Bitter Greens

Essays on Food, Politics, and Ethnicity from the Imperial Kitchen

Anthony Di Renzo

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781438433189, 9781438433172
• eBook ISBN: 9781438433196
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Despite the inclusion of six classic recipes, Bitter Greens is not an ethnic cookbook but a Roman banquet of political satire, cultural criticism, and culinary memoir. Set primarily in the Empire State and arranged like the courses of a traditional Italian meal, Anthony Di Renzo's wide-ranging essays meditate on Italian food at the noon of American imperialism and the twilight of ethnicity, exploring such issues as the Wegmans supermarket chain's conquest of Sicily; assembly-line sausages; the fabled onion fields of Canastota, New York; the tripe shops of postwar Brooklyn; Hunts Point Market and Andy Boy broccoli rabe; and the fatal lure of Sicilian chocolate. Is the new global supermarket a democratic feast, Di Renzo asks, or a cannibal potluck where consumers are themselves consumed? Sip an aperitif, toast Horace and Juvenal, and enjoy Chef Di Renzo's catered symposium. It will feed your mind, tickle your ribs, and heal your spleen.

CAFFÈ

Neapolitan Espresso Coffeehouse Philosophy

NEAPOLITAN ESPRESSO

SNOBS SPEND HUNDREDS, sometimes thousands, of dollars on industrial-sized espresso machines suitable for restaurants and bars. Eduardo De Fillipo, the Neaoplitan actor and playwright, would have been appalled. Anyone can prepare good caffè with a moka—an ordinary aluminum espresso pot.

Using steam pressure, a moka forces water through a strainer to create espresso. Bialetti, which invented this device in 1933, still sells the best and least expensive mokas. A two-cup model will produce espresso superior to the boiled ink served in most coffee houses, for less money than the hundred dollar knock-offs at Wal-Mart.

Here's how to make espresso the Neapolitan way.

MATERIALS AND INGREDIENTS

• Ground espresso beans (popular Italian brands are Illy and Kimbo)
• Sugar
• Distilled cold water
• Two-cup moka espresso pot
• Small mixing bowl
• Four ceramic demitasse cups

DIRECTIONS

1. Pour water into base of moka but do not pass fill line. If water seeps through the strainer when you insert it, the coffee will be thin and weak.
2. Fill strainer with espresso and wipe off excess grounds before assembling the pot. Form a perfect seal or water will spurt out once it boils.
   Warning: Never pack strainer! You will clog the system, build too much pressure, and turn your kitchen into a set from The Last Days of Pompeii. For the best results, the espresso should lie flush with the pot's upper strainer.
3. Assemble moka. Once again, ensure no grounds form on the outside rim. Screw the pot onto base by holding the pot itself, not the handle.
4. Place moka over low heat. The longer the brew time, the richer the flavor. A slow trickle is better than a jet fountain.
5. As the espresso brews, add sugar to the mixing bowl. Start with a teaspoon per cup and then adjust to suit your taste.
6. This critical step takes practice. When the espresso begins to bubble out, remove pot from heat. Pour liquid slowly into the bowl and stir until the blended sugar and coffee are as thick as peanut butter. If mixture is too dry, add more espresso a little at a time until the consistency is right.
   Tip: If you run out of espresso, return pot to heat until more comes out. But the first coffee is best because it is the strongest. If you add too much espresso, you can: (a) compensate with more sugar (not recommended for diabetics), or (b) admit defeat and pour in the remaining pot. You will lose the foam but save the brew.
7. When espresso finishes brewing, pour half into bowl. Stir vigorously to aerate mixture and to produce a thick foam. The amount of foam depends on technique and the amount of sugar used. Once thoroughly mixed, add the remaining espresso to the container and mix once again.
8. Pour espresso into ceramic demitasse cups. If necessary, spoon foam. Since the cups are small, the espresso may quickly turn cold. To prevent this problem, place cups in hot water before you start brewing. Once warmed, the cups will retain the coffee's heat and allow you to serve piping hot espresso to your guests.

American supermarkets stock the most popular commercial brands of Italian espresso: Illy, Kimbo, Lavazza, Medaglia d'Oro. But coffee shops contain hidden treasures. My local Gimme Coffee, for instance, sells Piccolo Mondo Fair Trade Organic Blend.

Whatever your preference or budget, don't deny yourself the joy of making stovetop espresso. As Eduardo De Fillipo observed: “The only real cost is personal skill and patience.”

