, Savo, was on the brink of dying when Spiro walked out into the piazza as an American jeep entered it by a side street and drove straight toward the group of men with whom Spiro was standing. A striking American named Dan Wickersham stood up and shouted, “Does anyone speak English here?” Spiro’s hand shot up and he said, “I do, sir.” Captain Wickersham motioned for Spiro to get in the jeep.
They drove to headquarters just south of Rome, and when Wickersham led Spiro through a mess tent, Spiro almost fainted at the smell of food. They passed a corporal grilling steaks, and Spiro stopped Captain Wickersham and said, “Please, my brother and I have not eaten for days.” Wickersham grabbed six uncooked steaks and gave them to Spiro, who told me, all those years later, “The great Captain Wickersham saved the life of my brother and me.”
Later, Spiro admitted to me that he rented the house to my family only because I reminded him of the great Dan Wickersham.
Spaghetti Carbonara was born at the same time that Wickersham was liberating Rome. My neighbors at the Piazza Farnese told me that the army of liberation brought eggs and bacon into Roman restaurants and asked the chefs to make them a pasta sauce. The Romans quickly adapted the ingredients into this delicious recipe, and my family often dined at a restaurant near the bakery and the olive man in the Campo de’ Fiori with “Carbonara” in its name. The Romans use pork jowl, but pork jowl is hard to come by in America. I normally use pancetta, but the finest grades of bacon work well.
• SERVES 4 AS A MAIN COURSE OR 6 AS A FIRST COURSE
1 pound thick-sliced bacon, chopped
1 pound spaghetti
4 large eggs
2 teaspoons freshly ground black pepper
1 cup plus 2 tablespons freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano or Pecorino
1. In a large heavy skillet over medium heat, cook the chopped bacon until crisp. Remove the bacon and reserve, saving the bacon drippings separately.
2. Cook the spaghetti according to package directions in abundantly salted boiling water. While the spaghetti is cooking, beat the eggs, pepper, and 2 tablespoons cheese together in a bowl.
3. When spaghetti is al dente, drain thoroughly and return to the pot. Toss with about 1 tablespoon of the bacon drippings (all the noodles should be coated).
4. Place the pasta in a warm serving bowl, add the egg mixture, and toss quickly. Add the reserved bacon and 1 cup grated cheese and toss again.
> 5. Serve at once, passing more cheese and the pepper grinder at the table.
In the early eighties, I brought my family to live in Italy based on an ill-conceived theory I have about the effects of expatriation on writing. I’ve always thought that writers should spend part of their lives testing themselves in the crucibles of alien cultures. As a Southern writer I’ve worried that my prose would smell too much of okra and sweet potatoes, that my vision would begin and end along the drifting, surreal avenues of small Southern towns, and that all my novels would be summed up in the phrase “the night the hogs ate Willie in South Carolina.” For a long time I’ve looked on Europe as a kind of finishing school for writers, a place for me to replenish exhausted metaphors and to refresh my dimming imagination before I sat down to write a new novel. What I didn’t know but learned fast is that living abroad is Europe’s revenge for our ancestors’ migrating to the United States.
We chose Italy because of the weather and because Italians seemed as friendly as Southerners. My mother raised a grinning child with a congenital need to be around other smiling people. We rented a house outside Rome in a compound surrounding a castle called Largo Olgiata. We moved to ancient Rome to reside in a modern villa built in 1971. Our house was made up of rhomboids and trapezoids and had all the warmth of a Rubik’s cube. But the house was authentically Italian, and we did without electricity, gas, telephone, heat, and water at various unbearably lengthy intervals during our time there. If something worked in Italy, it was considered accidental and temporary, and rather amusing.
Instead of writing deathless, flowing prose, I spent much of my time apologizing to my children for brutally uprooting them from the emerald city, Atlanta, and transporting them to Europe. Moving will never be easy for children, and no child will ever make it easy on his or her parents. I showed them the Alps, castles, medieval towns, the Sistine Chapel, the mustard crops of Dijon, the lake country of Italy, and all the glories of the Uffizi Palace, and they fixed me with their wounded, kidnapped eyes and wailed they would much rather be at Six Flags Over Georgia. High in a snow-glistening Alpine pass I heard one of the children whisper, “This is okay, but I like Stone Mountain a lot better.”
But the South was deeply in them. The fall we lived in Rome, Lenore and I took the children to Florence as a reward for not once mentioning Atlanta during a blissful three-hour period. We stayed at the exquisite hotel Villa la Massa, in Bagno a Ripoli, a converted palazzo overlooking the Arno River. The Villa la Massa was my candidate for the perfect hotel, with a splendid restaurant, a discreet staff, grapes ripening in the arbors, and a German shepherd named Otto who was multilingual and could say “good morning” in four languages. There was a small chapel in the garden, a bar with gold-leaf wallpaper overlooking the river, and brimming fishponds. The goldfish, wary of the resident cats, swished along the bottom like animated bullion. A perfect hotel can seduce even children, and I watched each of them solemnly sign the leather-bound guest book in the hotel’s sitting room. When I signed the book as we left, I read my daughter’s note. She had loved the hotel but was holding fast to her identity. The note read: Megan Conroy Atlanta, Georgia. How ‘Bout Them Dawgs?
Yet education is a secret and indefinable thing, and I watched the effects of travel on my children, who changed, despite their allegiance to Atlanta. I had a feeling the sediments of Rome were going to rest in the hidden sills of their memories for years to come. While in Rome, they went to dinner with an Italian countess who had attended bullfights with Ernest Hemingway; drifted silently beside the tombs of popes; went to parties with their schoolmates, Soorig, Dariush, Atubia, and Jean-Franco; ate octopus (“It tastes like a tire, Dad”), prosciutto, finocchio (fennel), and a dozen different varieties of olives and olive oils; tasted wine from almost every district in Italy; sledded in the Apennines with a writer who had written five novels; and lit votive candles in every church along the Corso in Rome. (They prayed they would soon return to Atlanta.) I no longer told them that they’d someday regret not getting more out of the Roman years. Rome did its work quietly on all of us, and there was nothing we could do about it except be grateful.
My youngest daughter, Susannah Ansley, was born on December 7 at Salvator Mundi International Hospital in Rome. I became the first Southern writer I’ve ever known who’s the father of an Italian citizen. She was delivered by cesarean section in the city where Julius Caesar drew his first breath by the same method more than two thousand years ago. When Sister Magdolena emerged from the operating room she carried an inert bundle in her arms and passed me without saying a word or nodding in my direction. Her face was covered with a gauze mask and the baby, ominously silent, lay still beneath a white blanket that covered her face. I trailed after Sister Magdolena until she came to a small chapel. She entered, held the child aloft, and genuflected before a crucifix.
“Sister,” I asked, “I hate to bother you, but can I ask you a question?”
“Sì,” she answered through gauze.
“Is this my baby?”
“Sì.”
“Sister Magdolena, is the baby alive?”
“Sì. Big. Molto grande. Tre kilos, sette cento.”
“Can I see the baby?”
“No, signore. You have many germs in the mouth.”
I could have lived in Italy for a hundred years and never known the true weight of tre kilos, sette cento. Later, an American friend with a calculator informed me that Susannah weighed eight pounds, three ounces. I called my mother that night and told her that the family had produced another Roman. My mother was born in Rome, Georgia, and the binding of the two Romes provided a pure associative joy.
When she was old enough to understand, and we were back in the South, I told Susannah about Rome and her first days on earth and the friends who came to see her in the hospital. I told her why we went to Rome and how the city changed us forever. That is the singular gift of travel: it changes you because it gives you more to celebrate, to cherish, and to remember. I told Susannah how Italy changed me and changed how I looked at the world. It made me confront the essence of my being Southern. It had nothing to do with geography; it had everything to do with my own personal view of the world.
When I refer to myself as Southern, I am talking about the part of myself that is most deeply human and deeply feeling. It is the part of me that connects most intimately and cordially with the family of humankind. There are qualities of grace and friendship and courtesy that will always seem essentially Southern to me, no matter where I encounter them on the road. Then I told my daughter that I never appreciated the South until I left it for the first time. And that the reason you travel is to find out who you really are and what you really believe. I came to understand that the country of Italy produced Michelangelo, da Vinci, Dante, Garibaldi, and most significantly, for the history of my family, because of accident and writing and a need for definition, a pretty black-haired Roman named Susannah Ansley Conroy
ITALIAN SAUSAGE WITH CRISPY SWEET POTATOES AND WILTED BROCCOLI RABE • SERVES 4
3 large sweet potatoes (about 3 pounds), peeled and sliced into ¼-inch medallions
Olive oil
1 lemon, halved
Coarse or kosher salt and coarsely ground black pepper
3 pounds hot Italian sausage (in one piece)
Two 1½-pound bunches broccoli rabe, trimmed, washed, dried, and cut into 1-inch pieces
1. Preheat the oven to 400°F.
2. Toss the sweet potato slices with olive oil until lightly coated (do not drench). Add the juice of half a lemon and salt and pepper to taste. Divide and transfer to two baking pans. (Overcrowding will prevent the potatoes from browning.) Roast until golden brown, about 20 minutes, turning the slices over halfway through. Set aside.
3. Lower the oven temperature to 350°F.
4. Loosely coil the sausage into a large ovenproof skillet (packing it too tightly will prevent the sausage from cooking evenly). Prick the casing with a fork or the tip of a sharp paring kn
ife (you want the sausage to provide cooking liquid for the broccoli rabe) and place the skillet in the oven until the sausage is cooked through, 20 to 25 minutes. Transfer the sausage to a cutting board and loosely cover with aluminum foil.
5. Return the potatoes to the oven.
6. Transfer the hot skillet (be careful; the handle will also be hot) to the top of the stove over moderate heat and bring the sausage cooking liquid to a low simmer. Immediately add the broccoli rabe (this must be done slowly because the skillet will be very full until the broccoli rabe begins to wilt), squeeze the remaining half a lemon over the greens, and cook until crisp-tender, about 3 minutes. Transfer to serving dishes.
7. Cut the sausage into serving-size pieces and place on top of the greens. Tuck the warm potato medallions alongside and serve immediately.
ROASTED FIGS WITH FRASCATI ZABAGLIONE When my daughter was born in Rome, Italy, on December 7, 1981, I sent telegrams to the United States to the houses of Bo Marks and Mike Devito. The telegrams said, “The first true Italian has been born to our room, and her name is Susannah Ansley Conroy” For one week, until I registered her with the questora, Susannah was an Italian citizen, and I rejoiced in that sweet fact. I was the first to father an Italian child in the history of the Conroy family, and all the surprises and astonishments and switchbacks of fate and history lay contained in the joy of her birth.
While living in Italy, I grew familiar with all the small-change bigotries that the Italians from different regions have for one another. When I told an elegant Milanese businessman that I lived in Rome he sneered and said, “Africa,” summing up the northern Italians’ contempt for those in the south. I remembered Bo-Pig and Mike-Swine warning me about the provenance of each other’s families when we roomed together at The Citadel.