Mediterranean Summer (24 page)

It must have been quite a sight that evening—a polished sailing yacht parked by itself in one part of the marina, two crew members in their uniforms standing on the old stone quay next to the
passerelle,
rinsing and cutting sea urchins in bare hands with scissors. Nigel and I were going through them, culling for the biggest ones, when a man came up to see the catch.

“Where are they from?” he asked in raspy Italian.

When I told him, he acknowledged that was good water for them but suggested another spot he believed to be better. Then he asked how we were serving them.

“You should toss them with spaghetti,” he came back.

“That sounds pretty good,” I said. Nigel had no idea what we were talking about as he carried on the task at hand. I continued our food talk. “How do you make yours?”

“Scoop the roe from the shells and toss with spaghetti, chili flakes, and parsley over a very low flame. Add the pasta water little by little until the urchins melt and coat the pasta—almost like making a carbonara. It’s the best way to eat them.”

The mention of carbonara, a Roman dish, surprised me, because he appeared to be the kind of guy who didn’t venture higher up the boot than Naples. But what he said made complete sense. The use of gentle heat and small additions of pasta water to work the main ingredient, in both cases eggs, into a thick and creamy sauce was the same method. Having learned the technique at a small winery estate, Colle Picchione, just outside Rome, I was inspired to try his recipe that night.

I saved a bunch of urchins to make a small plate for Rick, Nigel, and me to try after dinner service. It turned out to be one of the most delicious
primi
I had ever tasted, and the satisfaction displayed by my co-workers was unanimous. I now had a new front-runner in my all-time favorite foods repertoire, a recipe provided unsolicited by a passerby on the Porto d’Ischia quay.

Nigel, a quick eater by nature, disappeared up the ladder as Rick and I finished our plates. Now that we were sated and mellow, the subject meandered to the question of “what next?”

“What are you doing after the season? Staying here or maybe going home?” Rick asked as he lay supine on the mess table bench.

“I don’t know yet,” I answered. I hadn’t even thought about returning home since I arrived in France more than four years earlier.

“Maybe it’s time.”

He had a point. Maybe it was time for me to start thinking about returning home and trying to put together a stateside career.

Rick planted a seed in my mind that needed no watering. Before, when I tried to picture myself back in America, I found the scene intimidating. I had grown to like the simpler lifestyle in Italy—not so many choices about things like food or even mineral water. I thought of a grocery store in the States and the overwhelming variety of products it offered. And there was always time in Italy to go into a
caffè
and enjoy a perfectly made coffee served in a ceramic cup and saucer.

I found Italy easier on a human-interaction level, too. Now that I had my
carta d’identità,
I could work legally and reside as long as I wanted. With it I could receive medical coverage, college tuition, pension, mandatory five-weeks-a-year paid vacation,
tutto.
Four years ago, I had crept into Italy as a clandestine worker—now I could live in the country without the risk of being deported.

Then there was the freedom issue. In Italy, much more so than at home, a good day was about balancing work with life’s other needs—family, friends, home, community. In the restaurants where I had worked, the rule was a busy but steady pace, centered on keeping the guests relaxed and happy. During meal breaks, restaurant owners wanted the staff to sit and eat. If they had a question when they saw you eating, they waited until you were finished. And you didn’t have to create a way to busy yourself at the stove or risk being criticized if you weren’t.

While at anchor one
day on the other side of the island and just outside the breakwater of a small marina and village called Sant’Angelo, Rick and I were getting the day together down below when we heard a crack of laughter, applause, and heavy footfalls on deck that began to make their way down below. Moments later, in front of me stood a dripping wet, burly middle-aged man in shorty dive gear holding a speargun in one hand and a magnificent
cernia
—a grouper—in the other.

“
Buon giorno!
” he said with a big smile on his face. “So you are the chef
americano
?” He told me his name was Gianni.

“Where did you come from?” I asked. I could see from the speargun that he either was or fancied himself to be an expert fisherman, but beyond that I had no idea how this guy had found our boat or what he was doing in the galley. He certainly could not have been a friend of the owners, at least not in my mind.

