It’s a real sign of summer: fields and fields of lupine, mostly summer-sky blue but dotted with white and occasional pink spears, all up and down the coast of Maine and deep into the interior. The first spike sighted always makes me smile but the rolling fields that blossom along roadsides and meadow edges leave me slack-jawed at the spectacle. Unfortunately, almost all of this is what’s called big-leaf lupine (Lupinus polyphyllus), as the Maine Botanical Gardens website informs us, and, gorgeous as it is, it is an aggressive invader that is pushing out our native sundial lupine (Lupinus perennis), which is on the verge of extinction. If you’re interested in contributing to the revival of native lupine, the Wild Seed Project is a good place to start.

And speaking of connections, which I am about to do, this was the table decor at a Sunday lunch recently at East Forty Farm, all grasses and flowers gathered from the meadows where their herd of Jerseys graze in mammalian contentment. These cows are fed not just on alfalfa but on a complex combination of flowers (daisies, buttercups), legumes (clover, vetch), and an assortment of other natural vegetation that all goes to make a diet for rich and fragrant butter and cheese.

Several events in recent weeks have led me to think more about the networks that connect us all, the threads of community and humanity, the links that bind us to a place, or a person, or a group of people. One was a devastating explosion in a small rural community near my Maine home, the other a death, not unexpected but deeply mourned around the world. And finally, a new connection, established through that great network of Substack.

I’ll start with the huge explosion that tore through a historic lumber yard not far from where I live on the coast of Maine. Local fire crews were battling a quickly spreading blaze when a silo packed with wood chips and sawdust exploded like a horrific bomb, instantly killing one young fireman and injuring scores of other first responders, many critically. Fire brigades, emergency medical teams, and life-flight helicopters responded from all across the area, rescuing the injured, transporting them to nearby hospitals, which were quickly overwhelmed, then to burn units as far away as Portland and Boston, even as ground crews continued to struggle with the spreading fire.

It was an overwhelming response but not unexpected in Maine where, we like to say, for all our size, we’re just one big small town. When something goes wrong, and in this case something went majorly wrong, there’s an immediate outpouring of help as people pitch in, rush to the scene, ready to assist, and in the aftermath to contribute whatever can be scraped together to cover the enormous costs to individuals, families, enterprises, and communities. Finally, in the end, to help with the healing—with money, with food, but most of all with arms, both actual and figurative, wrapped around each other. Sometimes what the world needs most is a warm and comforting embrace, a connection.

What this horrific accident told me, the lesson I took away, is this: For all our constant wrangling and bickering (we are in the midst of an intensely disputatious electoral season), for all our backbiting, our finger pointing, our accusations of bad faith, we are still a community, our ties are still strong, our links are unbroken, at least for now, and when tragedy happens, we don’t question motive, we just move to help.

Those networks, it turns out, don’t just connect humans one to another, mind to mind, soul to soul to soul, they exist also in the natural world and in places where most of us had never expected it or experienced it—that is, in the world of plants and trees and growing things, from stately elms and pine trees to the crowded and often voluptuous world of the understory to the mycelium that stretches below the surface and constantly vibrates with messages, transmitted, unseen, among beings. There’s some comfort, at least for me, in the thought of that unbreakable connection.

Another network that ties us together was forged by a remarkable visionary, a man who died last month but who had what I hope will be a lasting impact. That man was Carlo Petrini who forged the worldwide network called Slow Food. Others have written about him, how they first met him, how they knew him or worked with him, but I think his memory will be strongest in some of the most obscure parts of the globe where, perhaps, Petrini himself never set foot and yet his ideas resonate, ideas about food and its importance to those who grow it, cultivate it, create it, cook it, and share it. Food, Petrini recognized, is nourishment on many different levels from the physical to the spiritual, and it is a vital part of the network that keeps us connected to one another.

I think my friend Marjorie Shaw, now on Substack at insidersitaly@substack.com (and I urge you to subscribe and read Marjorie regularly if you care about Italy)--Marjorie said it best in her tribute to Petrini: “He understood . . . that food was not an isolated cultural domain, but a concentration of labour, ecology, inequality, and power. And while he was deeply rooted in and attached to the Langhe, in Piedmont, he was as at home speaking to a Napa Valley farmer as he was to an English prince as he was to a rural community of women in Peru. ‘Sediamoci a tavola’, he would say. Let us sit down at the table.”

Petrini, in his genius, recognized what connects us all, because, Marjorie notes, through Slow Food and its sister organization Terra Madre, he “created a living network connecting small-scale producers, indigenous communities, cooks, and academics across more than 150 countries, . . . held together by the conviction that, despite enormous challenges, food systems could still be rebuilt from the ground up.”

Food is connected to place, and place is connected to memory, and memory is what ties us to each other—the network, again, that connects us all.

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Substack is developing into just such a network—and I’m speaking now only about food, although I recognize that there are many networks, often braided together, on Substack—people who care about the arts, or music, or 18^th century English literature, or basketball or UFC or jazz or-- well, you get the picture. One of the great pleasures I’ve had as a contributor is that very business of connecting. Readers have become friends and long-lost friends have become readers, but there has also been a sense of re-connection with the world of food writers, those of us who make a living, slender as it is, by writing about food. With the disappearance of major food magazines and extended food sections of important newspapers, I’ve lost a sense of being part of the world that cares deeply about what we eat, where it comes from, how it’s prepared, and what new and old things we can do with it. So Substack helps a lot.

Last week I met a new friend from Substack, Domenica Marchetti, who writes prolifically about all things Italian, but especially about food. Traveling in Maine to promote her delightful new book, Italian Cookies:

It’s a wide-ranging compilation through all the magnificently varied world of Italian cookies, from the familiar biscotti di Prato to the exotic to the truly unknown except perhaps in some small corner of Italy undiscovered by international travel where Domenica has scoped it out. She is italiana genuina, cento per cento, as we say, and has written several other books about Italian cuisine. Among them, my all-time favorite is Preserving Italy, which, like the cookie book, takes a pan-Italian look at all the multitude of ways that Italian cooks and chefs keep the harvest.

Domenica broke away from her book tour for lunch—not on the kitchen porch because it was still too chilly, but around the kitchen table. (Since you asked, I served a cold sorrel soup, using fresh sorrel from the garden, and lobster-potato salad with a mustardy vinaigrette, served on red Napa cabbage, a new find from the farmers market.)

So what did we talk about over our long lunch? Changes—in Italy, in Italian food and travel, the struggle to preserve culture and its hallmark cuisine, the old ways of doing things, the invasion of new ideas and products, and the balance that Italians struggle to maintain between national and regional identity, so strongly tied to food traditions, versus a kind of xenophobic defense of People Like Us. Nationalism can be as ugly as racism and Italians are not innocent of either, as communities seek to ban invasive species like kebab shops and curry houses. And yet, there is so much to be valued, as Carlo Petrini knew more than anyone, in the strong traditions that have been handed down, often over generations. Connection or distinction? It’s a conundrum.

Catch up with Domenica on her Substack page, Buona Domenica, where you’ll also find very sage wine advice from her husband Scott Vance.

I loved all the recipes in Italian Cookies and tried several, including a favorite from Venice, the cornmeal (think polenta) cookies called zaletti. But when I spied the recipe for reginelle, a lean sort of shortbread that is distinctively coated with sesame seeds, I leapt into it. Reginelle come from Sicily, not surprising given the Arab influences on Sicilian food—and the Arab love for sesame in all its guises. So far, so good. But what swept me up was my memory of a favorite pastry-coffee shop in Manhattan’s East Village, Veniero’s of venerable reputation. There the cookies are called biscotti regina and are said to be, inevitably, a favorite of Queen Margherita of Savoia who must have been enormous if she consumed all the foods that are attributed to her (i.e., pizza margherita, q.v.). But a better story, from the Veniero’s website, has to do with Frank Sinatra, a huge fan of the regina biscotti—but he liked them toasted, it was his secret to make a good thing even better.

So of course I put the reginelle I’d made for our lunch into the toaster oven for just a few minutes to turn them even more golden and crisp. And you know what? Old Blue Eyes was right, and Domenica agreed with me.

Following is the recipe for Domenica Marchetti’s reginelle, which are delicious, toasted or not. Paid subscribers have access to it. For the rest, you’ll have to become a paying subscriber—or buy Domenica’s cookbook.

Or why not do both?

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NB: I call my Tuscan village Montanare which is unrelated to its actual name. This is to protect the identity of the community itself and the privacy of the people who lived there, many of whom are still there to this day. I could just call it X but it seems humiliating for a place I’ve loved and cherished. Montanare it shall be. I offer this piece, slightly edited from what I wrote a few years ago, because it’s possibly the introduction to a book I’m working on.

Back in 1972, more than half a century ago, together with my then husband, I paid the equivalent in Italian lire of about $5,000 and thereby gained possession of a tumbled down stone cottage and a plot of land measuring ten hectares (25 acres) in a remote Tuscan mountain community that I call Montanare. How, I am sometimes asked, were we able to do that?

The reason is simple: All over Tuscany in the 1960’s and ‘70’s the contadini, peasant farmers, were abandoning the land, fleeing the countryside and flocking to towns and cities where work was available, tough work, yes, but not as tough as hoeing a living from the stony, unyielding ground of these mountains. Furthermore, at the end of the month the worker went home with a busta paga, a paycheck, something no farmer would ever see.

I have to pause for a small but critical Italian history lesson here. Tuscany, since at least the 13^th century and possibly as long ago as the ninth, that is, for a thousand years or more, was the home to an economic system called mezzadria. (It existed in other parts of central and northern Italy too, but it was so endemic in Tuscany that in the early 20^thcentury, almost half of all Tuscan farmland still operated under this system.) Mezzadria was a form of share cropping that made sense, at least superficially. The land owner, the padrone, owned the fields and the housing, and supplied the seeds and the necessary if rudimentary equipment to farm the land, in return for which the mezzadro or contadino, the peasant farmer, supplied the labor. The landlord received half of everything that was produced--half the wheat, half the wine, half the oil, half the lettuces and eggs and tomatoes, and when a ewe produced two lambs, the landlord got one. And if, as sometimes happened, the ewe produced only one lamb, the landlord, the padrone, got it, along with half the beans even when there were only enough beans to keep the contadino’s family fed throughout the winter. You get the picture. If superficially mezzadria made sense, in practice, in actuality, it was profoundly unjust. Moreover, it was self-perpetuating over the centuries.

So that was mezzadria. The word comes from Latin medius, Italian mezzo, meaning half. In the best of cases, the padroni worked closely with their mezzadri, their contadini, to determine what would be cultivated, grown, and harvested. If you’ve read Iris Origo’s War in Val d’Orcia or A Chill in the Air, you will understand mezzadria as Marchesa Origo did. She and her husband worked diligently with the peasant farmers who lived on their land, improving farming methods and enhancing the lives of the men, women, and children, establishing schools, promoting literacy, developing up-to-date sanitation systems, and so forth. These were the families, often multi-generational, who lived at La Foce, the Origos’ 4,000-acre estate in the hill country south of Siena. But the Origos were an exception. More often, one hears of very different situations, padroni who were strict masters, rigid in their demands (taking the fattest chickens, the best of the wheat for instance), treating the contadini as serfs and fearfully resisting any changes or improvements, any reforms that might disturb the waters and possibly induce the contadini to rebel, perhaps to overthrow the system.

Eventually this deeply unfair but deeply embedded situation had to change, and as Italy picked itself up from the ruins of World War II and the Fascist decades, a great wave of reform swept over the country. At that point, large estates were broken up and farming shifted from local subsistence economies, family-centered and based on sharecropping, to modern consumer-based, market-driven agricultural capitalism. Interestingly, the surge in production of high-quality Tuscan wines and extra-virgin olive oil can be dated to this same period and for many of the same reasons. A contadino might make a first-class vino rosso but he could never produce enough of it to satisfy his family and his padrone, as well as a distant national or international market. Consolidation of land, new ideas about wine-making, broader outreach, and fresh infusions of cash helped to make the difference.

But the upshot was that Tuscans, along with a great number of other rural Italians, left their farms in droves, deserted them, moved away.

And that’s how my family came to buy one of those deserted farms, 25 acres of steep, rocky, heavily forested land with a tumble-down farmhouse, for a mere $5,000. Even half a century ago, that was pretty astonishing. A knowledgeable Italian friend, a prosperous fruit and vegetable farmer with roots deep in the rich soil of the Po valley, was astonished: “I would not believe that anywhere in Italy,” he said, “you could find ten hectares of land at that price.”

Montanare is still to this day a very small hamlet, the center of a series of even smaller communities stretching out below the old Roman road along the ridge line of the montagna cortonese, the hills east of Cortona. Despite its size, like similar rural communities around the world, it’s packed with stories, with a history that goes back generations, incorporating incest, murder, rape, internecine feuds, and romances that blossomed into long-standing love affairs. Communities like Montanare--and larger ones, even much larger ones, like Arezzo and Siena and Florence--illustrate what Italians call campanilismo, a kind of tribal loyalty to the local community, defined as including those close enough to hear the bells of the local campanile, the church tower. Loyalty goes first to the family, then to the folks within the sound of the bells, only then to the region, and way, way down the list to the nation itself. In fact, the people we outsiders call Italians are far more likely to call themselves Romans or Venetians or Sicilians or whatever. Here in Montanare, within a few kilometers of the Umbrian border, my neighbors are quick to describe themselves as Tuscan. Their dialect is Tuscan, their cooking is Tuscan, and their values are Tuscan too.

An example: Nita, my next-farm neighbor, resisted sending her tiny granddaughter to school in Cortona. “It’s too far,” she said, “too long to spend on the bus.” I suggested the asilo, the nursery school, down the valley in the next village which was only a few miles away. “No,” said Nita, “it’s in Umbria. She’d start talking like an Umbrian, quack-quack-quack. I can’t have that.”

Not everyone in Montanare was a contadino, share-cropping someone else’s land. Most of my neighbors actually farmed their own small fields and logged their own woodlots. But the farm we acquired, which was called Pian d’Arcello in the catasto records in Cortona, had indeed been part of a larger holding and had operated traditionally under mezzadria. Gianfranco Valentini, from whom we bought the place, had inherited it along with other properties when his father passed away years earlier. Franco himself, however, had only a peripheral interest in farming. Movie star handsome, with an engaging smile, he was actually a high-priced veterinarian with a fancy clinic in Rome’s Piazza Navona where, it was said, he had treated Elizabeth Taylor’s dogs during the filming of Cleopatra. His estate was small but comfortable; it included the main house, the casa padronale, where he lived when he was up from Rome on holiday, and three smaller stone cottages with adjacent fields, widely dispersed across the mountainside; one of these would become ours but only after days of intense negotiation, with an American friend doing the translating.

The American friend was the reason my husband and I had come to this remote place. A few years earlier Bart and his wife Nonie, expatriate Americans, had bought a similar small, no longer productive farm in Montanare; when we came to visit they were hard at work on the necessary reconstruction. “Everything is for sale,” Bart reported, and he was right. That first afternoon, when we arrived, he pointed from the lawn in front of his house, indicating with his wine glass at least four properties on the broad slope of the mountain facing us. “And around that ridge,” he said, “there’s a whole village for sale.”

