Bread

Ranch Style® Beans are Min’s number one foolproof side dish for instant satisfaction every time. She says that if Andy Warhol had been a Texan, the Ranch Style® Beans can would hang in museums throughout the world. The chili pintos’ unmistakable label dressed in basic black with bright white Western lettering and yellow and red accents is as common a sight in Southwestern pantries as Campbell’s tomato soup ever was. These well-seasoned beans make an “appetite pleasin’” homey cornbread casserole with any leftover cheater meat.

In the south near Cagliari, in the town of Sant’ Elena, is staged a September festival—a tribute to their patroness and a celebration of the vendemmia—the harvesting of the grapes. There are four ascendancies in the week’s pageantry. The ancestral dress of the townsfolk, the great, pendulous, ambered muscat grapes, called zibibbo, with which the whole, humble precinct is festooned, the wine pressed from their honeyed juices, and, finally, the luscious breads baked from zibibbi left to dry and crinkle in the sun. Though the bread is sweetened and ornamented with raisins, it is most compatible with game dishes such as fagiano arrosto alla Saverio di Nulvi, (page 240) or braises such as the cosciotto di maiale al coccio del pastore Sassarese (page 237). We ate pane di zibibbo in Sant’ Elena with the sweet, white flesh of a myrtle-roasted pig. The bread, still warm from the oven, or roasted over a wood fire, makes for a gorgeous fine pasto with a piece of young pecorino and a glass of moscato. I reserve the bread’s golden-crisped fringes for the baker.

Piana degli Albanesi is the name of the city settled half a millennium ago when a band of oppressed Albanesi took flight from the Turks and, with the permission of Giovanni II, the then Spanish viceroy in Sicily, took refuge in the countryside near Palermo. A somewhat unmingled populace, cleaving still to its heritage, they perpetuate, in full dress and with great ebullience, the story of their gastronomy. And yet it is a fornaio, a baker, there who makes one of the finest examples of the traditional bread of Sicily. Heavy, cakelike in its wet, golden crumb, its crust is thick, hard, wood-scorched. And to cradle a hunk of it in one’s hand is to hold a piece of the ages, it seems. Insofar as things like this can be carried from one part of the world to another, here follows his formula.

An intriguing bread both sweet with honey and anise and savory with pepper and pancetta, versions of it have been baked for pagan and sacred and secular festivals since the epoch of the Greeks. Giuseppe Fazia sometimes bakes the gorgeous, fragrant bread at his forno in Via Tommasini in Reggio Calabria.

Sitting a few kilometers from the snarls of the city’s traffic, Mondello is Palermo’s beachfront. Less chic than it is drowsy, the tiny port’s center is paved with little trattorie that offer still-writhing sea fish from which one can choose a fine lunch. And at noon, just as bathers and strollers longing for some icy little aperitivo start off for the bars and caffès, a husky, microphoned voice seeming to come from the fat, dark leaves of the old plane trees intrudes on the operetta. With the precision of a corps de ballet, the cast of characters pivots in the direction of a small white truck, chugging slowly, then edging to a stop in their midst. Lo sfincionaro has arrived. In another place, he might be called the pizza man, though his is hardly some prosaic pie. His voice invites: “Just come to see them. They are warm and fragrant. I don’t ask that you buy one. I only invite you to admire them.” We watched as there came a fast gathering of his devoted. Mothers and babies, men in rumply Palm Beach suits, Australian fishermen on holiday, an Englishwoman with a great yellow hat and a silver-headed cane. Children clutching five-lire notes collected, each of them waiting for lo sfincionaro to enfold a great, warm heft of his beautiful onion-scented bread into a sheet of soft gray paper. A traditional confection of Palermo, it is called lo sfincione. It is a crunchy, rich, bread-crusted tart—and close kin to southern France’s pissaladière—that cradles sautéed onions, dried black olives, sun-dried tomatoes, anchovies, pancetta, and pecorino. Fashioning smaller sfincioni and piling them up, newly born, in an old basket and passing them about with jugs of cold white wine can make for a lovely summer supper.

To tear at a beautiful, newborn bread and eat it with fat, salty olives, a potent red wine sipped between them, is a meal everlasting in its innocence and sensuality. Here follows the simplest of recipes that pairs the soft creaminess of roasted garlic with the olives for a lush result. The dish asks only a little dalliance in the oven. Roasting the olives plumps them, renders them voluptuously fleshy, tender. And when whole, fat garlic—caramelized in a long, slow roasting—confronts the salt-tinged meat of the warm olives, the whole becomes quietly paradisiacal. As beautiful as it is, stray for a moment from the red wine idea and consider a fusion, instead, with an iced Marsala Superiore Riserva or Marsala Vergine or Marsala Soleras Stravecchio—altogether different wine from the often industrially produced sweet varieties that find their way to the States and are used to make zabaglione or to splash sautéed veal. The crackling, almost dry golden chill of them leaves just a point of sweetness on the tongue.

