From a Classic Saveur: Jesse Tries Recipes from an Italian-American Institution

 

Jesse Sutton-

Okay, y'all, we've always had a strong focus on Italian-American cuisine on this blog.  We've devoted an entire podcast episode to it, and I've done a cookbook review.  Also, my obsession with Chicago-style pizza is a matter of public record, and currently the subject of an ongoing series.

I'm also known for my love of old Saveur magazines (tip the 40).  My success rate with their recipes is about 75%, which really isn't bad (although the failures have been pretty epic).  Yeah, there was the time I wasted an entire day trying to make Caribbean fried bread, and it wouldn't rise, and the filling had way too much molasses in it, and the whole thing was a messy disaster, but, then, their baklava recipe was absolutely perfect.  Saveur is one of two magazines (the other being Lucky Peach) that I will actually cook out of.  (Oh, and the other common thread between Saveur and LP?  They are both defunct.  Ain't that a bitch?)

So anyway, I was reading Saveur #28 (July/August, 1998), and there was a great article on classic NYC Italian restaurant Rao's (pronounced Ray-o's).  This place is legendary.  Apparently, it's next to impossible to get a table.  (I cheated, and went to the one in Vegas.  I had a veal parmigiana that was absolutely massive.  And good.)  The article had some history on the place, a little fawning and mooning over the famous staff and more famous patrons, and a pretty solid line-up of recipes.  I tried two.  It all went pretty great.

Penne with Cabbage and Sausage

Recipe here.

Okay, I had to try this one, for a couple of reasons.  First, cabbage is my wife's favorite ingredient, and sausage is mine, so this was a no-brainer.  Secondly, and more intriguingly, the recipe for marinara sauce that it called for started out by rendering diced salt pork.  I've never started a tomato sauce with salt pork before.  Sure, I've started out countless sauces with bacon (or pancetta, or guanciale), but the simpler, cleaner flavor of salt pork seemed intriguing.  

The sauce worked out absolutely fantastically.   Ultra-simple.  San Marzano tomatoes, olive oil, salt pork, onion, garlic, basil, salt and pepper, and (horror of horrors) dried oregano.  (I know, I know, lots of people use it, get off my back.)  The recipe had a couple things going for it.  First, the salt pork really added something.  The flavor was cleaner than the other types of cured pork I mentioned earlier, and yielded a gently salinity and richness, that did more to lift the natural sweetness of the tomatoes, than to mask them or trample them.  Using whole canned plum tomatoes instead of crushed tomatoes or puree meant that even after an hour-long simmer, there was a distinct meatiness of texture, like it was less a sauce, and more of a porky tomato stew.  And the tiny amount of oregano used managed to do what dried oregano is good at, which is give a savory, herbaceous back-note, without doing that one thing dried oregano likes to do, which is completely take over and make everything taste like Olive Garden.

The dish itself was fantastic.  Super simple: penne (I used Rao's brand, which only seemed natural, and it was as good as De Cecco (but more expensive, and not really better), the sauce, Italian sausage, blanched savoy cabbage, garlic, seasoning, and freshly microplaned Pecorino Romano.  The cabbage provided an intriguing heft to the sauce, speaking to the obvious origin of the dish, that being to help manage a situation where you need to feed a family of ten, with only enough pasta and sausage for 5.  However, it didn't taste like the cuisine of poverty.  It's poignant that while Rao's trades in gigantic portions of meat (like my aforementioned gargantuan veal scallop), they still highlight dishes like this.  The cabbage, originally conceived as a way to stretch, has become an attraction unto itself, and this majestic, porky pasta was absolutely worth the effort.  (Pictured at the top.)

Shrimp Scampi 

Recipe here, but take note: there are some differences.  Omit the linguine and halve the butter.  The Rao's recipe from 1998 was an app.  Somewhere in the 14 years or so between when they printed the recipe and when they added it to their website, they made it into a pasta entree, and added extra butter to stretch the sauce.  However, they didn't increase any of the aromatic ingredients accordingly, so I have to see this as a hastily-adapted mistake, one that will likely yield a bland dish.  This is why I always stick to the hard-copies.  That plus I'm a collector fanboy nerd-o.

