As you may have inferred, I am not overly impressed by this show or others like Man vs. Food that marvel at just how gluttonous and boorish the host can be. Perhaps it’s because I frequently over-eat and then avoid looking at myself in the mirror, but in the same way as I don’t favor shows featuring close-ups of young fools guzzling booze, like, say, The Real World, I also don’t enjoy watching some fat guy shoving 4 pounds of pancakes down his pie-hole surrounded by the cheering obese. I find it all, shall we say, sorta gross.

On a more serious note though, if such shows are truly representative of the best road-food in this country, and were I an American truck-driver, I would fear for my health. I know from personal experience that driving isn’t one of the more healthful occupations given the innumerable sedentary hours in the cab, but when the majority of truck-stops offer only greasy fast food, you can be pretty sure that expecting to to enjoy a long and healthy retirement after 40 years in the game may be optimistic.

We mentioned our appreciation for the fare offered at Italian truck-stops a couple of years ago — noting with joy and surprise in equal measure that one can get beer or wine to accompany, amongst other things, fantastically fresh panini — but our recent trip to France has re-opened the debate over which country we’d prefer to be a trucker in.

Known as routiers, French truck-drivers have a reputation for gruffness and industrial action. Rarely a year passes in which they do not blockade the Channel Tunnel or the autoroutes around Paris with blazing oil drums to protest rising fuel prices, increased tolls, or out of sympathy with the similarly militant French farmer. Having driven in France, one sympathizes with their complaints over the miserable state of fuel and tolls, but if there is one facet of Gallic truck-driving life about which they cannot complain, it’s road food.

Perhaps to compensate the routier for his hard life behind the wheel, the weeks away from his family (and it almost always is a him), and the hours of solitude, in true French style, there has grown up a nationwide network of restaurants that principally cater to him: the Relais Routiers. The French trucker network makes sure that wherever he may find himself, from the city to the countryside, from Flanders to Gascony, the hard-working driver can get a three-course meal with wine and a shower without having to resort to such desperate measures as his American (or British) counterpart and settle for fast-food. In fact, a handy pocket-guide is published annually to help them find these often out-of-the-way places.

And therein lies the rub: rather like the average Frenchman who will happily spend an hour of his precious Sunday driving out to a tiny auberge hidden in the hills to support the cooking of a particular chef, the French truck driver will always go out of his way to arrive at a Relais Routiers around noon. And why not? They serve excellent, often regional, food at the correct price that has him returning every time he’s passing by.

But to many throughout the provinces of France, the Relais Routiers are more than just a truck-stop. They are the local restaurant, watering-hole, social club and informal town hall — the locus for ties that bind the community together. And like local businesses everywhere, owners of Relais Routiers know their clientele well enough to understand that their customer’s loyalty to a restaurant is only as strong as its loyalty is to their stomachs and pocket-books. Consequently, they offer reliably good, honest food. Indeed, in these thin times, and with the advent of so many pretentious, expensive eateries causing the collapse of local bistrots across France, some commentators have called Relais Routiers the guardians of the nation’s cuisine. This might be slightly unfair to the Paul Bocuses and Daniel Bouluds of this world, but like a good pub in Britain or quality diner in America, you simply know where you are with a Routiers. You know what to expect and while your expectations might rarely be exceeded, they are always met, and familiarity and comfort are what most people seek most of the time.

Until comparatively recently, the laws governing alcohol consumption and driving in France were less than strict, and it was perfectly normal for a routier to wash his three course meal down with an aperitif, half a bottle of wine and a digestif (all except the digestif being included in the price) before breezily climbing back into the cab of his 10 ton machine and trundling off. These days the carte routiers still includes three (sometimes four!) generous courses, but with the booze sensibly capped at a 1/3 bottle, often served in a small jug that looks touchingly dainty in the nicotine-stained hands of blue-chinned trucker.

When we visited Auberge St. Martin — a Relais Routiers on the RN31 in Pontarcher, Ambleny, between Compiègne and Soissons in the Oise department of France between Christmas and New Years — our delicious three course lunch and half-carafe of house red plus coffee set us back an astonishing 22 euros ($29) for the two of us. The charge of one euro above that levied on many of our fellow diners was due to our inability to flash our routiers membership card.

The Carte Routiers had its customary three options that day, a choice of two starters, two mains and two desserts: a charcuterie plate (containing slices of the local specialty, andouillette, or tripe sausage) or pork rillettes, followed by poulet Basquaise (Basque-style chicken with peppers and onions in a spicy sauce) or biftek (rump steak with french fries), and fromage blanc (a delicious thick natural yogurt) or assiette de fromage (cheese plate) for dessert.

The food was simple and delicious, and the service prompt and informal. The sole problem we encountered was in following directions to the bathroom which appeared to lead to the bar, but in fact directed you outside to a separate door where the shower was located. The most enlightening aspect of the whole experience — quite apart from note penned on the menu listing a shower for 2 euro or 3 euro with a towel — was that this place really did a lot of its business with truck drivers. Outside, packed tightly together on the muddy verges of a country road were 10 or more giant trucks, and glancing around us more than half the diners were sitting quietly by themselves, sleeves rolled up to reveal a bevy of tattoos, breaking their midday bread in companionable silence. We looked at each other and both said, almost simultaneously, “this would never happen in America.” It was a moment of sincere cultural recognition on our behalf, and we raised our glasses to toast these heroes of haulage and their continuing role as custodians of the nation’s table.

