Mediterranean Soups in America

We are a lucky nation to have so many different cultures and ethnic groups creating an American food. The Portuguese who settled in southestern Massachusetts have given us a wonderful soup from the Old World. It's from my new book THE BEST SOUPS IN THE WORLD


Portuguese Kale Soup
It may be called Portuguese kale soup or caldo verde, but this dish is a classic of Portuguese-American cookery as found from Fall River and New Bedford, Massachusetts, east to Cape Cod, where many Portuguese immigrants settled in the late nineteenth century. This version is my attempt to approximate the one I ate regularly at P.J.’s Dari-Burger in Wellfleet on the Cape during our summer vacations. The key ingredient here, besides freshness, is the fresh linguiça sausage. Supermarkets usually carry it on the East Coast, but elsewhere you may need to substitute the fully cooked version, and if you can’t find that, then sweet Italian sausage or kielbasa.
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 pound (about 1 link) fresh Portuguese linguiça or chourico, casing removed
1 large onion, chopped
4 cups chicken broth
2 cups water
1 1/2 pounds russet potatoes, peeled and thinly sliced
1 pound kale leaves, heavy stems removed, laid on top of one another, rolled up, and sliced 1/4 inch thick
2 1/2 teaspoons salt or more to taste
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper or more to taste
1. In a large pot, heat the olive oil over medium heat, then add the sausage and onion and cook, stirring occasionally and breaking up the sausage but leaving largish chunks, until the onion is softened, about 10 minutes.
2. Add the chicken broth, water, potatoes, and kale. Bring to a boil over high heat, then reduce to low and simmer, partially covered, until the potatoes are softened and almost falling apart, about 1 ½ hours. The potatoes are meant to fall apart and thicken the broth. Season with salt and pepper and serve. Break up the potatoes further in your bowl to make it thicker.
Makes 4 to 6 servings

Soups from the Mediterranean

Paparòt is an interesting spinach soup from Friuli-Venezia Giulia, the region of northeastern Italy, and is far more exciting than its humble list of ingredients would indicate. It’s a spinach soup made with fine cornmeal flour used as a thickening agent. Paparòt, in the dialect of Friuli, means “pulped” used as a noun (in other words “pulped soup”) and indicates that the spinach is treated like a pesto but is pulped by chopping rather than pounding in a mortar. The kind of cornmeal to use is the one used for polenta, and I prefer the slightly coarser one because I enjoy the resulting gruel-like texture. The taste is surprisingly rich and filling.

The recipe is in my latest book THE BEST SOUPS IN THE WORLD

What do I do with Kale?

In the Mediterranean kale cries out for soup. In northern Italy a very nice black kale soup is called minestra di cavolo nero e fagioli. It uses a dark leafed kale, a hearty leafy vegetable in the cabbage family, called black kale, Russian kale, or Tuscan kale. I like it with blood sausage. Cook some chopped onions, carrots, garlic, pork belly pieces or pancetta and a four-inch-square piece of pork skin in some olive oil until soft. Add some red kidney beans, maybe 1/2 cup, and about a pound of kale cut into thin strips, and cover with 6 cups of chicken broth. Bring to a boil then reduce the heat to very low and simmer until everything is very tender, about 4 to 5 hours. An hour before serving you can add 1/4 cup of soup pasta such as semi di melone. Season with salt and pepper at the end. Cook the blood sausage separately in barely simmering water.

[Photo: Clifford A. Wright]

Laguna Beach Eating

Orange County, California is renowned for being a culinary wasteland. Sure, you might find rave reviews

[photo: Mark Abel]

of some restaurant on the plebian tripadvisor.com web site and even the foodie web sites. But my favorite knowledgeable account of restaurants in Orange County was the person who wrote the following answer to someone's query about where to eat in Orange County: "you don't go to Orange County to eat."

Now, that being said, what you can eke out are the names of acceptable places to eat that provide decent or adequate food in a nice environment, but nothing to write home about. I ate at Ocean Brewing in Laguna Beach, California and it was a very fine experience. A nice brew pub producing their own fresh beer and a menu they called Mediterranean-Italian which was, in fact, Italian. A lovely greeting, nice attentive but not overbearing service, and an almost imperceptible transformation from a restaurant to a DJ-run music blasting dance venue around 9:30 pm.