COFFEEHOUSE PHILOSOPHY

“THE DRINK OF PHILOSOPHERS,” Uncle Tonino declared, sniffing his espresso. His refined but saturnine face—like the actor José Ferrer's, only puffier from overwork—was so suffused with pleasure that the barista behind the zinc counter half grinned. My uncle and I had spent an entire Saturday sightseeing in Rome (“Ruins and fools,” Tonino had commented; “what could me more instructive?”) and had ended our tour of the Eternal City at this small coffeehouse by the Pantheon.

The establishment had nothing to recommend it aesthetically, a shoddy affair of chrome, chipped marble, and secondhand Art Deco posters. But Uncle Tonino had insisted on coming here. The Pantheon district, he maintained, serves the best espresso in the city because all its cafés use Aqua Virgo, the soft Virgin Water flowing from the fabled Aqueduct of Agrippa. Here, he explained, one drank classicism, not coffee.

My uncle certainly seemed as poised as Horace, hovering over his demitasse. Slowly, he swirled the crema, the ambrosial, caramel-colored residue that forms on the surface of all good espresso, stirred in sugar to spite his doctor's warnings about diabetes, and savored his coffee. “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh,” he said. His customary melancholy faded away, and for a moment he was content, even beatific, his face wreathed by a nimbus of steam. “That reconciles a man to his life,” he remarked, then leaned forward and added confidentially: “As I said, my boy, I am a coffeehouse philosopher.”

At the time, I thought he simply meant he was a man of the world. Now that I myself have become something of a coffeehouse philosopher, straining the grinds of failure from the cup of my own life, I know better. A coffeehouse philosopher is more sage than bon vivant, a connoisseur of irony and disappointment who prefers taking life strong and black. Socrates in prison quaffed his hemlock in one gulp. But a coffeehouse philosopher sips his poison little by little in public over a lifetime. He drinks what is bitter without bitterness and dies in an odor of espresso.

If anyone had the credentials to be a coffeehouse philosopher, it was Uncle Tonino. Urbane, detached, and adaptable, he was a man equally at home in the past and the present, someone who equally appreciated a Piranesi etching of the Forum and an Armando Testa poster for Paulista Coffee. Forums and coffee, in fact, defined his life.

A business journalist and advertising executive, my uncle had covered or handled such major coffee firms as Lavazza, Classico Caffè Circi, and Illycaffè. He once boasted that he was the only man in Rome who knew both the exact number of saints atop Bernini's colonnade at St. Peter's (284) and the exact number of espresso cups made daily at the Nuova Point china factory (15,000). Tonino began his career as a provincial surveyor, spending the better part of his youth traversing the Abruzzi with transit, tripod, compass, and paper. Following World War II, however, he dreamed of becoming another Luigi Barzini, so he journeyed to America to work as an announcer at one of New York's two Italian American radio stations.

Manhattan exhilarated him with its skyscrapers, subways, and billboards. After the rubble of the war, America seemed as prosperous as Augustan Rome, and my uncle took the same pleasure charting the trajectory of the postwar boom as he had mapping the peaks of the Apennines. He liked American cars, American clothes, American movie stars. The only thing he disliked was American coffee. “Rocket fuel,” he called it. He mocked people standing in line at the Chock Full o' Nuts cafeteria, upbraided my father for investing money in Maxwell House, spat in batches of percolated coffee. Until he died, his nose wrinkled whenever anyone mentioned Nescafé.

This bête noire, notwithstanding, he remained an unapologetic, if critical, lover of America until McDonald's opened a restaurant in the Piazza di Spagna and served instant espresso in Styrofoam cups. Then he raged like a madman at the swindles of time and the grotesqueries of globalization. But even on the worst days, when his Pirandellian tirades cowed his wife and exasperated his cronies, he always savored a strong cup of coffee and showed a wry affection towards the foolish American nephew who bears his name.

The hard-bitten barista, a pug in a soiled apron, beamed at us approvingly—until he noticed and scowled at the glass of milk in my hand. This was during my wholesome phase, a period of madness that lasted between my fourteenth and twenty-sixth year, during which I impersonated Mr. Rogers. If you can imagine a young Al Pacino wearing turtlenecks, cardigans, and Hush Puppies, that was me. I was clean. I was earnest. I was credulous. I was as kind and as priggish as a Methodist missionary. I had more hopes in my belly than Pandora's box, and I used words like God and democracy, peace and justice the way certain Long Island matrons use overdrawn credit cards. “So good he's good for nothing” was Tonino's judgment.