Made during the horrid, self-reflective, and, frequently, gassy hours aboard a trans-Atlantic flight this past weekend, our New Year’s resolutions swore us to no less than three weeks of Spartan, monkish grazing on whole grains, green vegetables and lean protein in order to trim ourselves of burgeoning, lumpy mid-sections brought on by the combined Holiday calories of three Thanksgiving dinners, two Christmas roasts and a New Year’s trip to France.

However, we have since surprised, or dismayed, even ourselves with the deplorable level of willpower demonstrated in abandoning our resolutions after just three days. Only slightly less amazing is that three days of salads could drive us to such an extreme. Perhaps the only positive we can draw is that at least we’re starting 2010 with a gastronomic bang instead of whimpering abstemiousness.

The chivito is, informally, the national dish of Uruguay and legend has it that it came about when an Argentine tourist from the city of Cordoba, visited the establishment of restaurateur Antonio Carbonara in the beautiful beach resort of Punta del Este, and asked for a sandwich of roasted young goat meat (a specialty of her native province), known as chivito*. Having no goat, Senor Carbonara proceeded to prepare a steak sandwich for his Argentine guest, topping it with just about everything he had to hand in his kitchen. The resulting sandwich was such a great success that it became a permanent item on Carbonara’s menu, and its fame spread across the country like wildfire, becoming known in the process as the chivito.

As with nearly every “national” dish, there are a few variations on the theme, but the chivito is basically a sandwich made of a thin piece of beef, often skirt steak (churrasco) topped with melted mozzarella cheese, grilled or pan fried red pepper, bacon, ham, egg (either boiled or fried), lettuce, tomato, sliced onions, mayonnaise, sliced pickles and olives on a bread roll. The two principal variants on this theme are the Chivito Canadiense (Canadian chivito) which substitutes Canadian-style bacon for the crispier kind, and the chivito al plato, a deliciously messy platter of all the typical ingredients served without a bun on a plate and often with fries, or, maybe even more commonly, with ensalada rusa (Russian salad – potatoes, mayonnaise, carrots, peas, tuna, onion, parsley, and, occasionally, boiled egg and sliced beets). Note: Chivitos may also substitute chicken or veal escallopes for the steak.

On our final night in Montevideo last spring, instead of our usual giant steak dinner at one of that city’s wonderful parrillas, we tasted our first chivito at a small sidewalk cafe in the quiet neighborhood of Pocitos. Until that moment, we had been led to believe that the United States was the home of the world’s most ambitious and artery-busting sandwiches — indeed, it is home to most of them — but we now know that the Uruguayans, in their charmingly understated and apparently ego-less manner, have created something which can challenge for that title.

Whether you choose to make yourself a chivito now or later, as a reward for an extended period of fasting, is entirely up to you, but since last night’s regimenal aberration we have remade our vows to gastronomic penitence. How long we keep them this time is, as yet, unknown, but the mere sight of a chivito tends to focus your mind on, ahem, one’s weighty personal issues.

*The word chivito refers, specifically, to a young goat that has been weaned and fed on solid food. It, therefore, differs from the cabrito, or baby goat – an unweaned animal – by being some months older.

On our honeymoon, almost exactly two years ago today, we arrived in the fair city of Verona thoroughly pissed off. And then things got worse. It wasn’t as if the day had started badly either: waking in Bologna; leisurely sipping a doppio espresso; before strolling along Via Pescherie Vecchie to buy a small, crusty loaf, a giant, but sweet tomato, an immoderately-sized leaf-wrapped burrata, and a serrated knife; then, wandering into the Piazza Cavour to make ourselves nearly sick with buttery cream cheese curds washed down with a half-bottle of bardolino. All in all, a pretty reasonable opening gambit.

I don’t even recall at what point things began to go west, but the supposed simple hour and a half drive between the two cities took us more like four. So, in late afternoon, we lurched into Verona hot, tired, stiff, and needing to pee. And then we couldn’t find our hotel. Another hour of angrily trawling the Veronese streets in our banana-hued rental car, grinding gears, and now with excrutiating pee pains, we finally found it – closed. No amount of banging on the door, honking of the horn or screaming at the windows produced a response. Despairing, I relieved myself copiously in the hotel’s flower bed and, looking up with an air of contentment, spied a large pink elephant beaming at me from across a field. Salvation arrives in many guises, and drawn towards it, things immediately improved.

With a free bottle of valpolicella, a purring welcome from a friendly ginger tom, a pair of iridescent peacocks puttering outside, and a room for the night with breakfast, Hotel Elefante saved us from sleeping in our car and, perhaps, from premature marital counselling. Having regained at least partial equilibrium, we made for the city center dressed for the theatre.