Most of these were not properties that had been in mezzadria—the land was too poor, the village too isolated, for anything substantive. But Franco Valentini was a proper padrone, albeit small-scale. By the time we arrived on the scene, however, there were very few contadini left to do the work on his holdings. Which was one reason why he was selling them off to apparently rich foreigners like us.

But there was another reason: With an advanced degree in veterinary medicine, even though he mostly occupied himself with the health of fancy pets of fancy Romans (and very fancy film stars), Franco had decided to invest in the scientific raising of pigs. He was in the process of constructing a large, extensive pig barn on his padronal property. The outside walls had already been painted an incandescent pink, so bright you could pick it out from across the mountain. All that was needed now were the young pigs to occupy it. And he needed money to finance the operation.

It was a time when, it seemed, all over the western world 60’s rebels had turned away from politics and were heading, in the words of the era, back to the land. It was the heyday of The Whole Earth Catalog, which we studied religiously, and of communes of religious or ethical or environmental inspiration, rising and falling with the tides of enthusiasm. In Maine the Nearings were preaching self-sufficiency, sustainability, and what they called the good life, living close to the land, building your own stone walls, growing at least your own parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme, if not grains, beans, and vegetables.

And what better place to accomplish that, it seemed to me, than a remote Tuscan village, 20 kilometers from the nearest town over a steep and curving mountain road? Here in Montanare, fresh water was supplied by wells and clear mountain springs, heat came from fireplaces stoked from the farmer’s own woodlot, electricity was available but only to houses directly on the communal highway, phone service was restricted to the local bottega, and food for the most part was produced, grown, and harvested right on the farm, including meat from pigs, chickens, rabbits, and a few small flocks of sheep. Even the flour, the wine, the olive oil, those Mediterranean staples, were the result of unstinting efforts by local farmers to produce a local supply.

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And so we set to negotiating with Franco Valentini, with our American friend translating while a mysterious local man sat alongside us. He was Bruno, one of many Brunos in a village where every second man seemed to bear that name. Our Bruno said nothing but observed it all as he chewed on a length of straw. On those balmy late-spring afternoons we sat outside beneath the shade trees in Franco’s yard and worked toward a settlement. We talked about the acreage, the barely accessible dirt track that led to our stone hovel, the need for water (electricity would not enter the picture for many years more). Together we argued in a pleasant but guarded way over whether we would pay $4,000 (our figure) or $6,000 (Franco’s request). And at the end of that time, Bruno, who had so far been a silent witness to all our discussions, spat out his straw, pushed back his greasy fedora, leaned in and seized Franco’s hand and that of my husband, brought them together with his own two hands wrapped around them, raised and lowered them rapidly three times, and droned or rather chanted: “Uno, due, tre, fatto!: One-two-three and it’s done.”

And we had the place for $5,000 or the equivalent, about 3 million Italian lire. And that single gesture set me on a path that I had never anticipated, and a love affair with a countryside and a culture that would only reveal itself in small, steady glimpses over the course of the next thirty, forty, fifty years. A year ago I made what I now realize would be my last time in Montanare and although I ache to be back there, reality, the reality of aging, of the difficulty of travel, of the impossibility of living in a three-story stone farmhouse all by myself at a distance of some 30 kilometers from the nearest ER, all that governs my life now and so I call up memories, which is what this story is about.

And this particular Bruno, with his old fedora and his perpetual blade of grass to chew on, it turned out, asI learned much later, he was a sensale, a traditional (but not official) mediator, a go-between whose role and function goes back over centuries and most likely at this late date exists in very few, very remote parts of Italy. I will tell you all about that another time.

Several years later, after we had restored the tumble-down cottage into a more reasonable place to live with our two small children, we celebrated its completion with a festa to which the entire village was invited, along with all the workers, and all the foreign residents who, like us, sensing a bargain, had seeped into the valley in the meantime. At the festa, of course, we served the traditional Tuscan treat for such occasions, a handsome porchetta, made from a whole young pig and prepared by Amerigo, a local lad who roasted pigs in his wood-burning oven and then drove a porchetta-laden food truck around from market to market on a weekly rotation, serving hearty slabs of meat to hungry shoppers. Here I offer a recipe for a similar treatment. It is not the same as the traditional porchetta, which should be stuffed with the pig’s liver and masses of garlic, bayleaves, and wild fennel pollen, then slowly roasted overnight in a wood-fired oven, but it’s as close as you might get in a modern American kitchen.

The recipe below, I want to stress, is not for an authentic porchetta but it will give you a sense of the possibilities. The seductive fragrance of wild fennel, garlic, and bayleaf are what’s important. As for the cut of meat, pork belly—it is not, I assure you, the stomach of the pig but rather the paunch or flank, the undercut of the animal from which pancetta and often bacon is made. This is a delicious cut because its layers of fat and lean, like the layers of puff pastry, lend considerable flavor and fragrance to the meat. You might not find pork belly in a standard American supermarket where everything comes precut and pre-wrapped, but if you don’t have a specialty butcher, look for a Chinese or other Asian market. Butchers in Asian neighborhoods will offer the cut with the skin, sometimes called the rind, attached, and that’s important. If the belly comes with rib bones, have them removed or remove them yourself, an easy chore at home, and add them to the stock pot.

If pork belly is not available, the recipe works just as well with a pork shoulder or butt, but be sure to have the outside rind or skin left on. That, roasted to a crisp crackling, is what gives porchetta its seductive crunch. In Italy, pork liver, chopped in savory chunks, is also added but that is almost impossible to find in American markets. I sometimes substitute chicken livers, but you could also omit the livers entirely if you wish.

Fennel pollen is much easier to find online than it was when I first started trying to recreate Tuscan recipes in the U.S. It is expensive but necessary for that true Tuscan flavor and a little goes a long way. In a pinch, you could substitute more widely available fennel seeds but the pollen has a distinctive warmth and roundness of aroma that the sharp-scented seeds lack. Market Hall Foods in Oakland offers wild fennel pollen straight from Tuscany, but with a little online searching you might be able to source a local product since wild fennel does indeed grow along California roadsides.

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It’s definitely, palpably, unmistakably, trending into summer on the coast of Maine, and it could not be more welcome. The lilacs are in flower (a little early this year) and peony buds are swelling, on the verge of bursting into extravagant bloom. In garden plots asparagus is coming up along with stout stalks of rhubarb and sorrel, alewives and elvers are running in a spawning frenzy up creeks and rivers, bees are buzzing, and, another sign of the season: it’s halibut time, blessed halibut, truly the finest fish of the North Atlantic, meaty and sweet and ready for the grill or the frying pan. Or even, as I had it at Nina June last night, in an elegant crudo, raw, thinly sliced, and fanned across a delicious bed of olive oil with tiny sweet radishes.

Coming after a long, cold, and difficult winter, this is a season of special luxury, voluptuous with the ripening fragrance of blossoms (Korean spice viburnum!) and with all the tones and shades of green on lawns and woods and waters—dark-green somber spruces, acid green trembling birch leaves, the green swirl of streams overflowing into harbors up and down the rocky coast.

On the river banks of the Medomak below Waldoboro, cows and their young calves are out on fresh greening pastures at East Forty Farm and cheese-maker Allison Lakin (she makes Lakin’s Gorges award-winning cheeses) is churning butter—and such butter, delicious butter, butter with an actual complex of flavors, such as you might not realize butter can provide.

I know, I’m a lifelong (almost) proponent of the virtues of extra-virgin olive oil but I am here to tell you that with butter of this quality, I’ll put butter on my toast, butter on my asparagus, and butter even on a smoked alewife if you give me one, boned, on a wedge of crusty bread. This is the kind of farmhouse butter that has almost disappeared from our tables, replaced by a smooth, bland spread that is what it is but, frankly, it isn’t much.

What makes Allison’s butter so tasty that I consume it almost like cheese? Butter, when it’s minimally processed, just churned from fresh Jersey cream, nothing added but salt, Allison explains—butter carries all the flavors of the milk. And this Jersey milk carries the flavors of the pasture, a carefully curated mixture of grasses managed by Allison’s partner Neal Foley. And the meadow grasses in turn carry the flavors of the soil.

Neal has been farming for more than three decades, most of that time herding dairy cattle. Most recently he’s been associated with PASA, a national organization that works with farmers across the country to improve techniques, including soil management, with a focus on environmentally sound practices and farming that’s based in communities rather than corporations. You see, “organic” doesn’t just begin with no spray, no added chemicals; rather, it goes deep into the soil, a rich medium for the things that grow and become in their turn feed for the animals that feed us. To watch Neal “read” a pasture is to experience a kind of superior intelligence at work. I am reminded of an Italian cheese-maker who recounted something like 115 different types of herbage in the pasture where his sheep grazed—that, he said, accounts for the flavor. Just so with Neal’s pasture, their cows’ productive output, and Allison’s cheeses—and her butter! It all begins with the earth and the grass that grows thereon. It’s all inter-connected.

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Where can you find Allison Lakin’s butter? For now, you have to be on the coast of Maine and even here, you have to be lucky. Best is to go straight to the source, East Forty Farm, and ask whoever picks up the phone (probably Allison, might be Neal, could be one of their cheerful assistants). Or send them an email. And while you’re ate it, check out their supply of ethically raised veal, beef, and pork (raised, like those fabled Parma pigs in Italy, on the whey from making cheese). (And don’t forget the cheeses—Prix de Diane is my personal favorite but the whole range is seductive.

In the kitchen, I’m working with all this harvest—asparagus, butter, rhubarb, sorrel, halibut, even alewives, and all the other greenery that’s coming along, day by day. Like minimally processed butter, I think the richness of spring is best expressed with minimal effort. Keep it simple, keep it straightforward, enjoy the direct flavors of what nature is offering you.

Asparagus: trim it, lay it flat in a high-sided skillet, barely cover it with lightly salted boiling water, and let it simmer till it’s just tender. Eat with fine butter (see above) or the best extra-virgin olive oil, a crunch of sea salt, maybe a few drops of lemon, nothing else.

Rhubarb: Make a compote to serve with fatty spring fish (salmon, tuna, fresh young mackerel) or with anything porkish. Trim the rhubarb and cut in one-inch lengths, combine with an equal quantity (by weight—use your scales) of sugar (maple if you have it) and simmer until soft and syrupy. Add a pinch of ground aromatics—cinnamon, clove, or cardamom—or a spoonful of freshly grated ginger.

Halibut: Easiest of all, buy a filet or halibut steaks. A pound of fish will serve 3 or 4, depending on what’s served with it. Pat the fish dry and coat lightly with olive oil. Then pound to a paste a mix of finely chopped garlic, parsley, lemon zest, black pepper, and lemon juice. Spread on the surface of each piece of fish and arrange the fish in a lightly oiled baking dish, top with bread crumbs or panko crumbs and dabs of butter. Roast at 375 – 400ºF (175 - 200º C) for 15 minutes, then turn on the broiler to crisp and toast the top layer. Serve with some of that rhubarb compote above.

Alewives (smoked): You won’t be able to find these unless you discover some little hidden outpost on the coast of Maine (Jess’s Market in Rockland, which I mention frequently as my seafood destination, sometimes has smoked alewives in season); if you find them, split them apart, remove any obvious bones, spread Allison Lakin’s good butter lavishly on a crusty piece of whole-grain sourdough bread and arrange the alewife filets on top. Consume with well-chilled Maine lager.

To be continued. . . .

SKATE is one of those fish I cook very seldom, mostly because I don’t often come across the real thing, so infrequently in fact that, when I do find the pearly wings of fresh skate at my local fish monger, I have to go back to a few cookbooks and double-check the recipe. Not that cooking skate is difficult at all, but the question always is: Do I poach the skate wings before saucing them, or do I sear them in the black iron skillet and then build the sauce right in the pan? Sometimes I’ve done it one way and sometimes the other.

This time I came home from Jess’s, my cherished fish market in the South End of Rockland, with three beautiful wings, alabaster colored with hints of lavender and rose along the edges, and so I did an experiment. I poached one of the wings in acidulated water (just plain water with salt and a couple glugs of white vinegar plus sprigs of thyme and bayleaves added to it) and I seared the other two wings in a very hot skillet with a splotch of olive oil over the bottom. And so, dear cook, I can state with authority that, unless you happen to have an unreasonably large and thick wing of skate, the searing method is really better by far. As with most techniques that add a little browning to the flesh, be it fish, meat, or eggplant, it’s all the tastier for that Maillard edge.

But first, I lined up my mise-en-place for raie au beurre noir, skate in black butter, the classic French preparation that one used to find on the menu in all those bistros back when one found bistros with classic menus—not so easy these days though there are a few still tucked into hidden corners of Paris or New York, Lyons or even London. The recipe goes very fast so it’s important to have the mise, as the chefs say, all set up next to the stove. This mise consists of the following: a handful of finely chopped parsley, a slightly smaller handful of chopped capers (rinsed under running water if they’re the salt-packed kind), a couple of ounces—say half a stick—of unsalted butter, and more of that vinegar, either white-wine or apple-cider but not red-wine vinegar as it would give the sauce a disturbing color.

The skate wings I buy at Jess’s, and what you will most likely find at any good fish monger in New England or the northeast, have been skinned and the cartilage removed so they’re practically ready to eat. Don’t ask me, please, how to skin the critter—I have no idea. What I look for when I buy skate, apart from the advance prep, is the clear, almost lustrous color and a good fresh fragrance. If there’s the slightest hint of ammonia, it’s not for me. At Jess’s, the skate is fresh, locally caught, sustainably harvested, and it’s one of the cheapest fish in the market. It’s also an amiable fish, sweet and tender, so even picky eaters will find it acceptable. Last week I paid $9.99 a pound. It’s entirely edible, with no bones to discard, so a pound or a little over is plenty for three people. That is a small price to pay for a truly elegant dish.

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Since raie au beurre noir must be served just at the moment the sauce is done and poured over the fish, not a moment later, make sure your guests are seated, bibs tucked in, knives and forks at the ready. Give them a small salad to keep them occupied while you stand at the stove.

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Road Trips

Like Toad, my father, may he RIP, loved to hop in the car and drive. . . anywhere at all. He suffered mightily throughout gas rationing in World War II which restricted our travel to just one annual trip up, as we said, to Boston. In the late spring of 1946, with the war finally over and rationing lifted, he bundled wife and kiddies into the convertible, lowered the top, and took off for Canada. Truth to tell, we didn’t get very far. We followed more or less the route of Benedict Arnold’s march on Quebec in 1775. I don’t know if that was the intention, and I don’t know if my dad wanted to go all the way (which we did, at another time), but our trip ended at Lac Mégantic, just over the border from the North Woods frontier station of Coburn Gore. I know it was June because it was black fly season. How do I know that? Because all along the single main street of Mégantic, in front of the little houses with their steeply angled roofs, people sat on their porches amid great billowing clouds of murky smoke from smudge pots, set to light to keep the black flies away. They sat in the late evening alpenglow and chatted comfortably back and forth across the lawns and garden plots while the dark smoke rose and their children tumbled and played, kicked balls, rode bikes, and spoke French to each other. How on earth, I wondered, could they understand what they were saying?

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That trip has stayed in my mind all these years, not least because it was my very first encounter with a “foreign” culture, one that spoke an entirely different language from what I knew.