The barista also had me pegged: un astèmio, a goddamn teetotaler! He bristled with contempt. I could see his lower lip curl. So did Uncle Tonino, who, to help me save face, took a teaspoon of espresso and placed it in my milk. The dark stain transformed my goody-goody drink (“Seventeen years old and you still drink milk!”) into elegant latte macchiato. This libation appeased the barista, whose rising anger subsided into a cynical shrug. “Meno male,” he said. Not bad. I sat there, flabbergasted, while Tonino sipped his coffee.

“How's your milk?” he asked in English. His tone was malicious, his face impassive, and he never raised his eyes from the cup.

“Ruined,” I said. “Why did you put coffee in it?”

He arched an eyebrow. “A reminder,” he said.

The barista huffily began grinding coffee beans. The noise startled me, and Uncle Tonino smiled acridly. “Do you know that sonnet by Giuseppe Belli,” he asked, “‘The Coffeehouse Philosopher’?” I shook my head, and he began reciting in the Romanesco dialect: “L'ommini de sto monno só ll'istesso / Che vvaghi de caffè nner mascinino …” Men in this life are just like coffee beans going into an espresso machine. First one, then another, a steady stream, all of them heading for the same fate. Round and round they go, always changing places, and often the big bean crushes the little bean. But they've hardly begun when they crowd each other through that iron door and are crushed into powder. And that's the way people live: soft or hard, mixed together by the hand of fate, which stirs them round and round in circles; and gently or roughly, everyone moves, draws breath, without ever understanding why, then cascades down the throat of death.

Belli's sonnet has since become one of my favorite poems. In fact, I consider it a personal present, since Belli composed it on my birthday, January 22, 1836. But when I first heard it, it appalled me. I was an innocent at the time, and my face must have turned as white as my milk. Defensively, I attributed this shock tactic to my uncle's morbidity. Despite his many accomplishments, his life always has been shadowed by a terrible disappointment: the death of his first-born son, Carlo, which cut short his ambitions in America and forced him to return to Italy. Whenever he finished his espresso, his eyes lingered at the bottom of the cup as if searching for something lost, as if coffee grinds and the dust of the dead were the same thing. I thought of the cupshaped funeral urns in Rome's underground columbaria and shuddered. Uncle Tonino saw I was shaken but merely asked: “Why don't you drink coffee anymore?”

“Scusi?”

“Caffè,” he said. “You loved it as a boy. Why don't you drink it anymore?”

His tone, so earnest, so heartsick, so reproachful, gave me pause. But I had been brainwashed by enough suburban YMCA lectures to reply: “Well, it's not good for you.”

At this Tonino threw up his hands in exasperation. “Jackass!” he said. “And since when is life about what's good for you?!”

THAT KOAN WAS THE beginning of my enlightenment, my initiation into the Society of Coffeehouse Philosophers. It has taken me twenty years and thousands of demitasses simply to reach the postulancy of this ancient Italian order. But as the Zen masters say, “Practice is endless.” I still have a lifetime to go. The Society of Coffeehouse Philosophers may not be as old or as venerable as the Knights of Malta, but its aims are just as laudable—to cultivate intelligence, irony, and wit in the dull and the naïve, and to safeguard reason, maturity, and taste in a world that is rapidly becoming a psychotic amusement park. To accomplish these goals, the Society offers its members these three guiding principles, somewhat corresponding to Buddha's Four Noble Truths: honor the past without illusion, live in the present without complacency, embrace the future without hope.

This creed is secular in the best sense of the word. The Society of Coffeehouse Philosophers promises neither salvation nor nirvana. It will not deliver you from absurdity, forgive your sins, or provide a pacifier for your Inner Child. Any evangelist or New Age quack can point the way to heaven. It takes a true philosopher to teach you how to behave in the piazza and to drink your espresso. Coffeehouse philosophy sees society, for all its faults, as necessary and pleasurable, accepts human beings as beanbags of contradiction that no ideology can explain, values nature but places a premium on manners, accepts technology but never succumbs to utopianism. And like all philosophies, it deals with morality and mortality, teaching its adherents to live well in order to die well.

Those who follow this path have a shot at becoming sane, robust, civilized adults. Those who do not risk insipidness or madness. That's how bad our civilization has become. Daily, we see lovers and relatives, friends and colleagues, acquaintances and strangers forfeit their humanity. Verily, verily, I say unto thee: if you do not eat biscotti and drink espresso, you could devolve into a couch potato, dance an S & M pas de deux with every telemarketer who interrupts your TV dinner, prowl bulk warehouses to get deep discounts on junk food, join health spas, shopper's clubs, and ashrams in a vain attempt to exorcise the emptiness and mediocrity devouring your soul, discuss your sex life in excruciating detail on Jenny Jones, surrender your sanity and life savings to Oral Roberts, massacre dozens of people with an Uzi because you were shortchanged a Chicken McNugget. The choice is becoming increasingly clear: either the espresso cup of wisdom or the Kool-Aid pitcher of Jonestown.