Skirting the wholly-invented balcony of the wholly-invented Capulet family, we ducked down Via Portici and into a restaurant filled with lovers pawing each other under the table and, like cartoon dogs, sucking-up the same strand of spaghetti. Still too flustered to entertain any romantic notions, we ordered what turned out to be a vast portion of fegato di vitello alla Veneziana or Venetian-style calves’ liver, which, with its heady richness of garlic, sage and cream, would have rendered senseless even the most amorous couple. Things continued to improve after dinner as we shuffled onwards to the arena di Verona and, cooling our tails on its ancient bleached limestone blocks, watched an epic performance of Puccini’s La Bôheme that somehow provided much-needed perspective on the day’s minor tragedies.

Periodically, we’ll laugh (or grimace) at our haplessness that day, but as time passes, we’re more apt to remember the liver than the liverishness. During a recent lunch at the very respectable Aperitivo here in Park Slope, Brooklyn, we ate a delicious adaptation of that dish over linguine with a nice dry Valpolicella that was reminiscent of our pre-opera meal in Verona. Here it is, recreated for your visual pleasure. Feel free to eat it on a balcony or at a banquet for quarreling clans, just don’t expect to be feeling frisky afterwards.

Virtually everywhere they make sausages, and in a lot of places they don’t, some form of sausage in bread combination is sold by street vendors, often to the inebriated, and, in many cases, the consumer is best advised to be under the influence before taking their life in their hands with one of these mystery bag sandwiches. The night I met my wife, for example, I remember being horrified that her sister (who had introduced us earlier in the evening) was reckless enough — even after 50 drinks — to buy an insanitary-looking sausage in a roll from a street vendor in London’s Piccadilly Circus.

Where sanitation isn’t the biggest issue, a sense of disappointment often is, with the boring and insipid offerings available at any of the myriad hot dog stands lining almost every Manhattan street exemplifying this. Do not get me wrong, a New York hot dog — pulled from the disquietingly opaque water, slapped into a curiously spongy potato roll, and painted with mustard and an unidentifiable relish – is certainly a real taste of NYC street life, and when you’ve been pounding the city streets for an afternoon, almost enjoyable, but it is not great street food, regardless of what Adam Platt at NYMag says. (feel free to post your own disagreements with me below)

However, the more I travel, the more I realize that these sausage and bread combos can actually be both safe for human consumption and, in some cases, a delicacy. You may remember our merguez frites sandwich of last year, which was not just the best street food we’d ever had, but right up there with the finest sandwiches too. Even the overtly filthy nature of that vendor in Carcassonne failed to put us off. Indeed, it’s probably true that we would risk a searing bout of intestinal drainage on a weekly basis if only merguez frites were readily available.

So, during our recent trip to Argentina we were intrigued by rusty little cabins that we passed throughout Buenos Aires, either parked-up or slumping shack-ily on the sidewalk, emitting wonderfully aromatic smoke and advertizing choripán and morcipán on gaily painted signs. After one particularly lengthy trek across the city from Palermo to Recoleta to the edge of Balvanera, we were ravenous and mentally-prepared for something of questionable hygiene wrapped in a roll and doused with condiments.

Following a tip we had picked up online, we headed to the corner of Avenida Juan B. Justo and Avenida Santa Fe in Palermo [right next to the Palermo Subte stop (D line)], to a very sweaty looking snack bar for a pre-dinner choripán — a chori(zo) on bread (pan). Smaller than our pitifully-sized Brooklyn apartment and decorated with aging posters of scantily-clad beer models, our senses immediately told us that this cafe was exactly the kind of place that would deliver the equal measures of delicious, greasy victuals and stinging doses of the raging squitters we were looking for. [Happily, only the former arrived.]

Your typical sausage and roll combination features a roll that follows the dimensions of the sausage: long and narrow. However, one of the many things I immediately liked about choripáns and morcipáns is that they invert this absolutist relationship on its head. The sausage is split down the center, seared on both “faces” a la plancha and, dripping with bright orange fat, is placed inside a rectangular hunk of French-style bread. Not only is it texturally superior to its flimsy American counterpart, but its increased surface area and the greater density of the bread, make it a far better designed sandwich than the hot dog. As, enclosed in a larger roll, your choice of condiments — in this case, mayonnaise, “golf sauce” (not unlike Russian/Thousand Island dressing), ketchup, mustard, and chimichurri — are less able to escape and damage shirt or shoes, as frequently happens when biting down on the open-topped frankfurter.

Unfortunately, once you go choripán, you can never go back, and their absence from my everyday street food scene has become a source of extreme frustration now that I’m back in New York. Passing-by vendors of the humble hot dog several times a day, I can’t help sneer a little at their meagre offerings of limp weiner and rubbery potato roll, and I mutter to myself that the magnificent, spicy, chewy choripán is a shining light compared to their ghostly reflections.

Happily, choripáns and morcipáns are easy and fun to make in the comfort of your own home and make a great alternative to the unimaginative backyard barbecue staples of weiners and burgers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we couldn’t find Argentine-style chorizo in Brooklyn, but the easy to find, and similarly fresh and soft Colombian and Mexican varieties make worthy replacements, even if they are longer and slimmer than their Argentina counterparts. This past weekend, humming “the choripán man, the choripán man’s really got it going on…” inanely to ourselves, we mixed-up a tangy chimichurri, grilled ourselves some chorizo, and enjoyed a taste of Buenos Aires with a cold beer, even if we had to imagine the warm weather and palm trees.