“I’m a friend of Fabrizio’s. I live on this side of the island,” he explained. Fabrizio was Dennis the Menace’s real name. The picture was beginning to fill in.

“Fabrizio asked me to try to catch some fish for the owners. When I caught this beauty, I brought it over, and everyone requested it to be made for lunch. What do you think? How are you going to cook it?” His tone clearly implied that he didn’t want some hack American making hamburger out of his catch.

“I could make it in
acqua pazza,
” I suggested.

“You know how to make it that way?” He looked shocked.

“Sure,” I said.

“How come?” he pressed.

“I learned to make it at a restaurant above Sorrento.
Sono bravi”
—they know what’s going on.

“Okay chef,” he said in English with a half smile and a look like I had better deliver on the promise.

This fish was perfect for
acqua pazza.
The gentle method of cookery had gotten its name from using something as fresh as this, fortified with tomato, a hint of caper, and parsley and cooked in a miraculous, aromatic bath resembling the purest seawater. With steamed potatoes on the side, the preparation would be optimum.

And this was exactly how I learned it at Don Alfonso.

“Come here,” Beppe, the
chef de cuisine
at the restaurant, said one day as he was plating a lunch entrée. “You have to see this. It’s called
pesce in acqua pazza
.”

“Fish in crazy water?” I asked, not sure if I had translated correctly.

“
Sì, sì, sì.
You’ll understand soon,” he replied. Alfonso was in the kitchen, too, and he told me that it could be made only in late spring and through the summer, when the tomatoes were ripening on the vine and full of sun, when they were their boldest. It didn’t matter which fish you used, he told me, as long as it was flaky and very fresh.

“We serve this with poached new potatoes from our garden,” Alfonso continued. “I will show you the garden later,” he added. I could see by the way he presented a pot of perfectly pared and poached potatoes that the garden was very special to him.

Local olive oil, the fish, diced tomatoes, capers, chopped parsley, salt, pepper, and the potatoes. That’s it.

“The tomatoes,” Alfonso started to explain, “must cook down while the fish releases some of its water to create a simple sauce, highlighted with parsley to give it an herbal edge. Then you season lightly with the capers. Once done, the overall flavor will resemble the sea, only better.” I thought to myself, that’s the trick to using capers—as a seasoning. Over the years I had mixed feelings about capers. Every time they had been used in a dish, their briny taste overpowered every other flavor. But how to avoid that? The villain was the brine. Alfonso showed me the capers that they used.
Capperi sotto sale.
Packed in sea salt, they were larger and plumper than any I had ever seen. The salt was rinsed off, and then the capers were finely chopped. In this way, they could be added like a seasoning to the desired taste. Just enough adds a subtle back flavor of a caper berry, not the brine.

I began to fillet Gianni’s fish and took note of the glistening of its firm white flesh. Once I had it broken down and the short list of ingredients prepped, I could feel it would come out well, one of those intangibles cooks can tell as soon as the process of cookery begins. I kept thinking about that day at Don Alfonso. And I remembered Faith told me this was an important dish to learn. Now I was making it on my own. The only foil was the amount of steam and spiraling humidity in the galley, making every pore in my body open up, adding more heat to the already sweltering work space. A total contrast in ambience to the relaxing and jovial banter I could hear from the mid-deck above me, all of the guests under the canopy at the table sipping champagne in anticipation of the dining event. Within such close range, hearing it made me want to be there.

Soon after I sent the fish up, I was summoned to the table. I quickly changed my shirt for a dry one before heading up on deck. Gianni looked at me with a long face and an even longer pause. Then he broke into a huge grin and said, “This is better than how my
paesani
make it. And from an American!” The table erupted with frivolity no doubt fueled by multiple bottles of champagne.
Il Dottore
offered a rare superlative beyond one of his hand signals to communicate exceptional taste: “This is
mitico”
—mythical.

“Bravo!” Dennis added, while to the chorus of praise his wife pronounced it “
da morire
”—to die for.

Gianni also basked in his glory. Having brought a treasure from the sea to the applause of guests and owners, he tried to stretch his moment of triumph by hanging with the crew on the foredeck until
la Signora
not so subtly hinted with a twirl of her finger that the time was ripe for him to don his fins and return to the water. He finally caught on, gave a quick wave, and dove over the side of the boat into the water.