I thought about that first trip a lot this past weekend when my daughter and I made a quick drive over to Canada’s Eastern Townships to try a restaurant that Ed Behr had praised in his Substack, The Art of Eating. You can read his glowingly intelligent review here. The restaurant, Parcelles, is in the town of Austin, right on Lake Memphramegog, and surprisingly (at least to me) only four and a half hours from our home turf on the coast of Maine, just a little more than a trip “up” to Boston. And, as the old Michelin guides used to say, ça vaut le voyage, it’s worth the trip.

The restaurant is simple but elegant, with the stark minimalist glamor we’ve come to think of as Scandinavian but might as well be called Canadian. Nestled in a landscape of rolling fields, orchards, and expansive vegetable gardens (seeds still tucked firmly in the soil), with a distant glimpse of the lake, it boasts a menu of inventive delight that’s never over-the-top, never showing off for the Instagram set. No, under the direction of Chef Domenic Labelle, this is serious food, combined to show off nothing but the distinctive character of the ingredients. And the ingredients? Entirely appropriate to the time and the place, starting with a pitcher on each table holding not, as I had thought, extra-virgin olive oil but rather freshly made and equally aromatic maple syrup. “Pour it on,” said our host, the chef, as we were served a wedge of quiche-like tart made of cheese and thin slices of rutabaga. ”Yes, yes,” at my skeptical look. “It’s the Quebecois way.” And so we did, a thin thread, just like that drizzle of olive oil and it was just the right touch. Vegetables like green radishes (similar to daikon), rutabaga, Jerusalem artichoke, cabbage and celery root are totally in keeping with this early spring season and, released from their old-fashioned homeliness into something fresh and new, just by combining them in interesting ways. The daikon/green radish, for instance, with delicate shreds of sweet snow crab and little pickled coriander buds, made a combination to tease the palate in the nicest possible way. But my favorite—and it was hard to settle on a favorite, believe me—was the deeply flavorful roast pork, like a confit, rich and tender, with a puree of celery root that melted next to the meatiness of the pork. If the menu looks daunting, it comes in adequately sized portions and well spaced so you never have that longing for it to end (a longing I experienced in certain over-the-top Napa Valley restaurants, where in my notebook I had scrawled “Please, can I go home now?”).

Parcelles is open weekends only (although check as the schedule may change in summertime) and reservations are essential. Go to the website here. The fixed-price menu is a bargain at $100Canadian, wine and tips not included. Rarely does one find such exquisite food for such a price. With only 25 diners at $100 each, I said to my daughter: “How can he do it? How does he pay the bills?”

“One thing he doesn’t have to worry about,” Sara said, “nor does anyone on his staff, is health care. In Canada, it’s free.”

Point very well taken. Keep that in mind. (You know, I don’t get into politics much in these posts but sometimes it is just unavoidable.)

Dandelion Greens

Back home, then, it’s the season for dandelion greens. My mother always dug what she called a mess of greens, cooked them with something pork-ish (ham bone or salt pork or bacon chunks), and served them with vinegar. “Iron,” she said, “that’s what’s in dandelions and that’s what you need at this time of the year. Tired blood needs iron.” She had a special paring knife she kept to slice right down under the roots. Nowadays I don’t dig dandelion greens, although I used to, but my knees object to the effort. Still, I can buy them freshly dug from my local farm stand, Beth’s, at White Oak Farms in Warren. And I do, even though I may be the only person who understands their appeal.

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These are not the long, tough, straggly greens sometimes sold in supermarket produce sections as dandelions, no these are small clusters, harvested before the buds break into flower. To my palate, they are refreshingly bitter, with a flavor that speaks to mineral goodness. My French-American friend François de Melogue insists on consuming them the way they do in a deservedly famous salade from Lyons, dressed with lardons of good bacon sautéed and then the fat poured over the raw greens. With a dash of Burgundian vinegar and a few crisp croutons, it is a worthy dish.

But I prefer the old-fashioned New England treatment of rinsing them thoroughly, then cooking them in the moisture clinging to the leaves, maybe with a few unorthodox cloves of garlic crushed and added to the mix and of course the inevitable glug of olive oil. Once they are totally softened, they’re ready for the vinegar treatment, just a dash, and make sure it’s a really good aged wine or apple cider vinegar. You can eat them hot, perhaps with a chunk of braised pork, or let them cool to room temperature and serve them as a cooked salad. Whichever you do, you will feel that iron surging through your veins and you will get up from the table ready to do great things. Weed the garden. Transplant the seedlings. Rake the lawn. Or go for a long bike ride in the spring sunshine.

What To Read (and Cook) Next

Are you planning a trip to Greece this summer? Maybe a quiet off-the-beaten-path retreat on Sifnos or Symi, or perhaps you’re looking for something more millennial, like dancing all night and sleeping all day on Mykonos. Whatever, wherever, you will doubtless transit Athens where, if you’re like me, you’ll stop to render worshipful homage to the Parthenon and, if you’re in gamba, as Italians say, meaning totally with-it, you’ll pay a visit to the National Museum and will not miss the Museum of Cycladic Art. (At the latter, you’ll have to duck past the utter banality of Jeff Koons’s monumental plastic Venus but hopefully it may be gone by the time you get there.).

All that sight-seeing is uplifting but of course, again if you’re like me, you’ll need something to eat, something to drink, and a competent guide to take you there. I can think of no one I’d trust in that category more than Diane Kochilas, Greek-American food writer and television chef who went back home to Greece several decades ago and has spent her time since digging deep into Greek culture and Greek cuisine and coming up with wonderful things.

You may know Diane from her many cookbooks, including the encyclopedic Glorious Foods of Greece, or from her television show, My Greek Table, which just completed its fifth season on public broadcasting. You may think you know her, you may even think you know the ancient city of Athens, but when you approach her new cookbook, Athens: A Cookbook, you’ll find a fresh, wide-ranging, and spirited take on the historic capital. “Food, Stories, Love” is the subtitle and although it’s billed as a cookbook, I intend to pack it in my bag for my next trip for all the stories, the information, and the lore of a place the author so clearly loves and wants to share with the world.

Take saganaki, just for instance, that fried and flambéed cheesy staple of Greek restaurants all over the U.S. Did you know it’s actually the name of a Turkish cooking vessel, a shallow, two-handled frying pan called a sahan? And that an Athenian saganaki might well be a sumptuous dish of eggs and spiced-beef pasturma, scrambled in butter, with not a shred of halloumi cheese in sight?

That’s the old Athens. But you might equally discover something entirely new, like the sushi dolmades, grape leaves stuffed with sashimi-grade tuna and flavored with dill and ouzo, for a cross-cultural experience at Argoura, a seafood restaurant.

Argoura is just one of the favorite places Diane cites in the pages of this book. There are tavernas like Diporto (“two doors”) “on the corner of Socratous and Theatrou streets in the heart of the Central Market area”; or Karavitis in Pangrati, Kitsoulas in Halandri, or the Katsogiannis family taverna in Drapetsona, southwestern Piraeus.

My one criticism of the book? I wish the publisher had seen fit to include a list of addresses for such notable spots, whether Michelin-starred restaurants or obscure holes-in-the-wall, to make it easier to find them. But after all isn’t that why you carry your phone? When in doubt, just ask Siri, or Alexa, or Claude!

Unusually for a cookbook, Athens is refreshingly honest about Greek history, especially modern, post-war Greece with its multitude of problems, from corruption and bad government, to economic depression as Europe imposed tough financial restrictions, forcing the Greeks to get their national house in order. And now? Athens, Diane says, has grown up, grown through its troubles, to emerge with confidence, a city that is “a great paradigm for good Mediterranean living and eating. . . an amazing food city, where Greeks and global flavors mesh seamlessly.”

And it’s worth doing what Diane suggests, don’t just make Athens a 24-hour stopover en route to a glamorous island retreat. I’m booking my ticket tomorrow, and I’m packing a copy of Athens in my bag. Meanwhile, I’m planning to make some Keftedes, meatballs of beef and pork, flavored with mint and Greek oregano, cooked in a tomato-ouzo sauce, and just pretend I’m sitting at an outside table at Dora Stavridou’s taverna in the working-class Athenian neighborhood of Drapetsona. (Thanks to Diane, I’ve included the recipe below the pay wall for all you paying subscribers.)

Στην υγειά σας!

Another quote from Toad, to send you on your way: “O what a flowery track lies spread before me, henceforth! What dust-clouds shall spring up behind me as I speed on my reckless way!”

The recipe below, which comes from Athens: A Cookbook by Diane Kochilas, is for paying subscribers only. That’s because it costs me time and money to test the recipes I publish on my Substack and I do test them all, regardless of whether I’ve published some in the past. Not only that, but the mere effort of writing, it has always seemed to me, demands some sort of recompense. If you agree, please take out a paid subscription. And thank you!

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CONVERSATIONS on the kitchen porch in recent weeks have drifted far from food, although the subject of food somehow always underlies everything else. We’ve talked about the incomprehensible, ongoing absurdity of the government in Washington, the senseless folly of attacking Iran, and the results, disastrous yet utterly predictable, that have jeopardized the entire world’s economy. We’ve lamented the awesome devastation, to which our own leadership has contributed majorly, in Gaza and Lebanon where, along with loss and death, families have been driven from their homes and once-thriving communities have been demolished, leveled to the ground and left a chaos of battered structures, roads wiped out and bridges smashed, with little hope of rebuilding. I remember the photograph album my late father-in-law compiled of what he witnessed in Warsaw in May of 1945 and the indelible horror of that destruction, painted in his black-and-white snapshots. What has happened, is happening, in the part of the world we call the Middle East, is worse. And we are responsible.

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We’ve also had some heady discussions about the primary elections coming up in early June. In Maine we’re blessed with a strong group of candidates for the Democratic nomination for governor—so strong that many of us simply aren’t yet ready to decide but are confident that any one of the four front-runners would make a good leader for a state whose motto is Dirigo (I Lead).

The contest to replace Senator Susan Collins, who is running for a sixth term, is more difficult to predict but the overwhelming lead is held by a surprise candidate, a youngish oyster farmer named Graham Platner who is running for his first elective office (unless you include his stint as harbor master in Sullivan on the Downeast coast). But don’t let the obscurity of his origins lead you astray—this is a man who has commanded national attention, in part because of his forceful conviction that we can and should live in a just world, and his outspoken demeanor, a refreshingly new approach and a stark contrast to the timidity of Collins who is famous for saying she is “concerned” and then voting the opposite of what her constituents want. Platner, for those of us wrangling with politics on the kitchen porch, represents a new and hopeful change in our national directions, away from ill-thought-out international interventions and back to doing what government does best, taking care of the needs of all Americans, including the most needy. Think hospitals and the health care system, think schools and the cost of education, think a more equitable tax structure and a broader distribution of wealth, think environmental policies to restore clean air and water and maintain our national parks. That’s what our government should be doing, was doing, before the present administration decided to sweep everything away.

Well, there you have it and I’ve gone off on a rant, unable to stop myself. But that’s fairly typical of what’s been happening on the kitchen porch, both the real porch, where it’s still a bit chilly for a long conversation, and the metaphorical kitchen porch which is actually around my kitchen table, often with a fire in the Vermont Casting woodstove to warm up the room.

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The spring has been, well, honestly, it’s been entirely typical for spring on the coast of Maine. Fits and starts is what we say, just about every year. Warm mornings when the sun calls and the breezes die, the daffodils dance and the forsythia looks about ready to burst, that kind of day when you can walk up and down Main Street smiling--Isn’t it gorgeous out?--at everyone you pass, that kind of day is succeeded by a sudden blast of Arctic air and you look up and by gorry, it’s snowing again. But the snow doesn’t last and it is beneficial, melting quickly into the topmost layer of soil, carrying nutrients to all those seeds and bulbs and roots that are just waiting, breath held in anticipation, for the chance to surge forth. Poor man’s fertilizer, the old-timers called these late spring snowstorms.

An Abundance of Eggs

The chickens are laying with glorious abundance. I get my breakfast eggs every week from my friend David who keeps this flock of beauties in his back yard hen coop. Our town is very liberal about back yard farming. We might draw the line at keeping pigs but chickens are just fine.

These are the very definition of free range, liberated in the fresh air and occasional sunshine of a Maine spring. The girls are plump and healthy and their wealth is expressed in their golden yolks. (I dare not suggest this to David, but, if noses can be said to dream, my nose dreams of a richly aromatic chicken stock made from one of these matrons after her laying days are long gone. Is that heartless of me? To everything there is a season.)

This week however, I did not take advantage of David’s minifarm because I suddenly found myself, doubtless caused by an overly enthusiastic response to Easter, with two and a half cartons of excess eggs—that’s 30 individual eggs. Clearly, even at my present rate of egg consumption, it would take me four weeks to make a dent in my supply.

What to do?

What any responsible cook would do—bake cakes. Especially cakes that use a LOT of eggs. Most cake recipes call for a couple of eggs at least but I was looking for cakes with a minimum of four eggs per formula. And I found them.

· an Italian carrot cake, very different from the traditional American carrot cake, Torta di Camilla it’s called: it’s the epitome of the lightly sweetened cakes that customarily appear on breakfast tables in boutique hotels or farmhouse B&Bs throughout the Italian countryside. I published a recipe for an Italian carrot cake here, but at the time I completely misread Chef Rosanna Grottoli’s recipe because what she had given me, without naming it that, was a classic Torta di Camilla. Now, you might ask, who was Camilla, and I have to confess that research has failed to turn up an answer. But whoever she was, she understood that pureed carrots can be just as delicious as, for instance, apple sauce in making a soft, moist cake. Serve this one as I did with a cream-cheese icing, or Italian-style with a sprinkle of powdered sugar on top, just as it would be served in that dreamy hotel with its balcony looking out over the Mediterranean and Elba or Capri in the distance perhaps. Camilla used four of my eggs.

· a Japanese cake of astonishing delicacy called “Cotton Cheesecake.” This one came from a favorite cookbook, Pastry Love by chef-baker Joanne Chang, founder of Boston’s Flour Bakery and possibly the only baker in the country with a Harvard honors degree. It was this recipe that sent me back to my mother’s dictum: Read the recipe all the way through before you begin. Why? Because I had planned to serve it for dinner only to discover that it has to rest for two hours in the turned-off oven and then another two hours on a cake rack before it is considered, by Chang at least, ready to serve. But it’s worth the wait, even if you have to consume it at midnight, maybe with a few crushed raspberries alongside. And it won’t keep you up or give you tumultuous dreams because it is so light you may not even dream at all but just tumble into a blissful sleep. If you can make it in the morning, even better—you can have it for tea and even keep it in the fridge for four days, stealing a slice every now and then. It used another five of my eggs.

· and, finally, would it be a traditional British Victoria sponge, a sandwich of butter cream and good jam? Or, equally traditional and even more demanding of eggs, a Boston cream pie with a pastry cream (crème pâtissière) filling and a chocolate topping? Or why not, for purposes of comparison, both? The Boston cream pie (which, you probably know, is not a pie at all but a layer cake filled with pastry cream and topped with a chocolate ganache) used three eggs for the cake and a grand total of 4 egg yolks for the filling. Now I was getting somewhere. But that left me with four egg whites so back to the recipe books and I found a classic American white cake that called for exactly four whites. This would be the foundation of the Victoria sponge, another layer cake in the British tradition, filled with strawberry jam and whipped cream. In the event, however, because I was carrying the cake to yet another meeting, I used a butter cream filling instead of sloppy whipped cream.