As Odysseus was nearly drawn to his destruction on the rocks by the enchanting song of the sirens, so your hardy WANF voyagers were almost powerless to resist breaking themselves on the plentiful tables of Uruguay. However, unlike Homer’s hero, for whom women were the main weakness throughout his epic peregrinations, during our recent travels in South America, we found that grilled organs, specifically sweetbreads, are the likely source of our eventual ruin.

A comparatively short (by Odysseian standards) three-hour Buquebus ferry ride from Buenos Aires across the Mar del Plata – the enormously wide and constantly brown estuary of the Rio de la Plata (River Plate) – lies Uruguay’s capital and largest city, Montevideo. Arriving by water feels delightfully old-fashioned, and it allows the visitor to get a sense of the lie of the land in a way that a plane ride cannot. Rather than the confusing meander through a city’s outskirts on the way in from the airport, the city slowly revealed itself to us as we approached it by sea, face-first, so that we could see the way it had been built, outwards from the port.

Centered on the port is Montevideo’s cuidad vieja (old town), which with its faded colonial glory and salty night-time reputation, is immediately charming to the visitor. Only the giant ultra-modern cruise ship towering over everything prevented us from wondering if the ferry hadn’t also been a time machine. The hub of the old town is the Mercado del Puerto, a magnificent Victorian-era market with a skylit roof supported by wrought iron pillars, where the air is thick with the thwack of cleaver on meat, the cries of competing vendors and the sooty warblings of its resident pigeons. It no longer serves as a venue for trading fresh produce, a fact that might be sad if it weren’t now a giant parilla (grill/barbecue) serving all manner of traditional Uruguayan meaty preparations.

More accurately, there are actually a bunch of different parillas within the mercado all in friendly and typically laid-back Uruguayan-style competition with one another for the title of best in the city. We spent a good fifteen minutes cagily circling the mercado trying to figure out some way of discerning which might be leading this contest. After inspecting rack upon similar rack of sizzling meats, we decided to let demographics be our guide and plumped for Estancia del Puerto, the place with the fewest available seats (2), and the most drunken dudes with guitars serenading the patrons (1).

We had left Buenos Aires on a very early morning ferry and, having eaten nothing on the journey, arrived in Montevideo in a terrible, bleary-eyed state of hunger. The only way out of which seemed to be robust servings of charred beast. Happily then, the menu was the most extensive of its kind we have ever seen, containing more than eight choices of steak, five of sausage, 3 or 4 matambres (stuffed beef rolls), chicken, pork, and an intimidating selection of organ meats, not to mention a full range of pasta, salads and sides, in both full or half portions. Understanding, by this point in our carnivorous odyssey, that servings tended to be of a generous nature in this part of the world, we ordered half portions of mollejones (sweetbreads), morcilla (blood sausage), lechon (suckling pig), the potentially gruesome chotos/chinchulines (guts), and a bottle of typically Uruguayan tannat (red wine), in the hope that this might save room for further sampling of the menu.

Since, like all good grills, only certain sections of this parilla were used to actually cook meat, with others functioning as warming areas for ready-to-serve meats, we were presented with our choices within seconds, and what a presentation! No garnish, no sides of vegetables, no wasted real estate at all, just meat on plates and silverware wrapped in a paper napkin, with deep, communal tubs of chimichurri and salsa criolla scattered around the bar. We dived in recklessly.

The star of the show was the lechon, or milk-fed baby pig, which was heavenly. So good in fact, that were it not for the perfectly crispy skin overlying a thin-layer of incredibly sweet fat, and the moist, almost milky-tasting, flesh of unweaned piglet, it would truly be a barbaric dish. But our pause for reflection on the plight of young pork was brief as we tore into the golden beauty of the sweetbreads, the complex spices of the morcilla, and the (surprisingly) wonderful crunchy texture and minerally-tasting joy of the chinchulines. It all tasted to us like no meat had before, even the condiments had a singular tang and freshness to them that we found a step-up from those we’d had earlier in the week. And it seems we were not alone in this.

Glancing up at our surroundings and fellow diners as we approached fullness, it was comforting to see that everyone else was head-down and going full-bore into their lunches too. And who could blame them? Like the irresistible song of the sirens, the evocative combination of wood-smokey atmosphere, beautiful Victorian architecture, and the surround-sound effect of wall-to-wall sizzling would surely stir the soul of any meat-lover and be ruinous to the anti-meat resolve of even the most hardcore vegetarian.

Mercado del Puerto
Rambla 25 Agosto de 1825 y Perez Castellano,
Ciudad Vieja, Montevideo, Uruguay
Mercado del Puerto online

No, friends, let me reassure you that you have not accidentally stumbled upon some weird, faux-rustic “pron” site. For good or bad, the only p0rn you’ll find here is daring, ultra-close-up pics of the juicy, young flesh of pasture-fed Argentine cattle. And the only things being roasted (or stripping for that matter) are long strips of beef ribs, or tira de asado.