Laguna Beach is an old California beach town with a real artist's colony and a most delightful location. Today it's a heavy tourist destination and has a somewhat crowded and unreal feeling, but still pleasant as a rendezvous. It's filled with restaurants nearly all of which are unmemorable except for locations (many overlook the sea) and sometimes expertly made drinks.

Molecular or Deconstructive?

The latest by-word in the culinary world is the so-called molecular gastronomy of chefs such as the Catalan Ferran Adria. But did you know that Adria specifically says there is no such thing as molecular gastronomy and that he does not call his cooking molecular? A better--and more accurate--description is deconstructive gastronomy. You can read more in-depth analysis and commentary about deconstructive gastronomy and all the cooking of the Mediterranean by becoming a member of www.cliffordawright.com

What you read here is like the display dessert at a restaurant. Step through the link to the rest of the kitchen, and the pantry, and the field, and the culture that lies behind the food you eat. Visit www.cliffordawright.com and you can see why a blog is only a baby step. Come visit a world of Mediterranean food.

Arugula Simplicity

In this day and age of Ferran Adria-inspired culinary alchemy we can easily forget the sublime joy of the simplicity of so much Mediterranean food. I went to my local farmers market this morning and purely by coincidence one farmer had his leafy bunches of crisp arugula next to a bin of nicely ripe beefsteak tomatoes and it immediately reminded me of a dish I hadn't made in a while.

Arugula is a popular vegetable in Apulia, the province that is the heel of the Italian boot, and it is used as often in stews and pasta dishes as Americans use it in salads. Cavatieddi con la Ruca is a simple dish of cavatelli, a pasta shaped like a cowrie shell, made by throwing the arugula into the boiling water with the cavatelli, draining and then tossing the pasta with tomato sauce and pecorino cheese. That's all it is.

Cavatelli is the pasta Vinny Mancini (Andy Garcia) instructs Mary Corleone (Sofia Coppola) to make, standing behind her in an erotically charged scene from GODFATHER III. Delicious on both counts.

[Photo: Clifford A. Wright]

Rotolo

Several regions of Italy claim the rotolo di spinach e ricotta, a large leaf of fresh pasta stuffed with spinach and ricotta cheese and rolled into a cylinder. The rotolo from Sardinia is a delightful and easy dish. There is time and labor involved of course, but all in all nothing is too difficult. It's also a crowd pleaser.

One starts by making the fresh pasta, using only flour, water, and salt. While the pasta ball rests one can make the stuffing. I put two pounds of spinach with only the water adhering to it from its last rinsing into a large pot and wilt it over high heat for 5 minutes. I let the spinach drain and cool and once it has, I'll pick up softball sized pieces of the spinach and squeeze all remaining water out. Then we chop the spinach and mix it with a pound of fresh ricotta cheese and 3 eggs.

The ricotta must really be fresh and not from a container in a supermarket. As of this writing supermarkets do not sell fresh ricotta so you need to make it yourself or visit an Italian market. The pasta is rolled out into a thin sheet about 24 inches by 14 inches. The spinach and ricotta stuffing is spread over the pasta sheet and rolled up tightly. Then ends are secured and the whole stuffed rotolo is wrapped in cheesecloth and tied off with twine.

Boil it for 20 minutes in salted water and serve with tomato sauce. It's very nice, very pretty.

[Photo: Clifford A. Wright]

In the Beginning...

Mediterranean cuisine is called one of the world's healthiest diets, but very few people will be able to tell you what Mediterranean cuisine is. This blog will hopefully get you started once it's up and running fully.

Specifically, I will be blogging about cooking and the food used in Mediterranean cooking. For the full range of the Mediterranean culinary experience and in the meantime, please visit my web site at www.cliffordawright.com to find your introduction to what the cuisines of the Mediterranean are all about. If you become a member you will have access to a thousand fully kitchen-tested heirloom Mediterranean recipes as well as a monthly and weekly newsletter. I call them newsletters rather than blogs because they are formatted differently, written differently, and have a different purpose than this blog will have.

If you are interested in travel information and restaurant recommendations in the Mediterranean you will do best by Googling the respective places you want to visit. If you want to know more about what might appear on a menu once there or what you should be ordering and eating...then stick around...this is the place.