And there you have it. Over the course of a week I managed to use up a full 17 eggs which, with my daily breakfast component, made a serious dent in the two and a half dozen that I had accumulated. Meanwhile, I fed a couple of meetings, a dinner party, a neighborhood get-together, and a monthly book club lunch. Not bad, eh?

The recipes are below, if Substack will allow me such a long piece. Hey, I’m no Heather Cox Richardson but I do have something to say now and then that takes more than a newspaperly 1500 words. Sorry to add, if you want the recipes, you’ll have to be a paying subscriber. That’s because it costs me money and time to put these recipes together since I almost always test them, even recipes that I’ve published in the past in my books and articles. It never hurts to do a recipe over again—there’s always something that needs tweaking or explaining. Paid subscriptions are what keep me doing this so if you appreciate the recipes, please consider taking out a paid subscription.

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Oranges are naturally green.

True!

They turn color, developing that bright deep glow we call “orange” when the raw fruit is exposed to cooler nights. In a warm, tropical, wet climate, like that of Southeast Asia where oranges originated several thousand years ago, the peel or rind often retains chlorophyll, stayiing green, even as the fruit fully ripens. Which inevitably leads to the question: Do we call them oranges because that’s their color? Or do we call the color orange because of the fruit?

Green is what they were in Lebanon back in the day, when the first oranges would come on the market in the middle of autumn. In our neighborhood fruit stall in Ras Beirut, they were often deep, dark green, the color of watermelons, and I avoided them at first, thinking, hmm, who wants to eat an unripe orange? And then I learned.

That was early November, the beginning of orange season in the Eastern Mediterranean, and it was also the beginning of my own personal orange mania. The pungent tart aroma of fresh citrus--any kind of fresh citrus, lemon, lime, grapefruit, mandarin, pomelo, yuzu, kumquats, but especially oranges—sets up a longing in me to get closer to the source, and my nose leads me as I tear away at the thick peel and inhale the fragrance: bliss!

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We tend not to think about a season for oranges, any more than we do for lemons. Or apples. Or even grapes. They are simply there, chilling in the produce section, month after month, even when it’s raining or snowing or steaming hot outside in the supermarket parking lot. And yet in real life oranges, like most fruits, do have a season and we are at the end of it now, here in the northern hemisphere. It begins in the fall and carries us through the winter with a prolific bounty of Vitamin C right at the time of the year when we need it most.

We don’t tend to think much about varietals or cultivars with oranges either. That is, we think of “eating oranges” on the one hand or “juice oranges” on the other, but most of us make no further distinction. (I of course am speaking for those of us who are a long, long way from an orange grove.) It used to be that oranges for eating (that is, navel oranges because of the little belly button on the blossom end) came from California and juice oranges, aka Valencias, from Florida but that is no longer the case. The oranges in your supermarket may have come from a number of places. Chile, Mexico, and South America have seen exports to the US soar, with Morocco, Peru, and China not far behind. And Brazil?—Brazil is the mother of all orange production but almost all of it goes into frozen concentrate. If your only source of orange juice is frozen concentrate, reconstituted or not as the case may be, your only source is Brazil, many zillions of four-dollar-a-gallon fuel-powered tankers from your breakfast table.

So: juice oranges, eating oranges, or reconstituted concentrate, take your pick. But the distinctions are starting to drift. One example of that is the blood orange: In 1967, when John McPhee wrote his wonderful little book called Oranges, he explained that blood oranges, much prized in the Mediterranean world, were scorned in America because of their unfortunate name.

And now we find blushing blood oranges even in supermarkets, even in Maine, a state noted (by me) as one of the more gastronomically conservative outposts in the nation. With their tart-sweet balance of flavors and their distinctive deep-ruby flesh, blood oranges are prized in modern markets. And so are Caracara oranges, a newcomer in US markets, pink-fleshed and originally with a delicate sweetness. I say originally because I’m afraid those once delicious Caracaras have suffered the same plight as so much of our produce, with all flavor bred out in favor of shelf-stability. One other distinctive cultivar you might run into in its brief season is the bitter or sour or Seville orange. These are different names for an orange that was always considered the sine qua non for marmalade but with not much else to recommend it. Still, they’re widely used in Caribbean and Central American cooking. Mexican cooking guru Rick Bayliss offers some very useful information and suggestions on his website.

Why are they called Seville oranges? Because the ancient Arab-Andalusi town if Sevilla, in southwestern Spain is filled with these particular orange trees. The Barrio Santa Cruz, the heart of the old city, is where you’ll find them, brought by North Africans more than a thousand years ago and now counting officially some 40,000 or maybe some 14,000 trees—it all depends, I guess, on who’s doing the counting.

But here’s the thing: I said it’s the end of the orange season but if you can get yourself to Sevilla right now, in the next couple of weeks, you will experience the heady phenomenon that locals wait for every spring—when the bitter orange trees that line the narrow streets of the old town, still covered like Christmas trees with bright fruit, burst forth with new blossoms and the intoxicating fragrance of the azahar blossoms (the name, obviously comes from Arabic) is almost palpable on the evening air. It is an intense experience, possibly made more so this very week by the processions for Semana Santa, Holy Week, when fraught religious statues are taken out of church sanctuaries and paraded through city streets, accompanied by what appear to be (but are not) Ku Kluxers, masked, veiled, pointy-capped men who bemoan ancient Christian rituals of the dying and risen god.

I’ve always loved the beginning of Wallace Stevens’s poem “Sunday Morning.” Although it does get depressing as one reads on, the opening lines are evocative of that ideal leisure and pleasure of Sunday morning coffee and oranges—and, I like to imagine, a fresh copy of the New York Times packed with news of battles fought and lost, of weddings and funerals, of theatre openings and new books and all the rest of a great Sunday-morning edition:

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late

Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,

And the green freedom of a cockatoo

Upon a rug mingle to dissipate

The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.

Wallace Stevens, 1923

Now, with orange “season,” such as it is, drawing to a close, I think of the way oranges can enliven dull, wintered-over senses. Like this famous Sicilian salad in which the combination is truly a wake-up call-- sweet oranges, pungent onions, salty olives and anchovies. And please, please, do not be tempted to cancel the anchovies. They add so much saltiness, pungency, and above all, the secret ingredient, umami, mouth-packing flavors to rouse sluggish appetites. The salad is usually made with blood oranges, but their season is well and truly past, way back in February, so use regular juice or eating oranges to make a bright colored spring plate.

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Spring begins on Friday and it cannot come soon enough. Where I am on the planet, the equinox will occur precisely at 10:36 a.m. In Tehran, because of the time difference, it will be 6:16 p.m. on the same day. That marks the astronomical onset of spring and the beginning of Nowruz, which is arguably the most important holiday of the year for Iranians. For thousands of years, going back long before Islam, long before Christianity, Persians have celebrated that day as the beginning of the new year. Timing the new year to spring seems entirely appropriate to me—I mean, why would you want to begin a new year in the middle of winter? (Blame Pope Gregory XIII, the man responsible for our modern calendar.)

Nowruz is a Zoroastrian festival and you may be surprised, as I was, to discover that Zoroastrianism is alive and sort of well, still tolerated as a minority religion in Iran although it’s stronger among Parsi communities in India (who are descendants of long ago migrants from Persia). Be that as it may, Nowruz, even under the current rigidly theocratic regime, is a beloved national holiday throughout Iran, welcomed like Easter (which it does not otherwise resemble) with joyful expressions of rebirth. One of those expressions, which I witnessed the one time I was in Iran, was in the delightful form of pots of freshly sprouted greens that decorated houses, doorways, window boxes, just about any vacant shelf or space. These, I learned, are called Haftseen and they reminded me of the Gardens of Adonis from ancient Greece, sprouted greens (in Iran especially of wheat grains or lentils) grown in pots to herald the rebirth of nature. In ancient Athens pots of green shoots like these were planted for the festival of Adonis, the dying god who rises again. (You can easily see how all of these beliefs connect with one another.).

I cannot imagine what Iranians are going through today as Nowruz approaches. The devastation of an unholy war, the massive destruction of their country, including some of the most cherished monuments like the great mosques of Isfahan with their immense tiled arches and domes, the deaths of thousands, including the 200 school girls, children massacred when their school suffered a direct U.S. missile attack, the toxic smoke and rain that enveloped Tehran in a poisonous cloud, the arresting fear that must grip the hearts of Iranians at home and abroad, all this on top of the nightmare of years of political and social repression—this is surely more than any people should have to bear.

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I recall something of my experiences when I traveled to Iran that one time, but it was a very long time ago, back when few dared defy the unquestioned authority of the shah and those few were punished as mercilessly as any dissident is in Iran today. It was Nowruz then, too, and I had no idea what I was getting into. The festival lasts 13 days and typically, city dwellers go out to the countryside to enjoy the first spring breezes while all the country folk flock to the great cities, Tehran, Shiraz, and Isfahan among them, for a taste of urban excitement before settling in to the chores of a new farming season. In the event, we (I traveled with a friend from Beirut) got caught up in this exhilerating exchange of populations and consequently missed a lot but thrilled to the sense of elation, of new beginnings, that the holiday brings.

Isfahan especially was glorious, the color of spring itself, a city of blue, every shade from cerulean to sapphire to lapis and turquoise, the colors of the tiles decorating the mosque domes, their elegant shapes dominating the horizon, and the great arched iwans that make the whole city a masterpiece of Iranian-Islamic architecture. The iwan, peculiar to Iran, is a high-arched, three-sided hall, open on one side to create a shaded airy space for gathering, perfect in Iran’s dry desert climate.

Isfahan itself is ancient. Like a bejeweled fortress, the city sits astride the historic trade routes that crossed Central Asia, but much of its architectural glory came under the great Shah Abbas, the Safavid ruler of the late 16^th century who turned Isfahan into his capital and caused the building of many of the most beautiful monuments. The question that haunts Isfahan of course is this: will the city survive the merciless assaults of the United States and Israel?

There are already reports of significant damage to the turquoise tiles of the Jameh mosque, the Masjid i-Jami, the Friday congregational mosque of Isfahan. One of the oldest mosques in the world, the Jameh mosque dates back to the Seljuq period, a thousand years ago. Similar kinds of damage have been reported to historic buildings in Isfahan and Tehran. Iran has a total of 49 UNESCO-cited World Heritage sites—four of these to date have been seriously impacted by the assaults. And today’s (March 16) New York Times reported that Trump is considering “a risky operation to send forces into Isfahan. . . to recover 970 pounds of near-bomb-grade uranium.

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Well, yes, you might say, it has to happen. If Iran plants 970 pounds of near-weapons-grade uranium next to a historic landmark, then Iran has to pay.

Well, yes, but it’s not Iran alone that will pay. As with the Bamiyan Buddhas, another precious piece of human heritage, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, we all lose when such cherished relics are deliberately destroyed.

I am fortunate to have seen Isfahan when I did, to have those magnificent colors imprinted on my mind. I’m not sure my grandchildren will ever bear witness to what we are losing, what we have lost.

Sabzi Polo ba Mahi: Persian Herbed Rice with Spicy Fish

The fresh green herbs that flavor this extraordinary dish are those of springtime in Iran: parsley, of course, and cilantro, plus dill, chives, spring onions (the green tops especially), and garlic. But it’s the technique that most interests me: the rice is first rinsed, then soaked, then cooked, parboiled in copious amounts of boiling water, and finally drained, mixed with the chopped herbs and steamed in a tightly sealed pot. This whole process, while it may strike you as laborious, makes—believe me—an extraordinary presentation, rice that is thoroughly cooked yet each grain separate and light with a tahdig, the crispy bottom layer, to offset the tender grains of rice. Sabzi polo is traditionally served with fish (recipe follows), which has almost universal significance as a symbol of abundance for a new year, a new beginning. One could hope that it will bring new beginnings to beleaguered Iran. One could only hope. . . .

This recipe is from my old friend and erstwhile traveling companion Naomi Duguid, whose book Persia (you can find it on Amazon, at KA&L in New York, or here) is an exploration of the vast reach of Persian cuisine and culture across a wide swath of the Middle East from the Black Sea to the Afghan borderlands. (Back in the day, one of the most popular restaurants in Beirut was called El Ajami, “the Persian,” not that it served specifically Persian food but the name served as a stamp of approval. Just saying.)

A word about tahdig: that is the crispy, crunchy bottom layer of the rice that Iranian gourmets (and ordinary Iranians too) consider quintessential to enjoyment of the dish. It should come as a buttery layer on the bottom. Soaking the pot in cold water, as described below, as soon as the rice is done will help release the tahdig.

Before I started prepping the rice, I made saffron water, following Naomi’s instructions. I took a good pinch of saffron threads (mine actually came from Afghanistan, courtesy of an Afghan woman in the Brunswick, Maine, farmer’s market.) Using a mortar and pestle, I crushed the threads to a powder with a small pinch of salt then mixed the quarter-teaspoon that resulted into a quarter cup of hot water and set it aside to steep overnight. The water turned a rich red-gold and I used that to color the rice (see below). And if you want to skip this step, it’s fine, but the color and flavor of the saffron really do add to the overall excitement of Sabzi Polo.

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I first had Anzac biscuits when my English friend Mary baked them for her children’s tea. We were living in Madrid at the time and I had no idea what they were beyond delicious, crispy, crunchy, just sweet enough, and obviously as healthy as a bowl of oatmeal cereal and a whole lot more tempting. They reminded me of another British nursery treat called flapjack, a sort of unleavened pancake, similarly made of oats, golden syrup, and butter, that Mary sometimes baked in a round pan and cut into wedges at teatime.

The name, Anzac, however is peculiar. It evolved from the acronym for Australia-New Zealand Army Corps, or NZAC, pronounced Anzac. Simple, eh?

Nowadays, in both Australia and New Zealand (as well as in Tonga or so I’m told), the crisp little cookies are baked in multitudes every year on Anzac Day, April 25^th. That day commemorates losses in the wars in which Australian and New Zealand military forces have fought over the years--the equivalent of Memorial Day in the U.S. or Remembrance Day in the U.K.

But why April 25^th? It goes back to World War I. On that day in 1916, the combined forces of Australia and New Zealand, NZAC, joined an Allied attack on Gallipoli in the Dardanelles straits, in a futile attempt to knock Türkiye out of the war. The terrible battle that ensued went on for eight grueling months. Turkish armies, led by Mustafa Kemal (later known as Atatürk), put up a fierce resistance until they finally routed the Allied forces. But 8,000 Anzac troops were among the losses. Thinking of that devastating and ill-planned campaign, it is impossible not to draw comparisons with what is going on in another part of that world today and to ask why and to what end? Why do we go on, year after year, century after century, punishing ourselves like this?

But the Anzac biscuits? They were invented as a treat for the struggling troops. Made of just oatmeal, flour, golden syrup, coconut, and raisins, with no eggs, they baked up crisp and moreover, they lasted for long weeks in the tins in which they were shipped halfway around the world, remembrances of home, sweet reminders of why those poor young men were fighting and dying.