I felt bad for Gianni, but the scene stayed with me because it reminded me of the other side of
la Signora.
When she wanted something, she expected it to happen, and our job was to make it so. Period. Maybe that was a good thing also. The fact that she set her standards high and that she expected the rest of us to reach up to those standards did make a lot of us stretch higher.

But still, whenever there seemed a chance that the two of us might intersect, I consciously avoided her. If I had to go aft, I passed on the other side of the deck. For the most part, she didn’t say much to me except to inquire about the menu. “
Cosa c’e di buono a mangiare?”
—What good things are there to eat? Although it was always phrased as an innocent question, something about her tone made me feel it was a cover for a statement that went something like: “It better be what I want, make me look good, and be delicious.”

I found it easier for me to communicate with her through the food.

On the eighth of
August, we were scheduled to arrive in Ponza, the largest of the Pontine Islands, northwest of Ischia. By now, I was addicted to our trusty mariner’s pilot guide. Every island and every port had its own story of lost ships, daring rescues, and exiled monarchs. Ponza would not let me down.

The Romans, it seems, didn’t just banish from the court those who found themselves in disfavor or had recently lost power. When necessary, they exported them to the Pontine Islands, whose most famous exiles were the brothers and sisters of the emperor Caligula. When Rome fell, pirates were said to take over the island and with the aid of assorted other sociopaths became its effective rulers for more than a thousand years.

As soon as we approached the island, I was surprised. It didn’t look like the other islands we had visited, with chiseled mountains rising from rocky coastlines. Just the opposite, the rock formations were low and seemed to rise right out of the sea, as if the water table had once been lower and the island larger. The island, I would soon learn, is ringed with underwater rock formations. Apparently the others knew what I was just learning—that Ponza, and the other islands in the Pontine archipelago, are merely the highest points of a volcanic eruption that created a much larger landmass, most of it barely underwater and often visible to the naked eye.

Nigel and I stood by the starboard rail on approach, only to see
Serenity
skirt one of the volcanic daggers by what seemed like no more than inches. Neither of us said a word. As we pulled in closer, I saw young people riding inflatable skiffs dashing in and out of Ponza’s coves to bask on the smooth rock formations and small white sand beaches. There was something about the island that radiated youth.

Later that morning, as Rick and I were cleaning up after breakfast,
la Signora
came into the pantry.

“Richard and Davide, tomorrow we are going to a small cove where there are some natural
fango”
—mud baths—“nearby. I am taking the ladies onshore for the day. We’d like to leave no later than eleven, so, Richard, we will need the
scafo”
—the launch—“in the water and loaded with everything we’ll need. Davide, we’ll take lunch with us, so if you can prepare a simple menu, that would be great. We will serve ourselves. The men can fend for themselves.”

“No problem,
signora,
” Rick quickly replied.

“
Hai capito, Davide?
” she said, snapping me to full concentration.

“
Sì, signora,
I’ll take care of it.”

The good thing about working for the superrich is that you get to see how they live. That’s the bad part as well. Ponza’s romantic coves and the inflatable skiffs I saw buzzing in and out of them made me envious. I wanted to be in one of those little boats myself, just once, with a girlfriend of my own, spending a sultry afternoon exploring the island’s fascinating coastline—not assembling antipasti in a galley where the temperature easily topped a hundred degrees and was trapped nicely by
Serenity
’s steel hull.

I wasn’t well equipped to handle a picnic, but once I put some thought into it, I realized a beach menu wasn’t too difficult to compose: marinated chickpeas with arugula to be served with sliced prosciutto, the Tuscan bread salad
panzanella,
and grilled tuna
panini
inspired by
pan bagnat
from the French coast, replacing the canned tuna that is usually used with thin slices of grilled fillets. The ladies wouldn’t be cooking anything onshore, just finishing. I figured that with the heat, and without proper refrigeration, I should create a menu made with as much from the pantry as possible since many of those ingredients are already shelf stable. At the same time, I wanted the food to be light, refreshing, and easy to assemble.