So anyway, shrimp scampi is a dish that's always pissed me off, for reasons of lazy nomenclature.  (To be sure, I have no problem with the dish itself.  Sauteed shrimp, swimming in a white wine, butter, and garlic sauce?  Sign me the hell up.)  But the name is infuriating.  A scampi is the Italian word for the Dublin Bay prawn, AKA the langoustine.  It is one of the most delicious shellfish money can buy, and it's traditionally prepared in a garlic butter sauce in Italy.  Shrimp scampi just means 'shrimp langoustines.'  Which is objectively obnoxious, and inaccurate, besides.  Even worse, in the American culinary vernacular, 'scampi' sauce has come to mean 'the sauce that they serve with shrimp scampi,' which means that we have have something called, essentially, 'langoustine sauce' that contains only garlic, butter, white wine, and seasoning.  (I suppose there is precedent for this.  Steak sauce doesn't contain steak, barbecue sauce isn't made with barbecue, but still.)  So I have actually seen 'pasta with scampi sauce,' where the chef had essentially just made aglio-olio, but didn't know the right word for it.  It's all a little undignified, if you ask me, which literally no one ever does.

However, it turns out that yet again, I am being a little too puritanical.  When immigrants came to American coastal regions, this was an example of how they adapted familiar recipes to ingredients available in their new home.  Gambero alla scampi (and please forgive any grammatical mistakes, I don't speak any Italian at all), meaning 'shrimp, scampi style' makes sense, and by extension, as English blended with Italian, the idea that it could be shortened to 'shrimp scampi' is actually perfectly reasonable.  So I will get off my high horse.  (This time.  Chicken rollatini is still f***ing forbidden on my watch.)

So anyway, the dish itself: it's pretty straightforward.  Shrimp (I used the excellent shrimp they sell at Tarvin's, in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina's Old Village, but high-quality frozen would have been fine) are shelled, butterflied, and rolled in flour.  They are then quickly sauteed in oil until starting to brown, before being set aside while a quick butter sauce (wine, garlic, chicken stock, worcestershire, lots of lemon juice, butter, parsley) is tossed together.  Then, the shrimp are tossed in the hot sauce to reheat and are served immediately.

The results: pretty solid.  It was cool to taste an old example of a dish that has become a played-out, Italian-American chestnut.  The sauce was balanced, and excellent.  The shrimp were good, but not great.  More on that later.  On the whole, the dish was a good one, one I might make again, with a couple of tweaks.  

The Problem with Shrimp: Okay, so I said the shrimp was good, but not great, and here's why.  First, I was using best-quality, local, never frozen, out-of-the-water-for-a-couple-of-days shrimp.  Shrimp like that really don't need to be floured.  When my wife was tasting them, she said 'I don't think you needed Tarvin shrimp for this one.'  As in, frozen shrimp would have held up just fine.  I'm inclined to agree.  The Rao's scampi treatment was actually a big aggressive, for such high quality shrimp.  But there was another, bigger issue: the shrimp were slightly overcooked.

Here's what I think went wrong.  The recipe called for 'large' shrimp.  Here's the problem.  Did the recipe mean large, as in 'grab some of the larger shrimp you can?'  Or did the recipe mean 'jumbo?'  See, shrimp is packed by count in a pound.  A large shrimp is classified as a 26-30 (between 26 and 30 in a pound) or 31-35.  But the problem is, this is actually a medium-sized shrimp.  So 'large' shrimp are medium, because 'jumbo' shrimp are large.  See the issue?  This is why I think recipes should always specify the count-size of shrimp, and not just an ambiguous adjective.  My issue is that I bought 'Large' shrimp, like what my shrimp-monger calls 'large.'  I probably should have gotten jumbos.  'Large' shrimp don't usually need to be butterflied.  That's the reason they overcooked a bit.  A 'large' shrimp that's been butterflied and floured will overcook before the flower takes on a golden color. 

The takeaway here is that if I make this again, I will use large shrimp and not butterfly them, or use jumbos and proceed as written.  That, and every time I write a shrimp recipe, from now on, I will specify shrimp count, because that's unambiguous.  Food magazines, don't underestimate your readers!  Sometimes, you can try so hard to be clear you end up being confusing!

An Interesting Italian-American Cultural Note: One thing that struck me about this dish was its similarity to New Orlreans-style BBQ shrimp, a New Orleans Italian dish originating at Pascal's Manale, a venerable hole-in-the-wall with surprisingly good food, as long as you don't mind dishes that haven't been updated since the Coolidge administration.   The main differences are that BBQ shrimp are not shelled, and their butter-garlic-white wine-Worcestershire sauce is punched up with the odd additions of beer and rosemary.  However, in contemplating the origins of shrimp scampi, I came to realize I'd also enhanced my understanding of this dish, which also has a name having little to do with the contents of the plate.

Culinary linguistics are fun.  (No, I don't know what makes them barbecue, either.)