And the seductive little biscuits (cookies in North America), with their perky insouciance became icons of a terrible defeat and an overwhelming loss, but also of patriotic sacrifice. There is, to me at least, something of the Australian native character in that juxtaposition, something ironic, sardonic, and slightly self-deprecating. I mean, a country whose national anthem lauds, not a valiant, tattered banner but a jolly swagman (a tramp, a wandering itinerant worker) is not without caustic humor, right?

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In any case, I had forgotten Anzacs for a long time when I stumbled on a recipe in, of all places, Joanne Chang’s splendid tome, Pastry Love. Chang, a renowned Boston chef, baker, restaurateur, and food authority, says she got her recipe from, of all places, Yotam Ottolenghi in his London-based kitchen. (And I don’t need to tell you who Ottolenghi is, so famous that his last name alone is sufficient recognition.)

I made the Anzacs, adjusting Chang’s recipe just a bit (as she admits to adjusting Ottolenghi’s just a bit). The biggest problem with the original was that very British item, golden syrup, which is hard to locate on this side of the Atlantic. (And no, in case you were thinking of it, Karo Corn Syrup is not at all the same thing.) Chang’s use of maple syrup struck me as sheer brilliance. In fact, although Aussies themselves might be shocked to hear it, I think maple syrup makes this treat even better, authenticity be damned.

And of course, given their history, Anzac biscuits (or cookies if you will) seem just right for this desperately militaristic world into which we’ve been plunged so abruptly. At least they can add a comforting if evanescent sweetness to each day’s bitter news. Try an Anzac with your morning coffee and see if it doesn’t help just a little.

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So it’s 1, 2, 3, what are we fightin’ for? Next stop is Teheran?

Here’s what we’re fighting for, here’s what our sons and daughters may be called to defend:
Pentagon officials used my tax dollars to purchase “a $98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff’s home, $5.3 million for Apple devices such as the new iPad, and an astronomical amount of shellfish, including $2 million for Alaskan king crab and $6.9 million worth of lobster tail. (Lobster tail is apparently a favorite of Hegseth’s Pentagon—the department spent more than $7.4 million total on the luxury item in March, May, June, and October.) In other pricey food purchases, the government decided to drop $15.1 million for ribeye steak (again, just in September), $124,000 for ice cream machines, and $139,224 on 272 orders of doughnuts.”

That’s from Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack column and if you are one of the very few people who don’t read her every day, I advise you to sign up here for an invaluable and insightful look at what’s happening in our world.

The Pentagon is spending a billion dollars of our taxes each and every day—those taxes that are due imminently. One billion every day of this insane, useless, destructive, illegal war. Think about that as you file your IRS reports.

I exaggerate. The actual figure is only about $891.4 million per day, according to Forbes.

We still don’t have enough spare change to provide decent health care for every citizen of what we brag is the richest and most powerful country in the world. There are further cuts coming to what remains of the minimal support we had.

Think about that the next time you fill up your gas tank at $3.50 a gallon and climbing.

My useless Senator Collins of Maine replies to my queries with the inane meme that we must “support our troops.” The best way to support our troops is to stop this war. Now.

I’ll be thinking about that when I go to the polls in November, Senator.

I rest my case.

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HOW can I think of food when the world is exploding around me? When little girls are killed in their classrooms, cities and villages are bombed into extinction, innocent lives are destroyed, and entire cultures are disappeared, lost both to history and to memory? I know I’ll be attacked for saying so but I don’t give a sweet damn (or anything stronger): War has never been a solution.

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Look, I grew up in World War II, when we fought fascism, fought for freedom, fought to save Europe from the Nazis; I went to high school during the Korean War, when we struggled to prop up gutsy little South Korea, the first of many Asian dominos that had to be defended by the U.S. from the Communist hordes; I grew to adulthood, studied, worked, married, had babies, marched, demonstrated, petitioned, sang protest songs, and wrote letters as our hapless armies surged into Indochina to secure one of the most corrupt regimes in a very corrupt world. And then there came, in rapid and deadly succession: Grenada, Panama, Desert Shield/Desert Storm, Iraq, Afghanistan, plus innumerable minor incursions in Africa and Western Asia, often barely mentioned unless and until they exploded into flames. Not to mention Venezuela.

And to what end?

Is the world safer today than it was in 1975? Is the United States more secure, more peaceful, more productive, after 251 foreign military incursions since that date? Have we produced freedom yet? Anywhere in the world? I don’t think so. If you wish to offer counter evidence, please, be my guest. I’d love to hear about it!

I’ll say it again, loud and clear, once and for all: War has never solved any problems. War does nothing but shift the balance. But it does do one thing effectively: it creates new problems. Just you wait!

So how dare I think about food? How can I imagine cooking? How can I conceive of something tasty and comforting, something that draws people (friends, acquaintances, strangers, enemies) together around a table to break bread, share food, offer another spoonful of sauce, an extra potato, a slice of cake, a helping of rice, along with chatter, gossip, ideas, hard facts, educated guesses and misinformation, speculation, argument, stories of the past and dreams of the future, along with the hopes that propel them?

Generosity is what’s called for: Let’s simmer up a pot of chowder or minestrone, posole, tom kha gai, or borscht, and invite the neighbors in for supper. Let’s sit down together and eat and talk and eat some more. Sweetness is called for too: Let’s make a cake and share it. Let’s make a batch of cookies and send them to someone who needs care and consideration, possibly to someone we don’t really like, just because. Let’s make a pact to get along, to respect boundaries, to approach and cross them gently, to find that other people are interesting and all people are worthy of listening to. Let’s take communion around a table of shared food. To hell with war—it cannot solve our problems.

You could start with Pistou, a spring soup from the south of France that’s fragrant with fresh basil and a hint of garlic. It’s one of two famous soups from Provence, the other being bouillabaisse, the great seafood stew, and if you think of this as a bouillabaisse for vegetables you’ll see that the two are very much alike. Everything fresh and seasonal from local farms and markets is combined and then exalted when a big dollop of basil-rich, garlic-rich, oil-rich pistou (pesto) sauce is stirred in, with more sauce served at the table. Don’t feel restricted by the vegetables I’ve listed. If fresh peas, fava (broad) beans, or other greens are available, by all means dice, sliver, chop, or shuck them and add to the pot. Scroll down for the recipe below.

Despite the clouds of war, time, as they used to say in the old news reels, marches on, and just like that it’s March. True, spring is still a long way off from where I sit on the coast of Maine. Morning temperatures are in the icy single digits (that’s Fahrenheit, friends), the ground is still laden with a crust of snow and the snow itself has grown ugly--dirty, grubby, coated with a grey-brown gritty pelt of sand and gravel, dog poop and auto exhaust. March is the harshest time of our year, when winter has grown old and spring is still below the horizon. But there are bright spots, hopeful touches, nonetheless—as the light grows stronger, the chickens perk up and start to gabble in the henhouse and then to lay again so we have eggs, the very image of spring. (It doesn’t take much imagination to figure out the origin of Easter eggs.) With eggs, my thoughts turn naturally to cakes, especially those very simple Italian farmhouse cakes that every massaia or farmwife whips together so quickly and has ready, covered with a printed cloth, on the table for tea or breakfast. If you stay in an Italian farmhouse or at an agriturismo, you will invariably be served a slice of ciambella with your morning coffee. I especially like this one because it’s made with ground almonds which gives it a pleasant density and citrus which sparkles.

I said above that a little sweetness helps in these gloomy times. Why not invite a friend over late some afternoon for a cup of tea, coffee, or perhaps a glass of wine with a slice of this simple cake? Why not cut several generous slices, wrap them in colored tissue paper or put them in a cookie tin, attach a spring blossom to the top, and drop them off at the kitchen door of someone who needs cheering. I don’t mean to be Pollyanna-ish but this is a time that cries out for gestures of caring, of connection, of just plain love. Reach out, please, extend a hand, connect!

You’ll find the recipe below—just scroll down.

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This morning I learned to my dismay that American Unagi, the cutting-edge aquaculture experiment undertaken in recent years by Sara Rademaker, is closing down and filing for bankruptcy. Sara’s brilliant idea, which she worked on diligently over many years, was to take the tiny elvers that migrate up Maine rivers in late winter, raise them in fresh-water tanks till they reach market size, and then harvest them for the growing market in fresh and smoked eel, often called by its Japanese name unagi, and increasingly prized by top chefs for its rich, slightly sweet flavor and tender flesh. Keep in mind that most of the unagi you select at your favorite sushi bar, was harvested in Maine, shipped to China to grow out, sent to Japan to be braised in a soy-based sauce, and then shipped back to the US to provide sushi and other restaurants all over the country. All over the world in fact. It may well have the longest supply chain of any food that’s commonly consumed.

With that unhappy news, I’m reposting a story I wrote about eels and elvers (the tiny wriggly baby eels in the form in which they arrive in Maine’s rivers), aquaculture and unagi. I’m so sorry the conclusion is a sad one but I salute Sara Rademaker for her commitment to a fine idea that promised a sustainable route to economic rewards for the region and for the Passamaquoddy tribe that had joined in her enterprise.

I moved back to Maine in the early 1990s, after many decades away, and took up residence in a small house overlooking Camden’s waterfront. From my back porch I could see across to the town with its church steeples, mill stack, and the picturesque waterfall where the Megunticook River somersaults over rocky ledges and tumbles into the harbor. One night in March of my first winter back, I locked the front door and was headed to bed when I looked out a back window to see a series of lights, high-intensity flashlights as they appeared to be, moving mysteriously around the waterfall. I watched for a while on that dark and moonless night and speculated that what I saw might have been a rescue operation for someone who had fallen into the water. Either that, I said to myself, or a drug bust.

Well, no, as it turned out it was neither of those. The next morning I learned from my chief informant on Main Street, Jack Clinton, that what I had witnessed was a seasonal eel fishery, involving a series of long funnel-shaped fyke nets, laid out across the rocks to trap baby eels, called glass eels or elvers, as they made their way, by the dark of the moon and on a rising tide, up over the falls and eventually past a half dozen old but still functioning dams to arrive, with considerable difficulty, at Megunticook Lake. There, in the lake’s deep waters they would flourish and grow to maturity.

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Eels are very odd creatures. Many of the fish in Maine rivers are anadromous (salmon, shad, alewives, sturgeon among them), meaning they’re born in fresh water and move out to sea with maturity, returning to the home river once it’s time to spawn and reproduce. Eels on the other hand are catadromous, that is the reverse, spawning in salt water and maturing in fresh. But that’s not all. It’s a strange but well-known story that all eels in North America, like all eels in European waters, are born in the Sargasso Sea, a 700-mile wide subtropical gyre in the North Atlantic east of Bermuda, where they spawn. But they are elusive: No one, I am told on reliable authority, has ever seen a spawning adult, though not from lack of trying, nor has anyone ever found an adult eel returning to fresh water. The one thing on which experts concur is that they breed in the Sargasso, and only in the Sargasso, and stay there for some time, years perhaps, until something moves them to head out across the broad span of the Atantic, looking for an estuary where they can make their way to a body of water, like Megunticook Lake, where they develop and mature over ten, twenty, even as much as thirty years. And then they leave and go back down the river, out to sea, homing in on the distant Sargasso, there to spawn and die.

That doesn’t explain why those fishermen were out there in the middle of a cold March night, hip deep in falling water, harvesting baby eels. The reason is, quite simply, market demand, which in Asia, especially in Japan, is overwhelming. In 1994, the year I first saw them in Camden, elvers were bringing $55 a pound and Maine fishers harvested a total of 3.3 metric tons. Since then the price has climbed steadily, reaching a peak in 2015 of $2,171.87 and remaining steadily around $2,000. That, I emphasize, is the price per pound. That was after the European Union had banned the export of eels, after the 2011 tsunami destroyed enormous quantities of eel aquaculture facilities in Japan, and after Asian eels were declared endangered in 2014.

Glass eels or elvers are also harvested in at least one river in South Carolina, but apart from that, Maine is the one great source of these tiny creatures, all of which are shipped to China or Japan where they are grown out into full-fledged adult eels, after which they are transformed into a delicacy known as unagi no kabayaki, grilled eel that is roasted in a sweetly tangy marinade of soy sauce, sugar and mirin (rice wine). It’s a hugely popular dish in Japan, especially in summer’s heat. The Japanese alone consume 100,000 tons of unagi annually—about 70% of the total world catch, most of it as unagi no kabayaki. If you’re a fan of Japanese food anywhere in the world, you’ve probably had that kind of unagi tucked into a sushi roll or topping a nigiri mound. Almost all the unagi no kabayaki that we consume in American sushi restaurants is imported as a ready-made product—that’s 5,000 metric tons of eel annually, most of it unagi no kabayaki. And more likely than not, that unagi started its commercial life in a Maine spring freshet.

It doesn’t take a mathematician to figure there’s a tidy bundle of cash to be made in what for most Maine fishermen is the lean off-season. And it doesn’t take a mathematician to calculate the carbon footprint of a fish that may be transported three or more times over vast distances before it reaches your local sushi restaurant.

Enter Sara Rademaker, a young, smart fisheries expert who got her early training in aquaculture at the University of Alabama, spent several stints in Uganda and Ghana helping to develop catfish and tilapia farms, and ended up at the Herring Gut Learning Center in Port Clyde, Maine, where aquaculture and marine science are part of the organization’s mission. “In 2012,” she explained, “the price of eels sky rocketed. And I said to myself why are we sending all these baby eels abroad? Why aren’t we growing them out ourselves?” If eels can be grown to market size in China, why not in Maine? “And then,” she told me, “I did a lot of back-of-the-envelope stuff, leg work, trying to figure out why no one has done this. Could it be sustainable?”

The only way to be certain was to try. “I’d never been around an eel before,” Rademaker went on, ”but in the spring of 2014, the state approved a permit that allowed me to acquire 100 baby eels from a buyer.” She put them in tanks in her Thomaston basement. “I wasn’t reinventing the wheel,” she added. “Basically, it’s just farming, you know, you’re working with a living thing. And you ask, what are the risks?”

Her next stop, as she expanded her infant enterprise, was the University of Maine’s Darling Marine Center, which supports and encourages aquaculture entrepreneurs. I caught up with her at the Darling Center in Walpole in the summer of 2018 as she was planning a move to a larger University of Maine facility in Franklin up a long inlet off Frenchman Bay, where she could raise 60,000 eels from elvers to market size, a process that takes about two years. Eventually, she installed her grow-out operation in a permanent setting in Waldoboro with good access to fresh water, a necessity for the land-based system she used. “Land-based, yeah,” she said, “that’s the way the industry is going.” A Recirculating Aquaculture System, or RAS, is an aquaculture method that offers the advantage of being entirely self-enclosed, meaning, cleaner water in and out and heathier fish, without the environmental implications of ocean-based aquaculture. It also meant she could raise her eels without hormones or antibiotics, an important selling point. I asked her if there was anything else she used. “Love,” she said with a broad grin, “lots of love.”

Initially, Rademaker’s eels went primarily to restaurants, either as fresh or smoked eel, although eventually she had hoped to reach a wider market, perhaps even introducing a Maine-made unagi no kabayaki.

Mainers are not great lovers of eels. My editor, when I mentioned my intention to write this story, squirmed squeamishly in her editorial chair before reluctantly agreeing to publish. And yet—eels are delicious, and old-fashioned Mainers remember a time when they were harvested in late winter to early spring when there was not much else in the larder and the fat fish was a welcome and nourishing treat. Maine tribal people still have their own permitted harvest quota of eels and they take pride in the annual yield from the Penobscot and other rivers. (These, of course, are mature eels, not the little elvers that are collected for growing out.)