The setting for this particular Argentine skin flick was El Establo, (meaning the stable), a famous old parilla in the Retiro district of Buenos Aires.

Arriving at this restaurant after another long walk across the City, we found ourselves salivating even more than usual at the sight of giant hunks of meat sizzling over glowing coals because the previous night’s meal had been so disappointing. We’ll devote an entire post about why our experience at Casa Saltshaker was such a let-down another day, but suffice it to say for now, that this chastening experience was beneficial because we learned that disappointment can be an excellent appetite-whetter.

Greeted enthusiastically by our ebullient waiter Javier, we were presented with a large menu, including a range of steaks and pasta, as well as a wide variety of northern Spanish classics – the restaurant’s founder being an immigrant from the Gijon area of Asturias. After a good ten minute study of said menu, we looked up and noticed our surroundings: a high-ceilinged whitewashed room with thick, dark wood beams, somewhat reminiscent of a stable, with the exception of the giant barbecue, and behind us, an intimidating old liquor cabinet packed with all manner of head-splitting firewaters in knobbly green and brown bottles.

Famished by our walk and the meager offerings of the night before, we ordered the heroically proportioned ensalada del Establo (containing almost every vegetable you can name plus potatoes and boiled eggs), and what turned out to be a giant order of lengua a la vinaigrette (cold, boiled beef tongue with garlic, hot pepper and vinegar sauce) as appetizers, and somewhat conservatively, we figured, a half order, respectively, of entraña (skirt steak) and tira de asado.

Tira de asado (roast strips) is one of several uniquely Argentine cuts of beef that are perfectly suited to the high-heat charring (al carbon)of a traditional parilla. Beef ribs are cross-cut so that long narrow strips of inter-costal meat are interspersed with knots of rib-bone, which serves to shorten the often tough fibers of this part of the beast and allow them to be grilled instead of cooked using the long, low & slow method for the typical beef ribs barbecue familiar to Americans.

The juiciness and wonderfully gamey flavor of beef ribs is also retained brilliantly with this method, creating an irresistible contrast in texture to the crust formed on the outside by the searing heat from the charcoal.

Similar cuts of meat are available from some butchers in the US, the closest probably being the flanken rib, which is a short rib cut across the bone. From what we know from visiting several local butchers in Brooklyn, these are delicious, but generally thicker and meatier than those we ate in Argentina, bringing us to the conclusion that they’re cut from higher up the steer. Of course, as we plan to do at several points over the summer, you could quite easily buy yourself a rack of beef ribs and a fine-toothed saw (or heavy cleaver) and cut your own meat to order. I expect that satisfying thwack of steel on bone will be one of the signature sounds of the season.

We were delighted with our lunch at El Establo in all respects, and the playful friendliness of Javier interjecting his Argentine-inflected “you’re welcome”s as he brought more and more food to the table, only complemented our general sense of well-being. Like many professional waiters, he did his job expertly without either writing anything down or seeming to be in a hurry. Strolling around, gracefully hefting heavily-laden iron meat trays, and pausing now and then to chat and joke with our fellow diners, Javier seemed to be enjoying himself as much as we were. In fact, the only time I saw him frown was when, casting a wary eye over the meaty wreckage on our table, he tapped his nose, and, winking, advised us that we would need another half-bottle of wine if were going to properly enjoy the remainder of our steak. You can’t argue with service like that.

We ate tira de asado on at least three occasions during our week in Argentina, and so hooked were we that for our first steak meal in the month since returning home we trekked all over Brooklyn looking for an appropriate cut of meat. Ultimately, we didn’t quite find an exact facsimile of what we’d eaten in Buenos Aires, but the ribs we made and grilled at home were still very, very good all the same. And, when accompanied with lashings of sweet-vinegary-spicy condiment salsa criolla (creole sauce), a hearty Malbec, and a bowl of the highly addictive side dish that is papas fritas a la provenzal (french fries with fried garlic and parsley), it didn’t take an enormous mental leap to be back at El Establo listening to Javier expound his theory of why Fernet-Branca is the most popular digestive in Argentina. (it burns through steak the best)

It’s fairly safe to say that no group, with the exception of the enigmatic gaucho, played as significant a role in defining Argentine national character as the Italians. Primarily (and principally, numerically-speaking) from Liguria (particularly Genoa), Piemonte and Tuscany, but latterly also from Naples and other areas of southern Italy, these Italian immigrants, literally by the million, descended on Argentine soil during the last decades of the 19th century and the inter-war period of the 20th century having a profound effect on the social, cultural, linguistic and gastronomic life of their adopted home. (bear with me, this is going somewhere)

And nowhere in Argentina was this impact greater than in the southern barrios of Buenos Aires, La Boca and San Telmo, the neighborhoods where these Italians began their new lives. A (then) new local slang, lunfardo - which not only features a highly confusing form of wordplay known as vesre that reverses words so tango becomes gotan (as in The Gotan Project) and cafe con leche becomes feca con chele, but which is also littered liberally with words taken from various Italian dialects (for example, laburar (to work) instead of trabajar, manyar (to eat) instead of comer) – grew out of this linguistic melting-pot. And it had a similar effect of Italicizing the Porteño diet with such Italian staples as pizza, pasta, gnocchi, and a variety of Genoese chickpea flatbread known locally as faína (similar to the famous farinata of Genoa we wrote about a while back) accompanying the ubiquitous steak and offal on restaurant menus.

