Travellady MagazineTM

Cook Book Cookin'

Fabrizio's Back Burner Teasers and Delights

By Marty Martindale

People come from out of town and out-of-state to enjoy his food. It’s important he presents frequent menu changes, for soon, many have “eaten it all!” More and more guests come to PELAGIA TRATTORIA for Fabrizio Schenardi’s specialities. “We sell about 20 lbs. a week of octopus, like crazy, and that’s a lot when you consider the servings are only about three to four ounces.” Hardly a year goes by without new awards.

Tall, lanky, boyish, gracious almost with a “wet behind the ears” look, Fabrizio’s hands are beautiful for a man’s, white, supple, long-fingered, marred temporarily by a three-inch occupational hazard, one of many “painful-ribbons” his chosen career dishes out.

Enroute to his second office in the under-layers of the new Renaissance Hotel, Tampa, the  back-room catacombs are places happy people seem to enjoy their work as well as Fabrizio each time he passes. Noticeably, the kitchen floor is dry! No deep puddles with racks on his kitchen floor.

Conspicuously on his desk is a picture of his wife. She’s Korean, and they met in Switzerland. She speaks Italian, and “she’s a very good cook,” he hastens. They have a three-year-old son, no doubt used to fine cooking and with a penchant for at least three languages. In this same office, Fabrizio stashes some of his treasures --olive oil in regal, slender. square bottles, better, somehow than “cold pressed,” pressed as if by gravity. He has  cases of wine here, too. Soon the Trattoria will sell bottles of each, plus maybe precious vinegars, scarce salts? Who knows? Fabrizio’s a chef with a plan, many plans.

He invites me to sit by his desk as he pours fondly through a few of his treasured cookbooks. “I always learn something when I look. Then I switch things around and have a new recipe! I don’t like to go straight from the book. Of course with a classical recipe, I go from the book.” Some of his  books are written in Italian, others in French, and he reads out loud in rapid English. Most of my books are old, some have yellowed pages. He’s amazed so many of the delicious dishes the books make him remember are no longer made, even in Italy. He finds this a challenge for his new cookbook! It’s time he has one …

These are memories his books evoke:

  • He searches for a word, like a wild rabbit, an animal he likes to fix, not one fixed much in the U.S. A hare! That’s it, he wants to serve hare. He has a recipe where the hare is cooked with raisins and wine, butter, fume blanc, and cream. “It sounds strange, but that is what they do. Serve it with a dressing of figs and potatoes.”

  • “With is dish, we use all the red parts of roosters faces, also intestines, combine with conichons, with Madeira, with truffle, with porcini mushrooms. It is a great dish!

  • “Snails. We used to sauté them in butter, then we would bread them. When you bite them, the butter oozes out.

  • “I love figs. How I like figs is with rosemary, then roast slowly in port and finish with blue cheese. I like the black figs for this.

  • “Beef with anchovies? If you go in a good restaurant in Italy, you find this.

  • “We also take the leg muscle from an animal we have in Europe. We marinate it in red wine, then smoke it with bay leaf. With a hook, we attach him to the ceiling and we cook it for a week or two, night and day, and it get dry. It’s like a jerkey. Then we sauté it, and it has the wine flavor. We did the same way with a duck salame. It was good.

  • “Pumpkin, fried pumpkin, it’s great!

  • “Boudella. It’s stuffed stomach, with the chestnuts, flour, hazel nuts, pine nuts, pork blood, milk, leeks, olive oil, nutmeg, cinnamon. Once in a while it is fun. 

  • “Eel is good. Most people don’t know how to clean it. I do.

  • “Favre beans, more and more popular. We take a small fish, Pinurine, from Luguria. we toss it in the flour and they we fry it. Then we serve it with a these beans and a sauce of parsley, tomato, garlic, basil and extra virgin olive oil.

  • “Castanache. We make it with chestnut flour, it’s very sweet. You put sweet raisins, pine nuts, extra virgin olive oil, salt and fennel seed and you bake it. It is kind of a hard pudding. Then you serve it plain or with mascarpone.

  • “Like the Ponyak. Nobody do it anymore. It is disappearing. It is a porcini mushroom. You start with grappa, then you make a little basket of puff pastry and then you bake it. It just disappeared from Italy. We need to revive it.

  • “Asparagus Barbadora from Cambiano near Tourino, even this disappear. What did they do? Ok. You take tuna, anchovies, olive oil and a hard-boiled egg. You divide the white from the yellow. You mix the white with the tuna, olive oil and anchovies. Then you sprinkle the top with egg yolk. No mayonnaise.

  • “This winter I want to go a little bit more on the game, so I was looking to use duck, pork tenderloin. Not Buffalo, for it really doesn’t go with the Mediterranean.

  • “Ginnea hen. It looks like a chicken, but the meat is more pinkish and firmer. Not too many people use it, but back in Italy we braised it then breaded it with brandy. Delicious! This is another thing not used a lot any more.

Even in Italy, dishes like this disappear, he ponders. “If you think of it, there is almost nothing I mentioned here which Americans think of as Italian. There’s a whole new world of Italian recipes out there not seen much in North America, practically no where. Nobody does much of it any more. I like to do it, it’s delicious,” he ruminates …

“I want to do this in my new cookbook!”

Marty Martindale operates Food Site of the Day.

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