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I was happily able to sample some of Sara Rademaker’s American Unagi at Nina June Restaurant in Rockport. (Disclosure: Nina June is owned by my daughter Sara Jenkins.) The skin of the eel had been removed to expose the four fillets, which were easy to lift off the spine bones. Bathed in a kabayaki mixture of soy sauce and mirin, then grilled, they were unctuous and delicious. The Japanese treatment is not the only way to get appetizing eels. At Sammy’s Deluxe in Rockland, chef Sam Richman smoked American Unagi to make a delicacy much appreciated by northern Europeans (Americans love it too). Roasted in its tough skin, eels gain flavor from the fat that bathes the meat, after which the skin is easy to remove. Italians— Romans, at least--eat eels on Christmas Eve by long tradition although they no longer come from the Tiber; and Spanish eat the little transparent glass eels or elvers simmered with garlic and chili peppers in terribly hot oil—so hot you’re given a tiny wooden fork with which to spear the eels. Anything metal, they say, would burn your mouth.

Would Rademaker really be able to sell the 240 metric tons that was her goal? It did not seem out-of-sight at first glance, as it’s a drop in the bucket of the 5,000 metric tons we currently import annually. So why not reduce the carbon footprint and market them right here at home? Maine-made and locally grown are brands with a good deal of class, a guarantee almost of clean quality. And clearly, it was a step in the right direction.

Update: In September of 2025, American Unagi filed for bankruptcy protection while searching for new ownership. According to the most recent press reports, Maine Community Bank, which provided $5.5 million in credit for the enterprise, is working towards a sale of the facility and has several interested parties.”

Sara Rademaker herself had this to say: “Through the development of the aquaculture facility, we were able to secure aquaculture quota for the state and generated nearly $1 million dollars in additional income for the harvesters we partnered with over the years. It is really unfortunate it ended the way it has, especially after so many successful years with harvesters.”

You can find out more about the American Unagi situation in the Portland Press-Herald here.

Ground Hog Day in some households (mine in the US, for instance) marks the time when we begin to anticipate new-harvest olive oils arriving from our friends in that blessed spot on the globe where the olive tree has flourished for countless millennia—of course, I mean the Mediterranean. This year brings old favorites as well as newcomers, all of which should be available, at a price (tariffs, anyone?), for extra-virgin lovers all across North America.

After years of pushing the trade, I’m pleased that more and more fine producers are following essential protocols, such as bottling in opaque containers to protect the oil from light, and also labeling products with the essential date-of-harvest information. That harvest date is much more important than the conventional use-by date, as I’ve explained frequently, because the use-by date is calculated from the time of bottling, which could be any time within two years or so of a harvest. Only the harvest date gives an accurate assessment of the age of any oil.

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It cannot be said frequently enough, olive oil does not improve with age, and certainly if it has not been protected from ambient light and heat. An oil that has been carefully nurtured will be fine two years from harvest date, although it will most likely have lost its initial sense of freshness and pungency. But beyond that, the oil, while still good to use (assuming it isn’t rancid), will have lost its distinctive qualities and should be kept for cooking.

My Tuscan neighbors always had two kinds of oil in the cantina—their very own fresh oil that was used to garnish everything from a salad to a plate of beans, and their very own old oil, last year’s or even earlier, kept for any kind of cooking, from braising to deep-frying, especially bomboloni, the soft, airy, yeast cakes that are de rigueur for martedì grasso—called Mardi Gras in English (!) and coming up next week. (See if you can diagram that sentence!)

A little side note about bomboloni (and, no, I do not have a recipe): My neighbor Maura always made these Mardi Gras confections for her girls when they were younger. One morning when I stopped in, she was in the middle of the process and handed me a fresh bombolone, split and filled with the most luscious chocolate cream imaginable. I liked my fingers and said to her: “I must have the recipe—this is utterly gorgeous!” She demurred but I insisted and when I pushed her a little too hard, she smirked ever so slightly and said: “It’s Nutella!”

Back to olive oil:

Here are the details of some of the new oils I’ve tried. These are all 2025 harvest and, unless stated otherwise, certified organic.

From Tuscany: Olio Piro, made from the traditional Tuscan field blend of leccino, moraiolo, and frantoiano olives, plus semi-wild olivastro seggianese from the slopes of Monte Amiata, this oil is double filtered to protect its phenolic content which makes it extra shelf-stable. (The producers say Piro contains a record amount of polyphenols and is shipped under controlled temperatures, for further protection.) A very aromatic oil, Piro has a distinctive Tuscan punch at the back of the throat. It’s ideal with any number of dishes, but especially the legume and meat stews for which la cucina toscana is noted.

Olio Piro is not certified organic although the producers say they follow organic and sustainable methods of cultivation and harvest. Find out more, including where to purchase Olio Piro here.

And for a recipe for Tuscan beans, here’s one from my archive.

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From Sicily: Tonda Iblea, produced by the Marquesi di Spedalotto in the hill country of southeastern Sicily near Ragusa, is a single-varietal (monocultivar) using the local tonda iblea olives which are noted for yielding sweetly grassy flavors, especially when harvested young as these are. It’s surprisingly lush yet full of flavor (think almonds, think hazelnuts). I use it as a garnish on top of almost any poached or oven-roasted fish, with a spritz of lemon and a hint of garlic. In summertime, it’s a favorite to top Maine lobster. But it’s an excellent choice whenever you want a fruity oil that’s decidedly olive but not too bold and assertive. Tonda Iblea carries the DOP Monti Iblei, guaranteed protected denomination. Available at Market Hall Foods in Oakland, at Olio2Go in Fairfax, Virginia, and other fine food stores.

For a Sicilian swordfish recipe, try this.

From Puglia: Coppadoro, produced by the Cicolella family in the heel of Italy’s boot, from the hills above Molfetta overlooking the Adriatic north of Bari—this is a new oil for me and very welcome with its intense flavors and pleasant, clean, lingering bitterness. It’s a monocultivar made from coratina olives, widely grown in Puglia and valued for a high phenolic content, which gives the oil great staying power. Oil from coratina olives is often combined with other cultivars to lighten its flavor profile but here it is celebrated, as Italians say, in purezza, as a 100% single varietal. I should warn you that Coppadoro is for true olive oil addicts like me, and not for the timid. It is piquant and pungent, with bold (and delicious) flavors that highlight its elevated content of antioxidants. It’s perfect for all kinds of tomato sauces, but I cannot wait to use it on fresh sun-ripened tomatoes from the garden when the season finally comes around again. Forget the mayo, give me Coppadoro! Order it direct from the importer, Gustiamo.com, here.

Find a recipe for a very tasty tomato sauce to go with it here.

A Newcomer to the Olive Oil Pantry? Well, No, Not Exactly

Istria? Do you know where it is? Think of the Adriatic, the long arm of the Mediterranean dividing Italy from the Dalmatian coast of what was once Yugoslavia. Away up at the top of the Adriatic, due east of Venice and south of Trieste, lies the heart-shaped peninsula called Istria, part of Croatia. For millennia, Istrian olive oils have been acclaimed for their excellence. Roman poets and agronomists, Martial, Horace, and others, declared it the equivalent of the finest of all Italian oils. Imagine that from an oil-proud Italian!

But of course, it was the olive oil I had come for and it was a revelation. Istrians pride themselves on their long heritage with an olive culture that goes back to ancient times. And yet, as in so many other parts of the Mediterranean, what is essential for producing high-quality extra-virgin today is a combination of historic cultivation methods cited by those ancient agronomists (early harvest, above all, said Columella) plus modern technology that allows cleaner, quicker methods for extracting the oil. The old and the new, working in combination, produce and preserve fresh green flavors and grassy aromas, and along with that, the extraordinary health-giving properties, the antioxidant polyphenols, that make extra-virgin a sure foundation for a healthy Mediterranean diet.

So, having said all that, I’m thrilled to see that my friends at The Rogers Collection are importing six very high-quality oils from two distinguished Istrian/Croatian producers. These are all organically produced and, I hope it goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway), all from the most recent Autumn 2025 harvest and so dated. The Rogers Collection are importers and do not sell directly to consumers but you can find information about how to purchase these oils, and other of their products, on their web page.

From Stancija San Antonio (San Antonio Farm) in the southern triangle of Istria, Rogers offers two single-varieties and a blend: Karbonaca, a mild, pleasantly fruity oil, with herbal overtones (thyme? za’atar?) and a delicate pungency in the aftertaste; Istarska Bjelica, a spicier, more forthright oil with that cultivar’s distinctive bitterness, an indication of high polyphenolic content; and an Estate Blend of the many varietals grown on the estate (Rosinjola, Karbonaca, Leccino, Buza, Istarska Bjelica, Pendolino, Picholine, and Leccio di Corno) that creates a balanced and happy combination on the palate.

Then from another producer, Istriana, in the village of Valtura, also in that southern tip of Istria, come three additional very distinctive oils: Leccino, a mono-cultivar (the same that we grow on our minifarm in Tuscany, so very familiar to me) that is noted for producing mellow, rounded, fruity oils with just a hint of spice at the end; Rosignola: the name indicates Italian origins but the varietal is indigenous to Istria, and lends a vegetal sweetness (think pea shoots, celery leaves, artichokes) to the oil’s flavor, perfect to anoint a fresh spring salad; and finally an estate blend simply called Istriana Extra Virgin, a beautifully balanced combination of leccino, rosignola, and the all-purpose pollinator pendolino.

One more interesting note about Istriana’s collection: The oils are bottled in specially molded clay (terracotta) jars just as olive oil was when Horace and Martial and other Roman poets and travelers were extolling the virtues of Istrian oil. The clay, partly extracted from that red Istrian earth, keeps the oil uncontaminated by light or heat, the two enemies of fine olive oil.

Happy the modern-day consumer--chef, cook, or just curious taster--who at last has the opportunity to see and taste what those old guys were talking about.

This was originally published in June 2017 in The Art of Eating, Ed Behr’s marvelous compendium of food writing, but it seemed good to republish now in this prime citrus season. The Art of Eating is available on Substack, where you’ll find the original of this story and lots of other good things.

THE PACKAGE ARRIVED overnight from California, from Kazi Pitelka, a woman I had never met in person but to whom I’d been electronically introduced. Inside were seven round bergamots (some call them bergamot lemons, others bergamot oranges), green-streaked yellow orbs from Pitelka’s orchard, along with a small, precious jar of her own bergamot marmalade. In my search for bergamots, I had contacted Evan Kleiman, the redoubtable host of KCRW’s weekly “Good Food” radio show, who knows everything and everyone in the California food scene. This package was the result.

Pitelka is a hobby orchardist with 30 different kinds of citrus in her present holding of 75 fruit trees, since downsizing five years ago from 125. One small tree is a bergamot, the mother of the fruits she sent me. Evan Kleiman says Pitelka is one of the best cooks in all Los Angeles and when I hear Pitelka talk about citrus, I know that’s right. You can hear her passion for flavors even when she’s just a disembodied voice at the end of a phone line.

Like me until Pitelka’s package arrived, you may never have laid eyes on a bergamot, one of the rarest and most exotic of the vast citrus family, which includes some decidedly odd and uncommon members (think Buddha’s hand, kumquats, yuzu, just for example). But if you are a tea drinker, you will likely recognize the aroma of bergamot immediately as the distinctive fragrance of Earl Grey, a British teatime favorite. When I opened my FedEx package from Pitelka, I scraped a thumbnail across the rind of a fruit and there it was — an austere but haunting fragrance, reminiscent of church incense, frankincense touched with myrrh and lightly smoky, like two-day-old ashes of an aromatic wood in the fireplace: bergamot.

The fruit itself has an intriguing flavor, sweeter than many lemons and less intense than most oranges, but with that critical balance of acid, sugar, and bitterness, in both fragrance and flavor, that makes citrus so useful in the kitchen. I would not deny the appeal of the juicy flesh of bergamot fruit, but what makes it precious is the intense flavor of the oil in the rind. It takes 100 kilos of bergamot rinds, gently squeezed by hand, to extract 500 grams of essential oil — that’s what goes into Earl Grey tea, as well as into a gamut of fragrances, beginning in the early 18th century with the original eau de Cologne, or Kölnisch Wasser, and 4711, its most recent interpretation, and continuing to the Body Shop, which produces bergamot perfume and also uses the oil as a sort of baseline or foundation for other fragrances.

But I am more interested in bergamot in the kitchen. Lemon curd made with bergamot rind and juice was a revelation, and bergamot marmalade with a melting pat of butter on a baking-powder biscuit hot from the oven — I don’t want to say it was perfection, but with a cup of strong Earl Grey tea it made an almost perfect breakfast.

I’m afraid, however, that unless you rush to befriend Kazi Pitelka or put in an order now for next winter’s delivery of bergamots from the four trees at Mud Creek Ranch, an orchard in Santa Paula, California, you will be hard put to sample same. David Karp tells me that Rising C Ranches (ripetoyou.com) is the best source for bergamots by mail order.

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Or you could settle down in Calabria for a season. That’s because almost all the bergamots in the world come from a narrow strip of land along the southern coast of Italy in that region. It’s here and only here that the bergamot is at home, as it has been since sometime in the 16th century, according to Helena Attlee, who has written an entire, fascinating book on lemons in Italy, called The Land Where Lemons Grow (a takeoff on Goethe’s resonant line, “Kennst du das Land/Wo die Zitronen blühn?”).

The Citrus genus, as Attlee describes it in chatty but meticulous detail, is the largest and most confusing genus in the whole world of fruit. Citrus of any species — lemons, oranges, mandarins, citrons, grapefruit, calamondins, yuzus, and even lesser-known ones — will mutate and hybridize spontaneously with any other member of the vast genus. The most ancient are pummelos (Citrus maxima,originally from Southeast Asia), mandarins (C. reticulata, native to China), and citrons (C. medica, originally from Northeastern India and adjacent regions). From these three and their crosses with each other and with their offspring are derived all other citrus, including sweet oranges, bitter or sour oranges (aka Seville oranges), lemons, tangelos, satsumas, limes, and on and on.

And that’s what happened with bergamots some 500 or so years ago. According to the University of California, Riverside, bergamots are hybrids, apparently spontaneous, of bitter oranges (C. aurantium) and lemon (C. limon). The bitter orange makes up 75 percent of the mix. At Riverside, the University of California’s Citrus Variety Collection, established a century or more ago and since added to through acquisition and cross-breeding, includes more than 1,000 varieties of citrus in 22 impressive acres of orchards just off the interstate on both sides of Martin Luther King Boulevard. The Los Angeles Times called it, appropriately, “a living genetic library” of citrus.

Despite some speculation, there is little agreement on the origin of the name bergamot, but the Citrus Variety Collection’s website confirms that its commercial cultivation is restricted to Calabria, one of Italy’s poorest territories. While bergamot trees do grow in other places, including Sicily and North Africa, nowhere else, it is said, does the fruit produce a rind with the intense fragrance of its Calabrian origin. Only on the plains below the forbidding heights of the Aspromonte where the balmy breezes from the Ionian and the Tyrrhenian mingle, at the tip of the toe of the boot, just where Italy kicks Sicily into the sea — only there does the bergamot achieve its glory. A full 90 percent of all bergamot oil comes from Calabria; the rest is inferior oil from bergamots in West Africa.