Of course, (and paraphrasing Karl Marx) the Argetin-izing of these Italian staples was also just as much of a historical inevitability, and while we’ll revisit our experiences with Argentine pasta in a later post, the focus here is Argentine pizza, and in particular the Buenos Aires classic dish that is the fugazzetta.

More or less three “types” of pizza are available in Buenos Aires: thin crust (a la piedra), a thicker, more risen (1 inch/2cm thick) doughy kind known as de molde, and media masa which is a half-baked version sold in supermarkets to be finished off in the oven at home. An informal and in no way scientific survey by yours truly indicates that a la piedra places slightly outnumber those selling thicker pies, but many of the most traditional Argentine pizzerias we read about, served pizzas in the latter camp, so it was one of the most famous of these that we endured a sweaty, grimy, two-hour walk across town to visit.

El Cuartito is decorated like the bedroom of an aging (and single) sports fan with faded posters for Las Vegas boxing showdowns cheek-by-jowl with team photos of 1980s Argentine soccer champions sporting the shiny, shortie-shorts popular at the time, and is split into two sections: standing and seated. Claiming a table in the seated section, the gruff, white-jacketed waiter – a dead-ringer for Fredo Corleone from The Godfather – plonked down two menus on our formica-topped table and scurried off.

Glancing at our fellow diners it quickly became apparent that Argentine de molde-style pizza is very different from any pizza we had ever eaten. Laden with masses of yellowy-white melted cheese, dotted sparingly with other toppings (like whole green olives and big slices of tomato) and served on circular wooden boards, it didn’t resemble either the pizza we’ve eaten in Italy or in New York or Chicago. Excited at having entered a new realm of pizza-dom, we ordered a pizza mixta (half cheese, half anchovy (no cheese, only red sauce on anchovy side), a fugazzetta, and an order of faína, along with two foamy mugs of Quilmes Chopp (ubiquitous draft Argentine beer).

The first to arrive, the mixta, was about the diameter of a large dinner plate and a shade less than an inch in depth. Half-covered with molten cheese (that tasted like somewhere between a mozzarella and a mild provolone) with the opposing half smothered in a crimson tomato sauce and laced with some giant salted anchovies, it would have been a good lunch by itself, and we were happy, when the fugazzetta hove into view, that “Fredo” our waiter ended up forgetting about the faína. 

Now, remember the seemingly dull linguistic and ethnographic details in the second paragraph? Good, because the word fugazetta is derived from “fugassa” meaning “focaccia” in Genoese dialect, and is the name given in Argentina to an onion focaccia with grated cheese gratiné-ed on top. First created by Genoese immigrant baker Agustin Banchero in La Boca around the turn of the 20th-century, the fugazza has since become famous enough that the family have not only opened a series of Banchero Pizzerias (first one in 1932), but the recipe was so valuable it was patented in the 1950s.

So, then, if a fugazza is a thick onion pizza, a fugazzetta – purportedly invented by Agustin’s son, Juan – is a fugazza stuffed with mozzarella cheese. And, when one arrives on your table with a solid thunk, you realize that this is a serious deal and rightly famous. Our faces were a mixture of surprise, delight and fear when we were presented with ours. Puffed up like a yeasty Michelin man, our fugazzetta was probably three inches thick, oozing with melted cheese and bristling with crispy sweet onions.

Deciding that we should take a brief rest before hurting ourselves on the fugazzetta, we searched for inspiration in the boxing posters on the walls and began humming the Rocky theme tune quietly to ourselves. Immediately to our left, was a framed Argentina soccer jersey, with the phrase “a mi favorito El Cuartito, siempre a mi cariño” (to my favorite “El Cuartito”, always in my heart), signed by one of, if not the, greatest soccer (futbol) players of all time, Argentine icon, Diego Armando Maradona, aka “El Pibe de Oro” (the golden kid).

Now, this was significant not just because a shirt signed by the great man loomed above us like Rio’s Christ the Redeemer statue, but also because, in the context of the giant fugazzetta slumping threateningly before us and our knowledge of recent Argentine history, it appeared more like the Argentine shroud of Turin. You see, (it’s not clear when Maradona signed this jersey), but in early 2005 Diego had to be admitted to hospital to have his stomach-pumped after eating an estimated 25 pizzas during a food and cocaine binge that nearly killed him. If the jersey was inked after this misadventure, one can only deduce that the pizza at El Cuartito is so good it’s impossible to bear a grudge against.

So, chastened by this story of gluttonous daring, but undeterred, we managed to get about halfway through the cheesy, crispy, doughy fugazzetta before conceding a weary, yet happy, defeat. To our right, two Porteños sporting significant bellies, were noisily tucking in to a fugazzetta of their own but, amazingly, were topping it with thick slabs of faína. As we waddled towards the door, it suddenly hit us that we had a lot to learn about the lore of Argentine pizza-eating if we were ever going to be able to compete with the locals, let alone the legends.

