Eating by Proxy
May 15, 2011

May I just say that when you are on a clear liquid-only diet for an upcoming medical procedure that taking three glorious cookbooks –Culinaria Italy, On Cooking, Great Italian Cooking—to bed to read is not a particularly bright idea?

I didn’t think so.

I was looking for a recipe to replicate what I had for lunch on Saturday when I took my parents out for a special albeit late Mother’s Day celebration. We ended up, with two of my siblings, at a fabulous restaurant that you’d miss if you didn’t know exactly where it was because this gourmet place is tucked into the corner of a tiny strip mall that has only eight parking spaces. The reason I chose it is because Mom once told me, long ago, that she loved Beef Wellington. I had never forgotten her casual remark so I decided that this was the year she was going to get it. A quick search of Yelp turned up this place, which I had never heard of. But the food we found is among the best any of us have ever eaten. I had the Seafood Linguini with shrimp, scallops, mussels, tomato, and saffron. Despite the generous portion I ate it all. It. Was. Fantastic!

So when I came home last night to water for dinner, I was still so happy and content I decided I had to know how to make the dish. That dish. Which is why I ended up salivating almost uncontrollably over pictures and recipes for dishes that had nothing to do with seafood linguini, but everything to do with fine eating. Which I cannot do at this point.

Cruising cookbooks seems a reasonable substitute. Or at least it should be. But I am finding it more frustrating than soothing. Food photography is as full of tricks and shortcuts and as subject to airbrushing and Photoshop as any other type of photography, but even knowing that I still find myself helplessly trapped in the tastes I “see” and even in un-illuminated lists of ingredients and directions such as those for Linguine Luigi Veronelli.

1 pound linguine
1 pound clams
1 pound mussels
1/2 pound shrimp         
1/2 pound cuttlefish or squid
1/2 cup dry white wine
1 tablespoon chopped onion
1/2 cup oil
2 cloves garlic, crushed in the garlic-press
Bouquet Garni:

2 sage leaves
1 sprig rosemary

1 1/2 pounds tomatoes, peeled, seeded, drained, and chopped
3 ounces Italian-style tuna canned in oil, broken into pieces
2 1/1 tablespoons Anchovy Butter*
3 tablespoons chopped parsley

Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Scrub the clams, mussels, and wash shrimp and put them all into a heavy pot (preferably earthenware) with the wine and the onion. Cook over high heat, covered, for 12 minutes. Remove the shrimp and then the clams and mussels as soon as their shells have opened. Strain the liquid through a cheesecloth-lined sieve into a bowl. Shell the clams and mussels and shell and de-vein the shrimp. Reduce the strained liquid over lively heat to about 3 tablespoons. Clean the cuttlefish (or squid) and cut it into small ribbon-like strips. Put the oil, garlic, and Bouquet Garni in a large, heavy saucepan. Cook over moderate heat until the garlic takes on color. Add the cuttlefish. Cook for a few moments, stirring to blend, and add the tomato pulp. Season with a pinch of salt and pepper. Cook over moderate heat for about ten minutes, then add the tuna, mussels, clams, shrimps, and the three tablespoons of reduced fish broth. Remove the Bouquet Garni. Cook the linguine in plenty of vigorously boiling, salted water until just al dente. Drains and put into a large, hot, shallow serving bowl. Pour the sauce over, top with little pieces of anchovy butter, and sprinkle lightly with chopped parsley. Mix lightly at the tables. Serves 6.

*Anchovy Butter: Cream 1 cup of sweet butter with 3 tablespoons of mashed anchovy fillets. If Italian-style salted anchovies are used, wash them free of salt** before chopping.

**Available in certain Italian specialty stores, one must first wash off the excess salt, then soak them in two changes of water, each soaking lasting about 1/2 hour.

While it’s not quite the same recipe, it is enough to inspire a raging culinary lust, especially in the face of my water diet. Unfortunately, it will have to wait as will any more reading of these books. I am dangerously close to sabotaging myself so I think I will instead stop wishing for it now (and writing about it) and instead make this the star recipe of my upcoming annual Great Memorial Weekend Read because I have a couple of fine books picked out for that. And what better accompaniment could there be than a dish that will remind me of that day, that time, her surprise, the perfect gift she never expected. Food memories don’t get better than that.

