Fruits - Aug 23, 2006

I haven’t even been swimming yet. Haven’t gotten out of town. Haven’t had a single mosquito bite. No lobster. No local tomatoes. Had some pretty terrific corn, though. Our corn from Long Island has been better than green market corn, swear to god. My partner Peter Romano has done gorgeous work this summer. His stone fruit has been superlative, particularly his white peaches and all those plums and pluots. Some drop-dead ribs from Rack ‘n Soul at 108^th and Broadway, and I’m not a rib freak. I go for brisket and pulled pork way before ribs. But those ribs were perfect; falling off the bone. Daisy Mae’s are wonderful, too, and so are Virgil’s and Blue Smoke’s, but Rack ‘n Soul’s – oh, baby.

The best tomatoes have been those Campari tomatoes in the rectangular clear plastic containers, and they don’t really qualify as summer stuff because they’re so agri-business. I mean, there’s nothing grower-holy or local-phile about them. They’re trucked here from bloody California, for chrissake. But, DAMN, they’re good – with one of those burrata cheeses we fly in every week from Campania. It’s a rarefied fior di latte, which is the proper name for Italian-origin mozzarella. “Mozzarella” is made from the milk of water buffalo (bufala). “Fior di latte” (the “flower of milk”) is the mozz made from cow’s milk. Whatever. Let the Italians differentiate. A burrata is a handmade mozz from Campania, the region of Naples, from the hills behind Salerno. But it’s rarefied in that this mozz is wrapped around shreds of fior di latte, plus thick, sweet cream, plus whey. It’s sort of this wondrous, amorphous gland that’s then wrapped in asphodel leaves, which are (logically) indigenous, and the leaves perfume the burrata with an indescribable fragrance. You simply plop the burrata onto a plate, lop the thing into bite-size pieces, pepper the heck out of it, and the quartered Campari tomatoes, drizzle one of my marvelous barrel oils over the whole thing, and I guarantee you you’ll feel like this is the best summer of your life whether you’ve been swimming or not.

Thanks god our best friends Robert and Margo (two lawyers, no children) and Tim and Dagny (whose lives are so full we refer to them as “The Virtuals”) invite us over a lot. Both locations are grill-friendly. Those prime, 21-day, dry-aged, grass-fed beefsteaks have that mineral-y, lingering flavor that make life worth living. I’m here to tell you. I love to roast whole poblanos with those steaks, right along side of them. And those red, sweet Tropea onions I bring in from Calabria. They’re torpedo-shaped, so we halve them lengthwise and grill them cut side-down. We usually roast a few dozen cherrystone clams first. Those we precede with a couple of cheeses. A Le Chevrot, a St.-Marcellin (or the bigger St.-Felicien), a Le Chatelain Camembert, a sheep’s milk Perail. Those are five of my go-to cheeses. I confess to being a creature of habit to a fault.

I don’t think there’s a better dessert on earth than brownies or cookies with ice cream.