Special thanks to La Cocina de Myri for her excellent history of the Fugazzetta I cribbed from liberally above.

Although the cuisine of both Buenos Aires and Montevideo, Uruguay, is delicious, it’s much more varied than most people may believe.  But, boy, one thing is true – they love, love, love, love, love their beef.  We ate beef eight days out of the ten we were there and learned so much about all the various cuts of beef served.  Needless to say, we’ll be eating salads for the next few weeks.  Activia is now our friend for the next two weeks, or at least until our digestive track is back on track.

We’re just off the plane, so before we get settled back into post-vacation life again, we need to make a note of some things we learned about on our trip. Everyone knows that Argentina is famous for its amazing beef, but you might not know that they usually cook it about medium-well to well-done. Some restaurants will ask you how you want it cooked but, for the most part, it comes they way they cook it. Even well done, the meat is still remarkably flavorful and moist. 

Another important thing to remember if planning a trip to BA is that dogs are everywhere… everywhere! They do not require that they are leashed-up and, often, you’ll wonder how runaway dog looks so well fed. Then you notice his owner 2 blocks away. Along with the freedom dogs feel in the city comes the freedom for them to poo wherever and whenever they want. Dog shit is everywhere… everywhere! No lie.

We started playing “poop watch” so that one of us could walk down the street for a few minutes without constantly staring at the ground.  If you go, be prepared to be on poop watch too.

Finally, Porteños are extremely polite, pleasant, kind, funny, cool, social and pretty much all-around awesome. They almost never let us speak English (which we loved because it stretches us) and were never condescending when we messed up a phrase or two in our pidgin Spanish. Their accent is difficult understand at first if you are used to the way Spanish is spoken here in the States or in Spain. They often lose (or aspirate, as it’s known) the “s” (i.e.: “despues” becomes “deh-puess”) and the double “L” is pronounced with a slightly slurring “J” (i.e.: parilla sounds like pa-ri-ja and molleja, Spanish for sweetbreads, sounds like mo-jea-ha).  When speaking fast it can be hard to keep up!

We have so much to write about our trip to Uruguay. We spent three nights in the capital and largest city in the country, Montevideo, which really is an amazing, and incredibly underrated, place. We also rented a car and headed into Uruguayan wine country only about 20 miles outside of the city. It’s a little known fact that Uruguay is the only place that produces the Tannat grape variety besides Southwest France. I think we’ll become ambassadors of tourism to Uruguay because we were blown away by the beauty of the country and the kindness of the people. Much, much more to come on that.

So, thanks for sticking with us during our hiatus. We’re feel much better now – well-rested, way too well-fed(!), and totally revved up for some spring cooking. Today, we’ll leave you with a delicious (and timely) spring recipe for soft shell crabs – they are just beginning to be in season now, so get your bums down to your fish monger and demands them! If this recipe isn’t for you, check out a few of the others we have created in the past include Soft Shells in Butter and Garlic and Soft Shell Sandwich with Red Pepper Aioli.

CORNMEAL CRUSTED SOFT SHELL CRAB PO’BOYS (serves 2 to4)

• 1 fresh french baguette – 12 inches long
• 3 to 4 soft shell crabs (depending on size)
• 1 cup of flour
• 2 eggs, beaten
• 1 cup cornmeal
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon pepper
• 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1/2 teaspoon onion powder
• Garnish and Toppings: sliced tomatoes, sliced pickle, lettuce, creole mustard (see step #4 below for recipe) and mayonnaise
• enough corn or veggie oil to deep fry
• lemon

What to do:

1. Pat your crabs dry with a towel.  In one bowl, mix the flour with the salt, pepper, cayenne, onion and garlic powder.  In a separate bowl, beat the eggs and add a tablespoon of milk or water to thin out.  In one other bowl, add the cornmeal.
2. In a pot, add enough vegetable or corn oil to deep fry and heat up to temperature.
3. Meanwhile, dip each soft shell first in the flour, then in the egg and finally in the cornmeal.  Set aside until ready to fry.
4. Make the creole mustard if you don’t have any handy. Not sure if theis is authentic, but I mixed dijon mustard with a few dashes of worcestershire and some hot sauce to taste.
5. When oil is hot enough, fry each breaded soft shell until golden brown – turn over if necessary to ensure even frying.  Should take about 2 to 3 minutes.  Allow to drain on some papertowels and sprinkle with a bit more salt and a squeeze of lemon.
6. Slice your baguette and on one side, spread the creole mustard and on the other side, spread the mayo. Add the soft shells and top with shredded lettuce, sliced tomato and pickles.
7. Enjoy with a cold beer.

When you’re a busy modern executive, web-based home-delivery services like FreshDirect can help you save those precious minutes it takes to race around a supermarket and snatch a few items off the shelves. When you’re into food, web-based home-delivery services like FreshDirect can be like, well…, like the daily temptation faced by a Frenchman living next door to a brothel.

So, everytime a flyer comes through our door informing us that a $50 purchase means an additional $25 worth for free, we are briefly gallant in our efforts to fight the urge, before capitulating and ordering all manner of products on the spur of the moment. Amongst our knee-jerk purchases just prior to Christmas were four quails, six soft-shell crabs, an immodest hunk of jamon serrano, and three large octopii – none of which were called for by our festive menu.