Upcoming Book Festivals:
The Midwest and east coast get to have some literary fun this coming weekend with these four festivals:

Location: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Festival: Philadelphia Book & Ephemera Fair
Date: May 21
From 10:00 am to 4:00 pm at the Greater Philadelphia Expo Center, lovers of rare, unusual, and old books, maps, Civil War and World’s Fair ephemera, autographs, trade cards, and more will have the opportunity to explore, talk about, and purchase these items. From 1:00 to 3:00, appraisals are also available for $5 per item. Parking will be free and there will be refreshments on site. Admission is $6 for adults, $3 for those aged twelve to twenty-one, and free to younger attendees.

Location: Lincoln, Nebraska
Festival: Nebraska Book Festival
Date: May 21
This festival, running from 10:00 am to 6:30 pm, will be hosted by the Nebraska State Historical Society. Twenty presenters will be there to talk about and share books. Among the events are several writers’ workshops, readings by Nebraska writers, book signings, the Mildred Bennett Award ceremony, and the keynote address by a panel of three: Ted Kooser, Virginia Smith, and Paul Amandes.

Location: New Hartford, Connecticut
Festival: Connecticut Book Festival
Date: May 21-22
From 10:00 am to 5:00 pm on both days, attendees will find an array of delightful literary activities including five panels, three performing groups, forty presenters, appearances by the Hartford Symphony Orchestra, two dozen exhibitors, lots of activities for children, books signings, and more.

Location: Ann Arbor, Michigan
Festival: Ann Arbor Antiquarian Book Fair
Date: May 22
From 11:00 am to 5:00 pm, the Michigan Union will be hosting this fair, which will feature forty booksellers, map, and print dealers offering first editions, old and collectible books, literature, children’s books, Americana, prints and more. Admission is $5, which benefits the library.

The Pub House:
McFarland publishes books that fall into two arenas: academic and nonfiction. The latter includes books that are bound to be of interest to general readers since they offer ones in the areas of pop culture and performing arts, sports and leisure, military history, body and mind, humanities, history, social sciences, genre (adventure, detective and mystery, horror, science fiction and fantasy, and western) and more. Old-time radio fans might appreciate Radio by the Book, which examines “individual characters [who] jumped from prose to radio and a number of programs that specialized in dramatizing literature” that included “mystery and detective shows, adventure stories, westerns, and science fiction, and anthology shows that adapted novels by such greats as Twain, Steinbeck and Dickens.” Those with an interest in American culture and history might enjoy Snake Oil, Hustlers and Hambones: The American Medicine Show, a  history of nineteenth-century popular entertainment—Wild West shows, pie-eating contests, clowns, and menageries—and how it developed in concert with advertising and medicine manufacture. Showing that there is nothing that cannot be made uninteresting, Clocks of New York is an illustrated history of not just timepieces and clock-makers but of the meaning that “in a New York minute” represented in tower clocks, time balls, post clocks, church clocks, sundials, and labor timepieces.

Imaging Books & Reading:
Readers in cigar factories have been honored in books, but here’s an image from the Library of Congress that shows one in Tampa, Florida, taken in January 1909. He is paid by the workers to sit and read books and newspapers that they select at the top of his voice all day long. For most of the workers, this is all the education they received beyond a minimum, but they were sufficiently enthusiastic about it to spend their own money on it. 

Of Interest:
Slush Pile Hell is the blog of an anonymous literary agent who has decided to take out his frustrations by posting pieces of actual query letters he receives. You may think that as a reader this could be of little interest to you, but in fact you might well be wrong. With the rapidly increasing numbers of vanity presses set to publish darn near anything the amount of what is called slush is poised to be set loose upon the reading world. If you have been spared the experience of reading slush, I can tell you that it is much, much worse than you can imagine. This blogger at least makes it funny.

Until next week, read well, read often and read on!

Lauren