"Heat" [.]

[fiefoe]

It was very nice to run into a long excerpt from "Naples '44" (of a spaghetti-eating competition). There was another ortolan shout-out as well.

<'self-education by self-abasement'>

• Blisters on blisters. The process was akin to what I was trying to do to the meat - break down the protein in the tissue with high heat. But this thought occurred to me only later.
• By seven o'clock, the hair on my arms had disappeared, except for one straggly patch by my elbow, which had melted into black goo.
• For the rest of the night, Mark retrieved random clams off plates at the last second "just as dishes were going out", and most of the pasta tasted, ineffably, the same.
• It made me realize how this visual facility was not one I had developed, probably because I'm a word guy - most of us are - and for most of my life the learning I've done has been through language.
• The flames started at the hem and, like that - two seconds - the whole apron was burning. (It's animal fat, it occurred to me -- of course! I'm a grease fire!)

__ Being a chef then, (Marco Pierre) White explained, with no small nostalgia, was a license to scream.
__ "Potatoes are grown on hilly fields. The top fields make the best chips."
__ "You stuff the bird so it cooks more slowly. With the empty cavity, you let in the heat."
__ From Platina's book: an occasional portion of porcupine meat reduces bed-wetting.
__ (On clams): Mario told me later: "No one is interested in the little snot of meat!"

• As with belly buttons, I concluded, there are two kinds of pasta: innies and outies.
• All those alla constructions.. are the Italian equivalent of the French a la and arose out of a nervous effort to sound fancy.
• A northerner is called a polenta eater, just as a Tuscan is a bean eater, and a Napolentano is a macaroni eater.
• (Porretta through the seasons): May was wild asparagus, arugula, and artichokes. June was wild lettuce and stinging nettles. July was cherries and wild strawberries. August was forest berries. September was porcini... October was wild boar... chestnuts (November), We now can't eat chestnuts. There are recipes that will disappear unless they are passed on soon, but for now, no one can touch them."
• A truce had been achieved: somehow Filippo, in unreasonably hitting Dario over the head with a menu, had persuaded him that he had been acting unreasonably.
• (The dominant demand food theory): Florence, the historic capital of European leather making, was only twenty miles from Panzano, in the historic heartland of the Italian cow.
• The Tuscan chart was dizzying... The thigh was a maze, like a road map of an impenetrable medieval city, with more names than there was space on the two-dimensional representational leg to accommodate.
• ... a sixteenth-century royal road show. For two years, (Catherine de'Medici) sought to consolidate the monarchy in the way that an Italian would understand: by feeding people.

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