“I have the tastebuds of an old Italian man who likes to play cards.” I said to my beloved.
“What’s wrong with that?” he shrugged as he bit into a soft, but sharp piece of Crotonese cheese. Isn’t it amazing when someone just gets you?
I had just returned from giving a tour of the Arthur Avenue Italian food stores to a group of visitors from the U.K. Along the way, I picked up a few things for my own Friday night dinner: The aforementioned Crotonese cheese made with a mixture of goat and sheep’s milk, a loaf of sesame seeded bread, oil cured olives, and a log of house made hot sopressata. Give me a glass of wine, a deck of cards and throw some Pavarotti on the record player and I’m basically my grandfather, a Calabrian man who would have turned 106 today. (His father lived to be 106 so it’s not really such an outlandish thought.)
When we were kids, my brother and I referred to sopressata, a type of dry-cured salame, as “supersize.” Like most Southern Italian sausages, it’s usually made with raw pork. The intense Calabrian red pepper is the preservative that keeps it safe in the warm southern climate. Preparing it is often a family affair. The pork is chopped coarsely, then rolled out onto a large table and seasoned with the red pepper flakes, garlic, and sometimes a bit of wine or grappa. Its name comes from the act of pressing it in between two planks of wood, producing a somewhat flattened look.
>> After the jump, more meat and more heat… >>
Butcher shops are once again growing in popularity. Thanks to Michael Pollan, Fast Food Nation, and Jamie Oliver, we now have a much better sense of how that shrink wrapped piece of meat ends up in the fluorescent fridge of our grocery store. We also understand that it doesn’t taste nearly as good as it should.
Before grocery stores became supermarkets and super Wal-Marts, most people shopped at butcher shops where their meat was custom-cut by skilled butchers. I appreciate the role of a butcher not just because I’m a foodie, but because I come from a long line of butchers.
My Grandfather Oteri owned a butcher shop in the Bronx where my father worked and my mother’s family always shopped. Eventually, my Dad first asked my Mom out on a date while she was stopping by the butcher shop.
All of my Grandfather’s brothers were butchers as were the brothers of my paternal Grandmother. Her father was a butcher in East Harlem, which, up until the 1960s, was the biggest Italian neighborhood in New York. All of these shops have changed hands and are no longer butcher shops. The shop where my parents met is now a Tower Isles Jamaican Beef Patty store. My Uncle Pat’s specialty poultry store is now empty, and the shop in East Harlem has probably turned over a dozen times.
There is one, however, that still remains, and what is most remarkable is that it is the very first store owned by family in the United States: Vincent’s Meat Market on Arthur Avenue is still a busy and bustling, custom-cut butcher shop with a huge array of Italian specialties. In my opinion, it is one of the best food shops in all of New York City.
>> Click here to find out more about the history of the shop and find out what Oscar-winning movie was filmed there! >>
Arthur Avenue, the heart of Little Italy in the Bronx, usually bustling with shoppers and tourists was less so this week because of the beginning of Lent. The fish market was busy, but the butcher shops were relatively quiet as meat is off limits to Catholics on Ash Wednesday.
Italian food on Arthur Avenue is seasonal and by seasonal I mean driven by the holidays. Yes, the heart of cooking in Italy relies on fresh ingredients, harvested at their peak, but in Italian-American communities it means having zeppole and sfingi (cream puffs) for the feast of Saint Joseph, fish on Christmas Eve, and, for handful of the old-timers, a pudding called sanguinaccio during Lent. (Pronounced san-gwee-nacho.) This week, handwritten signs on paper and in chalk popped up around the Arthur Avenue bakeries. They will remain in place until Easter Sunday, and then disappear once again.
>> Read on to discover the not-so-secret ingredient in sanguinaccio. (For those who took Latin, it’s exactly what you’re thinking.) >>