Though we might think of all citrus, not just bergamot, as ancient in flavor, in fact this whole category of aromatics, from lemons to oranges to bergamots, is a fairly recent addition to the Mediterranean palate. Food historians like to speculate about the blandness of various Mediterranean cuisines before the introduction of New World tomatoes, but it’s equally instructive to think about the tastes on the table before citrus, apart from citrons, arrived some time after the 10th century. According to agricultural historian Andrew M. Watson, Arabs brought sour oranges and probably lemons from farther east (Persia, India) into Syria and Egypt and thence to southern Italy and Spain. But the latest research, including archaeological finds, indicates citrons and lemons were present in the Mediterranean by the first millennium BC. In Cordoba, the erstwhile Islamic capital in Andalucia, you can spend a delightful time in the Patio de los Naranjos, the courtyard of fragrant Seville orange trees that was established in the Great Mosque by al-Mansur in the late 10th century. There you can reflect on what it must have meant to cooks and diners alike to add this freshness, this balance of sweetness and acidity, to the most common plates of the day.

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Next time you pass your supermarket produce section looking for an orange for breakfast or a lemon to squeeze over grilled fish for supper, pick up an orange, any orange — a Florida juice orange, a fat navel from California, a Valencia, or a juicy Cara Cara. No matter what you choose, it will be a variety of C. sinensis, meaning it came originally from China. In the bins of lemons, the choice is even more restricted. Whatever lemon you pick up, it will be C. limon and, in the US, almost certainly one of just two cultivars, Eureka or Lisbon from California, where many of the fresh lemons in American markets are grown. (The only exception to the rule is the Meyer lemon, which achieved fame primarily through the efforts of Alice Waters and Lindsey Shere of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California.)

This lack of choice seems sadly impoverished when you begin to scratch away at the story of Citrus, an enormous genus that is as botanically rich and taxonomically varied as anything that grows on Planet Earth. But for most American consumers, an orange is an orange, a lemon is a lemon, and that’s it.

And, no matter how common, we continue to find these fragrances and flavors of inestimable value in our kitchens. “Bright” is the adjective most often used with any kind of citrus. Something about the balance of sweet and tart, even with the sourest lemons, and the underlying tone of bitterness, “brightens” any dish to which it is applied. Fresh sweet strawberries, fatty cuts of pork, Tuscan-style grilled steak, the whole range of what Italians call “blue” fish (mackerel, tuna, salmon, herring, and the like), lemon and olive oil salad dressing, are all uses that spring to mind, and all would be unimaginably dull without the spritz of lemon or sour orange or even sweet orange juice. Bittersweet citrus marmalade with strong cheese (an aged Manchego or pecorino or very old Cheddar) is a modern preference, but salt-preserved lemons from North Africa are a traditional ingredient in Moroccan tagines. And I have yet to mention lemon meringue pie or orange sherbet. How odd to think we’ve only been eating this way for the last half-millennium.

And that brings me back to bergamots and the curd I made with Kazi Pitelka’s generous contribution to my larder. When I tasted it, I thought, hmmm, pretty good, but good enough to justify such an effort? Is it really any better than lemon curd made from ordinary supermarket lemons? So I made another batch, using those same big, undifferentiated lemons from my local market. And you know what? It really was different, and superior, more interesting, with a complex flavor — that earthy incense spice I mentioned earlier, plus a pleasantly metallic, mineral taste. When I served it to friends at dinner that night (piled loosely into shortbread tart shells), they all exclaimed over the intriguing but indefinable nature of it.

Later still, I talked with Kazi about the flavor of bergamot, and its evanescent nature. Because a citrus curd is not ever brought to the boil, just cooked enough to thicken the mixture, brought to around 170 degrees F (80 degrees C), that mysterious and complex bergamot flavor is retained. I grated some of the rinds and mixed the gratings with coarse demerara sugar, which I’ll use to top a meringue or whipped cream, or maybe just sprinkle it over some complicated rum cocktail later in the summer. With marmalade, which I made with the few bergamots I had left, the subtleties of flavor disappeared during 20 to 30 minutes of cooking, resulting in just another very nice but unexceptional jam.

But that doesn’t matter, because unless you are very lucky and can liberate a half dozen or so California bergamots, you will not be in a position to make bergamot curd in any case. Still, the recipe for citrus curd is a good one, and I imagine it would be very nice with some of those calamondin oranges in your grandmother’s Florida front yard, or (speaking of Florida) with a handful of Key limes, with Meyer lemons in season, or even with those big old Eureka lemons in your local supermarket.

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We were concluding a very pleasant meal in a small restaurant on the island of Torcello in the northern reaches of the Venetian lagoon. It was called Al Ponte del Diavolo, after the arching footbridge nearby, and it had been a chance discovery, one of those places that one is so happy to stumble on. “Oh, look at this menu, the place looks nice, let’s try it.” And we did.

My companions were a famous photographer and his girlfriend, later wife; she had grown up in Rome and spoke the purest, clearest Italian I’ve ever heard from an American.

We had gone out to Torcello on a fine May morning when the cherries were in blossom to see the recently restored mosaics in the basilica of Santa Maria Assunta. Probably the oldest church in the whole Venetian territory, one of the oldest churches in all of Italy, it dates back to the seventh century although the narthex, the entrance portal at the western end of the church, was a good 200 years later—ninth or tenth century, art historians agree. That’s still pretty old, even by Italian standards.

The basilica’s appeal is only partly historical--it’s what remains of the once thriving port of Torcello, the first settlement on the lagoon, the place Ruskin called “the mother of Venice.” It was the abandonment of Torcello, in the 14th century, that led to the glorious Venice we know today.

But the overwhelming lure of the church is not so much historic as it is aesthetic. That’s because of the stunning eleventh-century mosaics that cover the end walls, dazzling spectacles made up of tiny glittering tesserae, colored-glass tiles no more than a centimeter square, the likely work of Byzantine craftsmen.

The first you see on entering is the Madonna over the altar, an impossibly long, upright, solitary figure with the Christ child in her arms, truly a goddess, enclosed in an immense half dome of glittering gold tiles. In her solemnity, in her dignity, in her mystery, she recalls the Cycladic figures in glowing Parian marble carved by Aegean craftsmen millennia earlier. The row of saints below here seems indifferent to her overwhelming majesty.

But then, you turn and look the other way and the doomsday spectacle of the Last Judgment dominates the entire western wall, the counter façade, covered with six registers of figures from the stark simplicity of the crucified Christ at the top, down through complex rows and rows, intricate figures of angels, saints, apostles, animals and devils and mythical beasts, figures of Old Testament prophets, down, down to the final, lowest register where souls are divided between the terrors of hell and the glories of Paradise.

This is the Divine Comedy, laid out in spectacular detail, the mosaic tiles creating a memento mori for a people, most of whom could not read but who could look and see and take away the lessons on the wall.

We staggered from the cool, dark church out into the fresh, salty air off the lagoon, the spring sunshine, the grassy lawn of the cathedral close scattered with flowers, and made our way back to the Osteria al Ponte del Diavolo, the devil’s bridge, a name given throughout Italy to these impossibly high-arched bridges that date back to earlier times.

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At the eponymous restaurant, we had risotto, because one always has risotto in Venice, this time with castraùre, the famous small, sweet, meaty artichokes from Sant’Erasmo, another lagoon island, and then some fish that I don’t remember except it was of course simply prepared and delicious. It was a fine sunny day and, after being blown away in the depths of the church, we were happy to recover with a bottle of nicely chilled soave.

“I signori non si gradisce un dessert?”

Well, no, actually, having adopted Italian attitudes, we usually didn’t take dessert unless it was a little fruit, perhaps some strawberries although it was still early in the season for strawberries.

“Not even the famous tiramisù from the island of Burano?” the waiter suggested.

Well, then, actually, why not? Any time something is mentioned that’s local, special, traditional, only to be found here in this place, my food writerly palate calls itself to attention. I had never heard of tiramisù, although the name was enticing—pick me up, it means literally, tira mi sù. So yes, we would try it but only one portion. And three spoons.

And we licked the platter clean.

I don’t want to say it was a revelation, certainly not on a par with the mosaics in the basilica, but it was nothing any of us, experienced travelers that we were, had ever had before. And it was quite extravagantly delicious. Served in a glass bowl so you could see the layers, it recalled a similarly layered Florentine dessert (not actually a favorite of mine) called zuppa inglese, English soup, which itself recalls English trifle (definitely not a favorite of mine). Take the sticky jam, the whipped cream, the sweetened vanilla custard of a typical trifle, then pare the ingredients back and intensify the flavors, adding the bitterness of strong espresso and dark chocolate, the velvety texture and slight acidity of mascarpone, the contrasting softness and crispiness of sugar-coated savoiardi biscuits, and that’s something worth consuming at the end of a meal. A dessert, a concluding sweet, should never be cloying, never make you ask why you had that second bite. Instead it should have a sharp bitterness that wakes your mouth up again after the fullness of the meal.

At least, that’s what I think and I also think most Italians would agree with me. A chocolate layer cake thick with chocolate icing might be welcome at tea time when there’s no competition, but not, please, at the end of a good meal. A well-made tiramisù, on the other hand, is just the right touch.

How curious to think there was a time within living memory when tiramisù was quite simply unknown. Not just unknown to North Americans, actually unknown throughout Italy. And yet there we were, in a country and a region and a place that still stands out for its adherence to tradition, to the authentic, local, time-honored way of cooking and presenting and eating food—and we were tasting something not one of us had ever experienced before.

Within days it seemed, or certainly within months, of that encounter with tiramisù in 1983 in an obscure restaurant on an obscure island in the Venetian lagoon, tiramisù was suddenly everywhere. Nowadays, it’s on so many restaurant menus, from grand establishments to cheap diners, that it’s fallen to the bottom of the dessert menu, and featured in so many newspaper and magazine articles that it’s become an embarrassing cliché. The claim is even made that it’s an ancient tradition of northern Italy and yet it cannot be found in any cookery books, Italian or otherwise, before the early 1980s.

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How and why these food fads happen, what pushes tiramisù from a restaurant kitchen somewhere in northeastern Italy (origin points are in great dispute) to the world stage, is one of those puzzles that tease food historians. (Here’s another one, totally unrelated to the first: who could have predicted back in 1975, when it seems to have started up, that eating raw fish would become a phenomenon that would sweep across North America into every small town, even in the heartland, and end up with sushi in your local supermarket and even at interstate highway stops?)

But in 1983, I didn’t know that was going to happen. All I knew was that I had to find out how to put together this extraordinarily rich and satisfying yet somehow light and insubstantial dessert, how it was composed. Composed is the operative word here because tiramisù was clearly not really cooked but rather put together as an assemblage of ingredients. Two of those ingredients are of critical importance and, in my opinion, give some sense of how and why the sweet zoomed in popularity shortly after I discovered it. (Mind you, I make no claim for bringing tiramisù to the fore, just for being an early advocate.) Savoiardi biscuits are fairly ubiquitous on shop shelves throughout Italy. I don’t know when they were invented (some say in the 14th century) but they’ve been around for a very long time as favorite little sweets for dipping in coffee or a glass of sweet wine or vinsanto. To English speakers, they’re more familiar as ladies’ fingers. But ladies’ fingers are often flaccid and spongy, while savoiardi are crisp with a satisfying crunch.

A more important and more significant ingredient, however, is mascarpone, the smooth, spreadable dairy product that’s produced by coagulating rich milk or cream with an acid (citric or tartaric acid or lemon juice) and heat-treating it. It’s a mistake to call this cheese since there’s no rennet, no bacterial culture, and no fermentation involved. It’s a traditional and much-loved product of the region around Milano in Lombardy where dairy herds are prominent, but it was unknown in the rest of Italy until large-scale production began in the 1970’s coupled with improved refrigerated transport that got the product out to shops and markets all over the country to become the ubiquitous product that it is today. With it you make tiramisù. Without it, the authentic dessert doesn’t exist.

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The person who showed me how to put this altogether, step by step, was Daniela Rosín, a cheerful young housewife who did indeed live on the island of Burano but whose husband Loredano was at the time a highly acclaimed glass sculptor on the nearby island of Murano. (Loredano, alas, was killed in a boating accident in 1992.) Lagoon-dwellers travel the inter-island routes as casually as modern suburbanites go from home to school to office and back. Daniela took me under her wing and I spent several days in her kitchen as she walked me through the intricacies of some of her favorite dishes from the lagoon, including baccalà mantecato, a sumptuous cream of salt cod flavored with garlic and oil and served over squares of polenta; Venetian style pasta e fagioli; and an ancient tradition, sarde en saor, literally pickled sardines but made with small flatfish, like young soles about six inches long, fried in oil then topped with slow-cooked onions in a vinegar sauce and kept for at least a day before consuming. “The longer they’re kept, they better they are,” Daniela told me. “Più giorni che dura, più buono è.”

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I’m taking a break, giving my eyes and my brain a necessary rest from the computer. The eye strain is getting to me, and causing a certain amount of brain drain too, so it’s clearly time to back off. I hope to be back in your hearts and minds by Valentine’s Day but meanwhile, though I’ll check messages periodically and answer them when necessary, I’m essentially out of commission for the next few weeks. Hasta luego!

Just to keep you going till January 1st, here’s a tasty wintertime pasta from the great city of Napoli, a quick and easy dish for a midnight feast to toast the new year. Pair it with a wine from the region, a hefty red Aglianico from Mastroberardino, or a lighter white Greco di Tufo from Feudi di San Gregorio, and you’ll be in full Neapolitan festive mode, possibly even breaking into a spontaneous chorus of Santa Lucia as you wish your guests glittering seas (mare lucica), gentle waves (placida è l’onda), and prosperous breezes (prospero il vento) for the new year.

In Napoli they call this spaghett’ u natalina (that’s as close as I can get to the dialect name). It means literally Christmas spaghetti but I was assured, during the Christmas that I spent in the city some years ago, that it’s not necessarily for Christmas alone. In fact, it’s a celebration of walnuts, especially the celebrated walnuts from the Sorrento peninsula that forms the southern arc of the Bay of Naples. These walnuts, which have their own Slow Food presidium, are cherished for their sweet flavor and crisp but creamy texture.

You probably won’t be able to source Sorrento walnuts but do use the finest quality you can find. Best would be whole nuts in their shells but few are the cooks these days who are willing to put in the time it takes to crack the shells and pick out the insides. Walnuts, once the shell is removed, look very much like brains which is why, according to the ancient Doctrine of Signatures, they’re said to be brain food. But there’s some truth in that—walnuts are actually a valuable source of Omega 3 fatty acids, along with anti-inflammatory polyphenols and antioxidants. Call that brain food and you won’t be far off.

The other brain food in this delightful preparation comes from the anchovies. As a fatty fish, like salmon, like mackerel, they are also rich in those incredibly valuable Omega 3’s. I know, I know, anchovies, eeeuww! But give me a break, please, and try them in this dish. True food lovers, dare I say, true foodies, adore anchovies and not just because they’re health food. It’s the umami boost they give to any dish in which they are present. Fine chefs know this and know too that many of our favorite dishes actually have a couple of anchovy fillets crushed into the basic sauce for that very reason.

