Anchovies – You Gotta Love ‘em
Volume 49, Issue 1
By Michael Safdiah

I’d just moved into my very first New York apartment in Greenwich Village, a life long dream. It was on West Tenth Street near the corner of Bleeker, very gay, even in those days. It was a four story walk up, rent controlled, with windows in every room, including the large kitchen which looked onto a courtyard and overlooked a church steeple. Back in those mid-sixties days there were still plenty of Italian families living in the neighborhood, and the smells in the hallways and courtyard — those incredible, wonderful aromas –– are probably what accounted for my love of good Italian food. Every day as I passed apartment 12, I would swoon as Mrs. Minnetti, her door ajar, was cooking up some mouthwatering meal for her family. One day I had the guts to ask her what she was cooking that particular morning. "Artichokes" says she. Not at all satisfied, I beg her for details, because artichokes just don’t smell like that. Sometimes she stuffed them, and other times she just cut them up and cooked them "plain.”

She showed me how she trimmed them, cut up the fresh vegetables into slices, and then chopped up more garlic than I could imagine, and gently fried the garlic in lots of olive oil, and then she did THAT special thing: a few anchovies in oil were added to the garlic, and as she continued frying, the tiny anchovies began to disintegrate, and the perfume I was searching for arose from her pan. So that was it: anchovies. Anchovies which I hated on pizzas, anchovies which I never could stomach when they were served as cocktail canapés, repulsive anchovies had now found their permanent place in my culinary repertoire.

Mrs. M. was from Sicily, but all over southern Italy they use these little fishes to add depth, flavor and darkness to a dish. You aren’t supposed to taste them or even to know they are there, or too many were probably used. When my friends find out I’m about to use them they would always make a face like "eewww,” that is until they tasted — and they became converts. Here are a few ways I’ve learned to use them:

BAGNA CALDA is the Italian version of the French Provencal dish known as Crudités Aioli, which uses a garlicky mayonnaise as the dip. Bagna Calda means ‘warm bath’ because the dip is served hot. It’s a garlicky sauce of garlic, olive oil, butter and yes, anchovies.

Hot Dip: 1/2 c. butter, 1/2 c. olive oil, 10 anchovy fillets, one can boneless sardines, eight garlic cloves, mashed, 1/2 tsp. fresh ground pepper. Heat the olive oil in a small sauté pan, add the butter, anchovies, garlic and sardines. Simmer at low heat until the anchovies have disintegrated, maybe 10 minutes, mashing ingredients into oil — butter with a fork. Serve as a hot dip for bite size fresh vegetables (broccoli, celery, cauliflower, radicchio, cabbage, drained canned artichokes in water, zucchini, etc.) Also excellent is Italian crusty bread in chunks, sprinkled with grated parmesan cheese, which are then lightly grilled.

ARTICHOKES: Use frozen artichoke quarters when you can get them, or fresh baby chokes when they are in season. After cutting up the fresh chokes, rub them with fresh lemon to keep them from turning brown. Chop up around eight cloves of fresh garlic, and fry gently in olive oil with some red pepper flakes to your taste, and a few anchovy filets until the anchovies disintegrate. Add the chokes, and continue to fry until they get tender. Season with salt, pepper and a generous squeeze of fresh lemon juice.
LEMON CHICKEN: Trim the fat from, butterfly and pound the breasts, season with S&P, and a generous sprinkling of ground nutmeg. Flour lightly. Chop eight to 10 large cloves of garlic, more if you're me, sauté gently in enough olive oil to fry the chicken. Sprinkle on some red pepper flakes and a few anchovies. Fry gently till the anchovies disintegrate. Add the chicken, and fry on one side, season with more S&P and generous nutmeg and brush on some Dijon mustard onto each filet. Grate the zest from one whole lemon on top of the chicken.
Turn, continue cooking till almost done. Remove the chicken and set aside onto a plate while cooking down the sauce. Add some white vermouth, some chicken broth; a TB of capers, drained, or more if you like; I do. Also squeeze the juice from one and a half lemons and pour it into the skillet. Taste for seasoning. Add a handful of chopped flat leaf parsley, and a generous amount of olive oil to enrich the final sauce also the juices which have run off the chicken. Add the chicken back to the pan, cover and simmer until the chicken is cooked. Top each filet with some of the sauce. I know this seems complicated but if you read it again and visualize the steps, it's really simple.
BROCCOLI a la ROMANA: Trim the broccoli into long pieces taking around an inch off the base. Boil a large pot of water, salt heavily, add 1 TB sugar, a large pinch of nutmeg, and cook until the broc just almost loses the white part. Remove to a strainer and drain to cool. Season with S&P and more nutmeg. Beat a few eggs into a large bowl, toss the broccoli into the eggs and sprinkle generously with grated cheese. Sauté in a non-stick with olive oil till one side browns slightly, turn and turn and do the other side. Remove to a plate, squeeze a generous amount of fresh lemon on it, and grate some lemon zest on top. This dish loves to be served warm.

SEA SCALLOPS: Last night the meat market at the Pines had some beautiful dry (meaning really fresh) sea scallops. Rinse them for only a few seconds to get rid of the sand, then remove the lighter colored crescent shaped outer muscle — it’s tough and no fun to eat. Season them with S&P, and dust with flour. I use a baggie and then toss them into a strainer to lose most of the flour. Into a nonstick skillet I place around eight chopped cloves of garlic, lots of olive oil, a few anchovies, red pepper flakes and fry till the anchovies disintegrate. Then in go the scallops, fry on one side and turn over, fry again. Grate the zest from a lemon on top of them, and then add the juice. Now in goes some white vermouth and a splash of Pernod. Cook until slightly thick and then add a few heaping soup spoons of pesto, more S&P, .and taste for seasoning. Add some more olive oil, a pound of just cooked and drained linguine, a handful of chopped flat parsley, and a half can of peeled plum tomatoes, which you have broken up into pieces with a fork. Toss to distribute. Serve at once with some grated cheese.