Accordingly, to promote and preserve the public good, I have decided to violate one of the most important rules of coffeehouse philosophy—not to preach in public without a newspaper or a cappuccino—to discuss its history, practices, and beliefs and their impact on my life. Before I reveal these Masonic secrets, however, you must swear by the Grand Sultans Pope, Goldoni, and Voltaire, by the Exalted Viziers Pavoni, Illy, and Gaggia, never to reveal what I am about to tell you to the foolish, the gross, or the boring, especially to those Seattle yuppies who treat coffee like liquid pot-pourri. If you break this oath, may your pantry never hold anything but Sanka, may your blood turn into Folgers' crystals, may you be bound like Ixion on a Williams Sonoma coffee grinder!

BEFORE THERE WAS coffeehouse philosophy, there was coffee. The first shipment of arabica arrived in Venice from Constantinople in 1615. Coffee was a relative latecomer to Italy, reaching the peninsula some five years after tea and nearly a century after cocoa had been imported from the New World. Venetian merchants, however, made up for lost time through aggressive promotion. Like their predecessor, Marco Polo, and their successors, Milanese and Madison Avenue copywriters, they capitalized on their product's exoticism. With the help of musicians and commedia dell'arte street performers, they staged colorful skits about the origins of coffee in the Piazza di San Marco.

Two centuries earlier, a Yemen goatherd had discovered his flock munching the bright red berries of the kaffar bush. According to legend, the Queen of Sheba had brought this plant to the Middle East from Abyssinia as a wedding gift to King Solomon. The berries must have been magical, because the goats twitched their ears, bleated, and began cavorting around the bush. Fascinated, the goatherd tried some himself and joined the romp. A passing imam was struck by this interspecies break dance and secreted some berries back to his mosque. After boiling them, he roasted the pits, which he then crushed and mixed with water to form a paste. The bitter but delectable concoction proved a marvelous stimulant. The imam found he could meditate tirelessly for hours, read the Koran with greater clarity, and he decided to share the drink with his fellow muslims. Holy men prayed till dawn. Dervishes spun faster and longer. Pilgrims fortified themselves on their way to Mecca. The devout called the new beverage kawah, Arabic for “inspiration” or “enthusiasm”; others called it kaffa, after the Queen of Sheba's plant. The Italians decided to call it caffè.

Initially, the new drink was regarded—with good reason—as a drug, and as such it commanded a great price. A single cup cost a week's wages and could be drunk only under the supervision of a physician or an apothecary. Soon, however, lemonade vendors began selling coffee throughout Venice. Police records show that city officials regarded these vendors with suspicion. Like enterprising coke dealers, they probably cut their product to meet street, er, canal value. Ecclesiastical authorities were no less wary. The Inquisition investigated coffee merchants and expressed its concern to the Vatican. In Rome theologians wrote denunciatory tracts calling coffee “the bitter invention of Satan.” Fortunately, Pope Clement VIII, a sane and intelligent man, decided to sample this witch's brew himself. One sip convinced him that he had found paradise. “Coffee,” he pronounced, smacking his lips, “should be baptized to make it a true Christian drink.” Some of the denser cardinals thought the pope had suggested actually baptizing infants in coffee, but they finally caught on when His Holiness boiled them a fresh pot.

The pope's imprimatur mollified the Venetian government, and over the next thirty years, botteghe del caffè, the first genuine coffeehouses, opened their doors. Most of these had grandiloquent names to attract customers: Duc di Toscania, Imperatore Imperatrice della Russia, Tamerlano, Fantae di Diana, Dame Venete, Arabo-Piastrelle. Caffè Florian, founded in 1683, remains Europe's oldest surviving coffeehouse, as well as its most prestigious and most expensive. It is still located in Piazza di San Marco. Unlike their counterparts in Mecca and Constantinople, these Italian cafés were n...

Table of contents

• Series Page
• PREFACE
• KEYNOTE
• ANTIPASTO
• PRIMO
• SECONDO
• CONTORNO
• DOLCE
• CAFFÈ
• AFTER-DINNER SPEECH
• ENVOY
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS