Gastronomique: Just Bite Me
First order of business first, we run a correction. We described last week’s place Coryia Hot Pot City as Korean, as it reminded us of Brothers and such bbq places. We were oh so wrong, we hid in shame for a week. Thanks for reader Mihi for putting our nose in our doodoo, and telling us the place is more, like, Taiwanese.
This week, at Gastronomique, we went and educated ourselves about Italy. We actually traveled there last week, and had a wonderful time, until we went to the Mechanics Institute. There, Carol Field told us that Italy was not what it used to be, and we had missed it by 50 years.
Carol is a San Francisco writer, who splits her time between the city and the Italian countryside. She just wrote a book, which she was signing at the Mechanics Institute, Italy in Small Bites (HarperCollins). Her talk was accompanied by a tasting, which was reason enough for us to go. Never would we say no to free food. MUNI thwarted our plan, and while we were fashionably late, we missed on the little tapas thingies that were offered: a full room of punctual people had already feasted on them.
That, and we had to stand way in the back, next to the bar, with hardly a line of sight to the diminutive speaker. She was talking about these small dishes, mostly simple peasant spreads to put on bread or polenta, with a lot of passion. She went on for an hour, pretty much ad libbing the whole time. Merende are the Italian equivalent of tapas, and many are regional traditional dishes that we cannot find here in San Francisco.
Her motto: “stale bread is an opportunity”; she would tell the story of this Italian cameraman eating stale bread rubbed with garlic, a little bit of olive oil and a few grains of salt every day while she was shooting a documentary for PBS. She would mention how to turn stale bread into a delicious sweet bread pudding with raisins, grapes, apple chunks and, yes, rosemary.
Carol was amused to later see the everyday food of the Italian cameraman in the seventies become trendy bruschetta in restaurants in the U.S. She presents herself as an anthropologist, and her book as an effort to collect traditional recipes, which are disappearing. Most of these recipes hark back to a time when Italy was dirt poor, post WWII, and still fragmented in more regional interests. Economic development and globalization and modern communications have slowly helped these traditional dishes to disappear. When she was asking grandmothers about their merende recipes, she recalls, they did not fathom one could make a book on the topic. They were all convinced that there could be only one recipe in the book: theirs. They would not know that someone could or would prepare it differently a few kilometers away, as they themselves would not travel these distances.
In San Francisco, Carol conferred the Italian Seal of Authenticity to two places: Delfina, which serves wonderful food, says she, and A16, whose pizza chef was certified in Naples to make authentic Neapolitan-style pizza. We love the braised rib with polenta and the squid salad on a bed of white beans at Delfina, so we can only concur with Carol’s recommendations.
When we left the Mechanics Institute, we were yearning for some Italian small bite really bad. Luck befell us when we realized that Emporio Rulli now had an outlet on Union Square, just a block away. We usually tend to avoid the square and its tourists, so we cannot tell how long it has been there. We would have avoided the shop like it was the Cheesecake Factory, had not our friends from Marin brought us some cakes from the Larkspur Emporio Rulli, which were out of this world. A little budino –an oval tart filled with a cheese pudding, $2.90- seemed like the perfect ending for our little Italian trip. And boy, despite the fact that it was 8pm and the budino must have waited for us the whole day, it sure was.
Emporio Rulli
Stockton Street Pavilion, on Union Square
Also at 2300 Chestnut Street @Scott
and in Larkspur at: 464 Magnolia Avenue
(415) 923-6464