Traditionally, pettole are fried in bubbling oil, but here follows a version of the gloriously bay-perfumed breads—their faces glossed with diabolical olio santo—that are simply baked. The fat little breads are wonderful to serve with the Lucanian sausages (page 157) or some great platter of dried sausages, salame, and piquant cheeses. Even unaccessorized, they are wholly absorbing, their warm, crunchy goodness complemented by some cold white wine.

If I were given the task of choosing one bread from all the bakers of Italy, one that I could eat everyday and forever, it would be the golden-fleshed bread of Altamura, its thick skin, parched, crackled, its form a fat, crisped heart, cleaved nearly in two.

...Anchovies, and Black Olives) Brindisi, the ancient Brundisium of the Romans, is a sort of rough, emotionally bankrupt port city. Still, we like to walk and sit, sometimes, on the edges of its rickety old wharfs early of a morning to inhale the bright, briny tableau of the place. And round about eight-thirty—high noon for the fishermen, who rise before the sun—we wait to see the baker’s boy running down the docks, toting a great basket of puddica—traditional Brindisino flatbreads—just born and sending up great hungering perfumes for the fishermen’s lunch. It seemed to us the highest form of ceremony left in the dour old place.

Il Pane della Ninna Nanna (Lullaby Bread). Neither very sweet nor pizzalike in the flat, savory pie sort of way, this is a gold-fleshed, orange-perfumed cakelike bread that, if baked with care, will be tall and elegant, its crumb coarse yet light and full of the consoling scents of yeast and butter. Fabriziana is one of the several “middle” names of the Roman countess with whom I learned to bake the confection in the cavernous old kitchen of her villa that looks to the gardens of the Borghese. Ours were clandestine appointments, with our yeast and our candied orange peels and the tattered recipe book of her mother’s cook. You see, Fabriziana had never cooked or baked in her life, had never made anything from a pile of flour and a few crumbles of yeast. Forbidden in the kitchen as a girl, her adulthood has been always too fraught with obligations to permit interludes in front of the flames. But in the years we have been friends, she has always demonstrated more than a kind interest in my cooking, sitting once in a while, rapt as a fox, on an old wrought-iron chair in my kitchen as I dance about. And one day when I told her I was searching for a formula for an ancient, orange-perfumed Roman bread, she knew precisely where to find the recipe. Trailing off in some Proustian dream, she said she hadn’t thought of the bread in too many years, it having been her favorite sweet at Christmas and Easter. Once she even requested that it—rather than some grand, creamy torta—be her birthday cake. She told of poaching slices of it from a silver tray during parties and receptions, stuffing them deep into the pockets of her silk dresses to eat later in bed, after her sister was safely asleep, so she might share them only with her puppy. So it was that we decided to make the bread together. Wishing to avoid the chiding of her family and, most of all, her cook, we chose to do the deed on mornings when the house would be safe from them. It was wonderful to see Fabriziana at play. Flour and butter were forced under her long, mother-of-pearled nails, and her blond-streaked coif, mounted to resist tempests, soon fell into girlish ringlets over her noble brow. With a few mornings’ worth of trial, we baked Fabriziana’s lullaby bread, the bread of her memories. And once, on a birthday of mine, the countess came fairly racing through my doorway proffering a curiously wrapped parcel that gave up the telltale perfumes of our bread. The countess had learned to bake indeed.

Every summer when my husband, David, and I visit his parents, we arrive at their house to a feast of peel-and-eat shrimp, Jean’s crab salad, and of course enough “softies” to feed the entire neighborhood. On the Eastern Shore of Maryland, soft-shell crabs (blue crabs that have molted their shells) are a grand tradition. The season starts in late spring and continues through the summer. Crabbers must be vigilant: there is only a 4- to 5-hour window during which molting blue crabs are in the “soft-shell” stage, after which their new shells harden if they are not removed from the water. David keeps his Maryland pride alive while living on the West Coast. Every year when crab season starts, his father ships us a few flats of live crabs, and we throw a decadent soft-shell party. We decided that if our humble castle had a coat of arms, it would be two crossed strips of bacon with a soft-shell crab in the center

Wholesome and seductive all at once, this dark bread can be made in a flash. It’s wonderful with tea as a dessert or as a breakfast bread.

This rustic loaf is a perfect platform for making Italian sandwiches and is a natural accompaniment to antipasti. The bread can be wrapped in plastic and kept at room temperature for up to four days.

If you a prefer a loaf with a rounded top, you can bake the dough without the lid in place; the baking time should be the same.

This free-form dough can be shaped into two longer loaves or one big round; you may need to adjust the baking time.

Because brioche is made with a large amount of butter, it is important to use the best quality you can find. Remember: The butter and eggs must be cold, or you may end up with something that resembles cake batter, rather than bread dough. If this happens, chill the dough until it becomes workable. Never add more flour, which toughens the dough.