“Simple is best.”
It was the only English a gruff man originally from the Piedmont had said to me in half an hour of watching him cook. We were standing in his current home’s kitchen far removed from his native land but the balance of his commentary remained rapid-fire gabbles of Italian patiently translated by his long suffering daughter, not for having an Italian chef for a father but for unwisely dating me long enough to garner an invitation home for dinner. To be fair the man was a delight to watch and once you took the spatula from his hand and got him out of the kitchen, really a charming fellow to know despite the permanent grimace affixed to all fathers of women with whom you hold romantic intentions.
The whole family had gathered in their lounge to ply me with convivial cocktails at the start of the evening but I could tell he himself was growing restless. As he stood and aimed towards the kitchen door he said, via his daughter, that he was just going to make a quick appetizer but that I was welcome to watch if I wished. He had known I was a food writer and suspect it was a sort of olive branch that he knew I couldn’t resist. Standing and following into his inner sanctum I sensed I was being thrown a life preserver while otherwise bobbing in a question-filled ocean that would have soon consumed me. The women were riddling me with prying inquiries about my life and more embarrassingly my interactions with daughter number three. I knew her father would be a scowling yet silent saviour away from the scaled down version of medieval Inquisition occurring in the living room and took my chances. The mother didn’t follow me into the kitchen and I later learned that she never set foot in there, leaving all the cookery to the patriarch of the family or one of the six daughters. There was talk of her secretly being Albanian.
On the counter were a total of five ingredients. A few cloves of freshly peeled garlic, a stack of Portobello mushrooms taller than the toaster, a bottle of elderly blonde sherry from Portugal *, the three fresh loaves I had been instructed to bring from the bakery around the corner, and a litre of dense cream. Where they got the latter I have no idea because there wasn’t a cow in sight and we were in the middle of a bustling city. I remember that the fat had separated slightly in the pitcher as it does when it hasn’t been run through the industrial homogenization process and it looked to be half the volume. Apart from a bit of salt, pepper, and olive oil, there was nothing else. No fancy herbs, no meat or other vegetables, just mushrooms, booze, and cream.
* I was later told that Port works well too for taste but makes the sauce such an ungodly ugly colour they avoid it when possible. Similarly, any old mushrooms will do as will more exotic wild sorts you have to hand but the latter might be somewhat of a waste with such strong flavour from the booze.
If you didn’t already know, the giant “Portobello” mushroom is a bit of an imposter. The mushroom industry, stumped with what to do with ordinary (i.e. smaller) brown Crimini mushroom when they grew too large to fit through packaging machinery, decided in the early 1980s to invent a name and market the giant specimens at a premium price which has blossomed into a multi-billion dollar industry annually. Portobello, brown cap, Italian brown, chestnut, and dozens of other names are all the same species, Agaricus bisporus. Theories on the origins of the actual name Portobello abound but seem lost to grocery history. In Italy some call them cappellone which translates to ‘big hat’ but I never heard my very genuine Italian hosts utter that phrase so perhaps it’s a regional name or, more probably, my Italian ears are really horrible at listening. I’m sure they’ve been grown to huge sizes all over the planet long before mushroom marketing councils got involved.
Whatever they’re called, they have the delicious mature taste that all mushrooms gain when allowed to open their gills underneath the caps over time. Closed cap mushrooms are less intense in flavour and around my house I let them mature and begin to open on their own even if they were closed tight when purchased. Better still, grocery counters somehow seem to think open mushrooms have gone bad and discount them deeply at the first signs of expansion. There is a point at which a mushroom has gone off but it’s certainly not the day it opens its gills to the world. You’ve usually got another week at least during which they’ll be in their flavour prime.
My less-than-talkative host was a short blur about the kitchen – buzzing here and there filling wine glasses, magically procuring huge hunks of cheese to taste from his larder, and generally preparing to cook. It was most certainly his domain and I could tell I was being allowed in strictly on a trial basis. He proceeded to select the largest pan that would fit on the stove and set it atop a raging heat. After a flurry of slicing, in went olive oil to barely coat the pan followed by fat hunks of mushroom with quick yelps of sizzle. Things were moving fast.
To my surprise, he then turned and walked off into the next room. This left me asking if I was meant to tend the pan somehow. Had I missed some instructional sign language? The last thing I wanted to do at that point was fail in my first assigned kitchen task. “I wouldn’t touch it if I were you.” my girlfriend replied and so I patiently took her at her word. Just as we could smell the heady mushrooms coming into their own a few minutes later, her father walked back into the kitchen as if it was all a well-timed dance and uttered those few words of English. He quickly crushed garlic and nestled it in between the mushroom planks that had now been turned over to reveal the perfect golden colour. This order kept the garlic from scorching as it surely would have if it had gone into the pan first. In went in a very generous pour of the sherry with a steaming raucous “whoosh”, presumably to get them drunk, and seconds later the dense cream was added to calm the whole affair down. Measurements were obviously part of the genetic memory built into all Italians. Salt and pepper were added judiciously with the care of an alchemist on the verge of discovery.
What he had done in his brief vacation from the kitchen earlier was slice the bread into generous portions and toss them on the charcoal grill. No butter, no spicing, just a bit of delicious char and warming heat. They landed on a gargantuan platter in no particular order and then the mushrooms with their decadent sauce were poured over. My girlfriend surreptitiously handed me a tiny tasting spoon on the walk across the kitchen and my entire mushroom world changed in an instant. The interplay of those few simple ingredients defines for me what “greater than the sum of the parts” really means. Over the years recreating this dish I’ve been tempted to add Parmesan, grate in some nutmeg, or insert other veg but in the end, any of that enhancement is completely unnecessary.
Fat glasses of Chianti had been decanted and we all sat around a common bar with forks at the ready. “We usually just dip into the pan on the stove but mama insisted we use a plate. While it’s hot or it tastes like paste.” was translated and never shy with a fork I dove into one of the big lessons in my cooking life, and perhaps life in general. “Simple is best”.