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If you have ichthyophobes (fish haters) among your guests, make a separate pasta al pomodoro for them. In the fanciest restaurants, chefs are often willing to make a simple tomato pasta for the kids at the table, so why not for the picky eaters at your own?

Frankly, I think this dish would be just sort of blah without the anchovies. You may use either fully salted ones, which should be carefully rinsed under the tap to rid them of surface salt, or oil-packed anchovies which were salted in another life and then, once they were fully cured, packed in oil. What you do not want are so called white anchovies, also known by their Spanish name boquerones. Delicious as they are, they are lightly pickled not salt-cured and don’t have the slightly fermented flavor that salt-cured anchovies boast. But, I repeat, be sure to rinse the salt-cured ones (not the oil-cured ones) because the dish might be otherwise unbearably salty.

Note that some versions of spaghett’ u natalina have a handful of pine nuts and a handful of sultana raisins added to the mix.

This will make enough for 4 people if served as a main course, 6 if served as a primo before a more important secondo, or main course.

• 1¼ cups (about 125 g) shelled walnuts, the fresher the better

• About 1 pound (500 grams) spaghetti, linguine, or other long, skinny pasta

• ½ cup plus 1 tablespoon (about 120 ml) extra-virgin olive oil

• 6 garlic cloves, finely chopped

• 10 anchovy fillets, rinsed if necessary, coarsely chopped

• Sea salt, if necessary

• 1 cup (handful, about 60 g) minced fresh flat-leaf parsley

• ½ cup (about 70 grams) unflavored bread crumbs

• If you wish, a small handful each of pine nuts and sultana raisins

Set the oven on 350ºF. (180ºC.)

Spread the walnuts out on a cookie sheet and toast in the oven for 10 to 15 minutes, or until they begin to release their fragrance. It’s okay if they turn a little golden, but don’t let them get deep brown. Remove from the oven, and when the nuts are cool, chop them coarsely and set aside.

When you’re ready to cook, bring a large pot of water to a rolling boil. Add a small handful of salt and then the pasta and start to cook, following package directions for timing but be prepared to take it off and drain it while it’s just barely al dente.

(If you want to add sultana raisins, set them in a small bowl of very warm water to plump, while you prepare the rest of the sauce.)

As the water is heating and then the pasta is cooking, make the sauce: Over low heat, combine the half-cup of oil and the garlic in a saucepan large enough to hold all the cooked pasta. Cook gently, stirring occasionally, until the garlic starts to soften. Add the anchovies and continue cooking, using a fork to mash the anchovies into the oil. Stir in the chopped walnuts and cook for about 1 minute.

Meanwhile, in a small skillet, toast the bread crumbs in the remaining tablespoon of olive oil, tossing and stirring to brown and crisp them. (If you’re using pine nuts, add them to the bread crumbs so they get lightly toasted.)

When the pasta is almost al dente, remove about ¾ cup pasta water and add to the walnut-anchovy sauce. Let it simmer while you drain the pasta, then add the pasta directly to the walnut sauce, turning to coat it well with the sauce as it finishes its last minute or so of cooking. Taste and add salt if necessary (there may be sufficient salt from the anchovies). If using sultanas, drain and stir them into the sauce.

Turn onto a warm serving bowl, garnish with the minced parsley and toasted bread crumbs (plus pine nuts, if using), and serve immediately.

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It’s five days before Christmas as I’m writing this, time to start preparing for the great holiday. I know there are a few people who begin their planning in July, assembling Christmas gifts that they find perhaps at a summer vacation spot. And there are people who start to decorate their houses just as the Halloween pumpkins are dumped on the compost heap. And many more who, as soon as the dishes are cleared from the Thanksgiving table, fall into a frenzy of lists and cards and party invitations and digging out recipes and ordering a tree and wreaths and perhaps a big bird for the table and a shockingly expensive panettone and candy canes to hang with care and rum to spike the eggnog. And don’t forget the Christmas crackers, those explosive devices, one of which goes next to every plate and when exploded reveals, presto, a paper crown to wear lopsided throughout dinner. Presents for the children’s stockings, gifts to wrap and set under the tree, a treat for the dog, another for the cat, a box of chocolates for the favorite aunt, a bottle of single malt or, on second thought, maybe Canadian Club for Uncle Matt. And where did I put that copy of A Christmas Carol? Time to read it again with its chilling opening lines:

“Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.”

The spookiest Christmas tale ever?

Over the decades that I’ve celebrated Christmas, in many countries on many continents, I’ve learned that, even if you start to think about Christmas in July, you still end up five days before the event, with a daunting list of things left to do. And if half of those things don’t actually get done, it won’t make a bit of difference in your celebration of the day.

So, I’m down to the wire and hope to get to gift shopping tomorrow if only I can finish all the cookies and the spicy cheese biscuits before the end of today. Then it’s just assembling all the requisites for Christmas Eve (Christmas Day gets handled by other family members) and I’m off and running toward the new year.

Christmas Eve (la Vigilia, the vigil, in Italy, Noche Buena in Spain, Réveillon in France), according to ancient church dogma, marks the end of the Advent fast. I’m told the fast has not been obligatory since about the 12^th century, but old habits die hard and in Catholic cultures some form of symbolic fasting (beans or fish but above all no meat) is traditional for the Night Before Christmas. As usual, we’ll have something fishy for dinner before the great feast—but something fishy in this case means lobster stew, a rich assemblage of goodness that I learned to make from Maine’s culinary eminence Sam Hayward a good many years ago.

Chef Sam is all but retired now, but still considered the dean of good food in Maine. I can attest to the fact that much of what has happened to develop good food in this northeastern outpost has been the result of his encouragement over the decades—to farmers and fishermen, to young chefs coming along, to restaurant clients and ordinary consumers. His main (Maine) effort has been to inspire us all to Pay Attention—pay attention to quality, pay attention to our relationship to the soil and the waters that surround us, pay attention to what’s happening in our gardens, on our stoves, and on our tables.

In Sam’s recipe for what he calls Scotian Lobster Chowder (the name, he says, because he learned to make it in Nova Scotia), you can see his thoughtfulness coming to play: the freshly steamed lobster, the specificity of russet potatoes, the density of the thick Jersey cream, the gentle stewing of the leeks in butter, the emphasis on shoe-peg corn.

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“What exactly is shoe peg corn?” my friend Gail asked. It’s a tasty sweet corn with very small irregularly spaced kernels, a favorite in the southern states but devilishly hard to find elsewhere. (Sam’s southern grandmother may be the source of his predilection for shoe-peg corn.) I have occasionally found it frozen or canned but this time around, I had to substitute frozen white corn as the next best thing.

Scroll down to find recipes—for Sam Hayward’s Scotian Lobster Chowder and, as a lagniappe, directions for easy cheesy biscuits as made by the amazing Peg Shea, another great Maine cook, now alas no longer with us, but her cheese biscuits keep her in our hearts.

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Italy is bubbling over with self-congratulatory joy, and not just because of the holiday season. The explanation, ICYMI, was in The Guardian, December 10, 2025: “Unesco has officially recognized Italian cooking as a cultural beacon, an endorsement hailed by the far-right prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, whose government has put the country’s food at the heart of its nationalistic expression of identity.”

Pardon me for being a grinch, but I have to say that’s good news and bad news.

Good news when this distinguished body recognizes that a cuisine, any cuisine, whether of a country, a region, a culture, a tribe, or something else, is worthy of recognition.

Bad news to have Italian cuisine weighed down by a nationalist agenda. If you don’t eat what I eat, you’re not Italian, is what the prime minister claims in effect. Makes me wonder what Eccellenza Meloni had for dinner last night.

But for anyone who knows Italy even a little bit, in fact for anyone who may have traveled more than a week or ten days in the country, the inevitable question is: Which cuisine exactly are we talking about?

Italy, from the Alps to the heel, to the toe, and to the several islands, is a landscape of many regions, twenty in fact, each one distinctive for its cuisine, its language, and a few other cultural artefacts. And each one divided into innumerable provinces. Venetians speak vèneto to each other while Sicilians speak sicilianu. (According to linguists these are not dialects but recognizable languages, with their own grammatical structures.) But when Venetians speak to Sicilians, they converse in Italian because the two regional languages are not mutually comprehensible. Just so with the cuisine. A cichetto of baccalà mantecato (creamy salt cod mounted on a disc of toasted bread or fried polenta) taken with a glass of prosecco at 11 o’clock in the morning at a stand-up bar in a Venetian back alley near the fish market is as typical of Venice as a hearty pane co’ meusa (a robust spleen sandwich, softened with thickly dripping gravy) is of Palermo, especially if it’s offered from a stall in the narrow streets around Palermo’s dock area after a night of carousing. And try as you might, you will never find baccalà mantecato in Palermo nor will you find pane co’ meusa in Venice.

To be fair, the UNESCO designation goes way beyond a series of recipes for specific dishes (think carbonara, tiramisù, mozzarella in carozza, lasagna al ragù, parmigiana di melanzane, spaghetti alle vongole, e via dicendo) to embrace an all-reaching idea of what makes food in Italy so important that it deserves international recognition. In fact, we should be speaking not so much of food in Italy as of eating in Italy. The citation goes on:

“It is a communal activity that emphasizes intimacy with food, respect for ingredients and shared moments around the table … People of all ages and genders participate, exchanging recipes, suggestions and stories, with grandparents often passing down traditional dishes to their grandchildren.”

So, we could say, it’s a way of thinking about food, from beginning to end, and it really begins long before the kitchen or the table. It begins out there in the fields, the vineyards, the olive groves, the steep mountain pastures where sheep graze, the woodlands where wild mushrooms grow, the long long coastline where fishers cast their nets, it begins in fact with Italy’s amazing landscape that has been shaped and nourished and carefully tended by humans since the beginning of history.

In more than a half-century of experience in the country, I’ve found a simple truth, that Italians care more about their food than almost any other culture or country I’ve known, and certainly a great deal more than most Americans. From toddlers to grandparents, Italians are acutely aware of what they’re eating at any moment and why it tastes good. Or not. That’s why, as we stranieri like to point out, they spend most of their time at the table talking about the meal they’re eating, comparing it to the meal they ate last, and planning the meal they’ll eat next. That’s a joke but, like many jokes, it’s a gloss on the truth.

In Italy no matter where you are, in a kitchen, in a market, in a restaurant, a winery or a caffè or a neighborhood alimentari (food shop), the highest praise you can give to anything you put in your mouth is that it’s genuino. Which doesn’t mean genuine so much as it means authentic, honest, true, unadulterated, the real thing. A wine that’s genuino has not been adulterated with added sugars or flavor-boosting yeasts: “È buono,” the wine steward might say critically of a wine from Germany, perhaps, or California: “Ma non è genuino.” Meaning, it’s pretty good but it would be really good if it hadn’t had all that mickeymouse stuff added to it. And you can say that about olive oil as much as about a plate of pasta. Or vegetables. Or beans.

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I recall a meal shared one late autumn in a restaurant in Cortona with friends from Arezzo. We were served deep bowls of acquacotta (the name means cooked water), a sort of fundamental soup that is deeply traditional throughout Tuscany in many slightly different versions. Basically, it’s bread soup with plenty of onions and other vegetables, garnished with good olive oil. The version in Cortona came with a welcome plenitude of thickly sliced wild porcini mushrooms. “Delicious,” my visitors from Arezzo murmured, “but of course it’s not acquacotta. It’s mushroom soup!”

Acquacotta, you see, in the Aretine view, should not contain mushrooms, no matter how delicious.

Equally, Rosalba, a cook in Siracusa, making a traditional Sicilian caponata, listened in utter disbelief as I told her of another cook, Concetta in Catania who, like most cooks in that town, added a dash of bitter chocolate to the succulent mix of eggplant and tomatoes in a sweet-sour sauce. A mere 42 miles (67 kilometers) separate the two towns, yet more than that divides their kitchens.

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The problem, for people like our UNESCO colleagues trying to define Italian food, is that there really is no such thing. One learns very quickly that the ragù made to sauce the pasta in one village is different from the way it’s made in a neighboring village. Maybe only slightly so but that, as Frost said, makes all the difference. Our way is genuino; their way over there in the next town is hopelessly contaminated. Sofisticato, is the term used and, like genuino, the meaning is not the obvious one. It means adulterated, precisely. Possibly, like that acquacotta, adulterated with wild porcini mushrooms, or like that caponata, with a dash of bitter chocolate. “Delizioso, ma non è genuino!”

Another part of understanding the Italian relationship to food is understanding the attachment to the land and to country ways, even among people in the heart of the heart of cities. In Rome, back in the day (I don’t know if this is still true), the city was dotted with little markets that filled the smaller squares across the town, like piazza della Pace, where I shopped daily. The vendors, while they got lots of produce from the mercati generali, the wholesale houses, also brought in produce from the market gardens that surrounded the ancient city and offered some of the finest local, seasonal fruits and vegetables. Roman artichokes, Roman puntarelle (a bitter chicory green particular to the region), Roman fava beans and strawberries and agretti greens and so much else, were all considered treasures to be cherished like jewels that renewed themselves annually.

All this is changing, of course, as it is around the world. Old traditions die off, as they always have, and new, less desirable ones take their place. More and more supermarkets, with their conveniences, have invaded the space once occupied by local food shops. In my Tuscan town I’ve watched as the Saturday market, once a beacon attracting vendors and customers from all the villages around us, has shrunk over the decades to perhaps a third of its former space. The locally owned shops, the bakeries, the pastry emporia, the butchers, the fruttivendolo (greengrocers) have disappeared, one by one, and been replaced by bars and eating places (some quite good) that cater mostly to tourists, as well as elegant boutiques selling tourist desirables, cashmere, lace, antiques, much of it priced beyond the reach of local residents.

At the same time, where once local shoppers had access to a wide range of prepared foods, prepared on site, that is, delicate spinach gnocchi, individual baked lasagnas, hefty slices of porchetta or a skewer of pork livers called fegatelli, salt cod with potatoes on Fridays, stewed tripe on Saturdays, pasta e fagioli almost any day of the week, things a busy housewife had no time to make at home, now a lot of that need is filled by frozen or, worse yet, ultra-processed food. One of the most disheartening sections of our local supermarket is the aisle devoted to snack foods for children. Here a harried mother can pick up individual packs, one for each child for each day of the week, of the kind of high-fat, high-sodium, highly sweetened and chemically stabilized junk that Americans are accustomed to. Gone are the slabs of country bread with a smear of ricotta or tomato paste or even Nutella that kids used to get.

So it’s not, pace UNESCO and the celebrating Italians, a universal truth that Italian food, as it exists today, is an “Intangible Cultural Heritage.” It’s the intangible part that I would dispute. In fact, I would hazard a guess that this kind of recognition (this kind??? this is unique, at least so far) often comes along, like a Slow Food commendation, just at the point when a product, a method, a whole way of life, is in danger of disappearing.

But, speaking as an American, there is still so very much for us to learn from Italians and the ways they grow and harvest and process and cook and serve and share their food. The most important lesson is to pay attention. Pay attention to what you eat, pay attention to how it’s cooked, pay attention to where it came from and how it got to your table.

And set aside time to enjoy a meal, with family, with friends, with strangers, or on your own. Stop scrolling while you eat.

Above all, remember, a tavola non s’invecchia mai.

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