My friend Ali and I met when we were three. Then we were in
kindergarten together, and then first grade, and then she switched schools and
we only lived five blocks apart, but never got to be in the same class again.
Until junior year of college, when we conspired to spend the same semester in
Florence. And it was heavenly. Better, even, than Mrs. Houk’s first-grade
class! Better than pretty much anything.
Mostly what we did, of course, was eat. We ate enormous,
oily tuna and artichoke sandwiches at the Antico Noe hole under a bridge
shop. We ate risotto ai fruiti di mare, filled with fat clams and chewy calamari, at the
cheap and wonderful trattoria where we ended up dating the chef and waiter
(long story short: a mistake—the boys, not the risotto). We ate dishes of
ribolitta, dark with something called black
cabbage that we would, years later, come to know at home as kale. We ate gelato every single day. We ate
ravioli so freshly formed that we could still see the old woman’s thumbprints
in the dough. We ate blood oranges and gorgonzola and gnocchi, and we gained
twenty pounds each. We drank a lot of wine.
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| You have to look at cornmeal because I do not seem to have the emotional fortitude to get out my Italy photo album. Sigh. |
Also, we ate polenta in a tiny cavelike trattoria run from
the same kitchen as the city’s famous and expensive Cibrèo restaurant. You could not eat there and not feel
like you were getting away with something, because while the chic Italian
silk-and-suede crowd paid a small fortune get fussed over with white linen and
crystal water glasses, we ate the same food out back, on long wooden benches at
long wooden tables, and the dishes we ordered cost $5 each. One was a heap of
clams the size of your fingernail that arrived in a garlicky, tomato-y broth
with a hunk of charred bread. The other was the polenta, and this polenta no
longer exists anywhere but in my memory.
The polenta associated online with Cibrèo seems to involve
masses of herbs, and I’m sure it’s delicious. But the one we ordered (over and
over again) in 1989 was simpler: a mound of tender cornmeal, a moat of melted
butter, a shower of parmesan and—Ali, I need you—green peppercorns? Maybe it
was just black pepper, but I think it might have been green. It was as perfect
a dish of food as I’ve ever eaten anywhere, and Ali was the perfect person to
eat it with. To spend my life being friends with. To shepherd out of life,
even, because lying around with her was so great, even at the end. But she’s the worst person to
be left by, because there’s nobody else who remembers the same thing as me, and
everything I forgot to ask her I will now never know. And I kind of can’t get
over how much that sucks.
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| Ali and Ben. |
Brown-Butter Polenta
2 cups whole milk (use at least a cup of milk to 3 of water,
but half milk is even better)
2 cups water
1 cup coarse cornmeal
2 teaspoons Diamond kosher salt (or half as much table salt)
4 tablespoons butter, divided use
1 cup freshly grated parmesan
Freshly ground black pepper
Heat the oven to 350. Pour the milk and water into a deep,
lidded oven-proof casserole (not a huge one), and whisk in the cornmeal and salt. Put the pot in
the oven and bake for 50 minutes.
Remove the polenta from the oven and whisk it. If the
cornmeal isn’t tender or there’s still liquid in the pot, put it back in the
oven for ten minutes, but otherwise, whisk in half the butter and half the
cheese, then cover the polenta and let it sit while you brown the butter.
Melt the rest of the butter in a very small pan over medium
heat, then continue cooking it, swirling the pan constantly, until the butter
gets golden-brown and smells nutty and insane, another 3 or 4 minutes. Remember
that it will cook for a bit longer after you turn the heat off, so maybe err on
the side of cooking it to short.
Divide the polenta into “4” (ahem, really only three) bowls
and top each with a spoonful of brown butter, a flurry of parmesan, and a good
grinding of black pepper.
A poached egg can be added!