Consequently, because we had exceeded the capacity of our scant storage space, we were obliged to prioritize our consumption of said victuals based on what could fit in the freezer. I know we have your sympathy when I tell you that this forced us, quite literally, to gorge ourselves on quail and jamon one desperate night. The anguish. Happily, octopus not only freezes well, but freezing actually helps to tenderize it, so in to the ice-chest went our three 8-legged friends.

So recently, when the time came, and after having followed our tried and tested octopus boiling method on one of the ‘puses, we found ourselves reminiscing about a wonderful, crisp octopus salad we ate in the famed town of Alba in Italy’s Piemonte region two summers ago. Surprisingly, perhaps, for a restaurant specializing in Albanese specialties (truffles, mushrooms, game, and hearty red wines), but appropriate for the conditions, the salad was similar, if not identical, to the kind of insalati di polipo typically found in Puglia. Perfect as a first-course for lunch on a scorching summer’s day, the crunchy, yet tender, octopus worked beautifully with crunchy and fibrous celery in a lively dressing of lemon juice and an almost unbelievably bright unfiltered olive oil.

Now, here in New York the conditions of late have not exactly mirrored those of July in Alba, but, reasoning that there was no better cure for seasonal affective disorder than a big plate of crunchy, zesty tentacles and the memory of the sun-heated flagstones under our bare feet, we went right ahead and made this magnificent salad all the same. Indeed, because sunshine is so scarce at this time of year, you should treat yourself to some liquid sunshine – the year’s new olive oils are becoming available – and this is a salad that really benefits from the best extra virgin oil you can afford.

Insalata di Polipo alla Pugliese (Puglian-Style Octopus & Celery Salad)

Ingredients

1 octopus (allowed to cool after being boiled and prepared in the traditional way), grilled on a grill, griddle pan, flat top or skillet and chopped into bite-sized chunks

2 large celery stalks, chopped roughly

1 plum tomato, chopped roughly

1/2 red onion, chopped roughly

3 tbsp flat-leaf (Italian) parsley

1 clove garlic, smashed & chopped finely

3 tbsp your best olive oil

juice of 1 lemon

pinch of salt & black pepper (substituting hot red pepper flakes for the black pepper works nicely)

Recipe

Combine all ingredients together in a bowl. Mix well to ensure oil and lemon juice coat all components. Enjoy with thoughts of summer.

It’s nearly a year now since we were in Madrid, and while during that time we’ve managed to shed some of the excess poundage we gained there, we’ve lost none of our longing to be back there. And, it’s a strange thing about longing that all your memories become more vivid, and you remember even the smallest details.

So, on Sunday morning, we sought to recreate what, while in Madrid, seemed like a comparatively minor facet of our stay – breakfast. In Spain, as in other parts of southern Europe, a typical breakfast is characterized by three things: sugar, caffeine and nicotine, but it would unfair to suggest there is no greater variety than the, admittedly delicious, combo of pastries, coffee and strong cigarettes.

Roommate Mario (our hotel, not an actual person), in the Opera district of the city (not far from the magnificent Palacio Real – see above), was a small, boutiquey-type place and not, by any means, the type of hotel we’d commonly stay in. And, apart from the unusually reasonably-priced room, what convinced us to pick this hotel was its renowned “free” breakfast.

Research suggested that not only was it sumptious and delicious, but that it was served until noon, which, given that we like to sleep on vacation and would be eating and drinking later than normal to fit in with the insomniacal Madrileño lifestyle, was another bonus. I’ve always found it despicable and somehow mean that most hotels only serve breakfast until 10am, so that people who actually on vacation nearly always miss it.

Our typical breakfast at Roommate Mario was, of course, a tongue-tinglingly powerful cup of café solo or “capuchino”, a tiny glass of freshly-squeezed and enjoyably sour orange juice, and several triangles of the most perfect tortilla española layered on fresh, crusty bread with slices of manchego and lomo – cured loin of pork delicately flavored with pimenton – and topped with a drizzle of golden Andalucian olive oil and, our new favorite condiment, grated tomato. I know it doesn’t sound like a wildly exotic or even a very exciting breakfast (especially to our Spanish readers), but to us, who usually only shove down a slice of toast before hurrying out of the door of an average morning, it was out of this world.

So, this past weekend, as you can see from the pictures, in a flood of nostalgia, and flush with many of the requisite ingredients, we recreated our Madrid breakfasts in our Brooklyn apartment – courtesy of a very kind deli counter worker at Union Market (69cents for six slices of jamon iberico!) and through the good graces of our friend Nuría Farregut at Spanish Recipes and the miracle of vacuum-packing. In fact, so thoughtful and kind is Nuría that yesterday, just as we were mourning the last of the chorizo de bellota she sent us from La Boquería over the summer, another package arrived with some magnificent-looking dry salami/salchichon! It’s as if we managed to telepathically transmit our longing for Spain to Nuría in Barcelona. I mean, we’re still desperate to return, but at least our stomachs are temporarily satisfied! Thank you so, so much, Nuría! Una amiga en jamón, es una amiga por la vida!