July 2006 | Food
The Shortest Food Chain
Foraging for seasonal delights with wild foods connoisseur Angelo Garro
By Andrea Blum
When chef and local foods activist Alice Waters wants something wild, she knows where to find it. In preparation for a feast in honor of author Michael Pollan and his new book The Omnivore’s Dilemma (Penguin Press HC), she dispatched two of her former cooks not to a forest or field in the countryside but to a city — to the home of Angelo Garro, a Sicilian blacksmith/philosopher/cook living in heart of San Francisco. They came to harvest a weed blanketing the verdant urban hills and to watch Garro prepare one of his many recipes from this local foraged food: the ubiquitous and delicious wild fennel.
In the soft rain on a quiet knoll north of the Castro District, Garro gathers fragrant bouquets of fennel to take back to his forge. His round unshaven face, his felt hat, and his animated presence evoke a peasant from the old country. Garro was responsible for initiating Pollan on the author’s first wild boar hunt, part of Pollan’s hands-on research for his book.
Surrounded by the green fronds, Garro grabs the tall fennel plant at its base and snaps the stalk, looking for tender shoots that will soon be fried into savory cakes. Driving back to his home he talks of his love for wild chicory, rapini, boar hunting and San Francisco Bay herring like a proud father. He speaks of his homemade prociutto and pâté, his handpicked olives, his grappa, his cider and his Calvados. He leaves for Mexico soon, he says, to fish for tuna. “I want to make tonno sotto olio (packed tuna in olive oil),” he enthuses in his Italian accent. “Like my mother used to make.”
In the heart of the metropolis, Garro lives as his ancestors from Syracuse, Italy did so many years ago, hunting and gathering meats, vegetables and fruits and salting and brining to preserve the bounty. As in the twisted back alleys of Palermo, the back of Garro’s workshop holds a cellar and walk-in refrigerator stashing homemade provisions: cured meats and delicacies that would make any food lover stop in wonder. Prociutto hang on hooks, boxes of salted fish lie in wait, and a large glass jug sits fermenting an unknown liquid on the cement floor. Lines of mason jars are filled with jams, pickled fish and fish roes. On forged racks, a collection of wines hasn’t had time to gather much dust. The place conveys a feeling of authenticity and a love for all things handmade. It’s the embodiment of what Michael Pollan describes as the “shortest food chain” and part of the “grace of nature” (not industry) that allows us to eat.
“Right now is a fantastic time for fennel,” Garro enthuses, directing Alice Waters’ cooks to search Tilden Park in the Berkeley hills. “It’s also a fantastic time for wild chicory and cow’s tongue.”
Garro ushers the small group into the kitchen to begin the day’s lesson. Passing a wall of steel tongs, anvils and hammers and a fig tree in small courtyard next to the kitchen, Garro grabs a prociutto, a jar of home-cured olives and a crunchy bread loaf shaped like a sheaf of wheat from his secondhand Wolf range. He places the goods on the table. “Manga,” he cries in his lingua franca. He cracks open a bottle of home spun grappa and begins to pour it into miniature glasses — a little appetizer before cooking. It’s 11:00 o’clock in the morning.
The Chez Panisse alumni get to work. They chop with perfect technique and follow Garro’s cues, eyeing ingredient amounts. Garro cooks all by feel. There is no written recipe. The conversation veers toward food and the importance of family. Garro, gripping one of the many cast iron frying pans hanging like dried herbs around the kitchen, fries the small fennel gallettes in a little extra virgin olive oil, before depositing them, golden brown and glistening, on a paper towel. Slightly sweet and piquant, with a perfect crunch, the gallettes are a perfect example of the joys of the shortest food chain — from field to plate in two hours.
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